How to Turn Curiosity into Creation | Chris Mayer & Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I was working at Google, uh, I experienced what they call imposter syndrome. I really thought that someone would figure out that I did not belong there, that everybody was way smarter than me. It was a mistake that someone had decided to hire me to work on these amazing projects with these amazing people. So as a result, I was saying yes to absolutely everything. And that's when I burned out.

I always tell people, like, one of the great things about keeping a daily journal is that over a period of time, you can see how much you changed and you can't lie to yourself about it. It always makes me think Richard Rorty, a little philosopher I like, he would always say that the answer to a great poem was, was another great poem where there's no final way to say, there's no final vocabulary. There's, it's always, you can always say, and there's nothing that we can say that we can't say differently.

That's why learning in public is so powerful, right? I really like this and I think it's, I can see why Matt, you made the connection now.

Now between the two because you're watching Just Press Record right here, Cultish Creative YouTube. I'm Matt Ziegler begging you to come, come play with this network with me. We're gonna have some fun. Two guests today. Let me introduce them. This first guest now, what do you get if you mix up Michael Myers and no, no, no, not the beloved horror movie character. I'm talking about the actor, The great portrayer and creator of Austin Powers, specifically a man who sees both the good and evil characters as essential variables for him to play with all inside of a story. And we combine that Michael Myers with Oscar Mayer, the hot dog, the hot dog. I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener because then everyone would be in love with me. But how does the hot dog get made? We're never supposed to ask that question. Nobody's really right to know. And yet if we embrace the composite, the Chicago dog, the New York dog, maybe even the Frisco dog. And we can add one more Meyer to this mix, to the good and evil characters, the mystery of that lovable hot dog. We need communication, a sprinkle of, dare I say it, John Mayer with his good looks and very, very punchable guitar faces. Because this guest absolutely mixes all these Mayers together, from his work at Woodlock House Family Capital to his books on investing like 100 Baggers to general semantics like dear fellow Timebinder and the others. This Meyer's body of work truly is a wonderland. Chris Meyer, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on, Matt. Great to be here.

We're gonna have a good time because this next guest, a composite in her own right, the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster, the local stories, the conspiracies, the almost scientific proofs of curious photos claiming mythical sea dragons and cloudy camera footage. If we combine that with Little Orphan Annie, the scrappy hard knock lifer playing with the world of orphanages, the innocent in a corrupt, the capitalistic world around her, failing forward and experimenting to find the serious upsides of serendipity, the kind you can't plan for, you can only adventure towards. And with one more ingredient, I'm gonna throw in just a little bit of Carl Sagan, not just for the encouragement to tinker, but for the billions and billions of stars, of people, of ideas, of tiny experiments, if you will, that we can run on anything and everything that we're curious in. And if you mix all that up, the Loch Ness Monster after-school PBS Broadway musical that emerges, it looks a lot like this guest, The creator of Nest Labs, a personal life experimentation online community with Sagan levels of science and just enough woo to beg you to ask childlike questions. Author of her new book, congratulations, Tiny Habits, out now, a delightful field manual for said experimentation. It's Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Welcome to the show, Anne-Laure.

This was the best introduction I've ever had on the podcast.

Ever.

My goal here is hype man for hire. I figure if nothing else, I could segue these into just introducing people for the rest of my days. And I'd be quite happy with that. I, I, I want to start, I want to start with this question. We're going to, you're going to unpack each other's backgrounds. You've never met before. At the end of this show, I'm going to ask you if you can figure out what the reason was I wanted you guys to meet. So you're going to guess at the end, you at home, you can try to guess too. But this first question, Chris, I want to go to you. Did you ever burn out? Were you ever working really hard at something and you just totally burned out what you were doing? Is this an experience you've ever had?

Sure.

Sure. What?

So you mean, yes.

Give me a story.

Well, I mean, sometimes you, you know, I'm, I'm an investor and so sometimes, you know, you just get burned out of just, you know, researching a name or I can think of sometimes where you're just, you know, you've done as much as you can do and so you need time to step away from all that. And I mean, the best way to kind of avoid those, that burnout is just to change and do something totally different. And, um, you know, there's simple things like just going for a walk or whatever, but yeah, break that burnout, just do something different. Now I know you're gonna ask me something, you know, that was just a little, that was just a little soft pitch there. Now I know you've got something hidden behind there that you're digging at.

Yeah, that's, that's a little soft pitch, but I love that answer. Anne-Laure, what about you? What about you? Burnout? You've, you've, you've experienced a thing or two about this.

Yeah, I, I have. I think just like any ambitious person who has tried to do great work and had experienced any kind of time pressure or has tried to do their best over a long period of time, I have definitely experienced burnout several times. And, uh, this is, this was actually part of the inspiration for my work at Nest Labs. Because the first time I experienced burnout, I actually could not find any resources that were helpful in my specific situation. All of the resources I could find assumed that I had an awful manager and people forcing me to working on projects I didn't care about and that I had no agency whatsoever when it came to my schedule. But the reality was that I loved my job and I was doing this to myself. So it was very interesting to explore this, this paradox almost between having this negative experience, burnout, something none of us want to go through, but also knowing that ultimately a lot of why it was happening was due to my own relationship to work rather than external factors that I could blame.

Tell, tell Chris the story. So where were you working at the time when you went into this research rabbit hole of figuring out what was going on with you?

I was working at Google. It was my first, I wanna say, real job. I had summer jobs like everybody else before, but that was my first real job straight out of university. And, uh, I experienced what they call imposter syndrome. I didn't know it was called that at the time, but I, really thought that someone would figure out that I did not belong there, that everybody was way smarter than me, and that it was a mistake that someone had decided to hire me to work on these amazing projects with these amazing people. So as a result, I was saying yes to absolutely everything. I was the yes woman on the team. You could just tell me, hey, I need last minute help with this project. Yes, I'm here. Hey, I need someone to help me with this. Might require to work a little bit late tonight. Yes, absolutely. You can count on me. And, uh, I was really treating my time and my energy as if they were infinite. And that's when I burned out.

Well, that's interesting because I was thinking while we were talking that we haven't really defined what burnout is exactly. We just sort of assumed it, you know, what it is. And so when I think about burnout, I would, I think about burnout as being that point you reach where you just feel like you can't work on something anymore. You know, you're just done. Your brain is done with it. You just need, you need to, you need to change. And you know what brings that on? And I think partly it's like really pushing your level of concentration and focus for a long period of time without a break. And so I'm actually pretty conscious of that burnout and I try to manage that pretty carefully. So that would be my take on it, but I'd be curious to hear How, what do you think burnout is to you?

Do you have a, do you have a definition for us, Anne-Laure?

I think this is a very good definition. Um, there's also for a lot of people, a feeling of lack of control and, uh, people actually also sometimes experience burnout, not necessarily because of the volume of work, but because of the work itself. And, uh, you will find that your levels of energy can feel pretty elastic actually when it comes to the work that you're doing. And you've probably noticed that sometimes you can work really, really hard for a very, very long time if you're actually interested in what you're working on. But if someone gives you something boring that you have to work on nonstop for a week, you will feel pretty burned out at the end of that week.

So it's, uh, yes, I think that's important. And the other thing you mentioned is important too, to, to amplify was that you have a feeling of no control. So again, if somebody gives you something to work on and where you actually feel like you can make an impact in on it, that also probably lowers the risk of having that burnout feeling.

Exactly.

Okay. Anne-Laure, stick with me on this one. What's the first thing, first memory, core memory, whatever you wanna call it, where you felt that, uh, almost like opposite of burnout thing where the curiosity was so strong and it could be the stupid, most trivial thing you can think of. What was the first thing that you got totally engaged with and you entered the time warp and it all melted away and you were in that flow state?

