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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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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.
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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.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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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.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with my colleague, Jamie Catherwood for another episode of Infinite Loops.
1:47
And today, I have been waiting for this for a long time.
1:54
I fucked up and didn't sleep one night and had to reschedule this. My guest is Mr. Packy McCormick. Well, Jesus Christ.
1:58
They're going to let the Irish guys talk about the future.
2:06
Packy McCormick: That was beautiful. That was beautiful.
2:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What has the word come to when they let the Micks talk about what's going to happen.
2:14
Packy McCormick: It's amazing.
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Once you figure out the potato situation and everyone's well fed, you can focus on other things.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Boom, there you are.
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And we finally figured it out.
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I'm actually super excited.
2:22
I subscribe to your newsletter, which is very cleverly named Not Boring.
2:28
Packy McCormick: Thank you.
2:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which, of course, being the type who looks at things like that, I immediately get suspicious I think.
2:36
This really better not be boring.
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Packy McCormick: I set myself a bar when I had I think 400 subscribers when I changed the name to Not Boring and so at that point, there is no pressure in like- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. I love it.
2:50
And the other thing I love in your bio is who's the guy who says, "I don't know who it is.
2:53
It is some other newsletter writer."
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Packy McCormick: Ben Thompson.
2:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, Stratechery. Okay. Very cool. All right.
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We got a lot to talk about.
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Packy McCormick: Yes we do.
3:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So what we're going to be talking about today is what you call The Great Online Game.
3:07
It goes by many names, though, right?
3:14
So I call it the Great Reshuffle.
3:14
I think Matthew Ball calls it the Into The Metaverse.
3:20
But I think we're all talking about the same thing, we might have different things that we're emphasizing.
3:25
So for people who don't have the pleasure of being able to read your newsletter, tell me what is The Great Online Game? Packy McCormick: Yeah.
3:36
So The Great Online Game is this piece that I wrote about a month and a half ago.
3:36
And it was one of those pieces that I thought when I was writing it, and when I hit send that it wasn't going to do very well because it seemed kind of obvious, right?
3:45
It's one of those pieces where I think I'm just kind of putting a name to something that people kind of feel and don't have words for.
3:55
But essentially my story is, I was at a startup called Breather internal doing kind of operations stuff.
4:02
Nobody knew who the hell I was, wanted to start kind of writing online, and then all these amazing things started happening, right?
4:08
Like I'm talking to you on this podcast today.
4:08
I've gotten to meet all these people that I've looked at from afar.
4:12
I've gotten job opportunities, this newsletter has become my full-time job.
4:17
And I was wondering, what that was, and I realized a couple of years ago, I just started writing, started interacting with people online, started to jump into Discord into Crypto, starting to read things and listen to more podcasts, and get involved and reach out to people.
4:35
And just start kind of using the fact that for the first time, we have access to billions of people around the planet, that you can find that group of people who are interested in the same things that you are.
4:44
And so the point of the grid on my game is like we're sitting at home, particularly during COVID, where work has become is kind of just moving objects around on the screen, which is an awful lot like a video game.
4:55
And that if you got to treat it as such as this, like kind of low stakes thing, where there's a lot of upside, as long as you're not an asshole, I think that's rule number one is don't be an asshole.
5:07
But as long as you're not an asshole, or do something bad, it's a pretty low stakes game on the downside and this really infinitely upside game, when you're able to kind of reach out to and engage with all these different people who might be interested in things that you are, have job opportunities, or x, y and z.
5:21
I think one like just kind of big misinterpretation of it, I think a few people read it as like, "Oh, this is about getting a bunch of followers and like how you find followers on Twitter?"
5:31
And that's not it at all, I think that's actually like that can hurt you if you do things to try to get followers for followers sake.
5:36
It's really about the fact that you're able to kind of form direct relationships and show off your skills and form guilds and do all these different kind of things that you would do in the real world, but just this much bigger, and then more specific scale online. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
5:53
And that dovetails really nicely with one of my central thesis around the idea of this Great Reshuffle. Right?
5:59
So, basically, what's happening is we are collapsing time, space, and most importantly, geography.
6:04
And it's the collapse of geography that fascinates me the most.
6:12
Because what is happening is, for example, one of my newest colleague on this show, is the guy who lives in India. He's young, he's 26.
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And I discovered him on Twitter.
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I have long said that Twitter is becoming the new university and the global intelligence network.
6:33
Yes, there's tons of noise.
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But if you curate well, what's happening is...
6:33
So I have a degree in economics, right?
6:39
And all that does really, is suggest that I have competence. It just suggests, right?
6:45
The new way is a living breathing CV on Twitter, on social media, that evolves that is cumulative, that you get to watch that person working.
7:02
And it's going to, in my opinion, like incredibly transform the entire way we do everything really. Packy McCormick: 100%.
7:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so one of the things that I'm not Panglossian about this.
7:13
I think that for the people like that, so my colleague, his opportunity set just exploded upward.
7:22
And I think that some of our younger people in this country might not totally understand the ferocity with which these new people are going to compete with them.
7:38
So, I think I'd like to actually stop there and just get your thoughts on that.
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Packy McCormick: It's so funny, the call that I had before this was with a startup in India that had gotten to two million users in a year and is building an absolutely incredible business.
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Has mostly American investors, down a bunch of them on Twitter.
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I got introduced to somebody that I found on Twitter.
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So that's kind of that happening in real time.
7:56
But there's a lot to unpack in all of what you just said, I think on that point, 100%.
8:00
It is just kind of this wonderful thing that anybody in the world now has access to opportunity and access to just expand their set in the way that you described.
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But if you're out there, and being I think it's going to get so much better for the people who are making the biggest effort and who are the most talented and all of that.
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And laziness, like the safety net on laziness, is just going to keep kind of dwindling and dwindling, and dwindling, and dwindling.
8:24
And so it is kind of scary, right?
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Like there is this kind of level of comfort that you can just have where I grew up in a place, there's jobs in this town, no matter what I do, I'm going to be able to find a job in this town.
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And I'm not competing with anybody except for the idiot next door.
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And so as long as I'm a little bit less of an idiot, than that guy, I'm in pretty good shape. I think that's scary.
8:40
But to your point, if you take it the right way, you're just building this kind of one ongoing kind of living, breathing resume.
8:50
And then two, this kind of just set of relationships that have these loose ties that famously are the best way to find a job or an opportunity or a spouse or whatever else.
9:00
And so if you're doing those two things at the same time, and you do it, like I don't think either you or I does this in like some weird, nefarious networking a kind of way.
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And I think that can go really bad.
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Just if you're being yourself, like the cool thing about this is there's so many niche opportunities and ways to find things and exactly what you're interested in, than if you're just out there talking about the things that you're interested and showing kind of doing the proof of work in the areas that you're interested in.
9:22
You'll find a good job in this very particular thing that you're interested in, which I think is really, really cool.
9:26
I just launched a venture fund, small $10 million fund, not burning capital.
9:32
And it was really interesting having the conversations with the potential LPs throughout the whole thing, where I came onto these calls, like nervous as hell that I was talking to these people that I've respected from afar for a while, waiting for them to like, kind of grill me with questions.
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They're like, "No, we read Not Boring.
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We know how you think, we'd love to invest." And that's it.
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And that's just because I've put my thoughts out there.
