Short update on funding, conferences, Zoom calls for paid subscribers, etc.
With some hints on what I've been writing, and when you'll get to see it...
Over the past few months, quite a lot has happened behind the scenes of The Egg and the Rock – largely offline, in the amusingly named “real world” – so I want to bring you all up-to-date.
EXTREMELY SHORT VERSION
I’ve received funding from two interesting sources; I’ve attended a fascinating unconference in Dublin, and spoken at it; I’ve spoken at another, more formal, complexity science conference in the UK; I’ve consequently met a bunch of interesting new people, and read a bunch of interesting new papers and articles; as a result of all the above, I’ve had a bunch of interesting new ideas; I’ve recorded a couple of interesting podcasts; I’ve gone camping with my interesting family; and I’ve written significantly more of the actual book, plus an EPIC post on structure formation in the early universe that is almost ready to go.
It’s all been very interesting.
SLIGHTLY LESS SHORT, BUT STILL PRETTY SHORT, VERSION:
FUNDING
The Egg and the Rock recently received funding from two philanthropic organisations, Emergent Ventures and O’Shaughnessy Ventures. In both cases, these are no-strings-attached grants to help me keep writing the book, and to keep explaining, exploring, and expanding on the theory of cosmological natural selection here in public on Substack.
EMERGENT VENTURES
Emergent Ventures is run out of the Mercatus Centre, located in George Mason University in Virginia (right beside Washington DC). It’s a grant and fellowship program, focused on "moon-shot" ideas, set up by the economist Tyler Cowen in 2018. (He also launched Fast Grants in April 2020, as a spin-off of Emergent Ventures, to provided rapid funding to scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Raised over $50 million, and awarded 260 grants.) I’m kind of fascinated by Tyler – he’s an important, active node in a bunch of the most interesting, future-leaning American networks – and I think he and his work should be better known, so I’ll give you a brief bio of the guy.
TYLER COWEN
Tyler has run the Marginal Revolution economics blog for over twenty years, posting daily (without, as far as I can tell, a single day off in that time); he also hosts the Conversations with Tyler podcast. Typical guests: Noam Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, Lydia Davis, Peter Thiel, Peter Singer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lazarus Lake, Rick Rubin, Margaret Atwood, Ken Burns, Claudia Goldin, Sam Altman, Fuchsia Dunlop, Tobi Lütke, and a homeless guy called Alexander the Grate – so, an eclectic set of interviews with some strong personalities. (Yes, “typical” was a joke. And no, I don’t expect you to know all those names.) He’s written or co-written over 20 books, including The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, Average is Over, Modern Principles of Economics (with Alex Tabarrok), In Praise of Commercial Culture, and most recently (co-authored with Daniel Gross), Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.
This all makes Tyler basically one of the most respected (and idiosyncratic) talent scouts out there, and so it’s a real pleasure to have gotten these ideas through his filters. It reassures me that I’m onto something. (He reckons there is a 30% chance that I am right, which is pretty good odds for such an unorthodox idea from such a rigorous thinker. I think there’s a 70%, maybe 80% chance I am right, but obviously I’m unbelievably biased.)
O’SHAUGHNESSY VENTURES
O’Shaughnessy Ventures is an even more recent entry to the field of philanthropy, disbursing its first fellowships and grants only last year. It funds a nice eclectic mixture of arts, science, and tech projects – including ones as hard to categorise as mine.
JIM O’SHAUGHNESSY
It was set up by Jim O’Shaughnessy (yes, a name so Irish it could only be American), that most intriguing of types; a successful algorithmic trader and hedge fund manager heavily influenced by Robert Anton Wilson. (Yes, the same Robert Anton Wilson I often quote here – “I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions” / “All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense” / “Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong” – and who greatly influenced my own intellectual growth, such as it has thus far been – the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, author of Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, and Quantum Psychology, and the guy who may or may not have had conversations, over several months, with aliens from Sirius, the Dog Star.) Jim himself has written several bestselling books on investment, such as What Works on Wall Street, been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, and his daughter is a successful writer, which is always a good sign.
O’Shaughnessy Ventures’ mission statement is the nicely Wilsonian “To help you go from good to great to “Wow, I never saw that coming!””
CONFERENCES
Emergent Ventures Unconference, Dublin, Ireland
As a result of getting an Emergent Ventures grant, I attended the Emergent Ventures Unconference in Dublin in August. There’s a very good account of that unconference here, by the playwright Ben Yeoh.
I gave a talk on the current state of cosmological natural selection as a theory. It seemed to go down well. Lots of interested questions.
Conference on Complex Systems 2024, Exeter, UK
I was invited to give a talk at the Conference on Complex Systems 2024. The conference was originally going to be held in Tel Aviv, but had to be moved for obvious reasons. (It ended up split between Exeter and London.) In the end, I wasn’t able to attend in person, but I gave my talk, on the current healthy state of cosmological natural selection, by Zoom. It may end up online at some point, in which case I’ll post a link. I’m very grateful to Georgi Georgiev (the physicist, not the footballer), Clément Vidal, and John Smart for the invitation.
