Jim O'Shaughnessy | On Investing in Infinite Human Potential

‍Beatrice: My guest today is Jim O'Shaughnessy, who is the founder of O'Shaughnessy Ventures, which is, I think, a very unusual investment firm. ‘Cause you're dedicated to actually rooting for innovators across very different fields like science, technology, and the arts. And I know you've a very long career in quantitative investing, but that these days you're mostly using your insights to invest in humanity's creative potential. And so, I'm really excited to discuss all of this with you today.

Let's dive into it. Maybe, Jim, tell us—if someone wanted to understand who you are and what shaped you, what do they need to know about you? Basically, tell us.

Jim: Well, I got my start on Wall Street. I was absolutely obsessed with why stock markets worked the way they worked. When I was thinking about what career I would love to pursue, it always led back to trying to figure out Wall Street. And so, I'm 65. And back then, like, in 1982, if you said, "Yeah, I'm a quantitative investor," people would look at you like you had three heads and they'd say, "What does that entail?"

So, I went and read as much of the literature as I possibly could get my hands on. They wanted to make me an honorary member of the board of the research library in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I grew up, because I was there so much. And I didn't find anything that was satisfying this itch of, like, "Okay, I understand when you explain, 'Oh, I love this stock,' and then you start talking about the CEO or the industry they're in or any of those types of things." And that's what I found for the most part.

I did find a lot of academic work that really intrigued me, which was, "Well, let's take a very long-term look at stocks with different factors and how do they perform." But much of that was either in the dusty academic journals or had a very limited amount of time that was analyzed. So, I convinced the people at Standard & Poor's Compustat—which is kind of the gold standard if you want to do research on, if you buy the 50 stocks with the highest PE consistently, how do you do? If you buy the 50 stocks with the lowest PE, how do you do?—but over very long periods of time: 40, 50, 60 years.

And I published the book, What Works on Wall Street, which was sort of my thesis, if you will, on ways that could be very helpful in investing and ways to avoid. And so for most of my career, I was in quantitative finance, but also began sort of more speculative investing in startups, in probably 2007.

Beatrice: And what, how did you end up where you are today? Because today, it's quite different. I mean, it is very speculative, but tell us about OSV Ventures, basically, which is, as I understand it, maybe what you're spending most of your time on these days.

Jim: It is, yes. So, another thing that I was obsessed with was the automation process that the internet—and now things like AI and machine learning—afford us. And I started a company in 1999 called NetFolio, and we actually had a patent on "the dissemination and fulfillment of investment advice over a worldwide computer network"—that shows how old the patent was. But what I wanted to do was essentially make it so that everybody could have access to these models, which previously to that were only for super-high-net-worth individuals and institutions.

And that didn't work out because of the dot-com bubble and burst, but we continued to build that technology. And then we issued a platform called Canvas that allowed for mass customization of portfolios. So, yours could be quite different than mine, and it could reflect you in as much as you wanted it to. So if you didn't want to invest in tobacco makers, for example, and or you wanted to make certain that your portfolio is the most tax-efficient it could be, you would use this software to allow yourself to do that.

That intrigued Franklin Templeton, which is a huge asset manager with more than a trillion dollars in assets under management, and they bought O'Shaughnessy Asset Management essentially for that technology. I had, as we were chatting briefly before we started to record, many other interests, but my career in asset management, I really had to focus on.

And so, O'Shaughnessy Ventures is kind of my third act here. And its verticals are all things that I love. So, we have a publishing company called Infinite Books that we think will really kind of create a new best practice for publishing. I like to joke that many of the traditional publishers are using best practices, it's just that many of them are from the 1920s, not the 2020s. And that can all be revolutionized with innovation through technology and other factors.

We have a film studio, essentially. One of the things—I love movies and I love to read, thus movie studio and book publisher. But one of the things that bothered me a lot was, most of the science fiction, for example—that I'm a nerd, sorry, I love science fiction and all of that—but most of it was very dystopian. And I believe—I passionately believe—that everything is downstream of culture, and what affects culture dramatically are the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we listen to, the stories we identify with. And if you look at the history of things like science fiction, what you see is early science fiction was incredibly optimistic. It was, "We're going to be able to do this and this," et cetera. And then it took a turn into just real darkness.

In fact, we have a new book coming out tomorrow, actually, called White Mirror. And that's a take-off on the popular TV show Black Mirror. We ran a contest several years ago saying, "Hey, is there anyone out there who can write good, optimistic science fiction?" And the result is being published tomorrow in a book called White Mirror.

