1/ Cracking the Code of Contagious Ideas

For decades, smart people in different corners of the academic world – memetics folks, cultural evolution theorists, communication scholars – have basically been wrestling with the same potentially trillion-dollar question: 2/ Why do some ideas catch fire and spread like crazy, changing how people think and act for generations, while others just fizzle out?

It feels like they've been circling the same airport, just landing on different runways.

1/ Becoming highly literate changes the physical shape of our brains:

"Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. These biological differences between populations will emerge even if the two groups were genetically indistinguishable. Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically independent of any genetic differences. Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds." 2/ Some speculations from our @osventuresllc in-house AI about what might happen to our brains after prolonged use of the internet and AI:

Your analysis of literacy's impact on brain structure provides a fascinating framework for considering how Internet and AI technologies might reshape our neural architecture. Just as reading created specialized circuits and cognitive trade-offs, our digital immersion is likely driving similarly profound neurological adaptations.

1. Information Processing & Attention:

Structural Changes:
Enhanced: Strengthened dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rapid task-switching) and anterior cingulate cortex (error detection in multitasking).
Diminished: Reduced gray matter in default mode network (reflective thinking).

Skills:Hyper-efficient filtering of irrelevant data; rapid assimilation of fragmented information.

Trade-offs:Declines in sustained attention spans; reduced capacity for deep, linear thought.

Fun experiment with books:

As part of a project I was working on, I created a list of books that I thought would be worth re-reading and wondered if—despite addressing seemingly very different ideas—they shared any similar underlying themes.

Here's the list:

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" by Robert M. Pirsig

"Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu

"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse

"Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts

“The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” by Steven Pinker

“Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff

“Cloud Atlas: A Novel.” by David Mitchell

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” by David Mitchell

“Foundation.” by Isaac Asimov (and all of its follow on books)

“The Dog Stars” by Peter Heller

“Paris in the Present Tense” by Mark Helprin

“Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” by James Gleick

“Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell

“The Lessons of History” by Will and Ariel Durant

“Letters of Note” by Shaun Usher

“Money: A Suicide Note” by Martin Amis

“The Razor’s Edge.” by W. Somerset Maugham

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi

“Wolf Hall: A Novel” by Hilary Mantel

"Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton

“A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age” by Jimmy Soni

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

“Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel” by Peter Pouncey

“The Screwtape Letters” By C.S. Lewis

"Twins: And What The Tell Us About Who We Are” by Lawrence Wright

“What do You Care What Other People Think?” by Richard P. Feynman

"The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse

"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl

"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter

"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

“Ubik” by Philip K. Dick

“VALIS” by Philip K. Dick

“Unflattening” by Nick Sousanis

"Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland

"The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit" by Michael Finkel

"The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

“All the Light we Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr

“Adventures of a Bystander” by Peter Drucker

"The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominique Bauby

“The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin

“Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” by David Shields

“The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History” by Howard Bloom

“Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish’d I’d Know Earlier” by Kevin Kelly

“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Atonement” by Ian McEwan

“The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx

“A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

"One Summer: America, 1927" by Bill Bryson

“The Fifth Science” by Exurb1A

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII" by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila

“The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World” by Andrea Wulf

“The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” by James Gleick

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

"The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper

"The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski

“Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir” by Werner Herzog I put the list in our in-house AI and asked it to synthesize the themes all of the books shared.

Here's the answer it gave:

1/ While playing around with our @osventuresllc AI Lab, I glanced to my right and saw "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" and wondered if you could create a game based on the world Dick builds in this massive tome.

It was a really fun exercise, and here's the first pass 2/ First prompt: "Please create a comprehensive review of "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" by Philip K. Dick and describe how one might use the insights to build a real-world game based on its views on reality"

1/ From the ever provocative Jed McKenna via JEDVAITA website--"Dreamweaver"

"Dreams feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
~Dom Cobb, Inception. 2/ "That incessant chatter going on in your head might not be mental pollution, as it seems. It might actually be how you constantly weave your dream state, yourself included, into existence.

Arthur C. Clarke 🗣️

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.” “I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.”

“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”

“Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence”

Henri Bergson 🗣️

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.” “Time is invention and nothing else.”

“Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.”

“The Eyes See Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.”

