David Byrne Explains How Forgotten Ideas Come Back to Life

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.

I'm Joe Weisenthal.

And I'm Tracy Allaway.

Tracy, something that both of us have observed multiple times on the podcast by now. Long-time listeners are tired of our Tired.

Of our observations.

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, any time 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.

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.

Yeah.

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

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 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 a, maybe this could be useful.

Well, Minsky is a really interesting one. Cause 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 discover 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.

That's right.

So we have an exciting guest, so 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 new book out called Sleeping Beauties, Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. And he has a chapter on the Minsky revival. So David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you. And here's somewhere where I can, yes, I could talk about Minsky. Of course, you probably know a lot about it by now. No, 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.

I knew this.

Was going to come up. But that's actually a legitimate example of what Sleeping Beauties is all about. Why don't, just to begin, give us the, in a nutshell, version of the book. What is a Sleeping Beauty and what are you trying to do here?

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 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 for us to appreciate. You guys mentioned the, yes, 2008. Yeah. 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. 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 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 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.

So for the Minsky example, let's just start with that one, given our audience. But what's 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 anecdotes for financial columns.

Wow. Yes. When did he do his– he did a lot of his work. I think it was in the 60s. I think that's right. 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. Yeah. Some people 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 has been proven right. Yeah, he's saying we're human beings. We behave according to, with these emotional instincts, as opposed, we don't always act rationally. 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 working in the little businesses in the towns they were visiting. He wanted to find out, how do you do this? How do things work here?

Tracy and I can relate to that sort of thing. I think both of us, it's probably this curse of trying to learn.

So much about the world. I don't know.

Maybe you're a little bit better at turning off. No, I think we both have this curse. We go anywhere and we just 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 Beauty is Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, many examples, including Minsky's.

including Discoveries of Roman Concrete, which we'll talk about, including the book Moby Dick itself, which we're definitely going to talk about. 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, etc.

How did you like Find the ones that you wanted to talk about, winnow them down, and talk to us about how this book arrived here.

There's lots of them. Yes. I'd write them up, do a first draft of writing things up, and then, 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. I'm going to tell you every single Sleeping Beauty I've ever stumbled on. Often I'd stumble on an article about something like you said, Moby Dick or whatever. It would be something, you know, an article about Melville. And I'd say, like in one sentence, I'd go, 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 guys go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you just buried the lead. From my point of view, that's the story. How did that happen? Because now, yeah, that particular, that book is revered.

Wait, how did that happen? Yeah, let's, all right, let's jump right into the Moby Dick story.

Just do Melville.

Yeah, let's jump right into the, my favorite book, by the way.

Wow.

You have to go back, wind back before that book, which makes, it makes the story kind of better. Before he wrote, started writing, he signed on as a, as a kind of merchant sailor. 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 to be a torturous, horrible, horrible experience. He and some others jumped ship on some island.

And I looked up. The island, of course, is gorgeous. And you go. I'd live there. I got it. Except for the cannibals. Except there were cannibals. Yes, there were cannibals. But he managed, he got away from that, got to another island where he was, became like a farmer growing potatoes on this island. And eventually he signs on with another boat, goes to, I think, goes, eventually ends up in Hawaii, where the first boat, the one he deserted from, arrives and they go, you're guilty. We're taking you back.

There's not much you can do about it. And as in the book, he's witness to floggings and just horrible, horrible conditions and horrible treatment and insane captains and all this stuff. I mean, it's all to there. So he's, he writes a book. Uh, I think Taipei 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. Uh, but I think there was someone in England or, who kind of was a witness who said, yeah, it did happen. All these awful things. All these awful things, this crazy stuff happened.

And so they published it. 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 that detailed more of these adventures. He didn't want to do another one. And he has friends with, I think it was Nathaniel Hawthorne. They were friends upstate or Massachusetts, western Massachusetts, 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.

You should still spend hundreds of words describing nautical knots.

Yes.

But a little more fantastical. Yes.

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

And so the English reviewers said, no, no, no. You cannot tell a story like this if everyone dies. Because who wrote it then? Who wrote it? Who's the witness? This is a rule of writing. And we didn't know this rule existed, but you can't do that. You can't have it where everyone dies because.

Then- Especially if it's written in the first person.