But the same is true for movies. Many movies of my youth and even my adulthood were very inspiring. They were very... you could, when after you watched it, you would feel, "Wow, okay, maybe I can try that too." And then kind of, movies went the same way. Like, I don't want to watch the 10th sequel to a superhero movie. It's not that I'm against superhero movies at all, it's just that I don't want to see the same thing just redone. So the film company basically is right now doing documentaries, but we'll be moving into full features in a little while.

We also have a media division for Substack, podcasts, et cetera. Same sort of story. I believe—I deeply believe—that cognitive diversity is a great thing and that when you put minds that don't think alike together, kind of really cool things can result from that. And that's kind of the path we're taking with the media vertical.

And then finally, we also started giving fellowships and grants to really outside-of-the-norm type people who we find quite brilliant and want to see what they can do. The internet first, and then many of the tech advances that we've had since the internet... it used to be a genius could be born, live, and die anywhere in the world and nobody knew. Sometimes not even the person themselves, because we were really captives of our geography, where we were born, et cetera. And that isn't true anymore. The internet has collapsed time, space, distance, and now we can find these geniuses and these people who think differently. And so we felt compelled to offer these fellowships and grants to not only highlight them but give them a chance to really spend deep time working on their ideas.

Beatrice: Yeah. And, yeah, I was obviously very excited when I came across your work because I was recommended to look at your stuff from Brooke, from Vibe Camp, who...

Jim: Oh, Brooke's great.

Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah. And it was—it's just very aligned. So, because this is the Existential Hope podcast and we run this program because we really agree with your thesis that we need better stories in general and, like, a better story about the future, like what is possible. And we should think about that and try to get people excited about that and work towards it. And so to just actually see that you're doing all this stuff and across all these different streams is just, yeah, really exciting. So, thanks.

I would be really curious to hear, because I know that you've already done quite a few projects, do you have any favorite projects so far that you could tell us a bit about?

Jim: Sure. The other part I didn't mention is we also are a pre-seed and seed venture investing company. And we focus on that area because it's an area where a lot of traditional venture capital doesn't go, because they are operating under a fund that has a time period, usually 10 years, attached to it. And they also—the math of venture capital is brutal. Because you've got to be willing to make lots of investments that end up going to zero in the hopes that you're going to find that one that can return the entire fund.

And our approach is a little bit different. It is, we want to find those founders very early, sometimes before they've even incorporated a company. And when we find somebody we think has great promise, we will see whether they're interested in forming a company, a pre-seed, et cetera. So, I mean, that's an ongoing thing that is a tremendous amount of fun. There are so many gifted, brilliant people in the world, and the idea that many of them, for most of human history, haven't been able to do anything with that really offends me. And so now that they can, we must.

But in terms of projects, well, let's take kind of one from each. I already mentioned White Mirror. I'm very excited for that drop tomorrow. We sold out the pre-order. We had a very fancy bundle where you got the book itself, you got the audio version, and you got a lot of goodies in it. I was really delighted to see that sort of sell out in, I think, 72 hours. And the stories in the writing itself are quite beautiful. So, and inspiring. And so that is very exciting for me.

On the film front, we have in production a documentary about Bell Labs. And we're using as our source material and working with the author of the book, The Idea Factory. Lots of young people don't know about Bell Labs. Bell Labs was this incredible collection of geniuses. Claude Shannon invented information theory while at Bell Labs. But what's fun about it is they were also kind of oddballs. And so the cast, the people who worked there, are actually very cinematic. Claude Shannon, like, being kind of exhibit A. He was quite a character. And that's been a ton of fun working on that.

Also on the film front, we are in editing right now on the Vesuvius Challenge. And for people who don't know what that is, Nat Friedman, a very successful tech entrepreneur, provided a prize for anyone who could both make out scrolls that were destroyed when Vesuvius erupted in ancient Roman and Greek times. What people didn't know was there were huge libraries there, and they went the way of all volcanic results. And so there's thousands of these scrolls, and in pre-tech times, if you tried to even touch one, it might disintegrate. So Nat provided a sizable prize for people who could not only figure out how to read them but also translate them. And they did. And it involved things that I find fascinating. For example, they used a particle accelerator to raise the letters off of the damaged scrolls, and then they used AI to translate them. And so what's exciting here is there are thousands of these scrolls. And imagine a new play by Aristophanes or finding some of the works—most of which have been lost—by Aristotle. So using technology to unlock ancient wisdom is kind of catnip for me.

