David Byrne Explains How Forgotten Ideas Come Back to Life

History is littered with ideas that have been tossed aside, only for them to gain relevance at some later date. Think of Moby-Dick: forgotten in Melville's time, but now regarded as the great American novel. Or the work of economist Hyman Minsky, which became influential a decade after his death, when the 2008 financial crisis made “the Minsky Moment” a mainstream term. These are just a couple of the things we talk about with the legendary musician David Byrne on today's podcast. Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, looks to categorize numerous “sleeping beauties” - ideas that were lost but then rediscovered. Besides Melville and Minsky, we also talk about the lost Roman recipe for concrete and we get into Byrne's thoughts on how to write a song and his own experience of having his music rediscovered by a new generation. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Tracy Alloway?

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• 1:47Speaker 03

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• 2:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:07Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, something that both of us have observed multiple times on the podcast by now. Longtime listeners are tired of our, tired of some of our stuff.

• 2:16Tracy Alloway?

  Tired of our observations.

• 2:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Tired of our stories and stuff like that. No, but something that we both have observed, and it relates to our career, is that sort of big times of big change, financial crisis, COVID, et cetera, anytime there seems to be some big turning point. It sort of acts as like a clearing in the woods where like new ideas can be discovered and so forth. So we like sort of go down some path typically, I like to think of it as like a narrow path through a forest and certain ideas we sort of go with. And then suddenly, something changes. Nobody is necessarily an expert on this moment. The gap in awareness between the smartest and the least informed person starts to shrink about what's happening. And then there's like, there's a market for new ideas that emerges.

• 3:02Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I think there's a democratization process, I guess, that happens in times of crisis or major change. And we've talked about it in relation to the 2008 financial crisis where back then you and I were in the early stages of our financial journalism careers. But we were basically on the same footing as people who had been covering banking and finance for decades at that point, because no one really knew what was going on. And so, as you say, this opportunity opens up.

• 3:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Tracy Alloway?

  And suddenly you start to see new ways of approaching it, new entrants discussing certain things, new ideas, maybe.

• 3:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. So for example, you know, people are like, oh, the works of Hyman Minsky, for example, right? They're like, oh, maybe this guy who most people, even in economics, had not talked about very much. Maybe he, he shed some light. We could go back and revisit him. Or even, you know, certain forms of what I would call like antique Keynesianism, et cetera. It's like, let's go back and see what people who we'd long discarded were saying. And maybe this could be, maybe this could be useful.

• 4:07Tracy Alloway?

  Well, Minsky is a really interesting one because again, I got into financial journalism in September 2008, and people were already bringing up the Minsky moment, right? And ever since then, it's become almost a cliche, to the point where if I see, if I see a financial journalist talk about Minsky moment as if they just discovered it, I kind of get a little annoyed and it's a little bit cringe. But what I didn't know is that basically up until 2008, a lot of Minsky's ideas had been discarded.

• 4:35Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. So we can, let's, we have an exciting guest who we don't have to talk forever. We're going to be speaking with someone who is primarily known for rediscovering the works of Hyman Minsky. No, that's not exactly true, but someone who has in fact talked about Hyman Minsky. We're going to be speaking with musician and author David Byrne. He has a, he has a new book out called Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. And he has a chapter on the, the Minsky revival. So David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you. And here somewhere, yes, I could talk about Minsky. Of course, you probably, you probably know, know a lot about it by now.

• 5:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Look, here's the thing, if we could spend the entire time in this conversation just talking about Minsky, as long as we also spend a minute talking about Moby Dick. Which you also talk about.

• 5:28Tracy Alloway?

  I, I knew this was going to come up.

• 5:30Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 5:31Tracy Alloway?

  That's actually a legitimate example of what Sleeping Beauties is all about. Why don't, just to begin, give us the, the, in a nutshell, version of the book. What is a sleeping beauty and what are you trying to do here?

• 5:43Speaker 05

  It's not my term, but I stumbled on it. Sleeping beauty is something that got a little bit of attention when it was first done. Could be an idea, could be a painter, could be an author. Then kind of faded from view, became kind of forgotten, maybe not entirely, but kind of, yes, sank below the surface. And then at some point, for various reasons, got re-appreciated and came back. And it was like, oh, yes, that is relevant right now. That's exactly what we're talking about now, and this person's already done it. Let's see if there's some information, some technique, some beautiful artwork, whatever it might be,

• 6:27Speaker 05

  for us to appreciate. You guys mentioned the, yes,

• 6:36Speaker 05

  2008, the crash, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I have a whole section of the book on how catastrophes, including war, are kind of a way that these things get rediscovered.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  I decided to focus on how they got rediscovered as much as I could, rather than how they got forgotten. How they got forgotten tends to be the same stories all over, over and over again, that institutional hubris, or racism, or sexism, or we think we know better than people knew in the past, all those kinds of things. But the, I thought, if we can find how they got rediscovered, that gives us a shot at finding the ones that are still out there, because for sure, there's some out there.

• 7:28Tracy Alloway?

  So for the Minsky example, let's just start with that one, given our audience. But what's, you know, we, I think everyone knows what a Minsky moment is, but maybe talk a little bit about the time before that became a journalistic cliche. And then also talk about what's the relevance of discovering Minsky post 2008? Or maybe even what the relevance would have been discovering him before 2008, other than it makes convenient, you know, anecdotes for, for financial columns.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  Wow. Yes. When did he do, he did a lot of his work, I think it was in the 60s.

• 8:07Joe Weisenthal?

  I think that's right.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. And his idea was, it's kind of behavioral economics. He was kind of saying, well, we don't exactly behave rationally. We don't always act in our best interests. I'm kind of summarizing here.