I think it was the first time I started writing online and I built my first blog. And it was at a time where there was no WordPress, no content management systems. You had to code everything by hand in HTML. And, uh, I spent so much time fighting with little pieces of code, trying to figure out how I could align different things and present my words on a webpage in a way that reflected the structure that I had in mind for them. So. This, uh, this state of, it felt like being in a, in creative flow, but with enough friction and challenge that I felt 100% focused on the task rather than something very easy that you can just go through without much effort.

What about you, Chris? What's, uh, I love that friction. We're gonna come back to that.

Yeah.

Chris, what about you?

Well, I don't know. I think, I think at first time, but when you mentioned it, that the thought that came to my mind was when I when I wrote How Do You Know, one of my books, I remember that just really, you know, people talk about books writing themselves and that was where I first really felt that. I mean, I was just writing and I would just like, the words just came out and the whole structure of the book, like I could see it and it just really flowed. And, you know, again, that was something it took quite a long time. So to Anne-Laure's point about, you know, if it's you can work, you know, your energy's elastic. You can work a lot. I mean, that, that took months to get that book done, but I had that sense of flow. I had that energy and it just, like I say, it just, yeah, it just sort of came out and wrote itself almost. So that, that's one experience that at least jumps to mind.

This is interesting too, uh, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, how, give me like either a point in time or an age when you were, and I'm more interested just where are you in your own development? When you have this, that challenge of like, I wanna be online, I wanna figure this thing out. And can't we just get these paragraphs to align? 'Cause we all know that feeling. Or yeah.

Uh, I was 13, I think.

Uh, okay.

Yeah. It's, uh, I grew up chronically online. I had my first blog maybe when I was 12 or something like this. When I was 14, I was managing one of the, the Uh, I was managing some online forums also with other kids where we would write short stories together. And, uh, so I've been writing online for a very long time.

Chris, you were in a totally different place when you were working on How Do You Know? Give me ballpark, where are you in life when you, when you enter that state for you?

When I enter that state of that flow?

Yeah.

Generally.

But, but specifically for How Do You Know? That wasn't that long ago, was it?

No, well, I wrote it in, uh, let's see, I guess it was 2016, somewhere around there, 2017. Well, what, you know, it's, I think part of it is, uh, well, that's also around the time when I discovered General Semantics not too long ago. And Alfred Korsinsky's ideas. And so that kind of gave me a charge. It was something that seemed new to me. I mean, I first read about it by reading Robert Anton Wilson. I don't know if you know about him, but it's a book called Cosmic Trigger. Pretty trippy, trippy book to read. And, um, Robert Anton Wilson's one of his— I mean, Alfred Krasinski is one of Robert Anton Wilson's favorites, so he mentioned it a number of times and that, that sort of got me into it. And when I started reading him, you know, you just kind of get charged. I read like a bunch of books about it and, and studied over a period of time and maybe, maybe it wasn't even that long, maybe a year or so. And then I just started writing the book. So it all just sort of kind of came together very quickly and all the piece. And I think that's what happens when you find something that's just so naturally, you know, grabs your interest. And it's, and it's not something that, not necessarily so rational, like, wait, take it apart. Why that, as opposed to a number of other things that could have grabbed me, but just the way, the way that it happened.

What is it about those new things that grab our interest and like force us out? You've thought a lot about the, the science of this, and I promise we're coming back to general semantics here. Don't think we're letting go of that. But, uh, Anne-Laure, what is it about the science of something that pushes us or drags us into that state?

Well, when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, the more information you have, the more likely you are to survive. That was the case thousands of years ago in the jungle. The more you knew about your environment, who the other players are, what's most likely to happen, the more likely you were to make the quote unquote correct decision in that moment, which again could mean survival. Because of that, we are drawn to anything that feels unknown or uncertain, and we wanna solve that equation. We wanna know the answer. We wanna figure it out. And this is a, a very human feature, this curiosity that we have. We want to learn, we wanna grow, we wanna understand. And so I think that's where this drive is coming from.

And is it almost the more, I don't wanna use the word dire, but, and I think I've, I've, I've read, read you, uh, talking about this too, like that's those same parts in our brain get fired. Like when we're, when we're hungry, when we're thirsty, or wherever else is when we wanna solve these gaps. Is that accurate?

Yes, it's a, it's a fundamental desire for information. There was actually a study where they showed that the same parts of the brain light up when we're thirsty for water than when we're thirsty for information. So there is biological evidence showing that this Thirst for information is literally the same feeling of thirst that we have when we need water.

When you hear that, Chris, like where, where does that make your brain go?

Well, I was thinking, I think how that definitely describes me. I mean, cuz I'd often been like that and I always thought maybe it was just a kind of a quirky personality, you know, type thing where I feel this thirst to learn different things and that's what really gets me going. And when you discover something brand new. And it also seems to maybe fill some holes or then your knowledge or, or it gives you a new filter to see the world. You know, like excited about it, you wanna learn about it and, and that's what drives it forward. So I was definitely thinking about that when she was, she was speaking and it does sort of feel that same analogy, like thirsty or hungry, scratches an itch is another analogy I think of.

So what do you think it was about General Semantics. And if you want to take a second and explain, actually, Anne-Laure, have you ever heard this word before? Do you know General Semantics? Are you familiar with this work?

I've heard the word, but I actually don't know what it is. So I'd love an explanation.

Why don't you tell us what it is, Chris, and then tell us why, why this was this itch you had to scratch.

I think it's hard to explain exactly what it is, but I can say generally what it is. I mean, it's generally, it's a, discipline that seeks to understand the assumptions underlying our various abstractions. So our words and our symbols and how we use those and what assumptions underlie those things. Um, with the idea that it would sort of penetrate to, uh, maybe the ultimate reality, but penetrate to really what we're talking about. So When people talk about, we use labels to describe people or things, you know, what, what are we really, what are we, what do those labels assume? And, and it's just a whole, you know, so I think of it as an aid to critical thinking. Um, and it does, once you start to learn these things, it does sort of change your world a little. So Korzybski was, Alfred Korzybski was the one who created it, this discipline, and he wrote about it in a book called Science of Sanity in the 1930s.

And it's.

Kind of, there's a whole bunch of books and ideas and things that have taken off since that. So, you know, like one example, you know, he gives, he gives a, it's very practical. So he gives a lot of tools to help you analyze the world around you. I find it useful even as a reader or just as a thinker through investment problems or whatever it is. And so for example, you'll use the, this idea he has of dating things. Like if I talk about, Anne-Laure today and the ideas she has today are, it's not going to be the same as she had 5 years ago, you know? So there's the Anne-Laure of 2025 versus the Anne-Laure of 2020. And so he has this little sub, you know, thing he calls dating. So keep that in your mind that things are changing all the time. You know, that's one idea. And there's lots of little ideas along that way. So that's the basic idea of it. I don't know if I did a very good explanation of it, but You know, it's a complicated topic. It's got a lot of different avenues and ideas. And yeah, go ahead. I was going to say the itch, you know, you say, what's the, what's the, you know, why did this grab me so much? I'm not 100% sure really, but I mean, part of it is that, you know, as someone who's always involved in financial markets, you're always trying to figure out and understand things. And so this sort of gives you a tool to suddenly pry into that and the financial world's full of these abstractions that we talk about things. We talk about stocks and the economy and interest rates and just, there's huge abstractions. And so I think General Semantics is great in helping frame questions that you might ask around those things and really drill down, you know, to taking those things apart and, and learning something.

