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Hello, everyone, it's Jim O'Shaughnessy of infinite loops with a very exciting announcement.
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Welcome to the first episode of our Infinite Loops series on the great reshuffle.
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This one's a little different in that I won't be talking to single guests, what we'll be doing is taking the insights of guests from the past and adding them in to try to make our case for the thesis that we are currently undergoing a great reshuffle.
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It's not anything brand new.
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After all, Robert Anton Wilson wrote in 1992, all of our old models are collapsing.
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Information is accelerating so fast, we barely know what's going on.
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We have seen over the last 10 years, almost an infinite and exponential change in so many aspects of our life, that we felt it would be very worthwhile to do a series on how the great reshuffle is going to affect your job, your education, your healthcare, your group of friends, it will affect every single aspect of all of our lives, many of the effects will be very, very good.
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Some of the effects may be very, very bad.
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What we want to do is give you an opportunity to hear what our thesis is around the great reshuffle and why it's important for everyone, no matter their age, to think about how it will be affecting them.
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Well, first off the great reshuffle.
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Okay, we're hearing a lot of greats, these days, we have the great reset, we have the great resignation, we have the great reshuffle, people obviously know what's going on, we've moved from linear growth to exponential
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growth, we've moved from worlds that for most people made sense to worlds where for many people who are still trapped in a deterministic cause effect world that the world that they're living in right now is very, very different than that world. One of my favourite lines is that we are
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One of my favourite lines is that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world.
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And often hilarity or tragedy result.
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There seems to be a great nostalgia for the absolute.
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Things were cut and dried, yes or no, zero and 100, black and white.
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That's a deterministic worldview, that many of us today still have.
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My thesis is that only those who are not seeking absolutes, will prosper in the new world that will emerge from this great reshuffle, The world we're going into.
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is one that will be one that prizes, people who are able to think probabilistically people who are able to understand that outcomes many times may not have an obvious cause.
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That is going to be in my opinion, one of the greatest hurdles that we all will have to face in living and succeeding through the great reshuffle. Why?
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Well, deep in our human operating system, way, way down in the base code is a simple question. Why? Why did this happen?
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Why do I need to know about that?
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What happens is we will invent cause and effect reasons, even when they simply aren't there.
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We are pattern seeking creatures.
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And we are also social creatures.
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We are very strongly influenced by what those around us believe, everyone is searching for an answer to why.
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I was talking to a good friend of mine who is I consider one of the greatest artificial intelligence and machine learning experts.
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And I put that question to him.
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I said, machine learning is going to be able to tell us what and when maybe but it will be almost silent always on why.
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And he started to laugh and said that is something that we have struggled with for a long time and he said quite frankly what will happen is people will very quickly invent the whys, even if they're totally wrong.
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And so the first thing I'd like to talk about is, this is a very useful exercise, we're going to get a lot of stuff wrong.
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So we're not trying to make predictable forecasts here, what we're trying to do is highlight our thesis for why the great reshuffle is happening, what some of the effects of it will be, and what you, our listener and viewer can do to better prepare yourself for the world that is currently here.
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But emerging almost at the exponential part of the curve, it's going to be a lot, it's going to be scary for a lot of people, especially olds, like me, a lot of older people have mental models that have worked for decades, and they're going to find that
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they're going to stop working, some of them will be open to saying, "Hmm, that model that worked for 20 years doesn't work anymore, I should try to figure out why that is" Unfortunately, many will remain fixed in their thinking. And for those people, we're going to
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And for those people, we're going to have to figure out exactly how to help them, not just old, but anyone who has a very difficult time rearranging the way they think about the world.
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Because what's happening is we're coming from a world that was a Bayesian distribution of the bell curve.
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Everyone is familiar with a bell curve, it is a distribution of attributes like height, eye colour, and all of these various things and society modelled itself around the 68% in the middle of that bell curve, every part of society, from government to entertainment to education modelled themselves around that 68%. Were there exceptions? Of course, there were.
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There were people who intentionally wanted to be outliers.
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Think of in America, the Ivy League, they didn't want to be in that 68%.
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They wanted to be on the right hand side of the bell curve.
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Think about entertainment, PBSs Great Masterpiece Theatre, etc.
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They knew that they weren't going for the 68%.