• 8:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  Some people will already know this, that when things are flush, we tend to assume that that's the way it's always going to go. We can just pile more, you know, invest more, do this. And, and we kind of ignore the danger signs and this and that. Needless to say, he's, has been proven right.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's saying we're human beings. We behave

• 8:47Speaker 05

  according to, with these emotional instincts, as opposed, we don't always act rationally.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  There was a nice story about him going on holiday with his family to Italy. And instead of going to see all the tourist sites, he started interviewing the people in the little business, who are working in the little businesses in the towns they were visiting. And wanted, he wanted to find out, how do you do this? How's, how's, how's, how do things work here? Yeah.

• 9:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy and I can relate to that sort of thing. I think both of us, it's probably this curse of like trying to learn so much about the world. I don't know, maybe you're, maybe you're a little bit better at turning off. No, I think we both have this curse. We go anywhere and like, we just, you know, try to enjoy it. But also like, how does this work? And why is the price this way? How many hours do you work? And how did you find your way into this job? So you go through in this book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. Many examples, including Minsky, including discoveries of Roman concrete, which we'll talk about, including the book Moby Dick itself, which we're definitely going to talk about.

• 10:03Joe Weisenthal?

  And then, you know, as you talk about your conclusion, maybe we can like, find a pattern that helps us discover old ideas or forgotten ideas consistently. But before we get to that, why don't you talk to us about the process of assembling this book? Because there's thousands of Sleeping Beauties and that. How did you like, find the ones that you wanted to talk about, window them down and like, talk to us about how this book arrived here?

• 10:27Speaker 05

  There's lots of them. Yes. I'd, I'd write them up, do like a first draft of writing things up. And then, you know, oh, this one, this was a good story. Or I see they're starting to fall into categories of how they got rediscovered and remembered. And I thought, okay, if I can, I need a nice little sampling in each of these categories. And then I think I'm good. I don't need to kind of overdo it. I'm not trying to be complete and I go like, I'm going to tell you every single Sleeping Beauty I've ever stumbled on.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Often I'd stumble on them, be an article about something like you said, Moby Dick or whatever. Like that can be something, you know, an article about Melville. And they'd say, like in one sentence, they go,

• 11:21Speaker 05

  Moby Dick was a failure and he died penniless, something like that. And then they'd go on to talk about something else. It was like one sentence and you just go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You just buried the lead.

• 11:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  From my, from my point of view, that's the story.

• 11:34Tracy Alloway?

  Hmm.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  How did that happen? Because now, yeah, that particular, that book is revered.

• 11:40Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, how did that happen?

• 11:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, let's, all right, let's jump right into the Moby Dick.

• 11:44Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's try, yeah, let's try and jump right into them. My favorite book, by the way.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Wow. You have to go back, wind back before that book, which makes, it makes the story kind of better. Uh, before he wrote, started writing, he signed on as a, as a kind of merchant sailor. Um, and at the time, they would go whale hunting and hunting for all sorts of stuff in the South Seas and in the Pacific. So he was doing that. He found it, he found it to be a torturous, horrible, horrible experience. He and some others jumped ship, uh, on some island. And I looked up, the island, of course, is gorgeous. And you go, God, I'd live there.

• 12:33Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  But, uh, yes.

• 12:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Except for the, except for the cannibal.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  Except there were cannibals. Yes, there were cannibals. But he managed, he got away from that, got to another island. Um, where he was, became like a farmer growing potatoes on the, this island. And eventually, um, he signs on with another boat. Goes to, I think, goes to, eventually ends up in Hawaii, where the first boat, the one he deserted from arrives and they go, you're guilty. And we're taking you back.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  There's not much you can do about it, but, and as in, yeah, as in the, the book, he's witnessed to floggings and just horrible, horrible conditions and horrible treatment and, you know, insane captains and all this stuff. I mean, it's all there. So he's, he writes a book, I think Typee was the first one about his South Seas adventures. He didn't say it was him, but it was, that's what it was. And, uh, the, I think it was the American publisher said, no, this is completely outrageous. Could not have happened.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Uh, but I think there was someone in England or who kind of was a witness who said, yeah, it did happen.

• 14:04Joe Weisenthal?

  All these awful things that he heard.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  All these awful things, this crazy stuff happened. And so they published it, uh, and it was a massive hit. It was huge. It became like one of the most popular books. So he wrote a sequel. It was called, I think, Omu, another kind of made up island name, uh, that detailed more of these adventures.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  He didn't want to do another one and he has friends with, I think it was Nathaniel Hawthorne. They were friends up, upstate, uh, or Massachusetts, Western Massachusetts and whatever. And Hawthorne said, oh, you should, maybe the next one, draw on your experiences, but maybe the next one should be more allegorical. You should get away from just the adventure yarn.

• 14:52Tracy Alloway?

  He should still spend hundreds of words describing nautical knots.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 14:56Tracy Alloway?

  But a little more fantastical.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  Yes. And, uh, so he did, uh, Moby Dick. I think first it was called just The Whale. And, uh, it was a failure. I think, oh, in England, when it was published, I think they, they sold maybe 500 copies, which was not, not so good. He forgot, he didn't, or maybe he forgot, but he didn't put the epilogue.

• 15:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  The epilogue is where Ishmael says, kind of survives.

• 15:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  And so the English reviewers said, no, no, no. You could not tell a story like this if everyone dies.

• 15:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Cause who wrote it then?

• 15:42Speaker 05

  Who wrote it? Who's the witness? We, yeah, this is a rule.

• 15:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Of writing and we didn't know this rule existed, but you can't, you can't do that. You can't have it where everyone dies because then.