So I'm gonna attempt to not translate, but kind of see an example where I saw just a, these things cross. Uh, Anne-Laure, you've talked about this framework in some of the, I think it was in a NessLabs post. I saw this first of, um, plus minus next and plus minus next feels like general semantics for me. Could you maybe talk about what that is? And then Chris, you see how this rhymes. I want to try to reconcile these two ideas. I think this is really interesting.

Yeah, Plus/Minus Next is a very simple tool for metacognition that I've designed. Metacognition is just thinking about thinking. And again, it's a very human ability that we have to be able to observe our own thoughts. So not only we think, but we're able to look at our thoughts and question them. Why did I think this? And what does that thought mean? And how can I connect this thought with this other thought? So that's. Metacognition, and Plus/Minus/Next is a very simple metacognitive tool that I recommend people use as part of their weekly review. Some people use it daily, some people use it just for their annual review or for specific projects where they want to be a bit more cognizant of their thought processes. And it has 3 columns. As you can see, I'm very good at naming. Uh, it's, uh, 3 columns are plus, minus, and next. In the first column, you write everything that went well or as expected. In the second column, everything that didn't go so well or not as expected. And in the next column, the one with a little arrow, you write everything you want to try next, everything you want to experiment with next, what you want to do differently in your next iteration of whatever it is you're working on.

Well, the thinking about thinking certainly resonates that. I mean, that's all what general semantics is, especially when you said, uh, you know, why you think that. And so general semantics deals a lot with that. I mean, certain words carry certain freight. And so why you, why you think certain things. I mean, those are, that's one of the things we're trying to get, get behind.

When you think about the tagging of these things, Chris, and you think about understanding tagging, like the pluses and the minuses, and maybe timestamp too. This is what I thought now and in this place. What's the value of cataloging these over time of understanding how your own impressions evolve?

Well, I think there are a couple different things. Like one is, uh, I keep a journal and I always tell people like one of the great things about keeping a daily journal is that you know, over a period of time you can see how much you changed and, and you can't lie to yourself about it. Like, you know, you look and read what you wrote 2, 3 years ago and say, yeah, that's actually what I thought. That's what it was. And it's right there in black and white because otherwise your mind has a way of, you know, creating narratives for yourself and, and you can misremember or retranslate certain events and it's not really the way you thought about at the time. So one of the values of keeping a journal I think is, is that, and that also gets to this idea of timestamping things or like Przybski, it was dating.

Yeah, it's the same idea.

I think it also allows you to look at those ideas with a little more detachment and be a little more, you know, dispassionate about it. So just because you have this, a certain idea today, for example, Anne-Laure, doesn't mean that you have to think it, you know, a year from now. You, you're free to say that that was what I thought then. And you recognize that you're always changing, and so you're free to change your mind. And that's one value I think in timestamping these ideas is to depersonalize them a little bit.

I really like this and, uh, I think it's, I can see why Matt, you made the connection now between the two because when I talk about plus minus next as a metacognitive tool, this is something that I think makes it so powerful is that if you sit down every week and you capture what are your current thoughts, what are your predictions, why you're going to try something in a different way, you can always go back to it in the future and if things are going in a way you didn't expect it, you can at least have that log of why you made those decisions. What was the thinking at the time? And if again, you didn't end up being correct in your predictions, that's okay. But at least you understand where ex— literally where you're coming from with your thinking. And, uh, because of the next column, it also captures thinking as an ever-evolving process rather than something that is fixed and rigid. And, uh, yeah, so I, I also journaled every day and, uh, to me, Plus/Minus Next every week is just more of a, a log, a more structured log of my current thoughts that I can sift through. And at the end of the year, when I write my annual review, I actually open all of my Plus/Minus Next templates for each week of the year. And it's very easy to go through them and see how my thinking has evolved. Going through my experiences. And as you said, it's actually fascinating to look back in December over what I was thinking in January, my worldview at the time, or even my priorities at the time, seeing how some things felt really big and important in January. And now in December, I can't even remember that I ever worried about that.

Yeah, that's huge. I mean, I agree that, that, that is something that jumps out at me too when I keep these journals is that when you're writing and that, that at that moment, what you're writing about, you know, it seems really important and then it doesn't really take very much time and you almost can't even remember it. I mean, it's really shocking. I mean, I think if a lot of people did that, they would be very surprised. So what that does also in terms of going forward is then it puts your, whatever you're worried about today, it also kind of, you know, makes you think, well, remember, you know, I was so concerned about XYZ, whatever it was a month ago, or And you can barely remember it now. So the same thing will happen with what you're worried about today. And so I think it helps a little bit to, you know, get through the day a little easier and get through your present challenges a little easier.

Do you feel like you have to— stick with me on this one, Chris— do you have to pull that up? Do you personally have to pull that present when you're wrestling with a new idea or you're exploring some curiosity? Do you pull that into the present? You're like, I might not actually care about this at all. Do you remind yourself of that?

I do. I do. And in fact, I'll do that in my journal a lot too. I'll say, you know, yeah, I mean, sometimes there's this, I'll give you like a stupid example. It's just kind of a silly example, but like, you know, sometimes I get interested in a new topic, for example, because I've read some book and then I'll want to order like, you know, like 3, 4, 5 more books on it. But I always check myself and say, oh, wait a minute, you know, this could just be another one of those little passing interests that, you know, flare up and then you'll order a lot of stuff and you'll never read it, you know? So you accumulate all these books that you never read. So just wait a little bit. Just give yourself a week and see if you're still that excited about it a week from now. I mean, that's a good— I have these little built-in cooling off periods. That can happen like in investing ideas too. I'll get all excited about an idea, but then, you know, give it a little time. Like, are you still excited about it 10 days from now? 'cause there's always a little, they always change. So yes.

What about you, Anne-Laure? Do you have a, do you have a built-in cooling off period or what's your way to pull this reminder into the present that you might not care about this?

Yeah, I don't do this with books. I should maybe, but, uh, I mean, there's a therapy group forming right here.

Yeah, exactly.

I have so many books I haven't read on my shelves, which, um, used to make me feel a little bit self-conscious. But, uh, then I discovered the concept of the anti-library where it's— Love the anti-library.

Library.

I love that. And now I can justify why I have all of these books I haven't read because those are things I'm curious about and that I can, I can choose to explore in the future. Um, but in terms of having a cooling off period, for me, it's, uh, creative projects. I, uh, I also, and it's, it's very similar to what you're describing, Chris, or even with the investments that you described where I'll read something, I'll get really excited about an idea and because I'm someone like doing stuff, making stuff. I will immediately have an idea for an app I want to build or a new blog post I want to write or a course, a project, a collaboration with someone. Maybe I want to create a, a group chat with people who are interested in this topic so we can talk about it. And the thing is, I know technically, because those are things I've done so many times before that I would be pretty good at managing these projects. It's not an issue of execution. I know if I decide to do it. Should launch these things, it would be fine. But then you end up with a thousand different things you're working on at the same time. And as you said, uh, in my experience, it's not because I'm highly excited about something for a couple of days today that I'm going to be able to sustain this level of curiosity over a long period of time. So what I did is that I created in my notes a, what I call a curiosity inbox. And so anytime there's something I'm curious about, I think I would like to work on or create a project around, I create a bullet point in there that describes the project and it's in there. And if it keeps on coming back to me, if over weeks I keep on thinking about it and I keep on going back to the inbox and adding more stuff to it, and this bullet point keeps on expanding, then for me, it's a strong signal that maybe that's something worth exploring. But 99.9% of bullet points in that Curiosity Inbox, I write in there and I forget about.