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I'm sure at the same token, there are probably people out there who didn't take the call with me in the first place because they're like, "This guy is an over optimistic idiot.
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And he's going to get crushed in a downturn, and blah, blah, blah, blah." And that's fine, too.
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Because like that would have made for a miserable LP relationship.
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And I was like, "By the way, I just invested in 50 companies."
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And they're like, "What the hell are you doing?"
10:12
So it's nice that you're able to not just find like the best opportunity, but the right opportunity, and relationships or the things that you care about. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I agree completely.
10:22
And one of the things that I think is another big part of what I'm calling the Great Reshuffle is the skill set that you need for the new way of doing things is very, very different than the one that people developed in the physical world.
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And so for example, I believe, if you are uncomfortable with nonlinear thought, you're going to really have a hard time.
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Because the new world as I see it, and we'll get into some specifics later on, but is it's a power law, it's nonlinear.
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And it is all about synthesizing knowledge, rather than...
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People often confuse information. Oh, that's knowledge.
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Bullshit, that's knowledge.
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Information is we're all at our Shannon limit.
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And so to be able to work with it effectively, we have to become much better synthesizers.
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We have to remain, I would say radically open minded about what's going on.
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And I fear that and this is going to be my question to you.
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How are we going to help the people because let's face it.
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There are going to be a group of people.
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So for example, I changed my mind on universal basic income, right? I think we got to do it. Packy McCormick: Yeah.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that is as a quant who knows all of the empirical arguments that say it doesn't work.
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And the reason I think we have to do it is, for the first time really in history, we're going to have a group of people who, and this is the important part I underline, through no fault of their own are going to have some difficulty getting up that curve. Packy McCormick: Yes.
12:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Do you have other ideas for how we can help people like that bring them along.
12:15
Packy McCormick: It's a really interesting one because I wrote about Axie Infinity.
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This game last week, where that is a play to earn video game where in the Philippines, there are- Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's a good piece.
12:23
Packy McCormick: Thank you.
12:24
There are towns full of people who are playing a video game to make a living.
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And so instead of making $5, a day before, they're making $20 a day.
12:30
And so it's interesting on its face, right?
12:35
And this company ended up at $193 million in revenue in July.
12:41
And so I got the normal responses to anything crypto, which is like this is a Ponzi scheme.
12:45
And like, kind of the mechanics are very Ponzi like.
12:45
There's a whole people in crypto are like, "Yep, here's the Ponzi dynamics of this thing."
12:49
And to bootstrap it off the ground like you do kind of need to just keep adding people and keep adding people.
12:53
And then you expand and I bring that up.
12:57
Because one of the things that Axie wants to do is to work with governments at some point when they have X percent of certain populations and say like, "All right.
13:03
Cool, what happens if we do UBI experiments through Axie?"
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Where we actually have this kind of closed world where we can track what happens if the thing that gives you meaning is fun enough, like playing a game.
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Can you both give people money, and keep them engaged and part of the community and playing a game and doing all of these things?
13:23
I think like, part of the challenge with UBI is tracking is a nightmare.
13:27
Part is that people are sitting disconnected in their houses.
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And so if you say, "Here's money, sit at home and don't do anything."
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Of course, things are going to go poorly there.
13:36
But like, what if you can give people more kind of fun outlets for their free time and something that gives them meaning and all of that?
13:41
And so, I guess one, that's a very specific answer to your question on UBI.
13:46
The two I think, is a broader point on what you do the people who need kind of empirical proof on a lot of things, which is, maybe you can give empirical proof of new experiments a little bit faster and faster and faster if you have these closed environments that you can play in.
13:58
And so it's not about saying, "Hey, man, just close your eyes and believe in the future," it's more about like, "All right, how do we get proof faster?
14:07
And how do we get proof with running 1000s of experiments, at the same time seeing what works and kind of continuing to adapt?"
14:15
And so there has to be a period where there's people like me out there who are like, "You know what?
14:18
I'm just going to believe in this future.
14:18
And I think let's go for it."
14:18
And I think you need a little bit of that dumb belief to kind of get over the hump.
14:22
But then I think obviously, like numbers and reality, and all sorts of stuff do catch up.
14:27
And so there needs to be that next step, which is how do we take what we have here?
14:31
Which is, not seven billion people.
14:35
But let's say half the world's population online, in environments that we can track and do that in a non nefarious way, and all of that, and build experiments that kind of test a bunch of different things and see what happens.
14:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
14:47
I think that's a really good idea.
14:47
So I will be stealing that from you.
14:52
And probably claiming it as my own.
14:52
Packy McCormick: Please do.
14:55
Although, we do have the tape now that it's mine, unless you added to that.
14:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I have the power.
15:03
So you touched on crypto being sort of the native currency, native token in the great online game.
15:10
And I'm still a dummy on crypto, I did an investment in it.
15:10
It did ridiculously well.
15:18
Not because I did it right.
15:18
It's just like random chance.
15:18
And so I'm totally open to the arguments.
15:25
Listen, all currencies have value if they have value at all because we believe they have value. Packy McCormick: Yeah.
15:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's the same for the dead presidents in my pocket right now.
15:34
And for the clamshells and salt they used to give Roman soldiers, but that actually had real value.
15:40
But the point is- Packy McCormick: That was a pain in the ass to carry around.
15:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Massive pain in the ass.
15:44
Things have gotten so much cooler.
15:44
So first off, is it crypto or I will confess to a deep suspicion. I don't want FedCoin.
15:52
And I don't want FedCoin because I'm not a political person.
16:00
I am animated by one thing and that is fierce anti authoritarianism.
16:07
And FedCoin just leads to knocks on the door at three in the morning and if they have...
16:07
For example, there's a really good reason black markets are priced in US dollars because they're the original Bitcoin man.
16:18
Packy McCormick: Yes, less traceable.
16:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You can't track them. They can't trace them.
16:22
And so does it need to be crypto or could it be an emergent currency that we haven't even looked at yet?
16:31
Packy McCormick: I think that's actually my tail because I'm so optimistic my tail risk to any of the things that I get excited about is like, the next even crazier thing that comes and maybe that is a new currency that comes after crypto that works better.
16:43
And has all of the good properties and none of the bad and it's scalable, and it's fast.
16:43
And it's all of those things.
16:48
And so certainly there could be something like that.
16:48
I think the interesting thing, thus far about crypto has been that it's essentially like equity that people are getting for believing early in a project.
16:58
So if equity moved around a lot quicker, if there weren't a ton of legal documents, if there weren't so many restrictions on who could own equity, if it wasn't a pain in the ass for companies to give out equity to their customers and to their employees, and all of those things that like, maybe it just would have been equity in the first place.
17:15
But I think what's really interesting now is that you can be rewarded for being an early believer in a product.
17:19
You can be rewarded for your continued support of the product and the project and the involvement in the community.
17:23
And then all of those things, and it's just like live scoreboard where everything is open.
17:29
And maybe that's a good case sometimes.
17:29
And maybe that's a bad thing sometimes.
17:33
But you can look at my crypto wallet right now on Rainbow and see all the assets that are in there, right?
17:38
I have a separate one that is not public and doesn't have Not Boring attached to it.
17:42
But you can see the things that I hold in there.
17:42
And that's both kind of monetary, but then it's also this kind of tracker of the things and the projects that I believe in and participant in and all of those types of things.