• 15:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Especially if it's written in the first person.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  Yes. Who's telling the story? And yeah, where's it, where their, where's their information coming from? So right away, he starts getting bad reviews as well as not selling too well. And the Americans were kind of, they looked up to the British reviewers. I don't know if that still happens, but yeah, they did. And, uh, so even though he now put in the epilogue where Ishmael survives, it was too late. The bad reviews had kind of set this, set the tone and yeah. Um, I think he went back to Hawthorne and said, what have you done to me? I'm, I'm destroyed, which he was. He did, he wrote other books.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  He wrote some weird stuff. He wrote an epic poem about the Civil War, the battles in the Civil War, kind of told from both sides. And in some ways it was kind of an anti-war, but a poem telling stories of all the carnage and everything viewed from both sides. That did not do well. The last one that was, that came out was one called Billy Budd. And that was discovered after his death in a bread box in the house where he lived.

• 17:15Tracy Alloway?

  That's where I keep all my unpublished manuscripts.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah, my bread box is just filled with manuscripts. So now he's, it's, he's done, he's done. I think it was mid 1800s when he was, yeah, you're publishing these. So kind of around the turn of the century, he's like, nothing, forgotten. There were, someone was asked, I think in UK to write an article about him and the, and the, the Americans said, is he still alive? They didn't know.

• 17:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  Anyway, so one of, we're going back to catastrophes and wars.

• 17:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  After World War One, people were asking themselves, how could we do this? How could we be so much killing, carnage, bloodshed? What is, what are we made of psychologically or whatever else that allows us to do this? And his book kind of deals with that. It deals with kind of this psychology of all this stuff. And it deals with a kind of colonialism and racism and all sorts of stuff that. So after World War One, people were asking, who are we? Uh, before that, it was just kind of adventures and seafaring stories and westerns and all

• 18:39Speaker 05

  this kind of heroic stuff. But now it's kind of like, the doubt has been put in and you go, does this book help us understand who we are?

• 19:04Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:30Speaker 01

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• 20:14Speaker 01

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• 21:15Speaker 07

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• 23:14Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I mentioned my favorite book is Moby Dick. One of my other favorite books is this book, I don't know if you've ever, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In by the author, C.L. R. James. And he talks about this a lot, that the Ahab character that, that Melville discovered, I mean, he created him, but he, but arguably he discovered the character was this character that sort of anticipated essentially the great authoritarians or the, the, the author, the authoritarians of the 20th century. That when we go back, if we might want to like psychoanalyze individuals like Hitler

• 23:56Joe Weisenthal?

  and Stalin and so forth, that Melville in a way saw them coming, this new man, sort of speak.

• 24:04Speaker 05

  Or at least it appears that way in retrospect.

• 24:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right. It appears that way, this, and this sort of, you know, maniacal behavior. And so the, the emergence of individuals later on suddenly makes Moby Dick such a compelling read.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  I agree. I don't know if I have anything to add there.

• 24:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, okay.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  I totally agree that, yeah, that's, it's kind of amazing that something, I don't believe that somebody like, an author like that can predict the future.

• 24:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  But I do think they kind of.

• 24:33Joe Weisenthal?

  They can see something in ourselves.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  They can see something in ourselves. They've had these, he's had this kind of really incredible experiences and encountered kind of these really despicable people.

• 24:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 05

  Where he can incorporate that and see that this is part of who we are.

• 24:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  And, yeah, so that, yeah, later on, after we've all, say, or everyone after, who was around for World War I sees kind of, how low can we go? You start to go, yes, how, is there some way to prevent this? Can we understand ourselves so that this doesn't happen again?

• 25:15Tracy Alloway?

  Can we talk about concrete?

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Love to talk about concrete.

• 25:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Another odd one.

• 25:20Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, this is something we've talked about.

• 25:21Tracy Alloway?

  So I have an, I have an interest in concrete, which is, you know, when I was younger and I was traveling to a lot of far-flung places, some of the most common ads and billboards that I would see in places like India or Myanmar would be for concrete brands, which you never see in the U.S. or in Europe. You know, people aren't advertising by this particular type of concrete. So I was, I was always really fascinated why concrete had like this position in those economies. But you point out in your book that actually the way we produce concrete nowadays, the most common way, isn't really the optimal technology for doing this.

• 26:01Tracy Alloway?

  And there's actually a very ancient concrete technology that might be better in some ways. Can you describe what you found?

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm going to go back to your experience because I had a similar experience. I've been to different places around the world and you, you see, it seems kind of incongruous. In places where the, sometimes the vernacular buildings in one place are kind of beautiful. And then you see these concrete kind of bunker type things and you go, that's what they're being, was being pushed on people as being, this is what it means to be modern.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  One of the people mentioned in the book is from Lithuania, I think. And she said, she's from the University of Miami and she says that, yes, when she was growing up, same thing, concrete was pushed as this is the, this will make modern housing.

• 26:57Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. Right.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Trash chutes, clean kitchens, big windows, oh yeah, all the stuff. You're not going to have these falling, little falling down wooden houses. We're going to enter the modern world and in her words, we'll be living in the future. And so it was, it was a big campaign to sell this stuff all around the world. It happened in the U.S. too. There was all these books about make your house out of concrete.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Anyway, uh, yeah, the, the story is that the Pantheon, the building in Rome, the temple in Rome, is 2,000 years old, has the largest unreinforced dome in the world, still, doesn't have a crack in it. And 2,000 years old. The companies that make concrete now for parking lots and all kinds of stuff, of course, it's, it's reinforced with rebar.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  They rate it themselves to last 50 years, five zero, 100 if we're lucky. So you gotta, you gotta ask yourself, what happened? And yes, did we just lose the recipe?

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Sort of, but you know, it's a little more complicated than that.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  The Romans used it a lot. These were big civic projects.