And then on the investment front, the brainpower out there that is not well funded is still way outdone by that which is funded. So we have some very early-stage innovators in not only artificial intelligence, but also in the world of atoms, where they're using technology to make processes that in the past were laborious and expensive much, much cheaper, more efficient, more eco-friendly, et cetera. We have, for example, an investment in a new process to make concrete, which is used all over the world, and it is much more efficient, it is much more eco-friendly, et cetera. So lots of exciting stuff going on.

Beatrice: That certainly is a lot of exciting stuff. I really love the, your point on potential as well. Like, we did a world-building exercise with our team recently, and we were trying to figure out, like, what world are we actually trying to create with the foresight work and advancing technologies. And I think the way that we sort of summed up our vision was something like, "for everything and everyone to be able to reach its full potential," because there's just, yeah, so much, so many people right now who, all over the world, are definitely not able to do so.

Jim: Well, that's one of our taglines: "All of us have infinite human potential." So, I'm very inspired by the Renaissance and by the idea that we... a lot of people who don't know the historical context, for much of human history, most humans looked at themselves as just cogs in a machine. And or, as above, so below; the seraphim in heaven ruled and you just followed. And nobody really had the temerity to say, "What if we do it this way?" And so that entire burst of just creativity and innovation and just incredible invention always inspired me.

Of course, it led to the scientific revolution where, essentially, we were no longer just mere gnats under God's thumb. We had the potential within ourselves to make our world a better place. And what fascinates me about that is just how new that idea actually is. And then if you look at our modern world again, our modern world is like a nanosecond in the grand scope of human history. It wasn't until about a hundred years ago where a single individual human was able to address more than a roomful or a stadium full, and that was radio. Right? And I was reading Bill Bryson's One Summer about America in the 1920s, and all of this he highlighted, I was just like, "My God, we are babies. We're just brand new." And when I was reading about the fellow who was announcing Lindbergh's return to the United States over RCA radio networks, Bryson made the point that that individual was making history. He was addressing more humans than a single human had addressed ever in human history. And it's kind of like, "Wow." Like, and even flight itself, the idea that we take for granted now, is also a relatively new idea. And so I think we've just—we're just touching the surface of our capabilities. And that's very exciting for me.

Beatrice: Like, yeah, there's a lot of potential technology and things that can help us now also, hopefully, in the next few years. I think one thing that with Existential Hope we're definitely thinking a lot about is, "Okay, well, we say we want to improve the world for the better," but how to actually best change and shape the future. And as I understand it, with OSV Ventures, you're, like, you're pitching a lot that you're rooting for things rather than working against things or, like, trying to stop things. Do you think that's generally, like, the most powerful lever that we have for changing the world? It's like, root for things, or do we sometimes also have to fight things? Or, like, what's your take on this?

Jim: Well, well, clearly, there are very few things that fall into the category of yes or no, zero or one hundred, black or white. The world is gray, and almost everything has a dual use, right? So, if you are very pessimistic about the future, you'll concentrate on all of the potentially bad things that an innovation or some new technology can do. And I don't think that is 100% inappropriate. We have to think about those things.

I believe deeply in the fact that... well, let's take fire. Right? Can you imagine if we took that precautionary principle and applied it to fire? "No, nope. We're not going to have fire because it might burn the village down. We might get burned by it. We might be killed by it." All of those things. Well, if we didn't have fire and didn't continue to use fire, we wouldn't have the prefrontal cortex that we have today. It was only after humans started cooking their food that the prefrontal cortex and the executive function of the brain truly developed. Now, is fire dangerous? Absolutely. It is absolutely dangerous. And that's why, rather than banning fire, we have fire alarms, fire departments, fire stations, fire exits, all of that type of thing.

So, I believe in error correction. Nothing will ever be perfect. And the idea that you shouldn't use something unless it was completely harmless... well, we wouldn't be talking via Zoom because there would be bans on electricity, because do you know how dangerous electricity is, for example? And so, our ideas are basically those of, "Let's be optimistic, but let's be also rational and prudent." And by that, I mean everything that we do invent, create, is going to have secondary and tertiary problems. And that's okay. That's why we have error correction. The great Karl Popper wrote extensively about that. And societies that refuse error correction fall into stasis and die. And societies that are built on error correction, meaning, "Let's innovate, but let's also correct as we go along"—well, then you have the modern world.