17:50
And so I think there is this very real use case for crypto and it's in a Bitcoin bores me kind of like I see the value there too. Bitcoin is boring to me.
18:00
But I think like the project specific things are really, really interesting because you can get in early and get an equity early.
18:05
And there's liquidity, but then there's incentives to not sell and like there's just like all these really interesting things that people build because they're designing new currencies from the ground up in the modern era, not could somebody come in.
18:18
And in 100 years, when the modern era is this totally different thing, design something else that is more suited to that modern era, 100% they could. And I'm sure they will.
18:28
I doubt Ethereum of is the last currency that the world ever sees.
18:32
But I think for right now, the fact that you have this internet native money that can be kind of embedded in different interactions, there is companies that are working on sending messages from wallet to wallet.
18:41
So you can build this whole thing where just money is a part of everything, and there's a scoreboard that's part of everything good or bad, dystopian or not.
18:49
I think there's some real practical use cases for that, that get people excited.
18:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what about like so in our little bubble, this is pretty much what we talk about. Right?
18:56
We're all super excited about what is coming.
19:01
I am what I would call a rational optimist, which means, look, all you have to do is look at what is happening right now. Okay.
19:07
You don't have to make any crazy forecasts about mRNA and it's multiple uses.
19:16
I think we are going into a golden age of biotech.
19:16
I think that I will probably be in better physical shape through intervention, when I'm 75 than I am right now.
19:24
And so all of this, like I find incredibly positive incredibly wow.
19:32
But there's a whole group of people who like they don't engage on social media.
19:40
I found this out when I was like talking to some relatives who aren't here on the east coast.
19:46
And was like, "Can you explain crypto to me?" And I'm like, "Sure."
19:51
And maybe you already answered this question.
19:51
But through the gaming and through that, how are we going to grab these people?
19:57
Packy McCormick: So I think it's this really interesting, almost barbell, where if you have money and comfort and enough good things have happened to you that you can still be optimistic and think about the future and all of that.
20:12
If you're on kind of the right side of the barbell, then of course, you're going to go experiment with crypto and like maybe put a little bit in and then it goes 1,000x and then you are kind of bought in and it kind of builds on itself.
20:19
I think if you're in the Philippines, making $5 a day and trying to survive, and there's no good way out other than potentially playing this game where you can play to earn and earn $20 a day and pay off your medical bills, then you're willing to try it.
20:36
And so I think if you're all the way on the left side, you're probably willing to try crypto.
20:40
I think the real challenge is going to be hitting like the 50 to 70 to 80% in the middle, who are not desperate enough that they'll try anything, and are not comfortable and optimistic enough that they're also willing to try anything.
20:56
But really have like these day to day concerns where they have a mortgage, and student loans and all these things to pay off.
21:00
And they're like just trying to do their job.
21:00
And they're like, "What the hell is this thing?"
21:04
I completely understand why you wouldn't want to participate?
21:08
I do not know what the right answer there is.
21:08
There are other companies, one of which I invested in what I can't say.
21:12
They're kind of masterplan yet, but that are really thinking about ways to onboard people to crypto without them even really knowing that they're being on boarded to crypto.
21:22
Like you kind of know a little bit, but you have to give all these kind of benefits and values upfront that are super, super clear.
21:30
And then slowly, slowly, slowly be like, "Oh, by the way, this is backed by crypto.
21:34
And by doing these things, you're earning crypto and it builds on itself."
21:34
And so I think that's probably it, or there just have to be on ramps.
21:38
And this actually could test for crypto itself, right?
21:44
Like, if crypto enables you to provide real value to people. That's a good test.
21:48
And if it does, then you should be able to give that value to people in non crypto ways that can then number them out of crypto, and then maybe they get some of the benefits.
21:52
But I know that's kind of a hand wavy answer to a really hard problem that I don't have the answer to.
22:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that what we have now is what I would typify as a chaotic distribution pattern, which is very peaky in the middle with very long tails. Okay.
22:07
So it's the tails that I am most concerned with.
22:14
Because if you have the skills and the tools, like the leverage that this new digital world gives us, it is literally unprecedented.
22:21
We haven't ever seen it, right?
22:21
And I was actually talking to my seven year old grandson who's a smart kid.
22:27
And he's like, "So, Papa, so it's kind of like, if I build like one of these digital things, then I could sell a million of them, right? At no extra cost?"
22:38
And I'm like, "That's right, Pierce."
22:38
And he looks at me and he goes, "That's cool."
22:45
Packy McCormick: Thank you, Pierce, you have just sound summarized why software is such a good business in a lot less words than it takes me to do it.
22:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But so the point is that, like I hate painting generations with a broad brush, right?
22:55
So I'm a boomer, but I was an early adopter.
23:02
Patrick always teases me that I went into the Metaverse in 1985 and never came out.
23:09
But honestly, at some point, right?
23:09
That there is going to be a generation that just is like, "I don't get this."
23:14
And there's going to be that generation that are younger people.
23:20
And like Pierce, my grandson is seven.
23:20
He's a native, it's like asking a fish what the water is.
23:25
And so are we going to see like these people just rock and roll, take over all of that wonderful part of the tail. And what happens? What do you think?
23:39
Packy McCormick: And this is an incredibly question.
23:41
Part of this generational for sure.
23:41
And I already am in crypto chats and other chats where I'm like, "What the hell are people talking about?"
23:47
to how do you possibly have the time to be in 75 Discords? It's like, I'm 34.
23:51
And I already feel the disadvantages of age, what I'm trying to, like not compete with, but keep up with that group of people.
23:56
So certainly, there's some of that.
23:56
And maybe it's not a one year born thing, but it's just like that age is just always going to have more time to get into whatever the new thing is, and lower risk for doing so and all of that.
24:10
But then there's also like, I don't know.
24:10
We've had a hard time convincing people to take a vaccine, right?
24:14
Like that is going to save you from COVID.
24:14
So even if you said, "Do this thing, and it will be fantastic for you financially, and here's all the proof that we have.
24:21
This will be financially fantastic for you."
24:24
And if you learn like maybe the internet gets really, really good at not just finding, and I said this before, but it's done, just find the best people.
24:32
It finds the people that are good for that particular drive matches as well.
24:37
And so maybe if you said like, just submit yourself to this, like you're good at something, if you were an auto mechanic, your jobs actually probably in great shape, if you were X, Y or Z thing, like you'd actually probably make a good designer or a good x.
24:45
And then we can find you really great opportunities, you don't have to be the best in the world.
24:49
But we can find you somebody right now that needs to designer, but like an upward type thing.
24:56
Good luck getting a lot of people to submit to that.
24:56
And so it's almost as much of an education and a political challenge as a technological challenge.
25:01
It's incredibly, incredibly complicated thing.
25:06
And it does kind of make me a little bit hopeless, when you can't convince people to get a vaccine when my kids are now starting to get COVID at alarming rates.
25:14
So that's I think the bigger challenge here is not like if, in 10 years, will the internet be able to kind of match people, no matter what their skill level to the right opportunities? I think so.
25:26
But when you actually get people to be able to participate in up themselves out there, that's another challenge entirely.
25:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So you get this, if you understand history, this is nothing new.
25:31
It feels new because there's so many of these subgroups, right?
25:38
And all the village idiots get to talk to each other online, as opposed to, right?
25:43
And so it seems like there's a lot more idiots.
25:43
I don't really think there are a lot more idiots.