• 28:34Speaker 05

  They cost a lot of money and to build the Pantheon or the Colosseum, which is also made of concrete blocks, or the aqueducts, which are made of concrete block, blocks, all this kind of stuff, costs a lot of money, a lot of manpower. And in the course of empire, as the empire spreads out, more resources are going to kind of keep the, keep the borders intact and all that kind of stuff.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  And the communities on the far-flung parts of the empire, they're not so interested in using concrete. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is made of brick and mortar.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  They have their own way of doing things.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  But, so when the Roman Empire collapses, I think in 470, somewhere around there, that's it.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  They don't make it anymore. Nobody makes it anymore. And so it's not like the recipe got completely lost.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  There's this guy Vitruvius who wrote a book about architecture and he includes how to make concrete in it. I think it was in 20, boy, I'm remembering my dates. I think it was 20 B.C. that he did this. It was rediscovered in the Renaissance 1400s. So that's quite a few years later. But it was considered, oh, this is an historical bit of curiosity. We don't need to, we don't need to do that. But they liked his information map proportions. So Palladium, Palladium and all these other architects in that period kind of took inspiration from him.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Now I'm losing my date, but I think it's in the 1800s, a guy in England makes something called Portland Cement. So we've really gone a long time. He makes something called Portland Cement, starts a factory in the U.K. And this is the precursor to modern concrete.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  It's not as good as the Roman stuff, takes more energy to make, puts out a lot of CO2 in the process, doesn't last as long, but it is back and it's, it's a French guy, I forget his name, it's a French guy, maybe 30 years later, comes up with the idea of putting rebar in to give it some tensile strength. So it's going to be better for bridges and all this kind of stuff. And yeah, so wow, by the 1800s, 1900s, it's being pushed as like, this is the stuff. You can build big things, bridges, highways, buildings, everything, you know, all this stuff you can build out of it.

• 31:43Speaker 05

  I mean, and then I can go into, I mean, what a huge energy cost this is in this stuff, as we know, doesn't last. So it's

• 31:56Speaker 05

  China does more of it than pretty much anywhere else.

• 32:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Tracy Alloway?

  But the guy who invented Portland cement, was he just unaware of the Roman recipe? Or was he maybe thinking about other things like, you know, it's cheaper to build? We don't have to get special ash from Mount Vesuvius or whatever it is. Did he have other considerations?

• 32:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was a thought that they'd look at the Roman recipe and think, oh, oh, it's special because they have, they use the ash from Vesuvius. They got this, the secret sauce that, but, and we don't have that. So we have to do with what we have.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  They also saw the Roman stuff.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  This kind of was going to lead to the kind of the solution. The Roman stuff has all these little white specks in it. And I thought, uh, they just didn't know how to mix it well. They didn't have the mixing technology. We can do that. So, yeah, we're okay.

• 32:56Tracy Alloway?

  So ours is better, basically.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  Basically, ours is better. It's kind of a bias, prejudice, whatever that we have, that whatever we know is better and smarter than whoever went before.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  That's just another kind of, yeah, example of how irrational we can be. So, but it was these little specks, they're called lime carsts, that there was some material scientists at MIT who started looking into it about

• 33:32Speaker 05

  15 years ago or so. And they did a test where they had the Roman stuff and they had some contemporary stuff. And they poured water on it. And the water eventually went through the contemporary stuff.

• 33:48Tracy Alloway?

  Which leads to cracks, right?

• 33:50Speaker 05

  Which leads to cracks, yes. Especially if it gets cold. But even if it doesn't. And then with the Roman stuff, it goes in and some of this lime car stuff, these little white specks dissolve and the, the cracks heal up. It's self-healing. But the other stuff, especially if it's got rebar in it, the water gets in. If it hits the rebar, the rebar is going to rust and crack and kind of expand. The rusting rods expand and make more cracks.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  So 2023, the folks at MIT started a company and they're going to start making, they've started to make the, the Roman stuff. Whether the world kind of beats a path to their door, it remains to be seen. But it has been rediscovered.

• 34:41Tracy Alloway?

  I would have loved to hear the initial conversation that's like, what do you want to study at MIT? And it's, I really want to look into those little, you know, like discolorations on Roman cement.

• 34:51Joe Weisenthal?

  That's the cool thing about universities. People can just have the time and space to find niche things. I'm curious, um, you know, obviously you have been a famous, successful artist, musician for a very long time.

• 35:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Recently, or back in 2023, 824 released, uh, re, or re-released the 1984 Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, sort of re-energizing, maybe, maybe introducing a new generation of listeners to the Talking Heads and so forth. Is that a Sleeping Beauty? Is that like, I mean, there was no period in which there weren't people listening to the Talking Heads. But perhaps like, there was like, at least among some people, some like respark of interest?

• 35:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's definitely been that. It's definitely been increased interest.

• 35:45Joe Weisenthal?

  What's been your experience of, okay, something happened. Someone says, you know what? This 1984 concert film, maybe it would be relevant again. Maybe there's people who would appreciate it again. What's been your experience or as, with at least one called, one specific cultural artifact of yours, sort of gathering new life, basically 40 years later?

• 36:05Speaker 05

  I've been doing the, whatever, the music thing.

• 36:08Joe Weisenthal?

  The music thing.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  The music thing long enough that I've seen my career go up and down. In the nineties,

• 36:16Speaker 05

  might've been the music I was doing, it might've been whatever, but I'm, my career went down. I was back to playing little clubs in lots of places where I'd been playing kind of much larger venues. Now I'm back to playing these sizable places again. It feels, yes. And I thought, but it's, but in some cases, I'm playing the same stuff.

• 36:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  I didn't change. I mean, I have gotten older.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  But it's all these other, it's all the context. If the, the audience, the demographic, the another generation, whatever it might be.

