#15 | On Summertime Reflections | Reading and Listening Recommendations

Hello everybody, Welcome to Engines of Creation podcast, I’m your host, Christian Mastrodonato. In this podcast I bring together my knowledge in complex systems. with my experience in leading technology innovation and new product development, to explore how successful products, organizations and ideas emerge.

Greetings from the Italian Maritime Alps, apologies if you may hear in the background the sounds of fresh water springs or birds singing, but while working on an incredible line up of interviews that will be available to you over the upcoming months, I thought why don’t share some ideas on what to read and listen during these vacation period? I’m sure many of you, as I do, take advantage of the summer break to refresh your minds with new and interesting ideas. So in addition to all the interesting episodes that Engines of Creation offers you, and please share this podcast to anyone you think might enjoy it, here some of the interesting ideas of I’ve been recently discovering and I’m happy to share with you. So let’s go!

The first reading worth to share is a longstanding friend sitting on my bedside table, Epictetus. I’ve been slowly reading his complete works for quite some time now, and while, at least for my personal preference, it does cater for an occasional deep reading of one of his discourses versus a single gulp of all his writings, the summer is usually a period where I can spend a bit more time in company of this old friend.

For the ones, many possibly, who never heard of him, he is one of main representatives of the Late Stoics, that is the ones mainly active during the Roman Empire period, others being Marcus Aurelius and Seneca (who btw was a man).

Personally I’m reading the Complete Works, but I’d say if anybody is interested should at least look at its discourses. His teachings really force the reader to think deeply about what she often takes for granted, that is what she can control, and therefore really matters, and what she can’t, and therefore shouldn’t bother with. Just to give a taste, one passage that deeply resonated with me lately was

• Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?

I’ve compared this passage discussing it with a friend of mine (a real one I mean, not Epictetus ) as a Mic Drop, very true and very uncomfortable.

it is interesting to note how recently Stoic philosophy has had quite of a renaissance, most likely one of the reasons this book has ended up in my reading list, and I believe Stoics have a lot to teach us, but to be honest some recent interpretations of Stoicism are at least shallow, if not questionable, so my suggestion is to read the real ones and make up your own mind :)

If you tell me, as I probably could have said some years ago, philosophy books are hard and I don’t really understand them, well, while I hope you are going to change your mind, I think you can absolutely start into Stoicism by reading Marcus Aurelius’s meditations. This might actually be the book that is going to change your mind about reading philosophy books. Written as a personal notebook not meant to be shared with others, is a very accessible treasure trove of deep thoughts and a great entry point to Stoicism. Give it a go and you won’t regret it.

Now moving into more recent times, but still with an interesting time perspective, I’m in the midst of reading Life After Google by George Gilder, a book suggested to me by Jeff Skelton, ICIS Managing Director. George Gilder is a very provocative writer, with a very distinctive style. Why did I say the time perspective of this book is interesting? Well, This book has been written in 2018, and the main thesis of the book is that blockchain is a foundation of a new model of economy and society. Many people would therefore probably have dropped this book after 5 pages, since think I’d be rich if I’ve been given a penny every time I have heard blockchain has failed over the last couple of years. But even assuming that Blockchain did fail, that might be a conversation for another time with a proper expert as guest, many of the reasons because the Big Data business model are flawed and dangerous are still valid, and many of the reasons why a economic and societal values enabled by blockchain can be a great option are still true ( whatever technology we want to use to build it, or not to use as my previous guest Aki Järvinen would argue). So I think this book is a useful refresher that we can build a different worldview if we want, even more useful in the days of Huge Data business models enabled by Large Language Models and Generative AI.

Of course it wouldn’t be an Engines of Creation episode if we didn’t mention complexity at least once. And I believe one of the foundational books of the modern definition of complexity is Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe.

The main scientific (possibly scientistic) thought school taught us to believe that the reason because we are here is solely due to Darwinian natural selection, which gives chance an incredibly important role in our existence, we here because we are absurdly lucky basically. A great book that explains very well this view is Chance and Necessity by Nobel Prize Jacques Monod btw. While there is a lesson to learn from it that we shouldn’t discount, given human hubris and self-absorption is possibly killing this planet with us on it, the reality might a bit more complex than that, pun intended.