25:49
It's just that we hear them more, right?
25:49
I have an old friend who had retired from an editor at a prominent newspaper.
25:54
And we were talking and he goes, and I brought this up.
25:59
And he's like, "The only difference Jim was we got all those letters.
25:59
We just laughed at a good chuckle and then threw it way."
26:05
Packy McCormick: I had this conversation with somebody the other day, where I was like, "Does the internet make us bad?
26:11
Or does it expose the worst of us?"
26:11
And my response is more than it exposes the worst of us, which is like all these people who say things that are like, "I can't believe you're saying that," they just wouldn't have had friends before, right? They'd be stuck at home.
26:22
They wouldn't be socializing because they're off putting in or whatever.
26:26
And now they could just go online and say whatever they want to whoever.
26:29
And so I think it is that it's not even just that there are like that everybody gets voice, it's that the people who did not have a voice, in some cases for a reason because they're an asshole, now have a voice.
26:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the thing is that the idea that they didn't exist before is felicitous.
26:42
They were there, they just didn't have a megaphone that they have now.
26:49
And I also kind of have a theory that is still in its nascent stages, and I'm probably wrong.
26:57
But I think that social media also serves as a steam valve.
26:57
And by that, I mean without social media where the angry man or woman can get in and scream into the void.
27:12
They might like, get a pitchfork in the real beat space, and go try and stab people.
27:12
And so the ability to vent, right?
27:20
Even though the nothing's going to come of it.
27:20
Just one of the most effective forms of therapy is something called talk therapy.
27:26
And here's the interesting thing, it doesn't matter who you're talking to.
27:31
It can be a bartender, it can be a psychiatrist, it could be a friend. And it works.
27:36
So I do think that that serves a purpose.
27:36
But I also think the bifurcation.
27:44
So Tim Urban- Packy McCormick: The night the Phillies won the NLCS in 2008, I went downtown, not even the World Series, the NLCS.
27:50
And they bust in riot police on school buses.
27:50
And everybody with the police inside, flipped them over.
27:57
They burned the stores, they broke windows.
27:57
This was not even for the World Series, which we ended up winning that year.
28:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It was celebratory.
28:04
Packy McCormick: That is how we celebrate there. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
28:08
But back to the idea of the downside, I think is, I was talking about Tim Urban, and doing a live thing with him.
28:16
And this is going to be a big part of the conversation, which is essentially, we are creating almost like hermetically sealed echo chambers.
28:31
And so like, I'm an algorithm guy, as you probably know, that's how we manage money.
28:31
And so I do all sorts of things to trick the algorithms and follow people that the algorithms telling me I shouldn't be following.
28:43
Just because I don't want them serving, although, as I said, off air, Toby at Spotify, he can algorithm me all day long.
28:48
But so one of the things that Tim and I have talked about, is how do we design and I'm asking this as a question for you.
29:04
Packy, is how do we design something where people don't just create these hermetically sealed echo chambers?
29:12
And to me, that's the death of thought. Okay.
29:12
So if you become dogmatic at anything, you're brain dead, as far as I'm concerned. And I'll just mute you.
29:23
Is there a solution to that?
29:23
Packy McCormick: I certainly hope so.
29:24
I frankly, have no idea what that solution would be.
29:24
It seems like they're getting more and more and more sealed, if anything. So I don't know.
29:31
What's your best thought on it now?
29:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So my best thought on it now is almost addition to an oddly, an algorithm that adds follows that really disagree with your prevailing worldview.
29:46
And I don't like that though because that's a little big brother ish.
29:55
Packy McCormick: I view myself as very open minded.
29:58
And I'll see some tweets or something from people that I don't normally follow, that I disagree with.
30:03
And even I have like this gut reaction.
30:03
I'm like, "I can't believe they're saying. Oh, my God."
30:08
It's so deep seated at this point that, I think that it's hard to break out or like, just seeing the other side sometimes just makes you angry, like it's gotten that divided.
30:18
So I don't know, if there just has to be like the most unbelievably unifying leader in the history of the country needs to come into office and somehow, like win as a democrat, and then pander to the republicans without...
30:29
I don't know what the answer is there.
30:29
But I don't think it's as easy as just showing you stuff from the other side.
30:34
Because your gut reaction so often, it's just like, "No, that's wrong." Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
30:39
So this is something that I have done deep studies on, and it's very tricky.
30:39
And so, I hope smarter guys like Tim Urban are going to be able to give me a good answer to it.
30:46
Because I just don't know how we do that in an effective manner.
30:50
That is, good for people. Right?
30:50
I don't want to compel people to do anything.
30:59
I just think that's wrong.
30:59
And it goes against everything that I believe in freedom.
31:05
Packy McCormick: And when you're talking, are you thinking like, as you're kind of thinking about this in your head, are you thinking about America specifically?
31:09
Are you thinking about the world?
31:09
Like, do we need an alien attack?
31:14
Do we need China and the US to physically go to war?
31:14
Like, what scale are looking at?
31:19
And is that enough to do it?
31:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, so I love that.
31:22
So I am thinking of it as the world because I think the world is shrinking.
31:28
And I think that, again, geography no longer matters.
31:28
And so there's going to, I believe, at some point, come kind of a new sort of set of either beliefs or tenants, etc.
31:34
And so I think it's a worldwide phenomenon.
31:43
I think the worry that I have, and the thing that I always get caught on, is the really clever people are going to get there a lot faster.
31:48
And that leads me kind of to another question.
31:57
It's like NFT's, for example.
31:57
All of the new stuff that's happening will it go mainstream ever, do you think?
32:04
Or do you think it's always just going to be kind of a sidelight?
32:09
Packy McCormick: I 100% think it's going to go mainstream.
32:11
It's already like starting to break out of its cracks a little bit.
32:17
I think Top Shot kind of broke it out a little bit because it's something that people are familiar with, obviously, Axie is doing it a little bit in different parts of the world.
32:27
But I think the fascinating thing to me that I put in this last piece was that the same week that LVMH's Bernard Arnault became the richest person in the world.
32:32
NFT's have their biggest resurgence and there is a way that is like kind of really easy and obvious for people to show off that they believe a certain thing.
32:43
I think maybe that's the thing that makes it a little more mainstream.
32:47
Is that there are easier ways to show off that you own certain entities and they're not going to be like, not everybody's going to buy it [inaudible] there's a new product that lets you fractionalize crypto bank ownership.
32:55
So a lot of people can own a little bit.
32:58
I don't think it'll be bad necessarily, but it might be like, I went to the Eagles Cowboys game and I got this NFC as part of it that flipped over to Eagles Green when the Eagles beat the Cowboys.
33:08
And I now instead of holding a ticket in the scrapbook somewhere, I own that NFT.
33:12
And so I think it's more that there's like kind of these digital assets that shows both kind of who you are and what you believe in what you like, and then also shows off that you were able to afford certain things sometimes and show that you care about those particular things.
33:25
I think that is just like the very, very, very beginning stages.
33:25
And then there are more and more and more things that will just kind of become an NFTs without feeling like NFTs.
33:30
And that you just get and talk to a bunch of companies who are kind of building products in the space, that you just get as artifacts of doing things.
33:39
And so maybe it's something shows up in your wallet and got to figure out how to get more people their MetaMask Wallet or whatever.