Yes. Who's telling the story? And- Yeah, 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 so even though he now put in the epilogue where Ishmael survives, it was too late. The bad reviews had kind of set the tone and yeah. I think he went back to Hawthorne and said, what have you done to me? I'm destroyed, which he was. He wrote other books. 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. 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 came out was one called Billy Bud. And that was discovered after his death in a bread box in the house where he lived.

That's where I keep all my unpublished manuscripts.

Exactly. Yeah, my bread box is just filled with manuscripts. So now he's done. He's done. I think it was... mid-1800s when he was publishing these. So kind of around the turn of the century, he's like nothing, forgotten. Someone was asked, I think, in the UK to write an article about him, and the Americans said, is he still alive?

They didn't know. Anyway, so we're going back to catastrophes and wars. After World War I, People were asking themselves, how could we do this? How could we be so much killing, carnage, bloodshed? 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 the psychology of all this stuff and it deals with kind of colonialism and racism, and all sorts of stuff that... So after World War I, people were asking, who are we? Before that, it was just kind of adventures and seafaring stories and westerns and all 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?

I mentioned my favorite book is Moby Dick. One of my other favorite books is this book, I don't know if you've heard, 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 Melville discovered, I mean, he created him, but arguably he discovered the character, was this character that.

Sort of anticipated.

essentially the great authoritarians or the the author the authoritarians of the 20th century that when we go back and we might want to like psychoanalyze uh individuals like hitler and stalin and so forth that melville in a way saw them coming this new man sort of speak or at least it appears that way in retrospect right it appears that way this uh and this sort of um Yeah, maniacal behavior. And so the emergence of individuals later on suddenly makes Moby Dick such a compelling read.

I agree. I don't know if I have anything to add there. Yeah, okay. I totally agree. It's kind of amazing that something– I don't believe that somebody like an author like that can predict the future. Sure. But I do think they kind of– They can see something in ourselves. They can see something in ourselves. They've had these– he's had these kind of really incredible experiences– and encountered kind of these really despicable people where he can incorporate that and see that this is part of who we are.

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

Can we talk about concrete?

Love to talk about concrete. Another odd lot. Yeah. This is something we've talked about.

So 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 US or in Europe. People aren't advertising by this particular type of concrete. So I was always really fascinated why concrete had 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. And there's actually a very ancient concrete technology that might be better in some ways. Can you describe what you found?

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 see, it seems kind of incongruous. Places where 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 was being pushed on people as being, this is what it means to be modern. 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 will make modern housing. Right. Right. Trash chutes, clean kitchens, big windows. Oh, yeah, all the stuff. You're

not going to have these 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 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. Anyway, yeah, 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. It doesn't have a crack in it. And it's 2,000 years old. The companies that make concrete now for parking lots and all kinds of stuff. Of course, it's reinforced with rebar. They rate it themselves to last 50 years, 5-0. 100 if

we're lucky. So you've got to ask yourself, what happened? And, yes, did we just lose the recipe? Sort of, but, you know, it's a little more complicated than that. The The Romans used it a lot. These were big civic projects. 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 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 borders intact and all that kind of stuff.

And the communities on the far-flung parts of the empire, they're not so interested in using concrete. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is made of brick and mortar. They have their own way of doing things. But So when the Roman Empire collapses, I think in 470, somewhere around there, that's it. They don't make it anymore. Nobody makes it anymore. And so it's not like the recipe got completely lost. 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 BC 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 unhistorical bit of curiosity. We don't need to do that. But they liked his information about proportions. So Palladio and all these other architects in that period kind of took inspiration from him. 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 UK. And this is the precursor to modern concrete. It's not as good as the Roman stuff. Takes more energy to make. Puts out a lot of CO2 in the process. It 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.

I mean, and then I can go into, I mean, what a huge energy cost this is. And of course, the stuff, as we know, doesn't last. So it's like, China does more of it than pretty much anywhere else.

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?

Yeah, there was a thought that... They'd look at the Roman recipe and think, oh, it's special because they used the ash from Vesuvius. They got the secret sauce, and we don't have that. So we have to do with what we have. They also saw the Roman stuff. This is going to lead to the solution. The Roman stuff has all these little white specks in it, and I thought, 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.

So ours is better, basically, aesthetically at least.