• 36:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Those things have changed. It's the, just like a lot of the things in this book. The paintings of Botticelli or whatever haven't changed, but they go in and out of fashion. And I realized, oh yeah, I've experienced that.

• 37:08Joe Weisenthal?

  How does that feel? How does it feel to go out of fashion for times? What's that?

• 37:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Do you get, does it get more comfortable when it, when there's another wave? You're like, I've been here before, like, this isn't as painful. I know that there's, this is a pendulum, et cetera. I'm very curious about this.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, after it's happened once, if it, if something happens like that again, you go, yes, I know.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  Don't take this personally.

• 37:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  Don't take it personally. The work might be good. You may have, or you may have done something terrible or not so good. But don't assume that it's because the work is bad.

• 37:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  But at the, I remember at the time, I just felt like, no, you just have to slog on. Just kind of keep, keep going.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Obviously you can only keep going like that for a while until, and if things go lower, you go, I have no income. But

• 38:06Speaker 05

  to some extent, yeah, I think you just have to keep going.

• 38:10Tracy Alloway?

  How do you tell the difference between, oh, I was unlucky or the audience wasn't ready for this? Or the audience doesn't appreciate how special this is versus I have failed to create something that resonates with my audience? Because I'm sure everyone has experienced this in their professional or creative lives at one point or another. If some, if you do something or you make something and it doesn't get the result that you want or the reception that you want, the temptation is to, you know, just kind of blame it on something else or excuse it away. You know, it's not that I'm out of touch. It's the children who are wrong, that sort of thing. So how do you, how do you balance those two things?

• 38:53Speaker 05

  I realize it's a little bit of both.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  In that period, I did a couple of records where I worked with Latin musicians and I was doing all Latin rhythms and all, uh, all that. And I was having a great time. It went down really well in Latin America and in parts of Europe. But in the US in particular, it's like, no, you betrayed us. This is not what we want from you. And I realized, oh, okay. I get, I, I get that. I can maybe, I probably thought, I can maybe temper this somehow.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  I, yeah, I do understand that, yeah, if you

• 39:35Speaker 05

  completely betray the, what, what your audience is expecting or hoping for. Yeah, that's not going to work for it. But there's a way to still do something interesting, something exciting and acknowledge a little bit what they're hoping for. And I thought, okay, I can kind of self-correct a little bit.

• 40:14Speaker 01

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• 40:57Speaker 01

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• 44:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Speaking of your interest in Latin American music, you tell a story about, and I think it's actually the first chapter of the book, the Brazilian artist Tom Z. And you went down to Brazil and you tell a story of someone getting a big stack of records. And the cover of this one record was a little different. You checked it out and it was amazing, but it was an artist that not many people have been familiar with. You repopularized him from your label. But rather than just talk about that per se, I want to ask like, you know, something that I've observed that has really changed in my lifetime is that it used to be that anything that was sort of avant-garde, whether it was music, whether it was political ideas,

• 45:41Joe Weisenthal?

  et cetera, it used to be really hard to find. Like, it used to be that like, if you wanted to read sort of heterodox political philosophy, you had to go to obscure bookstores. When I was younger, if I wanted to seek out a sort of indie music of some sort, I used to literally write letters to record labels and then they would like send back the catalogs. This was like in the early 90s, et cetera. The thing that's changed is that very mainstream musicians are, and very avant-garde musicians are both just a one-click away now. You just type in a different name on Spotify, et cetera. And so the digitization process of everything removes that sort of physical link that used

• 46:23Joe Weisenthal?

  to exist between sort of like, you really had to put in work to find the avant-garde thing before, physical work and often many cases, go to location, go to Brazil, et cetera. Now you don't. How does that change the sort of discovery of the Sleeping Beauties when the sort of physical constraints are no longer there? Everything is just a search way?

• 46:46Speaker 05

  I'm going to agree and also push back on some of that. I think not everything is on streaming or on the internet. I remember hearing a talk, I think from Bob Woodward or someone, talking about some research he was doing from a book. And he realized that there was something in somebody's basement and they had a boxes full of files and they were, it was physical stuff. I mean, the internet was there, but those things just weren't on it. And he had to go and go to this person's basement. And I thought, yeah, there's still stuff that's kind of hidden from view.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  But that said, I definitely agree that with streaming music, to some extent with films and all other kinds of information, I know especially with music, a whole generation, if they want to, if they're interested in something that's old, they can just listen to it and if they like it, add it to their playlist. So they end up, I think, sometimes with playlists that mix all these different genres, they come from different decades, different eras, which is kind of great. They're just putting it in there because they like it, not because, oh, this is the

• 48:15Speaker 05

  cool thing that's happening right this, at this moment. On these services, there's very little information.

• 48:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 05

  I mean, you can dig and get the information, but what's

• 48:30Joe Weisenthal?

  But the liner notes used to be a really fun part of buying a record.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. And you know, like, oh, this is produced by so-and-so. It's somebody, and this is who wrote it.

• 48:37Tracy Alloway?

  Looking at the, like, the art and stuff.

• 48:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So there's very little of that, which I miss some of that, but it also has the advantage of when you don't know, then you're not kind of put off by any of those factors like how, when it was done, the dates or whatever. You just, you're just listening kind of blind.

• 48:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 05

  And going, I like that. I don't know how it was received at the time, where it fits in. It's kind of, a lot of the context is kind of removed.

• 49:08Tracy Alloway?

  Conversely, though, the fact that all this information and cultural content is now available on the internet or on streaming services means that in some ways, discovery also gets harder. There's an information overload, I guess, like a curation problem. So for instance, I went to LA recently. I went to a random tiki bar out in the suburbs and they had on a haunted surf tiki playlist, which was a genre that I never knew existed, but apparently there are a lot of, you know, sort of like Halloweeny surf songs out there. I never would have thought to put that in the search engine bar on Spotify.