33:44
But as I think things just you start kind of getting them that kind of seeds, the idea that these are legitimate ways that people can show off what they believe in, and that they have a certain status and a certain community, I think that will certainly continue to grow. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
34:00
And that's also very consistent with the idea of mimetic desire.
34:03
And how we value things.
34:03
So, I think that anything that it just has kind of a natural glide path from the old, physical limited world, into the new sort of unlimited world is going to work pretty easily.
34:18
Packy McCormick: Have you seen that company Artifact? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Yeah.
34:23
Packy McCormick: So Artifact essentially has digital kind of clothes and asset type NFTs that if you're taking an Instagram picture, you can do it with your, like shiny, shimmering artifacts, sneakers.
34:34
And if like, most of the reason that people are buying fancy clothes right now is to show off on Instagram anyway, why not show off something even cooler that like changes colors and attracts attention.
34:45
So I think as more and more of us becomes digital, it'll only makes sense to show off parts of who you are with digital things.
34:49
It feels so weird right now, but I think that's going to be incredibly, incredibly natural.
34:55
And Instagram, it's like this weird kind of, in between phase where we're representing ourselves mostly digital.
35:03
We're like most people way more people digitally than in person at this point.
35:10
And if you, I don't use Instagram that much, but I'm just addicted to Twitter.
35:10
But my wife is on Instagram all the time.
35:13
There's plenty of people that she's never met that she knows really well through Instagram.
35:17
If they start showing up wearing artifact sneakers, then maybe she buys some and shows them off.
35:21
I think that's a natural behavior.
35:21
Talking about menics like I think CryptoPunks is just like, absolutely unbelievable.
35:26
And it's another case for those these controlled environments where you can just like kind of see it happening in this real time lab.
35:31
People kind of copying people certain types of punks becoming valuable and communities forming there, it's wild to see. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
35:44
And didn't, Gary Vaynerchuk just spent like three and a half million or 3. 7 million.
35:49
Packy McCormick: And that was the second most valuable CryptoPunk persons that day, and there was like 5. 6 million purchase also.
35:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So the other thing that this makes me think about though, is like the whole idea of Ready Player One, the book, not the movie.
36:05
In that, like when Oculus Five comes out, man.
36:05
My youngest daughter is a comedian, and she was here recently, and she's like, "Dad, I am the very thin tether that is tethering you to reality."
36:19
And she's like, "I don't think I'll be able to defeat Oculus Five because..."
36:19
And so do you, can you speculate on that?
36:25
Is there some kind of future where, rather than doing this via Zoom, we both put our Oculus is on, we're sitting in the same room, and it feels like we're there.
36:32
And I personally think that doesn't weird me out at all.
36:37
Packy McCormick: Me neither, right?
36:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think it's kind of cool, right?
36:41
Packy McCormick: And it's interesting how it goes in stages too, where we've had this whole year where we've been used to spending all of this time on Zoom.
36:49
So if you said even five years ago, by the way, "now you're just going to interact with people in Oculus in person in VR," like that might feel really weird.
36:59
But now it feels like we're in this low fi kind of in between period where we're not meeting in person, but this is like very two dimensional.
37:03
And so like it almost feels like it's bringing it back to a more normal thing when it feels like you can actually meet in VR, when it's more high fidelity, I guess and low latency and all those things than it is now.
37:12
So I'm not weirded out by that at all.
37:16
I think the challenge is that it becomes like, so fun.
37:22
And so amusing yourself to death or...
37:22
I'm totally blanking on the David Foster. Infinite Jest, right?
37:27
Where there's like the entertainment that once you start watching it, everybody dies, once they start watching this video date because it's so entertaining that you can't pull yourself away.
37:34
And so like that is I think the real risk there.
37:34
And I don't know if you read Ready Player Two which wasn't as good.
37:38
But then speaking of your friend, Tim Urban, he wrote that amazing piece on Neuralink.
37:44
And that's like, what that is when it's not just the visual, but you can feel people's emotions and download.
37:49
And I'm sure that at some point, like all of that will be there.
37:49
And you'll look back from that period of time from 2100 when it's like the next big thing.
37:55
And you're like, "Yeah, that's not weird.
38:00
I've been meeting with everybody in VR."
38:00
And it is kind of weird that I can't feel what they're feeling.
38:03
And so it just goes like, a little bit at a time.
38:03
And then you kind of get to this future where you're downloading other people's emotions. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
38:10
And the haptic part, I think, is really key.
38:12
I think that as we evolved as a species, there are certain kinds of parts of our base code, so to speak, and touch and feeling.
38:20
And all of that is really important.
38:20
But that doesn't mean that we can't emulate that. Right?
38:28
And I think we can, and I think that it becomes, it sounds foreign and weird to people now, until they actually do it.
38:32
And then it's kind of like, "Wow, that's really cool. Right?"
38:39
Packy McCormick: And then people will be complaining that it makes them like a little bit nauseous that when you feel someone else's happiness. It's like not perfect.
38:45
Like the map becomes the issue that the technology is like, not quite perfect yet.
38:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, right.
38:52
That's like reminds me of the Louie CK joke about where he's on the airplane.
38:52
And he's like, experiencing WiFi on the plane for the first time in his life.
38:57
And he's like, "This is a miracle.
39:03
I am 30,000 feet above the ear and a tin can going 500 miles an hour and I'm on the internet."
39:09
And then and then it goes off and he goes, "What the fuck?"
39:13
Packy McCormick: But it's so true.
39:13
I felt that I tweeted something similar the other day in my house where I was like, "I absolutely can't believe that I went outside and I'm on my laptop and the internet is not working." Come on.
39:20
It's you just get used to, hedonic adaptation is very, very real. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
39:29
And well, I think- Jamie Catherwood: There is a great cartoon from the 1920s that showed airplanes flying around.
39:30
And the caption was, well, first is like, an illustration of when airplanes were first becoming kind of more common, and everyone's staring at the sky and freaking out about the technology.
39:45
And then the right panel is more planes and everyone looking at the ground, not paying attention in the caption with like, airplanes are becoming so dreadfully commonplace.
39:49
And it's like, that's exactly what you're describing, but it just always happens with every new technology. Packy McCormick: 100%.
39:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm doing a bit of research right now because a friend of mine is basically convinced that these are rewiring our brains.
40:05
And I think he's probably right because there is a good book called The Weirdest People in the World or something like that, in which the author makes a very convincing case for the fact that literacy, right?
40:17
When people learn how to read, physically changes the brain, right?
40:23
And what I think is hysterical is, you know what part of the brain it invades?
40:28
It invades the part of the brain that is good at facial recognition.
40:36
So it's kind of like, "Okay."
40:36
But so I don't necessarily think that's like a bad thing.
40:36
I'm getting ready for another guest who's really interesting guy who's been doing a lot of work in genetic behaviorism.
40:47
And one of the things I was watching another guy's speech, same field, but he was talking about the fact that if you looked at lesson plans, etc, from like, the late 1800s, people were far more literal. Right?
41:00
And like you would ask them a question.
41:06
So the one I remember was, it always knows at the North Pole all of the bears that are there are white, what color would a bear be if you saw one at the North Pole?
41:13
And they would answer, Brown.
41:20
And the explanation was, they'd only ever seen a brown bear.
41:20
And so the answers became very, very literal.
41:29
And it's like, just basic, like the ability to extend in a symbolic way thought, was really low. And go ahead.
41:38
Packy McCormick: Another story of, I don't know if this is real or I could remember.