So, I think that another foible that we humans tend to fall in is we operate under this conceit that we know everything. We know virtually nothing. And the idea that we know everything... if you think you know everything, right, and you like the world you live in, what are you going to do? You're going to try to make the overstory or the culture one of complete caution. One that continually persists the ways of doing things from the past without any alteration. And I'm not opposed to tradition, but traditions evolve and they change. And so, one of the real trapdoors in thinking is that we know everything. And that cuts us off from the fact that, A, we don't, but it also cuts us off from all future knowledge. I'm a big fan of the quantum physicist David Deutsch and his book, The Beginning of Infinity, and he really builds a beautiful scaffolding for these ideas in that book. He's like—and he's pretty witty, too—he's like, "Hey, what were people saying about the internet and quantum physics in 1900? Nothing, because they hadn't been invented yet." And it's so funny when you hear it that way.

But, you know, the often maybe apocryphal—I think it's real—but quoted thing about the head of the U.S. Patent department closing down the patent department in the late 1800s 'cause he said everything's been invented. And clearly, everything had not been invented. So, we believe that everything that we can do at O'Shaughnessy Ventures to move human flourishing a little more forward is worth it. And that does not mean that we are naive or Panglossian about the world in which we live. We know there will be problems, and those problems, hopefully, will be better problems than the ones we're facing today. And so we think innovation, directionally speaking, is up. Does that mean that all innovation will be positive? Absolutely not. It means that we have to be very vigilant in monitoring everything that is happening, trying to error correct where we can, and yet continuing to push forward.

Beatrice: Yeah, that's generally, like, it seems like the best thing you can do is set a direction and keep going. I know I asked Christine Peterson, who's the co-founder of Foresight, sort of what... because there's always, when there's a new technology, there's always a lot of anxiety around it as well. It's like, there's... 'cause it is very easy to think of the ways that it can be misused and all these things. And she said that, like, it's obviously very important to think about that. And that's something that I, yeah, I also agree with is important to keep in mind, but in general also to, like, have some sort of North Star or just something—this is what it would look like if it goes well—just so that we have something to aim for. And then obviously there's a lot of room for innovation in terms of, like, safety and ways to make it more secure.

But what if I were to ask you... this is the Existential Hope podcast. Do you have, like, what would be your personal existential hope, vision of the future? If we say, like, 10, 20 years from now, and things have gone well, what do you think the world will look like or what will be different from today?

Jim: Well, my hope is that we are really, as David titled his book, at the beginning of infinity. We're just starting out. And I think if we're thinking existentially, I would view a world, 30 years from now, one in which all of these technologies have been used in service of expanding the flourishing, creativity, and production of we humans.

I think that there are so many examples, but it's long been understood that tutoring is the most effective way for children and adults to learn. And obviously not terribly practical for every human on the planet to have a human tutor. They can't afford it, they're in locations where there are no human tutors, et cetera. And so, here's an example of where we put our money where our mouth is. There is a company called Synthesis which does math tutoring for youngsters, and the results are ridiculously good. Kids who are like, "I hate math. I'm just not a math person," are, like, literally fighting for their... when they're on, even on vacation, "Hey, Mom and Dad, can I do a Synthesis lesson?" because they've made it not only fun, but they have the... it's AI, and the model learns on the student. Everybody has different learning patterns and techniques, right? And so, I'm incredibly bullish on a world, if it's 30 years from now, hopefully everyone will be able to spin up a tutor to teach them anything that they have gained an interest in. And that alone, just that one thing, is incredibly inspiring to me because the educational system, at least here in the United States, is more of a kind of a giant daycare system, for lack of a better expression. And if you look at results, they have not been great. And now we will have technologies where the student actually learns all of these things.

But math is just one thing. We've looked at investments in companies where you can have a conversation with any philosopher you're interested in. You want to talk to Richard Feynman, the noted physicist, you'll be able to do it. And I just find that incredibly exciting.

The world of books, I imagine a world where that is far more interactive than it is right now. You'll be able to have a version of a book that we publish through Infinite Books, and you might want to say, "I wonder what would happen if it had this ending." And voilà, you will have that ending presented to you through the innovation of the technologies we're using for the electronic versions. What about physical books? Well, we think that they should always exist. I'm a huge book lover. But they should also stop being so ugly. I don't know about you, but many of the physical books I buy, like, they're not... the paper is poor, the cover is like an afterthought, et cetera. All of the physical books that we publish, we want to be beautiful artifacts. And what's fun for me is when we give one of our books to younger people who have gotten used to the kind of the drab cover and the bad paper, they're like... I just love watching them when they first encounter the book and have it in their hands because they're like, "This is beautiful. This paper—my goodness, this paper is really a wonderful stock," et cetera.