In fact Kauffman posits that self-organization is a fundamental source of order in the universe, working alongside natural selection. This principle suggests that complex systems can spontaneously organize themselves without external direction, and this can explain the emergence of order and structure in biological systems, and possibly beyond to societies and economies. Kauffman uses computer simulations and models to illustrate how systems can evolve to higher levels of complexity by balancing on the edge between order and chaos, this balancing behaviour is often called self-organised criticality.

This has very interesting implications, for examples systems with redundancy (multiple components performing similar functions) are more robust and can evolve gradually. This robustness allows for the stable accumulation of variations, facilitating the evolution of complex structures. I recommend to listen to my interview with Luca Dellanna On Survival and Adaptation to have another perspective on this issue.

I think this is great book that shows how complexity thinking can completely redesign our assumptions of the world.

Closing about complexity readings , I’ve recently shared on LinkedIn and I’ll put a link to it in this episode description, to a very interesting article that defines anti fragility very rigorously but also very clearly. I know Anti-fragility is a concept, firstly introduced by Taleb, that I often mention, so it is always good to be able to refer to proper definitions.

Now enough about readings, and why don’t we rest our eyes, tired of endless hours of screen work, and we listen to interesting conversations instead? Maybe while driving on a road trip or laying on a beach, or looking at a beautiful landscape (ok you are also using your eyes in this case, but I’m sure they’d be relaxing, so it doubles the effect).

I like to think you are doing it right now, since you are listening to this episode. As usual, don’t forget to hit the like button, to follow it and to share it to your community, so they also can have interesting ideas for the summer.

I would start my listenings suggestion from a whole podcast to follow, and it is the Complexity: Physics of Life podcast, from the Santa Fe Institute for Complexity. Being run and curated by a scientific organization, it is definitively very deep, and in this sense very complementary to Engines of Creation, where we try to keep a more business and technology look at complexity, but whatever is your topic of interest, I’m sure you can find one or more episodes in this podcast that touches it from a complexity standpoint, it is worth a try if Complexity is stimulating your curiosity.

Going back to philosophy, but much more modern one, I thoroughly recommend the episode from Curt Jaimungal‘s Theories of Everything podcast when Doland Hoffman and Stephen Wolfram discuss their respective theories of Consciousness and The Ruliad, which is a computational theory of the universe. The episode is 3 hours plus long, but if you want to have a good idea of what some of most exciting and recent views of how our universe might look like, this is a great starter. An interesting fact is that these 2 theories have been developed completely independently and this is the first time these two thinkers meet, I’ve been following them for quite some time and I kept saying, these 2 guys should talk, for sure I wasn’t the only one, and in fact eventually someone made them talk to each other!

Finally, in a podcast that I have already recommended, Mindscape by Sean Carrol, there are 3 among the last episodes that stood out to me: the one with the Google’s researcher Francois Chollet on Deep Learning and Large Language models, which is a sobering and clear overview of the current situation, without marketing and sensationalism and with honest some reality checks instead; the one with Daron Acemoglu, very interesting for people working in innovation, showing the effects of technological innovation on society, not always that good apparently, and the importance of institutions to govern it; finally I really enjoyed Ellen Langer’s interview on Mindfullness and the Body, she is great at explaining mindfulness beyond the usual confinements of meditative practises, and how it can be a powerful and transformative tool in our daily activities.

I think that’s all for today, Thanks for listening to this episode of Engines of Creation, I hope to have given you enough interesting sources for new ideas and inspirations, hoping that the rest of your summer is going to be relaxing, joyous and full of new learnings.

And if you want to learn even more, be sure to follow Engines of Creation, and leave us a rating and a review.  And don’t hesitate to share this episode on social media and with friends and colleagues who might be interested, this podcast counts on you to grow and help other people to understand and embrace complexity to innovate and create.  If you have any questions, comments or feedback, feel free to reach out to enginesofcreation@mastrodonato.co, I’ll be glad to continue the conversation.

References:

• Epictetus - The Complete Works
• Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
• George Gilder - Life After Google
• Stuart Kauffman - At Home in the Universe
• Jacques Monod - Chance and Necessity
• Antifragility in complex dynamical systems - https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-024-00014-y
• Complexity: Physics of Life from Santa Fe Institute
• Theories of Everything by Curt Jaimungal - Consciousness vs The Ruliad | Stephen Wolfram Λ Donald Hoffman https://youtu.be/1m7bXNH8gEM
• Mindscape Podcast https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
  • Francois Chollet on Deep Learning
  • Daron Acemoglu On Technology, Inequality and Power
  • Ellen Langer on Mindfullness and the Body