Make Room For March 7th

I've made it home to the great state of Texas for the week, first to see my parents in East Texas, then to a leadership retreat in West Texas, and finally to SXSW in Austin for a long weekend of breakfast tacos, brainstorms, and big trucks (thank you Avis for the upgrade to the quad-cab Dodge Ram.)

I left Texas 13 years ago to try and make my way in the city that never sleeps. And while New York City is very different than the suburbs of Dallas I grew up in, there's one thing these two states have in common, people are very proud of their association with them. I am very proud to have grown up in Texas. I am very proud to have made my life in New York City.  I am extremely grateful to have family in both places and reasons to travel back and forth between the two.

Are you in Austin this weekend? Wanna meet up with me and some other Cool Kids? Come say Howdy!

Announcement I'm Thrilled To Finally Make

I've had the true privilege of coaching world-changing executives striving to take their next step toward greatness over the past few years. And while I'm still growing that side of my practice, I am thrilled to announce my first-ever Group Coaching Cohorts kicking off next month! I want to open up the opportunity to experience the upside of coaching to a new group of people that believe they'd benefit from intentionally investing in their careers, those that know they're ready to take the next step in their professional lives. Hoping to see some of you there.

Reason I'm Celebrating This Week 🌊

After 10 years of negotiating, and a final 38 hours push at the UN last week, there's finally a governing agreement for international waters called the High Seas Treaty.  This is huge because coastal countries can only enforce rules off their shores out to 200 miles of their coast.

That had left 64% of the world's oceans as a truly wet wild wild west of the world. This treaty is another huge step in the right direction of protecting 30% of the world's oceans by 2030. It also was just in time to stop the surge of expected deep sea mining that was set to occur beginning next month if this agreement hadn't been put in place.

Quote That I've Had To Sit With

"There are very few people who can really accept themselves, accept acceptance.  Indeed, it is rare to meet a person who can cope with the problem "Why me?"  Self-acceptance can never be based on my own self, my own qualities.  Such a foundation would collapse.  Self-acceptance is an act of faith.  When God loves me, I must accept myself as well.  I cannot be more demanding than God, can I?" - Peter Van Breeman

Podcast The Taught Me The Most This Week

It is no secret that Hidden Forces is my favorite podcast. But this past week Demetri took it to a whole new level. I mean, just look at the name of this episode:

WHAT PRE-WWII FRANCE CAN TELL US ABOUT AMERICA IN 2023

25 minutes into this episode, while talking about the Peloponnesian War, the guest, Professor Jonathan Kirshner, dropped this bit of knowledge: (emphasis my own)

"In regular people talking amongst themselves, you often use risk and uncertainty as terms meaning the same thing, but as a technical matter, risk and uncertainty are profoundly different concepts. Risk is when we know the underlying actuarial probabilities of an outcome. So if I roll two dice, I cannot predict the outcome that's going to occur when the dicer rolled, but I can tell you with precision the exact odds of every possible outcome.

So the underlying actuarial risk of rolling the dice is known. That's why insurance companies can make money because they can understand the underlying actuarial risk.

But in a world of uncertainty, we do not have access to that underlying actuarial data. The right phrase to use here is we simply do not know... We have no theories on which we can deploy to know with probabilistic certainty what's going to happen next.

And if you're living in a world of uncertainty, you must look at the world differently than if you're living in a world of risk.  And one of the things that distinguish classical realists from non-classical realists and certainly from the hyper rationalists, is the view that the world we're living in is a world of uncertainty and not a world of risk.

Rational expectations theory and the bargaining model of war, for example, all require known actuarial risk and they cannot function in a world of uncertainty or perhaps redundantly what we could call radical uncertainty, where we simply do not share the same correct underlying model of how the world or how the economy or how international politics works.

If there are competing analytical models of how the world works, then two rational actors can look at exactly the same information and come to very distinct expectations about "what will happen next." And this is a world of uncertainty, and that is a much more complicated world than a world of risk."

Dad Joke That Was Timely

What did Ol' McDonald say when someone told him about how ChaptGPT might change the future of farming?

"AI? AI? Oh!"

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