A BACKLOG OF IDEAS
As a result of all this stimulating conversation and interaction, the past couple of months have generated a significant backlog of new ideas. I’m not sure how best to clear them; the way I normally write posts is waaaaay too slow to deal with all of them as individual full-length posts. So, I may experiment with some very short, scrappy posts over the next while, to clear that backlog. Just the gist of each raw idea.
I am, however, working on one long and ambitious new post that has consumed the last two months. It pulls together some major, non-obvious implications of cosmological natural selection, it is inspired by this extremely important new paper in Nature, “Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web”, and it’s called The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe. I hope to get it finished soon (but I’ve been saying that to myself, as I labour on draft after draft, for weeks).
INTERESTING PODCASTS
I recently recorded a 90 minute conversation with the playwright Ben Yeoh. It covers my entire career (from fronting Toasted Heretic, through writing novels, and children’s books, and the ending to Minecraft, to now), but with an emphasis on my recent work here on The Egg and the Rock. Ben is a fascinating guy. His plays include Lemon Love and Yellow Gentleman; he co-wrote and performed (with David Finnegan) Thinking Bigly: A Guide to Saving the World; he translated the 14th century Japanese Noh play, Nakamitsu, into English, etc. And he’s a great host.
I also recorded an episode of Infinite Loops, the podcast hosted by Jim O’Shaughnessy of O’Shaughnessy Ventures. This episode concentrated, even more so than Ben’s, on cosmological natural selection. Jim’s a big fan of scientific heretics and original thinkers (he’s interviewed Lisa Feldman Barrett, Scott Aaronson, Rupert Sheldrake and others), so we got on extremely well. It should go live sometime in the next month or two.
I’ll probably post the transcripts of both of these, with the YouTube videos embedded, as separate posts. (Part of clearing my backlog.)
HOLIDAY!
Oh yeah, I also went on holiday for a week in August, like a normal person. (I didn’t go on holidays for many years, because for many years I was a fucked-up writer with no money, a bad attitude, and a severely unbalanced life. Not the serene spirit in the body of Adonis you see before you today, calmly juggling the many responsibilities of life with the balance and control of the Buddha with an MBA.) Went camping in the Netherlands with my wonderful wife Solana, our splendid son Arlo, and my delightful daughter Sophie. Cycled everywhere. Had a blast. Sunshine. Ice cream. So much cheese... Holidays are marvellous! Why did no one tell me! (Oh, wait, they did. I just didn’t listen.)
A ZOOM ASK-ME-ANYTHING FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS
I am also intensely grateful to my paid subscribers, over a hundred of whom are still hanging in there. (All my free subscribers should be grateful too! By funding the writing, those paid subscribers are helping me keep these posts free for everyone else.) So, I want to invite all you excellent, long-suffering paid subscribers to a Zoom call (probably on Sunday, December 15th) where you can ask me anything, or indeed tell me anything, and I can update you in more detail on everything that has been happening behind the scenes. You will get an email later this week, with a Zoom invite. (I can’t afford to host potentially 8,000 people on a Zoom call, so this is just for paid subscribers; but I appreciate all my free subscribers too! And yes, if you become a paid subscriber in the next couple of days, you’ll get the invite.) I'll probably make this a regular thing – roughly monthly – as I feel I've been taking my paid subscribers too much for granted, and that's bad for my soul. Also, more selfishly, I would value more feedback, as I work on the book version of these ideas…
I also hugely appreciate anyone who paid, say, for the first year back in 2022, simply as a gesture of support, or because they liked my other writing or whatever, and then cancelled. It was hugely helpful at the time, and I’d be happy to have you on the Zoom call too. Just answer this email saying you’d like to attend and I’ll add you in.
I’m going to schedule the call for a Sunday morning US west coast, so lunchtime East Coast, and evening in Europe and Africa. This means the majority of my paid subscribers can attend. (I realise this makes things rather late in India, while Australia and New Zealand get totally shafted, but that’s what happens when you live on the far side of a round planet. Upside, you can sit out World War Three. Downside, you can only hear me at 3 in the morning. Tradeoffs, man. Everything is tradeoffs.)
THE STATE OF THE BOOK
I have also, over the summer, been quietly writing the book version of all this, to the great relief of my long-suffering agent, Charlie Campbell. This led to a rather quiet couple of months on the Substack, but those early chapters should eventually be posted here (once I’ve finished polishing them); so think of it as delayed gratification, which is good for your character.
There you go! That was the short update! Remember, the big new post (The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe) will be along sometime in the next month; watch out for it. It has some ideas that I think are both strong and original, and really move the theory forward. Meanwhile, a couple of, ah, interesting shorter posts may pop up…
OK, be nice to each other.
Talk soon…