41:42
But when there was, was it the Native Americans standing on the shore?
41:46
And there was a boat coming- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I do know that story. Packy McCormick: ...
41:52
and they couldn't see the boats because they just didn't have the concept.
41:52
And they didn't understand.
41:56
I wonder if we're at the point now, where there's nothing like that, where you're so programmed to believe that things could possibly happen that, you would be able to see everything or if there's things that still would totally blow our mind to the point that we couldn't even see it.
42:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So Santayana said something along the lines of people say that seeing is believing.
42:13
But his quip was "No, no, we only see what we believe." The other way around.
42:22
And I think that we are still using an educational system that was designed by industrialists in the early part of the 20th century, with the goal of getting people to be comfortable with sitting in a room for eight hours doing nothing.
42:40
And so I think that the, the opportunities for new educational methods are just like there's a plethora of them. What are your thoughts?
42:46
Do you have any favorites?
42:51
Packy McCormick: I don't have a favorite.
42:51
This is another one of those that is not technologically limited, but is socially limited, like 100%, right?
42:54
And if everybody said, credentials don't matter anymore, we have some way of measuring your aptitude for each particular thing, or you're on Twitter all the time.
43:07
And that's your new resume, or your portfolios, your new resume or whatever.
43:12
Everybody just accepted that including parents, and they were willing to take that risk with their children.
43:16
I think there's a million different ways that people would educate their kids today.
43:19
And you could figure it out the child care piece, also because that's a huge piece of education, just giving parents time to work and do whatever else.
43:28
But that's the biggest thing to overcome.
43:28
I think there are plenty of ways to be able to design the cohort based courses, I think are super interesting.
43:31
That's mostly targeted to people kind of post college and whatever else.
43:35
I think synthesis school early on, which is, are you familiar with synthesis?
43:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Packy McCormick: Yeah.
43:41
So this guy, Elon Musk's kind of kids school, and then built this video game learning type environment where little kids are taught to learn, kind of by playing this game.
43:48
I think stuff like that is so unbelievably interesting.
43:53
But I think it all depends on people buying into the new set of credentials, which is just going to take longer, but I would imagine like, I'm thinking about my kid, potentially being educated, I find it really hard to believe that my son is sitting in a classroom from the time that he's three or four years old until college.
44:09
And then if I'm like, still on the border, then everybody else, behind me is less crazy is like, "Yeah, I guess, we'll put them in school."
44:18
So I think that's the hardest part is like, I feel like I'm taking a huge risk with his future.
44:22
But at the same time, now, I've had this experience of knowing that as long as he's good, and he puts the stuff out there, he'll be fine.
44:32
But it's really tough unless you've actually felt that and experience that, I think they are comfortable with the idea that like, none of that, like you don't need to spend all these years to get a piece of paper at the end that says that you're smart.
44:38
There are other ways of proving that, that's going to be the biggest shift by far.
44:42
I think, at that point, you can run a billion experiments on what the best way is educated people.
44:46
But that's the big thing to overcome.
44:50
It's not worth it, if you can't convince people to actually, big enough numbers adhere to the new kind of learning standards.
44:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So Richard Fineman, the physicist, one of my heroes, and he had this great line, which is, learning has to be fun.
45:03
And he goes, "If it's not fun, you're actually not going to be learning."
45:08
And so I just think that we have, there is just so much room for improvement over the way we do things it they could actually make people smarter.
45:16
And I think that there's just too many people have this authoritarian mindset where they want to teach people what to think, not how to think.
45:31
And I just think that this new environment, another reason I'm so bullish on it, is that we now for the first time, have the tools are just going to appear, that's what's going to happen.
45:42
Packy McCormick: It's also easier for us out, I would imagine just thinking about the kind of each single point like, "Yes, of course, education sucks.
45:46
Yes, of course, healthcare sucks. Yes, of course..."
45:51
And then within all of those, you're like, "Shit, but like, what about all of those people who are teachers?
45:56
And what do you do about childcare?
46:00
And what do you do for people who don't have good internet connection?
46:00
And how do you make sure that people don't get further and further behind?"
46:03
At least if it's standardized, then like, some people don't get further and further and further behind.
46:06
And then in health care, all right?
46:10
Well, part of it's the government part of its insurance codes, and like how certain codes are able to reimburse.
46:14
So it's not like, none of it is important, but there is like real systems thinking needed in each thing, let alone how all of those things interact with each other, that does make it really, really, really complicated.
46:26
And even how do you train for medicine or something where people are cutting into people's bodies without somebody going through this path?
46:38
Maybe there's testing along the way or something.
46:38
But like are there some fields that do need standardization?
46:42
And then how far back you need to start that?
46:42
So I do think like, it doesn't mean that I don't think this will be solved in the next 100 years.
46:47
But I do think it is just like really hard to think of socially.
46:51
And then you look at somewhere like China where like, they see tech companies getting doing trials.
46:55
They're just like, well, you're not allowed to play games on any apps anymore, or whatever.
46:59
Like, the idea that central control, like one is super scary, and then two actually probably does let you maybe redesign systems a little bit faster than we could ever do here.
47:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So the only pushback I would give you there is that most systems are complex adaptive systems.
47:19
And in complex adaptive systems, emergent behavior comes from the bottom, not the top.
47:24
And people have the hardest intellectual time getting that.
47:24
Well, why don't we just do this?
47:31
Well because if you've got an economics degree, you've heard the phrase ceteris paribus, which is all other things being equal.
47:36
Packy McCormick: It never happens.
47:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All other things are never equal.
47:41
And it's like the old joke about the people lost on the desert island, and they find this huge stash of canned goods.
47:47
And everyone tries to think of a different way to open them.
47:54
The engineer, like build something to open them up, and they get to the economist, and he goes, let's assume we have a can opener.
48:05
Packy McCormick: I've never heard of that one, but that's amazing.
48:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And one of the things that I think is interesting that I want your opinion on my recurring guest, Alex Danco has a very strong opinion on this.
48:17
And that is what do you see as the future of physical workspaces?
48:22
Packy McCormick: So I was in the world of physical workspaces for six years at a company called Breather before this.
48:25
I feel like there's going to be this in between period where people try to go back and some people really, really love it.
48:37
And some people don't love it as much.
48:37
And some people quit, and other people stay, and other people will only work in places where you are in person. And I don't know.
48:41
In the short term, I think we're going to be at this big shuffle as people figure out what's best.
48:46
And companies figure out the way that they work best and all of that.
48:50
I think, over time, my bet is that physical workspaces become less and less important, that talent obviously wins.
49:06
Like, if you spent any time in startups, the number one thing that everybody needs is engineers right now, or designers or whatever else.
49:10
And if you're limiting yourself by one geography, but then to saying you have to come into the office nine to five, five days a week, like good luck hiring anybody.
49:18
And maybe there are some companies that if you have the option to go work on the team.
49:22
But I think that the workspaces are kind of like we they're figuring out how hybrid works, which is really, really complicated, or you go all remote.
49:31
And then they're just more you repurpose a lot of that space for more social physical spaces where people get to hang out together and have fun, and maybe the employees go to like, a bunch of offices turned into kind of like a Soho house type vibe, where once a week, you come in and you actually hang out.
49:44
There are companies who are doing a lot more trips and like, they'll rent huge houses in Utah, and everybody on the team will go work there together for a couple of weeks.