It's kind of a bias, prejudice, whatever that we have, that whatever we know is better and smarter than whoever went before. That's just another kind of... An example of how irrational we can be. But it was these little specks, they're called lime karsts, that there was some material scientists at MIT who started looking into it about 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.

Which leads to cracks, right?

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

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.

That's the cool thing about universities.

People can just have the time and space to find niche things. I'm curious, you know, obviously you have been a famous, successful artist, musician for a very long time. Recently, or back in 2023, A24 re-released the 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, sort of re-energizing, 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 re-spark of interest.

It's definitely been that. It's definitely been increased interest.

What's been your experience of, okay, something happens. 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 with at least one specific cultural artifact of yours sort of gathering new life basically 40 years later?

I've been doing the whatever, the music thing. The music thing. The music thing long enough that I've seen my career go up and down. Um, in the nineties, uh, might've been the music I was doing. It might've been whatever, but my career went down. I was back to playing little clubs in lots of places where I'd been playing much larger venues. Now I'm back to playing these sizable places again. That feels, yes. And I thought, but it's, but in some cases I'm playing the same stuff. Yeah.

I didn't change. I mean, I had gotten older. but it's all these other, it's all the context. The audience, the demographic, another generation, whatever it might be, those things have changed. 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. How does that feel? How does it feel to go out of fashion for time?

It must suck.

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

Oh, yeah. After it's happened once, if something happens like that again, you go, yes, I know. Don't take this personally. Don't take it personally. The work might be good. You may have done something terrible or Not so good, but don't assume that it's because the work is bad. Yeah. But I remember at the time, I just felt like, no, you just have to slog on. Just kind of keep going. Obviously, you can only keep going like that for a while until, and if things go lower, you go, I have no income.

But to some extent, yeah, I think you just have.

To, 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 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 balance those two things?

I realize it's a little bit of both. In that period, I did a couple records where I worked with Latin musicians and I was doing all Latin rhythms and all all that. I was having a great time. It went down really well in Latin America and in parts of Europe. But in the U.S. in particular, it was like, no, you've betrayed us. This is not what we want from you.

And I realized, oh, okay. I get that. I can maybe, I probably thought, I can maybe temper this somehow. Yeah, I do understand that, yeah, if you Completely betray 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.

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 Zay. 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 had 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, etc., 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 or When I was younger, if I wanted to seek out a sort of indie music of some sorts, I used to literally write letters to record labels and then they would like send back the catalogs. This was like in the early nineties, et cetera. The thing that's changed is that very mainstream

musicians are in 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 to exist between sort of like you really had to put in work to find the avant-garde thing before. Physical work, in many cases. Go to a 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 away.

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. We were talking about some research he was doing from a book. And he realized that there was something in somebody's basement. And they had boxes full of files. And 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. But that said, I definitely agree that with streaming music, to some extent with films and other kinds of information, I know especially with music, a whole... 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 cool thing that's happening right this minute. at this moment, on these services, there's very little information. I mean, you can dig and get the information, but what's.

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

Buying a record. Yeah, and you know, like, oh, this is produced by so-and-so, and this is who wrote it.

Looking at the art and stuff. Yeah, 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 when it was done, the dates or whatever. You're just listening kind of blind 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.

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 um i never would have thought to put that in the search engine bar on spotify 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 why does that mean for the rediscovery of old ideas?

You're absolutely right. When there's so much out there, as I was doing some of this research, I saw that Condoleezza Rice 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, it doesn't like jump out and say, over here, take a look at this. Yeah, you can miss things even if they're still there.

Can I ask a question from one musician to another?

I have a band.

We play country music. This is just a pure music question, actually. It has nothing to do with discovery things.

Any particular kind of country music?

No, I would say it's kind of like down the middle country, maybe a little bit classic, et cetera. 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 play. Is there any difference between scales? So it's like if I write a song in G major and then someone else 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?

I only realized kind of recently that, yeah, you can transpose a song into it 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 at different places. And eventually you hit one and you go, oh, that's the sweet spot for my voice. For your voice.

For my voice. But is the song the same? That's a good question. I know that sometimes, especially on guitar, you're saying like a G chord, it 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, doesn't ring out the same way.

You might have to put a capo, a thing, to adjust 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, Yeah. 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.

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.