So, I think, if you want it to be really speculative, I think that we will find new and sustainable forms of energy. But they won't just be in the categories that we have today. There's work being done right now looking at unlocking energy from a variety of potential sources. It's interesting to see nuclear energy being rebranded as "elemental energy" because that was a hiccup that data simply doesn't support. If you look at the fatality rate and or injury rate for workers in nuclear power facilities versus other alternate forms like oil rigs and coal and all of that, the death rates are from the older ways of energy, like coal and the oil platform, et cetera, are much higher. Much, much higher. But we got it in, maybe an existential fear, right? That, "Okay, if there's an accident here, like, it could be catastrophic." Well, yeah, but the safety protocols, the way they actually build these power plants today, is vastly different than the ways that they were building them 40 years ago. And so you're seeing that coming back on the stage. Solar is still vastly underutilized, and we'll see, I think, newer, cheaper, more efficient ways for that to happen.

Self-driving cars. Another example. There's an old Walt Kelly cartoon character called Pogo, who is a little animal, and one of its most famous panels is him introspectively looking down and saying, "We've met the enemy and it is us." And what that means to me is when you look at the actual outcomes of things, people who are freaked out by self-driving cars are not looking at the empirical information. Because in general, if there's an error in transportation, be it a car, a plane, a helicopter, whatever, a boat, the error is almost always us, a human being. Like, self-driving cars are going to make travel via car much safer. And I find it kind of interesting that there's this huge backlash against them because clearly this is just born of fear, and I don't even understand really the fear, right? Like, I would understand the fear if all of the data was like, "Yeah, these self-driving cars are really cool, but damn, they're dangerous." Doesn't exist. No, they're not. And in fact, the death rate through automobile accidents will probably be vastly lower 30 years from now because of the coming online of these self-driving cars, self-driving trucks, et cetera.

So, I just imagine a world where... by the way, is this some utopia? Absolutely not. Because it will still be populated by we humans. And, like, there'll be different problems and there'll be different things that really irritate people and that they rally against. But I definitely think, directionally speaking, that world will be not only safer, it will also be far more conducive to people following their passions and their predilections. And this is not abstract for me. I have six grandchildren, and I want the world that they live in and grow up in to be a better one than the one I grew up in. And you know what? The one I grew up in was pretty damn good.

Beatrice: Well, that's a really important point. Like, you have stake in the future now with your grandchildren. But also the point of, like, a lot of young people now growing up today just think that it's not looking bright, basically. Like, they're not... they feel like it's going to get worse. Like, it's not going to get better. Whereas maybe when you grew up, you felt like, "This is great and it's going to get even better." And so, yeah, that's probably where we want to get people. And the, yeah, the self-driving car thing, I also feel like it's one of those things that maybe... I think if people just, like, got to go in them, because I had that experience where when I went in them, I was like, "I feel so much safer than when I go with a human." That I, yeah, I think we just need to, like, get more of them out there. But yeah, that's... it is happening. We actually are going to publish a special episode on autonomous vehicles soon of this podcast. And yeah, I think it's definitely, like, I mean the technology is there, it's just that now we need to, like, integrate it into society and we need policy and things to make it happen in the best way.

But to sort of keep us on track, I think that you mentioned that at OSV, you're kind of "AI first." And I think that would be interesting also to dig into a little bit. Do you have any... could you share a bit with us, like, how do you actually use AI now and maybe in novel ways, not just like how do you use an LLM, but how do you use AI?

Jim: So, when you say "AI first," that means that it is the substrate of every workflow that you use. And so, we talked a little bit about how we're using it at Infinite Books. One of the things AI is really great at is doing really quickly tasks that humans don't like, are very laborious, and sometimes very much affected by the state of the human doing that task. And by that, I mean, so let's take copy editing. In the old days, if you wrote a manuscript and submitted it to your publisher, you wouldn't get it back proofed, proofread for typos, for that type of line editing, for... eh, generally speaking, a mean return time would be about three months. Because think about it, I have line-edited, I've written four books, and oh man, it is a hateful task because you get this blindness when you're looking for, "Should this be a comma? Should it be a semicolon? What is this misspelled?" And that is a trivial matter for an AI model.

So we built in, as an AI-first company, we get a manuscript, it goes into our AI editor, and will generally... let's say you wrote a book for us and you sent us the manuscript today, you'd have it back by the beginning of next week. And not only would it be completely free of typos and misspellings, but we also, without changing anything you've done—I want to underline this, so we're not taking any of your agency as an author or your ideas and changing them—but continuity. So if in the first chapter you assert A is true and "I believe this because..." and you make a really good argument for it, but then in chapter nine you say, "A isn't always true, or sometimes it's outright wrong," we will just highlight that for you. And we'll say, "Do you want this to remain like this? Because it contradicts what you've said earlier. Or do you want to change it?"