49:52
And you make the fun parts fun, and you make them work parts convenient. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
49:57
I agree with that entirely.
49:57
I think that we just had an off site for OSAM, I wasn't able to go.
50:00
But Jamie was telling me how much fun it was.
50:05
Because I do think at the end of the day, we are human beings, we thrive on being with one another.
50:11
We also gain a tremendous amount of non obvious insights, if you will, I've studied micro expressions for a long time, and they work man.
50:20
And the other thing that is interesting, too, is when you think about the history of discovery, like half of it was by accident, right?
50:26
It's like he forgot to clean up his workspace, [inaudible]. Packy McCormick: True.
50:38
And I will push back on that just a tiny bit where now they're just like spending more time online, the amount of potential random bumps that you have, and maybe it's not leaving something in your workspace.
50:47
But the amount of random interactions that you have has grown just by a couple orders of magnitude, if not more, right?
50:52
So I do think that's an important piece of it to where we're used to those things happening because of physical accidents and physical kind of encounters because that's the only time that we have.
51:02
But I do think there's a lot more room for kind of digital accidents too.
51:07
And it's so much more fun like that kind of reimagining it almost as this funnel, as opposed to like, I don't know, some guy chose to put 50 of you in the same office and some of you, and don't kill each other when you chew on your pen all day. Or type really loud. Or whatever.
51:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. I totally agree.
51:26
So you've also written about liquid employment, you want to explain that?
51:33
Packy McCormick: Yes, so the idea of liquid employment is, and I wrote this piece called the Cooperation Economy a little bit about this.
51:37
And you've brought this point up already, like in terms of school, but the idea of showing up in an office from nine to five every day, and having kind of one employer is also outdated.
51:46
It's a kind of what was physically possible, and you couldn't run from office to, office to, office to, office to office and do five different jobs.
51:57
If you wanted to show up and keep your job in any one of those places.
51:57
But I'm sure you've seen that meme on Twitter that I think started from a real incident where someone's like, "Oh, yeah, I have like three jobs right now.
52:06
And my employers don't know, and they don't care."
52:10
Because the amount of productive work that you do in an office in a 40 hour a week, it's like, maybe 20 hours, if you're really, really good.
52:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Maybe.
52:17
Packy McCormick: Maybe 20 hours, and you can get away with that, and do that for a couple of different companies.
52:22
A really good engineer can do that for three companies and 10 hours each, and then take that Friday off.
52:26
And so I think that people are going to find ways to kind of either take off and do fun things and have a long weekend and whatever, or find different things that keep them interested versus like, I'm sure we have our weekly engineering stand up.
52:38
And now our exec team is talking to the company about our quarterly results, like all this dumb shit that you have to do, that's just being a part of work.
52:49
If that goes away, then either you can free up more time for yourself, or you can do different things.
52:53
And it doesn't also mean necessarily working for a company.
52:57
You could go join a dance.
52:57
It's kind of like the more out there example.
53:02
You could go just work on a project by project basis, you could have a side thing where in my case, I thought I'd be writing a newsletter is like a side thing.
53:06
But that turned into a job.
53:11
For me, I think a lot of what I write like, if I criticize myself, a lot of it is from my own perspective, and then extrapolating out.
53:16
And so I see myself, and I'm like, I would just never work for a company again, like I've had offers.
53:20
Since I started doing this that a year and a half ago, I'd be like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I just got that offer."
53:26
Of course, I'm doing that job.
53:28
And I'm like, "No, I'm not going to go work for somebody. That's crazy.
53:28
Why would I go work for a company right now?"
53:32
There's too much optionality, there's too many good things.
53:36
But I would love joining up with a group of really smart people for a project.
53:40
And so I'm part of this group of people building something called maple, that's kind of like, honey, for SAS discounts for founders.
53:44
It's a plugin, or it's like, "Oh, you went to Y Combinator, you have all these discounts.
53:48
Don't forget about them."
53:48
And it's all part time people.
53:53
And you don't need anything more, you need me to tweet occasionally about it, and like mentioned it in the newsletter, but doesn't mean that I can't add a lot more value with that distribution than I could have is like an employee to try to do a bunch of marketing campaigns before.
54:00
And so I just think there's a lot of those opportunities where a bunch of high leverage people can do a bunch of different things.
54:08
This goes back to the original place, when we started this conversation that we're there's that whole room in the middle.
54:13
And I do think that there's also opportunities for a pretty good designer or a good project manager, or like someone who you wouldn't think of is like the star of the show to find 10 different areas where they can also use their five most valuable hours on a bunch of different projects.
54:27
And so I think, when I talked about matching earlier, that's kind of what I mean that like, there should be ways for you to find the highest leverage ways to work to be rewarded and compensated accordingly and not within like some random pay band that you are able to stay in if you show up 40 hours a week and your boss gives you good reviews.
54:41
Like you should be able to make more by going and adding kind of like high value, high leverage work to a bunch of different things that interests you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I 100% agree with you.
54:52
And I think that this isn't an accelarable process.
54:59
And if you don't understand what's happening, you will be left behind.
54:59
This whole idea of like the people who want people back in the offices, those are the weekends, man.
55:07
Those are the weekends because they're the FaceTime people.
55:14
And that is dead, that is just dead. Packy McCormick: Yes.
55:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it's like, I had a fight with the president my company forever because he wanted people to be at their desks.
55:24
And I'm like, "Fuck that, man.
55:24
I want people who are adults and can do their jobs."
55:29
And if they get their jobs done, great, I love it.
55:35
Packy McCormick: I want to do FaceTime with my baby.
55:35
Like, that part seems like absolutely crazy.
55:37
Having like, really only been a dad during this period, where I'm like, both my wife and I are like, so people just like, left their kids at home and just like, wouldn't see them for hours or weeks?
55:48
So my dad was a management consultant, so he would just like, traveled for the week.
55:52
And then I'd see him Friday night.
55:52
That seems like absolutely crazy now.
55:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know.
55:58
And the lived experiences is going to teach us this.
55:58
And we are going to adapt very, very quickly.
56:03
What do you think the first billion dollar single employee company hits the exchange?
56:10
Packy McCormick: Hits the exchange.
56:13
It depends what exchange, like I think you'll probably see like a billion dollar creator token or something potentially even first.
56:17
I do you think this is another one where probably the social piece comes into play, where if you try to go through the IPO process as a single person at this point, they're just like, "No, you need a finance team and you need a follower and using your pilot accountant does not count.
56:33
And that does not make you IPO ready."
56:33
So I feel like they are things like that, that are going to prevent maybe in the short term that from happening.
56:38
But are we at a spot at some point very, very soon, where like Kylie Cosmetics is a great example of someone who needed other people around.
56:46
And I'm sure if that if Kylie was both the brand and like a little bit good at software, you could probably stitch together a bunch of things that could do a lot of the things that people did.
56:55
But I think like, I don't know, I think that we're not very far from like maybe a decade from people building billion dollar businesses.
56:59
There's a lot of billions of crypto billionaires at this point.
57:06
If you count that as a business or one person billionaires, but like actually building a product and getting that in people's hands, should be possible with software and some smart distribution. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Okay.
57:18
Packy, give me your most out there speculation that you think is going to happen that even when you tell your most switched on friends, they look at you like, "Come on, man, come on."
57:30
Packy McCormick: This is a really good one.