I have that same experience. Exactly. I mean, when, especially when you say it comes back and you see it's like a signal. I used to say to myself, the universe is sending me a message like this. I meant to, I meant to work on this now. You know, especially if like I'm talking to someone about the idea and then maybe like 3 days later they bring it up, a different person brings it up, you know, or you come across it in a different way. That was a lot. Yeah. And then, then it's meant to be, but absolutely agree.

Do you have a version?

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just, um, I call these curiosity attractors because it's like in physics, you know, the attractors where like things keep on all going back to that same center point and can't really control it over time. Everything is going to end up there. And so those are exactly those attractors that you're describing. It's not even you. It feels like there's something around you. Conversation.

Yes.

People, it just keeps on popping up and you feel like, you feel the pull, you need to go, you need to go and explore that thing.

Yeah.

Chris, how do you track it? So she's got her curiosity inbox, which I love, and you're gonna tell us more about how you set this up, but what do you have to track it? Or is it just your own intuition that I'm with you? Like the universe keeps sending the message and I go, right, this time I'm finally gonna start. Do you track it at all or is it intuition?

No, I would say it's, yeah, it's more, more intuition. It's more, you know, I have my writing, my journal, and then, uh, so I make note of different things, but, uh, it's not a formal process of tracking it, but yeah, it's more intuition, just kind of feeling it out, how things happen. And, uh, you know, so yeah, it's like Anne-Laure said, it's not necessarily feels like it's a process you control, it's just Uh, yes, other people, other things you encounter and they come together in certain ways.

Talk more about the process, Anne-Laure Le Cunff Le Cunff. Like what's the, how do you actually formalize this? And this is, you've got this scientific brain for solving these types of things. How do you actually think about solving for the universe keeps ferment presenting me with this idea, these attractors are happening. How do you know when enough hits makes a, makes a trend and you want to focus?

I think the tool I'm using for note-taking is helping a lot. I'm using a tool that has bidirectional linking, so I can link ideas with each other. And that means that every time I have something that comes up in a conversation, something I'm curious about, a question that I have, I can link it to something that is already in my database. Because of that, you can start seeing clusters that emerge after a while. And so when there's a cluster that I can see, that means it's again, literally the, an attractor. There's an attractor in there where ideas keep on converging and there's something to explore here. So it's not like I have a fixed threshold that tells me now this is go green light for going to explore this thing, but I do have a sense of how these ideas keep on coming back and are telling me that there is something here, something here I need to look at more closely.

Mm-hmm.

I love this idea of the cluster. Chris, how does that hit you? I guess anything from writing a book to even finding a new investment idea. How do you think about the clusters?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I mean, I don't have a formal process like that, but that's how it happens sometimes because you're just working. If you're following your interests and I'm working on a certain investment theme or idea, yeah, I mean, sometimes other parts of it will just, you know, they'll connect in ways that you didn't necessarily always expect and will lead you down a certain path. Just, you know, so if you're just following your natural curiosity, so it's like she said where, you know, it's not like you're getting the green light to go do this specific thing. But it's just, you notice that there's, yeah, clusters. I like that too. They all kind of come together and then you reach a certain point then, I don't know, some sort of critical mass point where you're like, okay, now I can work on this.

Talk about the critical mass point and I'm, both of you, Anne-Laure, you first, like what's the critical mass and give me this big one. You're, the book is out in the world. It's a lot of blog posts. It's a lot of other stuff. What's the critical mass that makes you laser in on a project, on a project like that?

It's, um, more qualitative than quantitative, to be honest. And, uh, it's, uh, yes, I will look at the number of conversations that I have around a topic. I also, for, because I write an online newsletter every week, I can kind of gauge, uh, gauge also the people's response. So if I send a newsletter around an idea. Sometimes I will spend so much time researching a topic and I will hit send, send a newsletter and it's crickets. Nobody cares except for me. Yeah. And, uh, sometimes I have this, this random idea and I feel like, ah, that, that's actually kind of interesting. Let's just write a little thing very quickly just to kind of open that door and, and start those conversations. And my inbox gets flooded by people who say, This is me. I've experienced this. I can totally relate and I'm so glad someone is finally talking about this. And, uh, this is a very strong signal, for example. I will also pay attention. There are external signals, but I will also pay attention to internal signals, my own level of excitement and interest, which is very important to me. There could be a topic everybody is excited about. If it doesn't resonate with me, I'm probably not going to turn it into a multi-month or multi-year project because I need to care to sustain my interest in it. So it's, um, it's a bunch of factors that come together and get to that point where I just know at some point that I have that critical mass where it would almost hurt not to go and explore this thing and I have to do it.

Yeah, and I certainly relate with it. What you were talking about, how, you know, I wrote a newsletter for a long time and then I had a blog that I wrote and similar, you know, there'd be something you, you'd think was great, like you had carefully crafted and you spent all this time on all this research and you're like, yeah, this is great. You send it out and you hear like nothing. I mean, cricket, like you said, you know, and then some mornings you just pop up and you just have this weird idea, whatever. You just pound it out. It doesn't take you very long. You're not researching very much. And that's the one that gets, you know, the flood of responses back from people. So that definitely happens. And that can, you know, like you say, that can lead you to more do certain things than others. 'Cause if you do this a number of times, you get certain, certain things to get all the feedback and you start connecting it. But then the other part of it is you have to, it has to be like a topic that's deep enough that it can sustain that kind of a project, like to write a book. So that's the other thing I always like think about, you know, do you really feel like you have just like so much to say about it, almost more than you can think you can contain. Because then, you know, the process of writing a book is you put a lot of this stuff kind of on paper or outline it, but then it's all a process of chopping and cutting things and trying to get it down to one, you know, key message. And that's part of the creative process. It's kind of messy and wayward, but, um, that's kind of the way it happens for me anyway.

All right, Chris, how do you, and specifically, I am more interested in the qualitative than the quantitative side of this. What's the thing in your brain that starts going off when you go, this well is so deep, there's, there's more here than I can possibly contain. I want to throw myself into following this attractor. What's, how do you know?

Well, I mean, part, part of it is that, you know, when, when you do write about it, like you feel like there's so much more to say every time you, you, you write it. Yeah, I remember, like for example, I wrote How Do You Know? It was the first book where I sort of wrote about general semantics. And even when I wrote that, when I was done with it, I was still thinking to myself, well, I still have more to say about this. You know, I still feel like, or there's things I could say differently that, you know, that's the other thing is that sometimes it's not that you're saying something new, you're just saying it differently, even than the way you said it before. Um, it always makes me think like Richard Rorty, a little philosopher I like, he would always say that, you know, the answer to a great poem was a, was an another great poem, or, or there's no, there's no final way to say, there's no final vocabulary. There's, there's always, you can always say, and there's nothing that we can say that we can't say differently. So sometimes you get those deep ideas like that where you just feel like, uh, maybe you're not gonna say something necessarily brand new, but you feel like there's so many different ways that you can present the idea that maybe will grab people or connect with people. And when you have that kind of an idea where there's just a lot of stories and just see everything seems to stick with to it and you can kind of filter almost everything through it, then you really, I think you have something.

Yeah.

What about you, Anne-Laure?