A lot of times... again, having not only me as the executive chairman of Infinite Books, but my editor-in-chief and CEO, Jimmy Soni, we're both authors. And so what we're trying to build is things that always bothered us as authors working with publishers, and fix those things. So not only will you get that manuscript back quickly, it will have that continuity, all of the various line editing done, and you'll be able to interact with the manuscript, and we'll see that as you are doing it. So we're going to be able to speed up the time that a book can get to market much, much more quickly.

But it's not just on the editing and that portion. We also, for authors who want it, we have a team, but we also have an AI that we have built and trained a ton of data on in the editorial sphere. So it will say, "A couple of... here's what we think really sings. This really works. This looks like it needs a little bit of touch-up. Here are our suggestions for that touch-up." Now, those suggestions you're getting are going to come both from our human editors, but also from our AI editors. And those are going to be yours as the primary author to either accept, reject, do what you will with. So we view it as just an enormous leverage point.

Authors... another thing that we're developing, and every author we've shown it to is like, "When can I have that? When can I have that?" And it's a utility that essentially takes everything the author has ever written and then fine-tunes it for the author to work with their own work. And that might sound odd, but writers who are prolific sometimes forget that they maybe wrote about a particular problem 19 different times. And with this utility app that we're building, authors will be able to immediately, as they're working on a new piece, call up the cloud of all of the old things that they've written. And it becomes very interactive. And watching authors use it is just so much fun because they're like, "Wait a minute..." And we present it as a knowledge graph, if you know what those are. It shows, like, if you're writing about nuclear energy and you've written a lot about it, that would show as a big bubble up here, but it will also show connections. And you'll be able to query your own writing: "Hey, did I ever make the connection between the safety of plant workers in coal facilities versus nuclear?" Those are things, unless you have an eidetic memory, you might not recall. Now it's just immediately there in whatever your preferred writing tool is. And so the results of watching authors work with the beta version of that is very encouraging because they're like, "I completely forgot that I wrote about that. I completely forgot that I said that."

So we think, again, that this is going to make that author much more effective. They can build on arguments that they've used in the past. They might have changed their mind. A lot of people do. They'll be able to call up everything they said and say, "Here's what I changed my mind about and why. Here's what I said, here's what I'm saying now, here's the bridge that got me to make this change." And it's going to give people, creative people, authors, scientists too though, just the ability to look at all of their earlier work in its own context, in their new ideas that they're generating.

But again, and by the way, this applies to anything that we're distributing. So, screenplay people can also use this app. But marketing—another aspect of both films and books that we think is just not well done. I got a fairly large advance, in fact, it was one of the biggest advances for a personal finance book ever back in 1997. And when you get that, the publishing company's making a really big bet on you. So they arrange for author tours, for interviews, and all of that type of thing, but they basically do it for kind of a two-week period, and then they move on to the next thing. Our marketing for our authors' books will be continual. Again, the AI substrate pattern, it's the first thing. So let's say you published a book with us about existential hope or innovation. Our AIs will continuously scan the internet for podcasts, Substack, any articles, TV series, YouTube series that are on your topic. And then we will match what's being said by the writer, the host, or whatever, to what you're saying. And if there's... if you seem simpatico, we'll auto-generate an email to that Substack writer or that YouTube or podcaster saying, "Hey, you really might want to talk to Beatrice because she's got this great book." And it is the furthest thing from a cold email. It shows that we're aware with what that podcaster had said. We're aware that you might be a great fit. And then it's up to them. Obviously, they don't need to have you on as a guest, but they're far more likely to if they already get a sense for you either being aligned with them, or maybe they want to have somebody who really disagrees with them on to have a debate about it. All of those things are now possible. And we're doing them all.

And then simple things like, let's say your book sales spike in where you are right now. We will scan everything there. The AI also translates everything, right? So even if it's not in English or one of the more popular languages, we'll see what they're saying, we'll translate our message to them, and see if they're English-speaking or French-speaking or whatever the author happens to speak. And so it's going to be continuous and interactive. Your book will never just have two weeks in sunshine. It will be in permanent sunshine.

Beatrice: That sounds amazing. I had not heard about this AI for marketing tool. I want to get my hands on that.

Jim: That's the other thing. We believe very much in being collaborative, and we want and test with authors, with inventors, everything we do. We want feedback. Some things that we think are great ideas, the authors look at us like, "Nah, I don't want that at all." And so we are very collaborative in the way we develop our technology and our processes because we view our authors as partners, but also because it's going to give the reader the ultimately better experience.