• 49:53Tracy Alloway?

  There's a playlist there, but I would not have gone looking for it. I would have been listening to any of the like hundreds of other songs that the algorithm was recommending to me. Today, when we're sort of overwhelmed by both informational and content choices, what does that mean for the rediscovery of old ideas?

• 50:11Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right. When there's so much out there, as I was doing some of this research, I saw that Condoleezza Rice, who was on, said that part of the problem with the Challenger explosion was a filter problem. The information and the warning about the O-rings and all this stuff was out there. It wasn't like nobody knew. It was out there. But when there's so much information that it doesn't like jump out and say, over here, take a look at this. Yeah, you can miss things, even if they're there, still there.

• 50:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Can I ask a question from one musician to another? I have a band. I we play country music. This is really just a pure music question, actually. It has nothing to do with discovering things.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  Any particular kind of country music?

• 51:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, I would no, I would say it's like, kind of like down the middle country, maybe a little bit classic, etc. But but I'm like a very bad guitarist. So I write all my songs in G or C because those are easy chords for me to uh to play. Is there any difference between scales? So it's like if I write a song in G major and then someone else writes, plays the song, it's like I could have written it in C major or A major. These are all easy chords to play. In your experience, is there a difference? Does something change when you transpose a song into a different scale?

• 51:38Speaker 05

  I only realized kind of recently that, yeah, you can transpose a song into when I'm in the writing process. You can move it into another key and try it a little higher, try it a little lower, try it to different places. And eventually you hit one, you go, oh, that's the sweet spot for my voice.

• 51:59Joe Weisenthal?

  For your voice?

• 51:59Speaker 05

  For my voice.

• 52:00Joe Weisenthal?

  But is the song the same?

• 52:02Speaker 05

  That's a good question. I know that sometimes, especially on guitar, you're saying like a G chord, has a lot of open strings in it. So you hit it and it just rings out. Whereas if you're playing, I don't know, a B flat or whatever, it doesn't ring out the same way.

• 52:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  You might have to put a capo, a thing to adjust to kind of where the neck of the guitar hits and all this kind of thing to get that kind of effect. You might be able to recreate that effect. But yeah, the guitar itself sounds different, which gives a kind of different feeling, depending on what key you're playing it in. The way the notes are stacked on a guitar or on a piano probably has a different feeling, too. But well, the good news for me was you can, which I thought, why didn't I know this earlier? You can move stuff until it hits kind of the sweet spot for your voice.

• 52:59Tracy Alloway?

  I don't have a music question. I'm sorry. But maybe it relates to musicians. What's the cost of not recognizing good ideas, good songs contemporaneously? So, okay, maybe Joe isn't recognized in his own time as a great country music singer, and we don't get good country songs from Joe or more good country songs from Joe. Maybe in the example of concrete, if we had been using the Roman recipe before, we would have had longer lasting buildings, less energy expenditure, less global warming, things like that. Talk to us about the cost of not recognizing these things in their own time.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  It's a little hard to to talk about the cost of, say, not recognizing musicians or composers or painters or things like that. I think it's real. That cost is real. But it's hard to measure. The kind of pleasure and joy and satisfaction you get from something like that and what it means for you, maybe giving you insights and kind of psychological and other kinds of benefits you get to it, it's kind of hard to measure. So that kind of gets maybe pushed aside and disregarded to some extent. Whereas, as you said, something like concrete or the medical, medical things, like there's a story on hand washing where

• 54:22Speaker 05

  people are just, people are dying. And all they need to do is for the doctors to wash their hands. And yeah, so you realize, no, in many cases, it's very measurable. These lives could have been saved. These buildings could have been lasted, had, you know, less energy intensive and they could have lasted longer. That's pretty easy to easy to measure.

• 54:49Joe Weisenthal?

  One way that new ideas, old ideas can be rediscovered and then applied is, I think, by an individual being sort of aggressively pluralistic about what they consume. So like, read a lot of like, you know, read a lot of books that aren't necessarily in your beat. We cover markets, finance and economics. But I think we would be worse at it if we only read books about markets, finance and economics. On the other hand, and maybe this is just me, and maybe this is just the curse of how my brain works. I have this tendency like, read anything and I bet, oh, that's really applicable right now. And then I'll read the next book. It's like, oh, amazing. That's really applicable right now. And then

• 55:32Joe Weisenthal?

  I'll read the next book. It's like, wow, the lessons of this book. That's just sounds like what's happening right now. And our brains can actually are very good at over metaphorizing, maybe example. So like, I don't know if that's a word. But it's tempting to like, look at anything. It's like, wow, that's like.

• 55:49Tracy Alloway?

  How do we avoid sleeping uglies?

• 55:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. How do you avoid the sort of find every new thing you come across to say, wow, that's, we should all be talking about that again. Because our brains are so good at maybe coming up with a tortured reason why this idea of old is actually very relevant to now.

• 56:06Speaker 05

  I have to say, I do the same thing, and I think it's pretty good.

• 56:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  There's a story in here about a woman, scientist Lynn Margulis, who basically ended up, she proposed, and it was later confirmed and proven, that the cells in our bodies, the cells in plants are the result of a symbiotic merging between an early kind of organism and bacteria. They, the bacteria became the mitochondria that do provide the energy from oxygen or from sunlight or whatever, and whatever. So this evolutionary big, big, big step, millions of years ago, came as a result of a kind of symbiotic cooperation.

• 56:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yep.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  And so I immediately go, ha ha, cooperation is key. And there's another story about this, this Russian evolutionary anarchist philosopher guy, Kropotkin, who also says, sometimes cooperation is a better strategy than competition. Not always, but sometimes. And of course, I thought, okay, wow, that is a kind of metaphor that I can just cut and paste all over the place and see, see where it fits.