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However, the world that we're going into now, I believe, thesis part one, is that we are witnessing the change in the distribution of outcomes so that they will be much more like a Mandelbrot chaotic, normal distribution.
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Chaotic normal distributions are highlighted by their very peaky middles, so it's no longer 68%.
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It is a much lower number of people.
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And they're very long tails, both on the left tail and the right tail.
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If you're on the right tail, the world is becoming your oyster.
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And you will have tools that no other human had throughout all of human history, you will have leverage and the ability to build and create, like no other human ever had access to.
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If you're on the left hand side of that distribution, we're going to look for ideas to try and help you make the most of this new reality.
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I changed my mind on a lot of things.
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As I came to understand this great shuffle, I changed my mind on universal basic income because some people through no fault of their own simply won't be able to use these new tools or understand or make sense of this new world that is emerging.
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I'm a fan of countries giving what I would call a country comma, index of stocks in that country to citizens when they're born.
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But I want to stop for a minute and say, Why me?
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Why is some 61 year old white guy from Connecticut, the person to lead us on this journey of the great reshuffle Well, a couple of reasons.
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I lived back then when everything was different.
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I started my first company in 1987, Dow dropped more than 500 points today the Dow dropped more than 22% and I'm going to compare and contrast in a minute the difference between my experience then and my experience now, in 1987 I formed a company called O'Shaughnessy Capital Management, I was 27 years old to form that company took me many, many months and many many travel miles.
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It was an asset manager much like the company I have today.
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But everything was in the world of atoms.
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Nothing was in the world of bits and bytes.
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Total time elapsed between starting O'Shaughnessy Capital Management in 1987.
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And it becoming a live company was about three months.
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Flash forward to the companies I'm going to be forming in 2022.
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Everything that I will do in forming these companies, doing 2 will be done online and effortlessly.
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Literally, I'll be able to get the whole thing done for both companies in a day, maybe two days.
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When you think about this.
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The differences are are absolutely extraordinary.
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The other thing that's fascinating about the way we're forming companies today is I can hire employees from anywhere in the world.
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I think that this is something that infinite loops has shown a great example of how this works.
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everyone on my team, except for Jaime Catherwood, I've never met in real life, everyone on my team didn't send me a resume or a CV.
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I watched what they did on social media for months, upon months upon months, one of the biggest changes that COVID made possible and is now the new norm, is the world is proof of work.
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This is where what the world calls digital natives, ie young people who were born into a world of smartphones and social media are gonna have a decided edge against olds like me, where we have to completely relearn many, many mental models that got us where we are today.
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Pre-COVID, everyone just naturally assumed they had to go to the office that they wanted a job pre COVID, everyone naturally assumed that they needed to move somewhere if they wanted to work for that company.
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So you would see a lot of people moving to Silicon Valley, which affected housing costs, which affected all other costs dramatically.
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But they did, they had a move theoretically, before it COVID Would you ever hire somebody without meeting them in real life? Doubtful.
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And yet, InfiniteLloops has gotten infinitely better, because of my team.
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For people who are creators, for people who are knowledge workers.
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The world we exist in today is vastly different than just a few years ago, for example, this recording, this recording is being made with me sitting in Greenwich, Connecticut, with my colleagues sitting in India all happening through and effortlessly through all of the new tech that we have developed over the past 10 or 20 years.
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Can you imagine a world if you're say under 30?
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Can you imagine a world in which you can't get in touch with someone who you urgently need to speak with or send something to that was the world of most of my adult life, there were parts of the world that simply had no telephone reception.
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If you were there, you were unreachable.
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If you were on a plane, you were unreachable.
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If you were in transit, in other forms of transit, you were unreachable.
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Now many people think that that's a pretty nice thing.
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And one of the new benefits is going to be able to be unreachable again.
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But the fact is, we now live in a world where time space geography no longer matter.
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And so I believe that that is profoundly important, profoundly important because in this new world, we are looking at an instrument or I guess, a platform in the internet, which my friend and guest Matt Clifford calls the greatest variance amplifier in human history.
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most of human history was built around variance dampening, You know, the rise of modernity, the rise of various dampening institutions, was really bad for ambitious people, it was really good for the average person.
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And you know, if you're a utilitarian, maybe on balance, that's a trade that we want to take.