57:35
This is such a lame answer.
57:35
I don't have any like one particular thing that I'm like, "This thing is definitely going to happen."
57:40
What I wrote about on Monday was just the idea that like way crazier stuff is definitely going to happen.
57:44
And it's not a super contrary opinion, but like that it is just going to continue to get crazier.
57:51
So I think we'll wake up in 10 years, and your idea of the VR world, will be totally normal that people spend a lot of time in VR.
58:00
They'll be doing multiple jobs in VR, they'll be rewarded in kind of a mix, maybe a VR and crypto.
58:05
They will date somebody across the world.
58:05
And it'll actually really feel like they're dating that person.
58:11
They'll take spaceflight and like, do like this really cool physical world stuff. Also, right?
58:16
Like spaceflight, the cost of that is coming down like a tremendous amount.
58:21
Obviously, the Jeff Bezos flight was $28 million, or whatever, in a decade you can go, and I heard about this, you can go to spacex.
58:25
com, and it is much easier to book space on a satellite.
58:32
It does put you in a form that you need to talk to somebody in the very end, once you've told it all the specifics about like getting your payload up into space.
58:40
And you go all the way through the funnel until like the pretty much like, "Let's just sign this deal," like e-commerce checkout to book satellite space.
58:43
So there's not one thing because I don't think I'm smart enough to know what combination of these things are.
58:53
But I think whatever I'm saying right now, and whatever I'm thinking about is not nearly as crazy as whatever it's actually going to be in a decade.
58:57
Because these things also combine with each other.
59:03
And so like that's the thing that makes it really, really, really difficult to understand is like, what happens when you have all these technologies in 15, 20, 30, whatever years.
59:14
All these technologies combined with kids who are educated differently and like are really like, come up through an education system that makes them perfectly adapted to dealing with all of this and like all these things, just keep pounding on each other.
59:25
And so I don't have one specific prediction other than like, holy shit, like I, it's going to be wild out there And to your point like some people will be left behind.
59:30
And that's why the big push that I've been trying to make in the newsletter is like trying to toe the line between being optimistic futurist and like a little bit grounded also in reality, so that people don't just say, "Oh, he's crazy and not believe me."
59:44
I'm trying to bring as many people along as possible to be like, "You don't have to give up your worldly possessions and live in VR right now."
59:49
But like, you really do need to be prepared for some of this.
59:51
Because if you think right now is weird.
59:57
It is going to get so much weirder.
59:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, it's so much weirder.
59:58
But to my way of looking at it so much cooler.
1:00:05
I am so incredibly optimistic about what's going to happen.
1:00:05
And let me also set a baseline there, that does not mean bad shit isn't going to happen.
1:00:12
Packy McCormick: Totally.
1:00:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bad shit is going to happen.
1:00:15
Packy McCormick: At a bigger scale.
1:00:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: At a bigger scale. Right, exactly.
1:00:19
And so, I'm not saying that everything's going to be perfect.
1:00:19
In fact, it's not going to be.
1:00:24
But as we move forward and compound forward and correct our errors, things get better, does not mean that we're not going to face a whole host of problems.
1:00:36
But we are putting in place in my opinion, the tools to deal with them better than we ever have in the past. So I'm very bullish.
1:00:42
Listen, man, this has been super fun.
1:00:42
We have a final question that we ask everyone.
1:00:50
And so you're going to get it, of course.
1:00:50
And it's this, we are going to wave a wand, we're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone.
1:01:00
You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp.
1:01:07
But you can incept them, like the movie Inception.
1:01:07
You can incept the entire population of the world to basically wake up the next day, thinking that it was their idea.
1:01:21
And starting thinking that way, changing the way they do something. What you got for me?
1:01:25
Packy McCormick: And this is like a little obvious, just based on, like just open mindedness.
1:01:28
I think, if I could just incept everybody with a little bit of open mindedness, optimism is maybe even too Pollyanna for what I'm going for.
1:01:32
But just like an openness to all the things that we've talked about, things that we haven't talked about.
1:01:37
Open mindedness to the fact that things can go bad, but just I think that open mindedness if everybody were allowed, and maybe the answer is like you just slip mushrooms into everybody's coffee.
1:01:48
But I do think that kind of just broader open mindedness is necessary for the next century and beyond.
1:02:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You got my vote there.
1:02:00
You got one more you got to give me though. Packy McCormick: Oh, no.
1:02:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You got two, man.
1:02:05
That's why we make it hard.
1:02:05
Packy McCormick: And I went with such a broad first one.
1:02:09
It's hard to do anything else.
1:02:09
I guess this is like kind of a similar track.
1:02:15
But I debated in high school in college.
1:02:15
And the thing that I liked the most about it, is that you have to take, you don't know what side you're going to get it.
1:02:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
1:02:24
Packy McCormick: And a lot of cases people argue both sides.
1:02:28
And so maybe one morning you wake up and you have to argue the other side, knowing that you're doing it, you'll go back to reality.
1:02:31
But having the bank kind of the other side's perspective, I think is really valuable.
1:02:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I totally agree, I do that actually, I always try to understand the other side of an argument as well as I can. Because I'm often wrong.
1:02:41
And it's good to remind yourself that you're often wrong.
1:02:49
And that keeps you in a frame of mind where you just want to learn.
1:02:49
And I also think it's really important to delete bad beliefs.
1:02:56
And the only way you can do that is to be open minded.
1:02:56
And check out what the other guys are saying, I think.
1:03:01
Packy McCormick: Or you just publish online, and everybody will tell you how wrong you are, hundreds of times a week.
1:03:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That my friend Tren Griffin convinced me of this, I'd never thought of it this way.
1:03:17
But he's like, and I'll say it to you because you do this.
1:03:17
He's like he was talking about my books in my case, but in your case the newsletter, "You have to be brave.
1:03:22
You have to be brave to be willing to say put it out there and the slings and arrows are going to come in."
1:03:28
And what happened with me is I just developed a like really thick skin.
1:03:34
But it does require bravery and I think that sometimes, if there's a young person listening to this, man, do it, just do it because- Packy McCormick: I was petrified the first six months that I did it, and now I'll get the worst comments back and I'm like, "Well, that guy's probably having a bad day."
1:03:53
Jamie Catherwood: Some of them are just like that. They're so funny.
1:03:55
I had one guy who unsubscribed like an hour after subscribing.
1:04:00
And he got like the welcome email that goes out an hour after you hit subscribe.
1:04:04
And then he unsubscribe with the reason, didn't want any emails.
1:04:04
So it's like, "Why did you sign up for an email newsletter?
1:04:08
What did you think was going to happen?
1:04:08
I was going to like hand mail you some like newsletters?"
1:04:14
Packy McCormick: There are 7 billion people in the world and you're going to get all sorts of responses, the more you interact with them. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
1:04:22
And you might as well just enjoy it and have fun.
1:04:22
That's the way I've done it.
1:04:22
It's like, I am endlessly amused by people's behavior.
1:04:27
We are wonderful creatures.
1:04:27
All right, Packy, this has been fantastic.
1:04:34
I want to have you on again, we'll think up a whole new thing to talk about.
1:04:39
I'm sure you're going to come up with some incredible ideas in the newsletter and we'll come back and chat about it.
1:04:44
Packy McCormick: I can't wait.
1:04:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Cheers, man.
1:04:47
This has been a lot of fun.