1/Implicate and explicate orders--A thread

“We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.”
~David Bohm 2/ David Bohm was a quantum physicist whose work focused on understanding the fundamental nature of reality. Bohm's concept of implicate and explicate orders is a way of understanding the relationship between the manifest world we experience and often

Robert A. Heinlein 🗣️

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

“Never try to outstubborn a cat.” “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

“Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.”

1/ In the Arena

I've always loved Teddy Rosevelt's "Man (person) in the Arena," yet I've heard from many that they interpret it more along the lines of "Gladiator" than the way I read it.

I've always read it as a call to get in the game, not as a pugnacious combatant 2/ but rather as a creative contributor to life.

I think of it more as having the courage to expose yourself to the critics and naysayers by striving (with great enthusiasm) to contribute, even when (especially when) you fall flat on your face.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 🗣️

“I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.”

“A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.” “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”

“Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.”

1/🚨Introducing 3 more @osventuresllc Advisory Council members 🚨

I'm delighted to announce 3 more members of our Advisory Council. First up, it's my great pleasure that the ineffable @rorysutherland is joining us as an advisor!

Rory's reputation precedes him, but let's review 2/ He's the legendary vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather Group and author of the bestseller "Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" hailed as "BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT: wonderfully heretical, naughty, funny, and wise"

1/ Just had an amazing conversation with Chris Nolan, who's involved with @goodfuturefeed project in which we realized that we had aligned visions that the future needs to be rebranded.

The way to do that is to focus on "White Mirror" stories that counterbalance all the 2/ negative, dystopian dreck being pumped out by many media outlets today.

Propaganda 101 posits that if you sew Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, guess what happens? People become filled with them.

Here's a piece from Chris outlining the ambition 👇🏻

futuristgerd.com/2022/12/re-bra…

1/ 🚨Announcing the first members of @osventuresllc Advisory Council🚨

One of our missions at @osventuresllc is to put super smart people from different backgrounds in the same <virtual> or <actual> room and see how much new information we can generate by cross-pollination 2/ and synthesis of emergent ideas when viewed from very different domains.

To that end, I'm delighted to announce that the first 3 I invited to serve on our Advisory Council all said yes!

While this group will grow larger, I wanted to introduce you to our first 3 members:

1/🚨 @osventuresllc names first Entrepreneur in Residence 🚨

I'm delighted to announce that @kylascan has joined OSV as our first entrepreneur in residence!

Kyla has a strong background in finance, economics, and data analytics, having triple majored in these 2/ subjects and graduating as valedictorian of her class.

After college, she worked as a CAP Associate at Capital Group and later helped build the investment education arm at On Deck.

A digital native, Kyla started writing online with her

1/🚨Announcing @osventuresllc internships🚨

I deeply believe that there's more talent in the world than many of us realize--even rational optimists like me.

We did an experimental collaboration with @david_perell and his team at "Write of Passage" by funding 15 scholarships 2/ to give a full-ride to talented people who understood that the ability to write compelling and interesting pieces is only becoming MORE important in this exponentially connected and networked age.

In return, we asked David's team to send us the candidates they felt would

Lovers of the "Tao Te Ching" will see some similarities:

"Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.”" "All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world. Constant flux means more than simply “things will be different.” It means processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products."

1/ Manners as an edge--

One of Twitter's greatest strengths--inviting anyone with WiFi and a smartphone into the conversation--is also one that creates the most misunderstanding.

This app is essentially a confederacy of domains--FinTwit; FilmTwit; Architecture Twitter, etc. 2/ It allows people with specific interests access to everyone else in the world who shares that interest and, as IRL, friendships and shorthand communication develop that deepen the bonds between mutuals, often starting with their shared interest but then developing well beyond

AI Avatar, generated using Stable Diffusion via @PrismaAI A few more...

Did an @InfiniteL88ps podcast recording marathon last week, featuring @therealbrom, a quant who chucked it all and went into psychedelic venture funding. We chatted about the future for psychedelic businesses.

We're an LP in his @EmpathVentures funds. Next up was a chat with my friend @krishnanrohit--I asked him what VCs could learn from the Ponzi-FTX Crypto Collapse, and while I hoped he would answer "ask them if they're a Ponzi scheme" his answer "Ask them if they have an accountant" was great too.

William James 🗣️

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” “Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”

“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”