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 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 things, like there's a story on hand washing where 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 less energy intensive and they could have lasted longer. That's pretty easy to measure.

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 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 to like read anything and I'm like, 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 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, examples. So, like, I don't know if that's a word, but it's tempting to, like, look at anything and say, wow.

That's like- How do we avoid sleeping uglies?

Yeah.

How do you avoid this sort of- find every new thing you come across to say, wow, 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.

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

Okay.

There's a story in here about a woman, a 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. 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. And so I immediately go, aha, cooperation is key. And there's another story about 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 where it fits.

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 again? It started with like an S or something.

I can't remember.

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

Schwarzkopf or something like that. Yes. Yeah, I can't remember the exact name, but yes, he's proved right. That's interesting to say.

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? It came about 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 becomes the fundamental unit. And then it 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 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 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.

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

Schwanderist was the insult. You're a real Schwanderist.

That's a good one. Which sounds cutting. But the guy was right.

It'd be unjust to his legacy.

It sounds like it could be like a classic Yiddish insult.

Doesn't it? It's like, oh, The Schwenderist.

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.

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 technique seems to be kind of a pluralistic.

Cross-disciplinary approach.

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 puts them into a box or a silo or whatever, and they can stay in there. Various kind of academics are trying to use formulas and different things to find patterns. AI might be interested. I mean, it is good at pattern identification. So you might see that in academic things where something's measurable, like citations. In science papers, if you see a little tiny uptick, if the ramp of the uptick takes a certain curve, you go, something's Da-na-na, 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.

Twenty-something years ago, 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?

Yeah, I did. I decided that PowerPoint would be an art medium because you can throw everything into it. You can throw type. You can throw pictures. You can throw films. You can throw sound. 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 dealing with whether it makes a good and accurate presentation. presentation or not. I was dealing with it in another way and saying, it's a creative medium. Um, and of course, a lot of people found this very funny because they have to deal with it in their daily lives. And they probably hate it.

Yeah.

They probably, they all hate it.

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

Really? You think so?

I'm being facetious.

Okay. Okay. I remember, uh, so I did this kind of presentation about this idea. Um, 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, so-and-so, will you stand up? Uh-uh. They wouldn't do it. They wouldn't show themselves. I see. Yeah, it's not very loved, but I thought, oh, now you can have fun with it.

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

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

David Byrne, thank you so much for coming on Oblaws.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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 just finding things that other people have forgotten or ignored or looked over.

Absolutely. I mean, the virality of ideas is something that we've talked about before. It's funny to think I never thought we'd be talking to David Byrne about concrete. And I had the song going through my head during the conversation. You may find yourself on a beautiful podcast. Yeah. In a random part of the world, talking about concrete.

With David Byrne.

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 are 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 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, the sort of cross-disciplinary approach to resurfacing some of this stuff is really interesting and harder than it seems.

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. 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?

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 this sense, they're probably, you know, there's some sort of course. I know a couple of architects, so I'll ask them if like as part of getting a degree in architecture or.

I said contractor, not architect. Someone who's actually using those building materials.

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

Read the classics.

Read the classics of engineering. It's interesting to think. So there's a couple of things that I think digitization of almost all knowledge now is going to be really important. And it's still day one. The internet's already been around For a few minutes. It feels longer. No, for real. Like, in the grand history of things, like, we're just getting started.

But digitization is going to be really important for a couple 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 going to get very good at cross-disciplinary identification. If the shape of one solution... If.

It's tagged correctly.

No, but if the shape... Like, not necessarily, because if the shape of one 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 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. Yeah, that's true. And so forth.

And I think that like, you know, in an AI model, like these shapes are going to be embedded in nearby multidimensional 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.

I just asked ChatGPT if I can make ancient Roman concrete at home. It says I can make a Roman-style concrete test block with hydrated lime, natural pozzolan, water, and stone aggregate.

You should do that.

It's telling me that I must not, under any circumstances, try the hot mixing method with quicklime at home because quicklime reacts violently with water and causes serious chemical burns.

Wow. Okay. Be careful, Tracy.

All right. Shall we leave it there?

Let's leave it there.

This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway.

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, Dashiell 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 slash oddlots.

We even have a music channel in there.

And for more Oddlots content, go check out our newsletter, which you can find at bloomberg.com slash oddlots.

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