I actually love that the, there's so much to say that even after writing the book, I felt like there will still be more. And I definitely had this with my first book, Tiny Experiments, is that I, so I recently had to record the audiobook. And, uh, there were several times where I was reading some paragraphs and I had this little itch of saying, ah, this also, this other thing that I would have added and this other thing, and this is a different angle that I could have used also. And, uh, I think that definitely makes for a good ambitious, bigger type of creative project where, you know, there is space for you to explore and where the challenge is going to be not to find enough things to say, but how are you going to make the very difficult choices of what to include, what to exclude for that specific project. And, um, another layer for me is how useful that might be for other people. And I know that it doesn't necessarily need to be a heuristic for everything you do in life, but personally, for smaller projects, I'm very happy to indulge in just explore something for fun and, uh, and go and see where my curiosity is going to lead. But for bigger ones that are, I'm talking again, multi-year projects, I also get energy from connecting with other people and having generative conversations around the work. And so it is helpful for me to sustain my creative motivation over time, to find something. If you picture a Venn diagram, that's at the intersection of what I care about, but what also will resonate with other people.

Yeah, that's, that's key because, you know, when you get excited by idea, when you start researching it, I mean, you invariably wanna pull in everything. It's like, at least for me, my first impulse is like, I just wanna share everything that I learned, you know? But that of course doesn't make a good book or really any creative project. You can't just dump everything, right? You have to be very, you have to show a great deal of discrimination in what you decide. To include. And some of that, like you say, is guided by what resonates with other people. And, and so you let that help kind of guide your golden thread. But yeah, a big part of the whole creative process in the beginning, it's like you get all this stuff and you absorb all this stuff, but then the really hard part is chopping it down to something that's simpler, more compelling, that follows more of a, a golden thread, more of a story. And, uh, that's also the fun part too.

Talk about your editing process with, with these ideas. Cause I think this is another thing we, you find something, you find all the information that you're just loving, the gravitational pull into the black hole of your brain of going like, just give me all of this stuff. But then you gotta tell somebody else about it. And that requires editing and that requires understanding that. You are now, my friend of the show, Dave Nodig, said this to me and I can't get it out of my brain. Anything you create is an act of co-creation with whoever you're sharing it with. How do you think about the editing process for you and just communicating an idea, Chris?

Well, I mean, it's helpful to actually have other people read, read drafts and read things.

You mean you can't just do it in a vacuum? You can't?

No, you really can't. And you gotta, and eventually the thing is it's, it's not so easy to find people to read things because you're asking them to do quite a bit. I mean, think about it. If you're here, you know, you're like, if I dump this on you, man, can you read this 50,000-word document and tell me what you think? I mean, it's quite a bit.

For you, sir. For you, sir. Yeah.

I would see, uh, asking. So sometimes I'll break it up and I'll have certain people read like just certain chapters that I want certain feedback on. But I remember, I think like in my process of writing the book, some of those things have been critical because I, I can think of like times where maybe 3 or 4 different reviewers all sort of kind of gravitate to the same little section as being kind of problematic for one reason or another. They don't really get it. Or, and it has led for me to cut out whole sections or chap— even whole chapters have disappeared. You know, I always have for a book, I have a cutting room floor and that's always kind of, uh, you know, an interesting pile of stuff at the end. You see what didn't make it, but I mean, it's always a process of cutting, cutting, cutting. I don't know if it was Mark Twain or another famous writer who said that, you know, you gotta kill your darlings when you write whatever it is. And that's really true. You really have to make those tough decisions. But at the end of the day, you know, uh, you, you mentioned earlier that, I don't know if we were recording or not, but this is kind of like barstool conversation, you know?

Yeah.

What we're doing. And I've had, uh, there's something called the barstool test that we used to use at Agora when I worked at Agora all the time. And we would tell people when they were writing, because sometimes when people write, then they shift and they say all this stuff they wouldn't say if we were just on a bar stool. Like if you were to tell me this idea, we were sitting in a bar and you were to tell me about this idea, what would you tell me? And that's a good test because a lot of things people write, they wouldn't, they wouldn't say.

What about you, Anne-Laure Le Cunff Le Cunff? I love that bar stool test. I need to save that somewhere. Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Um, you were talking about the stuff that was, that was cut. And, um, I think the best thing that ever, that happened to my book was when my editor said, we need to cut an entire chapter. And that was very painful in the moment because that was a chapter I had really wrestled with. I spent so much time on. It was probably the hardest chapter to write.

Mm-hmm.

And once my editor said, I don't think this chapter belongs in this book, we need to cut it. It was painful at first, but a relief then. And also the realization that the reason why I had struggled so much with this chapter in the first place was because it didn't belong in this book. And I was trying to make it work and it was just not working. And so I feel like the editing process can be quite, can feel quite ruthless, but it's necessary and it does make for a better product in the end. And I agree with you, Chris. I, um, think you need other people. Where as a writer, you're too close to your work. And I think you need to have those external eyes on it that will give you that feedback. I personally worked with beta readers as well for my book. With my editor, and I also hired a developmental editor even at the earlier stages, mostly because English is not my first language. So at first, that, that was the motivation behind hiring someone to help me. I wanted to make sure that the way I was writing was, sounded good. I feel pretty confident. Again, I send a newsletter every week, but a newsletter is way, feels less permanent, right? So for a book, I wanted to really have a partner that would help me But then there were a lot of advantages to it that I hadn't predicted. It was very, for me, practical again. English is not my first language. I need someone to have a look at the grammar and the way I'm phrasing things. But having this thinking partner was also very helpful. I think the, the bar stool example that you gave, those were the kind of pointers that she would give me. She would just ask me, are you sure you want to include this? Or do you? I know you find this idea interesting, but you know your audience as well. Do you think they will actually find it interesting? And, uh, wouldn't that be better as a footnote? Maybe, maybe you don't need to expand so much on that super nerdy thing that you got really excited about this weekend. So it was very helpful also to just have someone asking questions.

What was the role of this person again? This, the thinking partner?

It's called the developmental editor, and the reason why they're called this is because they come earlier in the process when you're still developing your ideas, and they don't necessarily write with you or for you or do any of the actual editing with the text, but, um, they will help you articulate your ideas better.

So it's this, like, they're helping you clarify by basically just asking questions. About the ideas that you're riffing on.

Yes. Uh, that first step, for example, not first step, it's a step, it's a process that you keep on going through until you're done with the book. But at the early stages, and especially because I've been writing online for so long, I had all of those ideas and, uh, she helped me, for example, go through all of these ideas and figure out, okay, we're all of that, we're not even going to consider. And then we still had a lot. How could you potentially structure these? What are different ways to, what is maybe an organizational principle that we could use for the book where we could touch upon these topics in a way that makes sense, that has a logical narrative? Those are the kind of questions that you can go through with a developmental editor.

That's so interesting. Chris, have you ever worked with anybody like that, or is it just friends, family, and kind strangers on the internet?

Yeah, I would say more of the latter. More, I mean, there are other people who have, uh, written, I mean, I had an editor, but not quite to the extent that she's talking about. Um, but the book I'm working on now, I do have somebody who's like that actually. So, uh, much more hands-on editor, much more, yeah, helping develop the idea as we go along, involved very early in the draft. And so that's been a good experience too. 'cause this particular editor's also successful editor of some good, very well-known books. So I, I take what, what he says. Definitely. And, and you know, another aspect of this too, um, you know, we talk about how it involves other people and there's some risk in that too because people can also discourage you or they'll, you know, almost kind of put you off certain ideas and, um, So that's a good test for your idea too, that it can stand up to some rejection and resistance. I know like when I first wrote How Do You Know, that book was different than all the 3 books I'd written before. And they're much straighter financial books about, you know, how to make money in the markets or whatever. And this book was much more about thinking about thinking kind of book. It was quite different. But I felt very strongly that I wanted to write it. I had and I had things I wanted to say and, and it was a strong enough idea to push through kind of some of that resistance and doubt you get from certain people.