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But why is it bad for ambitious people, because one of the main ways to sort of reduce variance is to stop a Napoleon invading Europe every time they want to show you how smart they are, or, you know, like insert your favourite example here.
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And so what you know, like the the apotheosis of this, if you like, is the idea of the career, like Napoleon didn't set out to have a career.
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He wasn't looking to impress his boss.
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And yet, you know, if you look at what the 20th century was about, from from the perspective of like work and ambition, it was really about having these like more or less formalised, tracks for ambitious people to climb, and it doesn't mean
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that if you got to the top of that you couldn't be wealthy, powerful, you know, insert your favourite adjective here, but what it did mean was that we more or less knew what someone at the top of that hierarchy could do and what they couldn't do. We can't let our world be a world where an
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We can't let our world be a world where an ambitious man or woman decides that "Hmm, rather than send my CV off to McKinsey or to Ox-bridge.
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I'm going to take over the entire world and proclaim myself emperor of the world.
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Well, that's exactly what Napoleon, a very, very ambitious man indeed to try to do.
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And when that war was over in 1815, whether it was planned or whether it emerged out of the situation, that had just transpired, we started creating variance dampening institutions.
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In other words, we started to create a rule book for success, a rule book for what's acceptable and what is not accepted.
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So that rule book looks something like this.
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If you're very, very bright, get into a first rate University here in the States, it would be one of the Ivies, in England, it would be Ox-bridge.
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Every country has their reach University, get a good set of grades from that university, and then look for a job in a field where you feel that you can shine.
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Some of the brightest minds went into consulting, finance, technology, etc.
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But there was a clear and definable path where, or a ladder if you will, that you could climb in your attempt to ascend to the top of the hierarchy.
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And that world made a lot of sense.
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Actually, many people understood what was and what wasn't something that they could do to become successful.
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And in that world, it was, at least in the United States, but probably globally, a highly controlled mental model or reality tunnel. In the United States.
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For example, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the most popular show on television was called I Love Lucy.
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Lucille Ball was one of the best known people in the world.
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63 million Americans watched her half an hour sitcom every week, to the point where stores changed their hours because no one would come if they kept their late hours for a period when I Love Lucy was on.
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Flash forward to today, that world has atomized.
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And if we look at the most viewed television show of recent vintage, that would be Game of Thrones, and its finale watched by 18 million people.
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So we have created a world where the dominant institutions - politics, media, academia had a stranglehold on what people actually thought and did.
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When I Love Lucy was on the air.
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There were also only three television networks that ran nightly hourly news segment, there were only two papers in the United States that mattered the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
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Now think about how easy it is to control the narrative in that type of world.
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FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was president during World War Two had polio, he was confined to a wheelchair.
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And guess what, almost all Americans had no idea about that. They simply didn't know.
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And they didn't know because all of the reporters said, "That's not germane, what's germane is, is he a good president or not?"
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When he was pictured giving a speech, he was always standing up.
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Most people don't know that while, he was doing that he was in horrible pain, because of the braces on his legs that allowed him to stand up-right.
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One thing that we're seeing right now, in this great reshuffle, is the fighting going on among former elites for supremacy becoming far more brutal and nasty.
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They're fighting for ideas, who they hope will become the new consensus reality, and they're fighting dirty, because essentially, the world is changing from underneath them.
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And many of them no longer matter.
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You see it most obviously, in the old mainstream media.
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What are the things that you see, when a formerly powerful either institution or brotherhood or sisterhood gets challenged, is you see vicious competition, to not go down the hierarchy.
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When an animal is cornered, and not yet dead.
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That is the time when approaching that animal is the greatest and gravest danger for you.
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A wounded animal will do anything to try to survive.
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Take this metaphor and look at the behaviour of the mainstream media.
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Look at the quality that has plummeted.
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Look at great newspapers on both sides of the debate, publishing things that they know to be lies.
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The lesson that we want to learn is because they've seen their stranglehold on power as the fourth estate in many countries, the media is seeing that that is no longer true.
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And they're fighting like that wounded animal.
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And what they will do is still somewhat unpredictable.
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False news has become all too common on social media.
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More alarming, some media outlets publish the same fake stories that simply aren't true, without checking facts first.
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Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think and this is extremely dangerous to our democracy