Beatrice: Well, so I think I would want to ask one more thing about AI just before we move on from that. Which is, it would be interesting just to hear... I mean, we've heard a lot about, like, what makes you excited about a future with AI. But it would also be interesting to talk a little bit about what we need to, like, how should we navigate this? I know, for example, I've listened to a few podcasts with you, you actually talk about maybe we need UBI to, like, navigate this to make it go as well for as many as possible. What do you think we need to do now to make sure that, like, our future with AI is going to be the best one?

Jim: I think that as excited as I am about machine learning and artificial intelligence, I view it as an innovation as important as the printing press or the internet, maybe more so. But one of the downsides to it will be that there will be a rather large group of people who—and this is the part that I underline—through no fault of their own, will be displaced and need to be retrained, et cetera. I had never really been in favor of universal basic income because the empirical evidence suggests that it doesn't work. But I now am of a mind that we should try everything we can to make that ride less bumpy than it might be absent those protocols being in place. I'm well aware of the arguments against UBI. I'm well aware of the arguments against a lot of the ideas that I'm willing to entertain, but I think that it's very important for people to not feel totally lost.

And so I think that as AI makes its way not only into the business aspect of society but all aspects of society, we should be experimenting with as many ideas as we possibly can to make it easier for people who are not going to be cutting-edge users of these tools to live well, right? And so, I'm deeply aware of the opponents to many of these programs. UBI seems to be the lightning rod, so let's just keep talking about that. We should just try it on a much more universal scale. And I would go so far as to say if governments don't do it, then private philanthropic organizations should give it a try. I would certainly participate in that if there was a large-scale UBI experiment that was funded primarily by private donors. I would donate to that. Because the ability to soften the blow... because I think even with all the hype, people are not yet quite 100% aware of how much is actually going to change.

Now, I think most of it's going to be for the good, and AI will give people who 30 years ago couldn't implement their ideas because they couldn't raise a fund or they couldn't get funding or they were in a geographically isolated location... they'll be able to do it now, which I think is super cool. But again, I think that everything we can do to make the ride less bumpy...

I'm also very much in favor of... there's an initiative here in the United States that is contemplating giving every child born here a share in a fund that invests in companies in America. It's not a new idea. This idea was proposed, I think, as early as the 1950s. It wasn't practical back then because we didn't really have the technology that would allow for that to happen. But I think that's an idea that is really worthwhile as well. You... it creates a collaborative understanding of, "Wow, isn't this tech all incredibly cool?" It feels very different if you see some benefit from that. And so making every child born in the United States also a shareholder in the companies the United States has, I think, is a unifying rather than a destructive idea. I think democratizing the benefits of all of these incredibly innovative and productive companies so that everybody has just... it's going to be a small slice, but a slice. It creates more of an owner's mentality, and owners think differently than employees. And wouldn't it be great if that was another initiative that actually had some legs?

So, while I think that the net benefits of AI are going to be overwhelmingly positive—we haven't even talked about drug discovery or a variety of the things that AI is going to be able to do in healthcare, again, human flourishing, healthspan, not lifespan necessarily, right? And we're going to come up with lots of ways that people can live much healthier lives in addition to elongating them—but yeah, I'm all ears when somebody has an idea for mitigating the downsides, because there will be downsides.

Beatrice: Yeah. And that's good to be realistic about, I think. So, across all these things, you said you're open to anyone who has, like, a good idea. Is there... is there a common thread in the people that you—'cause you're operating across all these different fields with OSV—is there a common thread in the people whose ideas you actually take on and who you say yes to? Who should... yes, like, who should engage with you?

Jim: Yeah. There is a very common thread. And the easiest way to reply is all of these people are highly agentic. They are not passive, they're active. They are, sometimes, kind of what we call moonshot ideas. But many of the ideas are also just improvements that, when you see the proposal, it's kind of like, "I wish I'd thought of that. It makes so much sense." But the idea of agency is absolutely required. These are people who already have demonstrated a history of having an idea and then going after it. And sometimes they hit a financial wall and they can't continue because of the circumstances—they need a place to live, they might have a family that they have to support, et cetera. But oftentimes, they might be in an environment where there are fewer like-minded people.