That risk of other people. I think this is really interesting too, because you have to, you sort of have to contextualize the feedback you're getting. Anne-Laure, what do you do to help contextualize feedback?

To me, I think it helps that I, for Beta, readers, I asked people reading my newsletter who wanted to read it. And I did talk to them a little bit and had an idea of who they were. And that was very helpful. And I could tell that, for example, that this feedback was coming from a young entrepreneur. This feedback was coming from a retired, um, you know, nurse who was living in a certain part of the US and who had had such and such experience. That context to me was really important because I wanted to avoid catering only to one type of person in my audience that might be the more vocal online. And so that can make you feel like that's the most important type of person to cater to, but they are not necessarily going to always be the largest part of your audience actually reading those types of books. So having diversity in the, the reviewers was important and also knowing how they were different, having that information, that context was important. And another aspect was having clarity as to what type of book I wanted to write, because sometimes I received some, I think, good advice in the sense that it could have maybe made, um, some parts of the book a bit more clearer with the technical aspects or more scientific or less scientific when it wasn't needed, et cetera. But I always ask myself, what am I trying to achieve here? What am I trying to communicate? And in what way am I trying to help the reader? And that was very important because there was feedback that was good on paper, but I don't think would have served this specific book I was trying to write.

Yeah, I was gonna say with, with a good, good editor also, um, they, they'll want to preserve your voice and they won't want to change what you're really about. And so sometimes, you know, you have to be careful. Some of the feedback you get, you know, it just doesn't ring true with you, then probably not something you should do. I mean, every writer has a voice, kind of an indefinable way of saying things, way of thinking about things. And you know, when you have other people suggesting things, they're gonna put the way they might think about it, the way they might say it, and you really have to translate that into your own way or, or you risk kind of losing that central voice.

What, what is it? And it, it's almost a fear. It's, uh, like a fear of when you have this curiosity that's pulling you into this project and now you're exploring the project and you're starting to get the feedback and you've got some traction, but it's not there yet. But you have to plant this flag. You have to sort of declare, this is the project that I'm making. And I think to your point, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, you can get feedback from somebody where you go, that's good feedback for a different project.

Yeah.

What do you, what is that fear? How do you turn it on and turn it off in ways that's useful? Kind of goes back to the whole friction and challenges piece that you brought up earlier.

I personally sometimes use that feedback to inspire potentially future projects. Sometimes I, I had notes from the feedback that actually went into my Curious Idea inbox feeling like, no, I'm not going to add another 3 paragraphs around this specific topic that the reviewer thought I should explore in more depth in the book. I don't think I don't think it belongs there. I do think it's interesting though. So maybe that would be part of a different article that I publish online later, or as part of a different creative project. So I do sometimes copy-paste some of that feedback and put it into my curiosity inbox for later, which again, 99.9% of the time I do nothing with it, but at least psychologically speaking, it makes me feel like this is somewhere I can access. Whenever the inspiration strikes again to explore this idea or this piece of feedback. So that's been helpful. And then another one that is maybe just more practical is just that I'm trying to be aware. We talked about burnout at the beginning of the conversation. I'm trying to stay aware of the amount of time and energy and attention that I have every day. And so. Sometimes the answer is just that there is no space. There are no resources to go and conduct the maybe 5 additional interviews that were, that would be necessary to conduct in order to do this topic justice in the book. And so I'm not going to do that because maybe my deadline is in 3 weeks. And so I'll spend my time, energy, and attention revising and reviewing what I already have versus adding something new. So sometimes logistical considerations can also be very helpful to push back and say, love it. Thank you so much for the feedback, but I'm not going to be able to implement it.

What do you think of that, Chris? Yeah.

Well, I was thinking, you know, there's just, there's always, there's always a tension with this process because, you know, on the one hand, you know, when you stake out a project, because I've done this a number of times now where I know that I want to have it staked out pretty well before I even start talking to people. But then, you know, you want to get other people involved early also, just because you want that feedback. And so there's always this tension between like preserving this original vision or project that got you excited in the first place, and then also integrating people's feedback and advice enough, but not enough so that it takes you off your path. Your, you know, your mission there, what got you excited. So it's a hard, it's hard to walk that sometimes.

And sometimes that evolves and I have to, I'll, I'll, if you want to take the analogy there, take it there. But I'm thinking of like in, with investments or anything else where you might, you might start with one idea, but then the work of excavating draws you to either maybe not a whole new idea, but there's, there's a bigger idea behind the idea that you thought you encountered. Is that something you feel like, do you run into that a lot too?

Yeah, that definitely happens. And I don't know, like, you know, why, I mean, again, it's just part of the tension of it and, and why then, I mean, what, what point do you know, okay, well I have to switch gears and go onto this different project. I mean, that's definitely happened. You mentioned investing. I mean, I can certainly think of, where I'm all excited about this particular company and I'm doing the research on it. And then as part of that research, you look at competitors and suppliers and all of a sudden you actually think a competitor is a more interesting one.

Yeah.

Or a supplier and it takes you down a whole different avenue. And so then you start working on that instead of the original project, you know? So that can definitely happen.

What about you for, uh, same, same idea, Anne-Laure, just this idea of like, You started on one idea and it opens up into an even bigger space or an even more interesting space.

Oh, this happens all the time. I think it happens all the time to anyone who's curious and who loves exploring and learning new things. And especially if you like making connections and discovering new patterns, you will inevitably fall into some sort of rabbit hole that was not the one you were planning on falling into in the first place.

Yeah.

So, uh, yes, it does happen a lot. And, um, that's why I designed my creative practice in a way where I do have enough space to explore different ideas and I never really feel stuck. So as I said, the only resources that are limited for me are time, energy, and attention. But if there's something I'm curious about and it doesn't fit into the book or it doesn't fit into one of my bigger projects, this is why I have my newsletter. This is why. I'm still active on Twitter/X. This is why I have those, those different channels where I can explore ideas and express my creativity. And it doesn't mean that I have to get married to that idea. Chris mentioned again, like the Anne-Laure of 2020 is different from the one in 2025. And I have posted a lot of stuff in those 5 years where if I look back, actually, I don't. Necessarily agree with my past selves. And I think this is a great thing, but I can only notice because I have all of these different breadcrumbs in different places, social media, my newsletter, my journals. So if I find something unexpected that is pulling me towards it, a bigger idea, I will try and see if there's one of those different mediums I can use to start exploring it and see if that leads to interesting conversations.

Yeah, it's almost like you're finding ways to let serendipity happen, you know? So you have all these different avenues where you're allowing, you know, you gotta, there's filters. We all have to have these filters because we can't take in everything, but we have to allow that. Yeah, that serendipity to happen. We have to allow some of those ideas through. And so I, I'm similar. So, you know, I also will like, one of the reasons why I push myself to travel and do, go out and do things and not get too stuck behind the desk, desk, you know, and just working at a computer all the time because yeah, you have chance conversations, you meet with, with people here and there that you didn't expect, and that leads to something else and this leads to something else and, you know, good things happen that way. So yeah, definitely part of the creative process is in allowing some of those good things to sort of, those sort of chance encounters and things to in.

Yeah, this, that whole thing about it's not even just inventing your own luck. But it is making sure that you're being exposed, your surface area is out there and exposed enough to, to let these attractors come run into us. Yeah. All right. I, I've got just a couple of notes from this conversation, so I'm going to invite both of you to freely interrupt as we go. Cause I just, I want to, I want a second look at some of the stuff that you said. At the beginning, we were talking about burnout and I think Chris, I think this came to you, but poetic, poetic in its simplicity. Just whenever you're burning out, just stop and do something new. Not supposed to rhyme. Not supposed to work out that way. I wrote it down and I went, wow, put that on a coffee mug. What is it about just telling yourself, stop and do something new?