• 57:33Tracy Alloway?

  I like the lichen guy who very early on caught on to the idea that lichens were an amalgamation of, I guess, fungi and algae. And no one believed him to the extent that his name became an insult in the academic community. What was his name? It started with like an S or?

• 57:51Speaker 05

  Oh, I can't remember.

• 57:53Tracy Alloway?

  It was, it sounded like a good insult. But I mean, poor guy, because he was directionally correct.

• 57:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. Schwarzkopf or something like that. Yes. But yeah, I can't remember the exact name. But yes, it's proved right. But.

• 58:06Joe Weisenthal?

  That's interesting to say. I I'm currently, because AI is like everything right now. So I'm trying to learn a little bit more about that. I'm reading this interesting book. It's called What Is Intelligence? Kim Badi, a year ago. And he says the exact same thing, that actually, evolution is co-evolution. That if you look at the history of things, that basically, the way the world emerges is there's thing A and there's thing B, and they merge. And if it works out really well, if this new structure works, then that becomes the thing A again. That that's the, that that becomes the fundamental unit. And then it's sort of like, gets bigger and bigger. And then that new thing will merge with another thing B. And if that works, that becomes a thing. And that life is essentially, or

• 58:50Joe Weisenthal?

  sort of like, the growing complexity of the world is essentially not necessarily a form of like, Darwinian randomness, where like, maybe something, there's a bunch of mutations, and some of them work out well, that actually, it's a little bit more ordered and structured by which new things emerge because they work out really well when they cooperate during that process of symbiosis. And that that becomes the new unit of life, or whatever it is. Maybe there were musicians, individuals, and then suddenly it turned out that a band could be a unit of economics or whatever, and then so forth. So this idea of like, yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this. But this idea that like, the symbiosis as the

• 59:35Joe Weisenthal?

  thing, cooperation as the thing that drives life and creativity forward, a lot of people seem to be, this seems to resonate with a lot of people.

• 59:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's coming from a lot of different areas, whether it's economics or biology, whatever. It's coming, yeah, as a metaphor, it's kind of springing up here and there. And you go, oh, okay, this is, this is a real thing now.

• 1:00:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Tracy Alloway?

  Schwenderist was the insult. You're a real schwenderist.

• 1:00:05Joe Weisenthal?

  That's a good one.

• 1:00:06Tracy Alloway?

  Which sounds cutting. But the guy was right. It'd be unjust to his legacy.

• 1:00:11Joe Weisenthal?

  That sounds like it could be like a classic, a classic, a Yiddish insult, doesn't it? It's like, oh, the schwenderist.

• 1:00:17Tracy Alloway?

  Can I ask, do you have any intuitions or a gut sense of where we should be looking for sleeping beauties today? Like, particular places where maybe our biases have prevented us from seeing these old ideas?

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  If I knew that for sure, I'd be a very rich person. Yes. I'd be coming on this show for a different reason. But like you mentioned earlier, one, one technique seems to be kind of a pluralistic.

• 1:00:50Tracy Alloway?

  Cross disciplinary.

• 1:00:51Speaker 05

  Cross disciplinary stuff. Then if, don't be in your silo. You have to be to some extent, but don't be too isolated in your silo. Along the same lines, there's the idea of how things get labeled and classified. That, that puts them into a box or a silo or whatever, and they, they can, they can stay in there.

• 1:01:19Speaker 05

  Various kind of academics are trying to

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  use formulas and different things to find patterns. AI might be, might be interested. I mean, it is good at pattern

• 1:01:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  identification. So you might see that in academic things where something's measurable, like citations.

• 1:01:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

  In science papers, you see a little tiny uptick. If the uptick, if the ramp of the uptick takes a certain curve, you go some dun dun dun, alarm goes off, something's happening there. But that's, again, something that is fairly easy to measure. Some of the other things are a little bit harder.

• 1:02:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Twenty something years ago, or you got into making art out of PowerPoint? Was the world ready at that point? Or is that the sort of thing that like in the year 2050? Like, how old was the reception to that? And would it be like, maybe it was a little bit too early? Like Moby Dick was?

• 1:02:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I did.

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  I decided that PowerPoint would be an art medium because

• 1:02:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  you can throw everything into it. You can throw type, you can throw pictures, you can throw films, you can show sound, and you can just, it's like this basket, you can throw everything in there, and it'll animate them and do all these things in a very clunky way, but whatever. So I wasn't, I wasn't dealing with the, whether it makes a good accurate presentation or not. I was dealing with it in another way and saying, it's a creative medium.

• 1:02:50Speaker 05

  And of course, a lot of people found this very funny because they have to deal with it in their daily lives.

• 1:02:56Joe Weisenthal?

  And they probably hate it.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, they probably, they all hate it.

• 1:02:58Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, now wait a second. I'm sure some junior analysts think that PowerPoint is indeed an art form.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  Really? You think so?

• 1:03:05Tracy Alloway?

  I'm being facetious, but

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  I remember

• 1:03:07Tracy Alloway?

  They treat it that way.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  So I did this kind of presentation

• 1:03:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

  about this idea. And I told, as part of it, I told kind of the history of the development of PowerPoint. And I remember doing it, doing one of these in Berkeley. And of course, some of the guys that did it were there in the audience. They came to see what was happening. And I said, they're here, da da da, so and so, will you stand up? Uh uh.

• 1:03:39Speaker 05

  They wouldn't do it. They wouldn't show themselves. Yeah, it's not, it's not very loved, but I thought, oh, now you're gonna have fun with it.

• 1:03:48Joe Weisenthal?

