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Today marks a special milestone—The School of Knowledge's 100th release on Substack. What started on a sun lounger in Crete in June 2023 as a way to deal with my hyperactive mind has grown into a space where I crystallise my thinking through writing. The process of having written has offered me clarity like never before.
The idea for the newsletter was simple—to try and remember more of what I read. It's interesting that not a single piece has been on such a topic. I've covered topics such as storytelling, how to do great work, how to make better decisions, principles, mental models, systems thinking and practical frameworks. I've shared my insights from books such as Poor Charlie's Almanack, Shoe Dog, Letters from a Stoic, Endurance, Elon Musk, Zero to One, and How to Read a Book. Essays from Paul Graham, Gary Halbert, The Nomad Letters and Amazon's Shareholder Letters have allowed me to venture into a natural interest of mine—business. I've learnt life lessons from people from all walks of life such as Naval Ravikant, Ray Dalio, J. Paul Getty, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Ernest Shackleton, Richard Feynman, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—but the last 6 months have seen the most growth, both in subscribers and in the direction the newsletter is heading.
Reading Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in November last year, followed by Lila at Christmas, I knew I'd read something special. The concept of Quality—of Static and Dynamic Quality is impossible to unsee once you've had the wool removed from your eyes. At times, I've had to fight hard not to let this newsletter turn philosophical with the wise words of Seneca creeping into my essays at any given opportunity, but Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality is everywhere. It's impossible to avoid. Around the same time, I read Thinking in Systems and could instantly see the crossover between the three books. Stable systems are Static, and we rely on them to stay so, but emergent and adaptive systems are Dynamic Quality at work. Recklessly pursuing evolution, it's how humans have got to where we are today—by pushing boundaries. Understanding this has allowed my curiosity to explore frameworks, systems and concepts through the lens of Quality to better understand how they all interact and affect our world around us.
One of the problems I've had over the last 2 years is not having enough time to read and write. There are still dozens of unfinished and unread books to get through and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of notes to conceptualise. Writing has allowed me to crystallise my thoughts, but each idea multiplies at a pace I can't keep up with. That is, by myself.
This isn't my full-time job—I only have about 90 minutes a day to read, write, edit, design, research and do admin for this newsletter. It's painfully not enough. The vision for the first 100 essays is different from what I envision for the next 100. The advancement of AI has taken everybody except those paying attention by surprise, and over the last couple of months, I've been listening to and watching how the best writers and thinkers are adopting—not rejecting, AI.
Tyler Cowen opens Grok, activates voice control and then reads. When he comes across something he wants to dig deeper into, he initiates a conversation with Grok. For example, "Hey Grok, I'm reading Lila by Robert Pirsig, can you give me a quick summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before I start?" or, "Hey Grok, can you explain why the Metaphysics of Quality is different from a classic Subject-Object one?"
People are using AI to create an interactive quiz utilising the framework of deliberate practice and spaced repetition to learn topics and subjects more effectively, in less time, and in line with the latest science and best practices for learning.
ChatGPT's deep research can do more than 99% of research assistants. It's insanely good and can be tailored extremely specifically to what you want. Dave Perell of How I Write asked it to produce a report on the flora and fauna history of Austin, Texas. It took 7 minutes. Do you know how long that would take a person and how many books, reports and other sources an assistant would have to get through to do the equivalent?
Others are creating AI projects modelled on Socratic questioning, asking it to help prepare for a job interview or look for blind spots and assumptions in their thinking.
AI is only as limited as your imagination and capability to design good prompts.
The aim of this publication is for it to help me become a better thinker and practitioner in the hopes that what I share can help others too. Naturally, it's acceptable for me to read a book, distil the insights, practise them, and share them with others, but to do so with AI makes people uncomfortable. Why? It's true that AI has hallucinations, but how much of the information that you get from Google, TikTok or traditional news outlets do you fact-check today?
There's a lot of virtue signalling with the anti-AI movement.
I love to read. I'm slow but it's one of my favourite things to do and something I won't be trading out. I've transitioned to Kindle recently out of necessity because highlighting and then uploading them to Readwise is too laborious for me. Again, something that's automated and means I can spend more time doing what I love—writing. I upload my essays to Claude to check for grammar, spelling and other writing errors because I personally hate Grammarly, which is what I used before. After all, it just puts commas everywhere in my essay where none are needed.
Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality and systems thinking naturally, at least for me anyway, form a symbiotic relationship, and now AI has created a third side to create a triangle. Quality, systems and AI—what can't I write about? I can write about businesses, philosophy, concepts, frameworks, mental models, nature, science, history, the past, present and future.
I don't want this publication to turn into an AI newsletter where I just bang on about the latest AI trends. I want to use it as a mentor and aid in helping me be a deeper thinker and better decision maker. I'm drawn to AI not for its novelty, but for its potential to create space for higher-value work and excited about the potential for automation freeing up time for deeper-value interests. When I write about AI, I want it to be helpful, not hyperbole and will endeavour to create practical uses out of it because being a builder I don't just want to consume—I want to build, and for the first time in my life I have an arsenal of assistants who never tire, complain or get bored helping me.
I’m looking forward to the next 100 essays, indeed.
Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).
Whenever you’re ready
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