Yeah, it's almost like, you know, reenergizing and recharging somehow. I mean, just the, that's the whole shifting over and doing something different. Engages different parts of your brain, different parts of your attention and focus and, and relaxes that part that's getting stressed out, that's getting burned out. And maybe that's all it is. Maybe, maybe that's all it is. It's as simple as that. I don't know. Anne-Laure, maybe have a different view.

No, I agree. It's, uh, very often when we burn out is because we're relying too much on our willpower, trying to push through. It never works. So I love that. So just stop trying for a second, take a break, go do something else, and you can come back to it later.

Yeah. We, we talked about this, this, the, the literal thirst for information, our literal desire to fill the gap, especially with something new. We wanna study it. We wanna dive into this, this, this area. And, uh, Anne-Laure, you brought up this idea of, again, the thirst for knowledge being a quite literal thing in the way our brain operates. And Chris, you brought it back to general semantics and this, this idea of it as a, a discipline to understand the assumptions of our abstractions. And I really love that language. Uh, Anne-Laure, I know you're just encountering this in more tangible terms for the first time, but that, that idea of understanding the assumptions behind our abstractions, what, where does that make your brain go? Probably down too many rabbit holes, but. Where's the first place it wants to go?

I immediately connected back to my work encouraging people to become the scientists of their own lives. And, uh, a lot of it is having a more experimental mindset where you turn any challenge you experience into a research question. And I feel like this is kind of similar here where instead of taking the definition of things around you or the current situation as the status quo as just the way it is and the way it's always been. And it has to be questioning the underlying assumptions of why things are the way they are. What does that mean? How does that impact our responses, our behaviors, our thinking? And maybe even how can we change and, uh, like work with these assumptions to change the way we think and navigate the world.

Yeah.

I also think a lot about, when I think about assumptions, I think about the language we use ourselves, just the, the just things we use to just to describe things in the world and how that influences the way we think. So, you know, if we've talked about, you know, in finance, for example, there's always this debate about what a business is. Like people will say Tesla is an auto manufacturer or no, Tesla is a tech company, you know. And what it is frames in how you think about it and how you evaluate. And so that's one thought. And then there's a whole bunch of words that we use where, you know, like all and never, or, you know, that when we, that are implied in what we say. So if we say something like, well, retail is a tough business. Well, is all retail a tough business? You know, is it always a tough business? You know, so you ask these sort of questions that are just Our language makes these assumptions, and then when you pick up on those keywords like the is or the always or the never or whatever it is, then that leads to questions that can be interesting.

How do you think about absolutes? This is a follow-up to this, Anne-Laure. How do you think about absolutes like is and always and never, like he just said?

That's what I was thinking about listening to that retail example is the next follow-up question is, and even if that was the case, if if that's the case, that all retail is stuff. Does it have to be? Because that's what we assume, right? We just assume if that's the case for every retail business today, then it just has to be the case. And so I think when you start, you stop thinking in absolutes, it opens up a world of possibilities in terms of what you could try, at least experiment with.

What is it about when somebody speaks in an absolute? Chris, is it's that it kind of closes the conversation off, right? When somebody speaks to you in one of those terms, what they're doing is they're saying like, no curiosity needed here. Like, here's the line, here's the barrier. And I feel like probably all three of us, that's, that's an active invitation of being like, surely there's a path around this wall.

Yeah, correct. Exactly.

We talked about the iterations, both of you keeping your own different versions of the journal. Anne-Laure, you helped connect plus-minus next to some of these ideas in general semantics with the dating. I'm really, I'm fascinated by this idea of this as a snapshot and a snapshot that helps us with both regret and worry minimization. I'm curious if there's anything on that either in the behavioral psychology of it or elsewhere. And both of you encountered this differently. The value of those snapshots to realize just how trivial so much of life is. Chris, you first.

Just trivial and, and, and transitory or ephemeral. I mean, there's one of the things like, uh, you know, one of the things I like to put in my diary or write about, it's just like things that I like today. But sometimes I used to have a running thing I would do right now. It's my favorite X, and it could be just anything, movies, books, you know, art, music artists. And it's just so funny, you know, how things change and you look at yourself 3 years ago, really? That's what I thought my favorite was. You know, and, and so yeah, that casts all your current convictions in, in a different light. And I think also what's good about having that journal, we've talked about this, is this also gives you permission to change. You know, this is just natural. This is just what happens. And not feel like you have to hold on to, you know, certain ideas and convictions of yours. You're free to let them go. You're free to change. And That's a good natural process. Yeah.

And, uh, to add to this and connect it specifically to minimizing regret, I think it does help with managing the recency bias. And especially when you work on longer projects and you're in the thick of it and it's challenging and you kind of hate it right now, you can almost forget why you decided to do that thing in the first place. Why did you start writing this book? Why did you accept to work on the startup? Why did you do that? And you can go back and see why you made that decision and you can see why it made sense. And that is just that it's a little bit difficult right now, but, uh, there's no reason to regret that decision that you made.

We talked about how you can't control the attractors. You can control, and this is one of my personal mantras, is You have to make curiosity a habit. There's no other way to do it. You have to make curiosity a habit. And if you can't control the attractors, you can only make a habit of harnessing them, of looking for the clusters. I love, love, love the idea of the curiosity inbox and putting this together. What I'm curious for both of you is looking for these things, and I want to ask it in two directions. For ourselves, I think of them as like the sticky signals. The ones where it's like when you, when you, you touch the Fruit Roll-Up or something and you're like, ah, and that tackiness is just on your hands and everywhere you go, you're like, I can't escape the thing that's now in my life everywhere. And you have to feel it in yourself before you start to test it on others. So if we can't control the attractors, just Anne-Laure first, like I feel it in me, then I have to prove it's there and it matters to somebody else. What's that conversion of self to others and how you think through it?

That's why learning in public is so powerful, right? If you create this habit of taking any idea that you're curious about and putting it out there, and it doesn't have to be a book yet, right? It doesn't even have to be a newsletter. It could be a quick post on Threads or Twitter just saying, oh, I just read this and it made me wonder that. And that's it. This is a great way to see if there's resonance between the things you're curious about and what other people are curious about. This is also a great way to have other people contribute other ideas that are connected that could be interesting to explore. And that could be a great way to plant the first seeds of a potential cluster that might expand afterwards. So I would highly recommend instead of working on ideas with the garage door closed to try and open that door a little bit and making that process of learning and exploring a little bit more public.

Yeah, I mean, I would definitely second that and I have so much like real-world experience where that exact thing has happened, whether I was researching a particular business or something, you, and you put it out on Twitter, like she said, it doesn't have to be a book or a well-thought-out essay. It could just be very simple posts. You know, I found this, this was interesting, 2, 3 points, and then other people contribute. And I've met a number of people where we then have shared research notes later on certain ideas or, you know, people that are now regular correspondents and that's That's how it started to just be, we both had a curiosity about a particular name or company or idea or whatever. And we just in the process of exploring that, you know, it's formed that relationship. So yeah, that's very, very valuable and uniquely to our times. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, we have a lot of avenues to potentially bring in like-minded people. Yeah.

And specific to this, this is one of the next notes I wrote, like This is the, the risk of other people, which isn't just the risk of other people. There's the reward of other people too. This is not a, you know, it might even be asymmetric if you know how to control for it. Uh, Anne-Laure, you talked about the thinking partner and what you were just talking about, Chris, too, of, I kind of think of, you have to cultivate these sandboxes to play in and the sandbox doesn't have to be the construction site, but you need these sandboxes to play in with these ideas. What's, do you have an example or a story of a big idea, Chris, that just sort of like came out of collaboration for you or developed into a big idea because of collaboration maybe too?