  When you wrote the song Glass, Concrete and Stone, by that point, did you know about Roman concrete?

• 1:03:53Speaker 05

  No, I did not. No, I did not.

• 1:03:55Joe Weisenthal?

  David Byrne, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 1:03:57Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:04:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, that was a lot of fun. I feel like everything he writes about in his book resonates with us both on the specific level, as in the specific things he identifies are very interesting and very us, like concrete, but also resonates with us in the sense of like, just finding things that like other people have forgotten or ignored or looked over.

• 1:04:33Tracy Alloway?

  Absolutely. I mean, the virality of ideas is something that we've

• 1:04:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Tracy Alloway?

  talked about before. It's, it's funny to think, I never thought we'd be talking to to David Byrne about concrete.

• 1:04:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Tracy Alloway?

  And I had, I had the song going through my head during the conversation, you may find yourself

• 1:04:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:53Tracy Alloway?

  on a beautiful podcast in a random part of the world, talking about concrete.

• 1:04:58Joe Weisenthal?

  With David Byrne.

• 1:04:59Tracy Alloway?

  We should have gotten into this, but he talks a little bit about the power structures that restrain good ideas from taking hold. And it kind of comes up in the background of something like concrete, where there were vested interests who maybe don't want to use a particular concrete formula because they base their entire business on Portland concrete. It comes up in his chapter about solar panels, where, you know, it turns out there was an early iteration of solar panels that could have been groundbreaking for the world, but obviously there were vested interests in oil and things like that. And so there are these power structures that restrain a lot of good ideas from taking hold. I do think his conclusions, this sort of cross disciplinary approach to resurfacing some of this stuff is really interesting and harder than it seems.

• 1:05:44Tracy Alloway?

  Like, this is almost, this is almost a fundamental question when it comes to information science, because the tendency of human beings is to want to neatly categorize everything, taxonomize everything, slot everything into neat little categories. Expertise is often very siloed.

• 1:06:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Tracy Alloway?

  It's hard to become a generalist, or it's hard to become a good generalist. And so really figuring out how to bring those different disciplines or approaches together, like, that seems to be the real challenge here. Like, why aren't contractors reading, you know, like ancient Roman architectural texts?

• 1:06:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Some probably are. You know, I bet like, so for example, I bet if you went to like an architecture school, I bet they are. Like, in the sense, they're probably, you know, there's some sort of course. I know, I know a couple of architects, so I'll ask them if like, as part of getting a degree in architecture.

• 1:06:33Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, I said contractor, not architect.

• 1:06:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, sorry, you're right.

• 1:06:36Tracy Alloway?

  Someone who's like actually building, using those building materials.

• 1:06:39Joe Weisenthal?

  No, you're right. I think the contractors need to be reading that stuff.

• 1:06:42Tracy Alloway?

  Read the classics.

• 1:06:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Read the classics of engineering. It's interesting to think, so there's a couple of things that like, I think digitization of almost all knowledge now is like, gonna be really important. And like, it's still day one, the internet's only been around for a few minutes and the

• 1:07:03Tracy Alloway?

  Feels longer.

• 1:07:03Joe Weisenthal?

  No, for real, like in the grand history of things, like, we're just getting started. But digitization is gonna be really important for a couple of reasons. Just because like, the sort of like, the physical effort that used to be required to like, find some sort of a song or whatever, like, that's kind of gone for the most part. And then, like, obviously, and I'm glad, like, we didn't waste our time talking forever about AI, but like, AI is gonna get very good at cross disciplinary identification. If the shape of one's solution

• 1:07:34Tracy Alloway?

  If it's tagged correctly.

• 1:07:36Joe Weisenthal?

  No, but if the shape, like, not necessarily, because if the shape of one's solution, I think this is actually what we're discovering with some of the math proofs, for example, is that if the shape of one's solution resembles the shape of an unknown solution, it can then like, fill it in. And there are all sorts of things in science like this. You know, for example, like, and this is obviously pre-AI, but like, you know, the shape of particle physics, turns out it resembles the shape of stock market behavior in certain ways.

• 1:08:09Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 1:08:10Joe Weisenthal?

  And so forth. And I think that like, you know, in an AI model, like, these shapes are gonna be embedded in nearby multi-dimensional space. And like, we may just sort of like, you know, we might get a flurry, essentially, of Sleeping Beauty rediscoveries as people pursue a different problem. People pursue, pursue some new solution to something, and the model gets really good at sort of like, pulling in something from a cross disciplinary plane. Just like, this, this shape could resemble the solution. So I think like, it's possible, like, we might just have the ultimate Sleeping Beauty discovery engine, for better or worse.

• 1:08:49Tracy Alloway?

  I just asked ChatGPT if I can make Roman, ancient Roman concrete

• 1:08:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Tracy Alloway?

  at home, and it says, I can make a Roman-style concrete test block with hydrated lime, natural pozolin, pozolin, water and stone aggregate. It's telling me that I must not, under any circumstances, try the hot mixing method with quick lime at home, because quick lime reacts violently with water and causes serious chemical burns.

• 1:09:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:09:16Tracy Alloway?

  So, that's valuable information.

• 1:09:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Be careful, Tracy.

• 1:09:19Tracy Alloway?

  All right, shall we leave it there?

• 1:09:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 1:09:21Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 1:09:27Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Check out David Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties, Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashal Bennett at Dashbot, Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And of course, you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots. We even have a music channel on there. And for more Odd Lots content, go check out our newsletter, which you can find at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 1:09:58Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk about music and resurfacing good old ideas, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're watching on video and you like the show, then please leave a comment or hit the like button, or better yet, subscribe.

• 1:10:15Joe Weisenthal?

  And remember, if you're a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.

• 1:10:25Tracy Alloway?

  Thanks for joining.

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