Another part of our fellowship and grantee program is the network it creates, giving that person access to people with very either similar drive or similar ideas or very dissimilar. And then you watch—I mentioned cognitive diversity at the beginning of our chat—like, we've seen this time and again in interactions within our fellowship and grantee network where somebody has a real significant breakthrough by having a long conversation with somebody in a completely different field. Because it's like the old quote, right? No matter how brilliant somebody is, no matter how insightful, you can't ask them to make a list of things that would never occur to them. And so they might not occur to them, but they definitely occur to this person in the other field. So we think that the network itself that we're building out of fellows and grantees is going to be incredibly useful in the ability for people to get things done.

But yeah, agency is the underlying theme for every one that gets a grant, an investment, a project greenlit as a movie, a book, et cetera. These are people not just sitting around. These are people who are acting on their ideas. Jung had a great line, which I quote a lot, which is, "You are not what you say you will do, you are what you do." And like, it's really easy to yap on social media, to be performative and say, "Oh, I'm going to do this and this," and make grand, sweeping claims and then do nothing. In fact, a lot of people spend a lot of time performing on social media and in real life. We don't want the people who are just performing. We want the people who are actually doing.

Beatrice: Well, well summed up. Yeah, I think that the sort of cognitive diversity, the cross-field... like, at Foresight Institute, we mostly work with science and tech, and we have these different focus areas, but it's honestly, like, the conferences is when we bring the focus tracks together that are the most interesting, 'cause someone working in, like, AI talking to someone in biotech or nanotech, it's like, those are the interesting novel things. And I think that's, yeah, that's just really exciting that...

How can we... just to, it's time to round off here, but how do you think we can better encourage these traits? Like, how can we make more people feel like they have this agency?

Jim: I think doing a lot of what we're doing right now. Talk about it, write about it, shout it from the rooftops. A lot of people who have great ideas but are bound by this, "Oh, I... it'll never happen for me." Again, that gets back to my theme of everything is downstream of culture. And if you're growing up in a culture that says that to you repeatedly, it becomes a truth to you. I mean, propaganda works because of repetition, and most people say, "It can't be that simple." It truly is. When you get the same message repeated to you every day, you're eventually going to believe that idea is true.

And so, I guess, like, if that's the empire, we're the Rebel Alliance. And the Rebel Alliance has to continually broadcast, "That ain't so. You actually can do this. You actually can have the agency. There is funding." I'm delighted to see the number of fellowships and grants growing. I'm delighted to see that there are now emerging networks for pre-seed and seed investing that are very different than the old traditional ones. Publishing... the idea that we are the gatekeepers who determine what can and can't be published, when that isn't our role. Now, we're not going to publish things that we think are objectively bad, but we are not engaged in trying to be the gatekeeper saying who can and who can't be published. If it's great work, if they're great ideas, even if they're ideas that we don't happen to agree with, if they're elegantly and brilliantly expressed and have supporting data to back them up, we'll publish that book.

So, the more of this that happens, the more the story changes. And if everything is downstream of the overstory, which is culture, that will eventually make a difference. Will it happen overnight? No. But that's why we're going full steam ahead with all of these projects. Because you can change the conversation. But to change the conversation, you have to be in the arena. You have to be taking part in the conversation.

And so, I think that given all of the resources... I mean, my God, if I had all of this available to me when I was a kid, like, I would've been in heaven. I spent a lot of time in libraries looking things up. And while there was a certain delight in that, now that I can do it... for example, I mentioned to you I'm writing a fictional book for the first time, which is really fun but also really challenging. But it needed and needs to continually be deeply researched. And if I had to do it the old way and hire a dozen researchers across the planet to scour all the stacks in the libraries, it would take me years and years to get the proper research done. And now, because of large language models, because of the internet, I can get all of that done in an astonishingly short period of time. And now some listeners or viewers will say, "But what about the hallucinations?" Well, all of that can be double and triple-checked. And by the way, things tend to have the DNA of their creators. And who are the best hallucinators and confabulators in the world? We human beings. So the idea that because they aren't perfect, they're no good, makes little sense to me, especially when you can nail down by double and triple-checking any data you get from them.

The speeding up of that research, though... it's astonishing. And like, I've been able to do deep dives on things that would've taken me over a year to get the amount of knowledge, in two days. And like, that is... that's like... what's the great quote? "Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." To me, that's magical.

Beatrice: That's, I think, the perfect note to end on. Magic. Thank you so much, Jim.

Jim: You're welcome.

Beatrice: For taking the time. We're going to link all the work of OSV and White Mirror and this Bell Labs documentary if it's available. And yeah, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for making this opportunity available to people. I'm really excited to share it with our community to make more people aware of it, basically.

Jim: Wonderful. Delighted to have you as a partner, and thank you for having me on.

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