Well, I mean, I, I, yeah, because I just thought of it and I'm still thinking of the investment process and under, and under, you know, understanding certain names and ideas and yeah, I can think of, you know, where I, got interested, for example, in, there's a certain group of companies in Sweden and they're called serial acquirers, a certain style organization and business. And I've met a lot of other people who then were also interested in it and it started off as just kind of a one-off interest in maybe one company. And then over the years it's, you know, blossomed into this whole thing. There are many different companies and ideas there and now there's conference about it and invited to be there as one of the moderators and it's, it's just taken on this life of its own. But to think that it started from just one, one little, you know, humble kernel and then years later it's, it's drawn into all these other people and much bigger ideas. So yeah, that definitely happened.

That's wild. So a whole other community and it sounds kind of like— whole community, kind of like the General Semantics community too. 'Cause that was another one that sort of lifted you up in a way, right?

Well, that's right. I guess because, you know, that's such a kind of an esoteric kind of subject. I mean, I wrote that book, How Do You Know, for example, applying general semantics to Wall Street. That was the first book that had tried to do that since 1958 was the last book when someone tried to write about general semantics and investing. So there was this big gap. It wasn't like there was a lot of people talking about it. It was just something I kind of discovered. And yeah, then to be able to find that community. And then I found that there's this whole Institute of General Semantics that Krasivski started, and there's a whole community around there and it's involves people from all sorts of disciplines. You know, there are artists and musicians and professors and communications specialists and, and, you know, business people. So it's, yeah, you find that community out there that you had no idea existed before.

Anne-Laure, it's the same for you because I, I mean, I, I've, I've watched the iterations of, of your, your process with all this stuff where you go from starting the blog and, going into, what was it, graduate school where all of a sudden you just go, I just wanna learn in public. I wanna show that I'm doing this. Tell Chris that story and I want you to just talk for a second about finding community with your curiosity.

Yeah, I, uh, after my last startup, uh, folded, I found myself feeling completely lost and I had no idea what I wanted to do next. So I decided to, as one does, go back to school. To study neuroscience. And I, so I went back to graduate school to study neuroscience. And that's when I decided to start Learning in Public, where I created a, at the time, very small newsletter to share what I was learning and to translate everything I was studying from neuroscience into more practical tools, which I thought was very helpful because when you have to write in a way that is understandable to anyone, you can't hide behind jargon. You can't pretend that you understand if you don't, you really have to engage deeply with those ideas. So that was the beginning of NestLabs and the newsletter that I started writing, which, as you were saying, I think the reason why there are so many newsletters online and the reason why mine grown so quickly, uh, getting to 100,000 subscribers fairly quickly, I think was because I was fully transparent with my learning process. I didn't start the newsletter saying I'm an expert. And here's a newsletter where you can learn from me. I said, I'm a student and here's a newsletter where you can learn with me. And I think it really resonated with people. It also meant that I encouraged people to always reply to the newsletter, to suggest additional research papers and ideas and directions that I could explore. And because of that, the community, we also have a private community with 3,000 people in it and, uh, I feel like you talked about co-creation earlier, and this is really for me the keyword that describes the experience of building Nest Labs. I don't feel like I built that on my own. I co-created it with the community.

Mm. That's a really cool sentiment and a really— what do you think about that, Chris?

No, I think that's, that's a great story. I mean, uh, and I'm sure, you know, you were very clear about what it, what it's all about and it kind of drew a lot of like-minded people and, and it's always fascinating how that sort sort of feeds on itself. It's almost like there's a compounding effect also with, with knowledge and connections. You know, we know the compounding effect of money, but the compounding effect in knowledge and connections also is really powerful.

I love how you're mentioning how I was clear about what it was, and in a very meta, weird, paradoxical way, I was actually clear with everyone about the fact that I was not clear about what it was. And, uh, I told them all, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm building, but I'm going to build it. And we're going to do that together. Feedback welcome. And, uh, it is a form of clarity, being very clear with people that this is, as Matt said, a sandbox, a shared sandbox for experimentation and exploration and a playground that we share together. Being clear about that was very helpful.

It's this weird perverse version of the IKEA effect over and over again. Right. All right. So here's, here's the real question I'm going to ask, uh, Chris, I'm going to make you guess first. Can you guess why I wanted to pair you guys up today? Do you have a, have a best stab? It's pretty trite. I'm going to be honest. My answer to this is not very deep or thorough, but, uh, I really think it was, I did think it was clever. So see, being curious, what, what do you think I saw in common between the two of you lurking on the internet?

Um, maybe they were both trying to take kind of quirky projects that had to do about thinking and making it practical and available to a lot more people. That's my guess.

That's a good guess. Uh, Anne-Laure, what do you, what do you think? What do you think I was onto with, to you?

Tough question.

Thinking around curiosity, the fact that we're both very curious, but also interested in curiosity and in, in thinking as a meta topic almost.

Mm-hmm. I love that. And, and bonus shout out to, uh, friend of the show, Tom Morgan, Bogomil Baranowski. There's a bunch of people behind the scenes. This doesn't happen without other people in the network. So I wrote, uh, The Tiny Habits of Time Binders. Ah, and like I said, it was a little trite, a little clever, but I was really fascinated with the two of you of how these little teeny tiny habits just compound and roll up and deal with all the abstractions of life in a way that actually codifies to something big on the end. 'Cause again, it's, I'm really gonna be stuck on this after this, this like sandbox construction site idea. Yeah. Of you both understand how much, how much time you put in. In the sandbox before you even dare to go into the construction site. And then, but once you're in the construction site, you're actually really making something of consequence that matters. And I see that in both of your works and I respect the hell out of it. So Anne-Laure, tell the people about the new book. Tell 'em where they can find you. Tell 'em about NessLabs. Uh, where, where should they come add you to, uh, their network on the internet?

Thank you. Yes. So my new book is called Tiny Experiments and, uh, you can find it anywhere books are sold. So just look it up and, uh, get your copy. And if you wanna read my newsletter, which I send every week, you just go to nestlabs.com and you can sign up there.

Fantastic. Heavy endorsement on the book. Very excited for this audiobook version now too. We're gonna have to see if we can hear the parts where you're questioning the paragraph mid-sentence. Chris Meyer, same thing. Where can people add you to their network out in the world?

Well, you can, if you Google Woodlock House Family Capital, my website will come right up. I'm also on Twitter, Chris W. Mayer, M-A-Y-E-R. So those are two ways.

Find Chris, check out the books and heavy endorsement. I know there's the 100 Baggers book. A lot of investment people are going to know that one. If you're not an investment person, it's a great investment book. But I really think Dear Fellow Time Binder and say the name of the first book there too.

How Do You Know?

Yep.

And how do you know?

These are really, really cool reads too. Check out all the books, check out all the stuff. Thank you both joining, for joining me so, so very much. This is Just Press Record on Cultish Creative YouTube, and we're out. Thanks for joining us. Like, comment, and hey, subscribe below to Cultish Creative on YouTube if you haven't already. As the good compliance people want me to remind you, Matt Ziegler, that's me, is a managing director at Sunpoint. SunPoint Investments. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SunPoint Investments. No information on this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of clients of SunPoint Investments. I hope you've been entertained. I hope you found this useful. I hope you talk to a professional before you try any of this stuff at home. And most of all, I hope you've subscribed. Be nice to each other out there. Don't forget, head over to cultishcreative.com and let's make curiosity a habit together. And I'm out.