The Gunn Show - 7.7.24

What I'm Thinking, What I'm Reading

Good morning everyone!


And welcome back to Edition #22 of The Gunn Show. I hope you all had a fantastic 4th of July week and were able to enjoy some time with family and friends over the long weekend. Special shoutout to the person that made the calendar for the year - scheduling the 4th falling for a Thursday to set up a 4 day weekend is a next level move. Gold medal to you, sir (or ma’am).


On the update front this week, I’d like to say a big congrats to my lovely wife on accepting a new role within Amazon Air’s finance division this week. It’s been a stressful couple months on the work front recently, and it’s nice to see everything work out for her to be set up in a great situation (and with a shorter commute!). Congrats, babe!


With that said, let’s get into this week’s newsletter and the biggest topic that has been on my mind this week: language.

On Language

As I wrote about in the newsletter two weeks ago, we are in the middle of meetings in preparation for one of the most exciting periods in the baseball calendar: the MLB Draft.


Every year during these meetings, I find myself thinking deeply about the concepts of language and communication - what they are, why they matter, how to be more effective at them. It’s a recurring line of thinking that owes a great deal to the structure of the meetings themselves and what they necessitate to be successful within them.


From my perspective, there are few settings in baseball that bring together such a wide array of perspectives in one sitting like the Draft - it is a uniquely collaborative process where front office executives, scouts, R&D analysts, player development members, and more must all work together to make the best possible decisions. The level of coordination required is immense, and as such it requires a number of things to go right.


You need subject matter experts that have a specific role in the process and know how to play it. You need people willing to subvert their egos to allow everyone to collaborate in a respectful way. You need accurate insights in isolation. And you need the ability to put those insights together to form as clear a picture of the player or decision as possible.


But the biggest premium in the room gets placed on something else entirely: the ability of people within it to communicate their knowledge in a way that is understood by everyone - regardless of department or background. Making the right decision requires scouts speaking to executives, analysts speaking to scouts, coaches speaking to analysts. And more. It necessitates that somehow, someway, people with different perspectives, different responsibilities, and most importantly - different languages - find a way to arrive on common ground.


Simply put, coordination necessitates communication.


If we zoom out, we this as a common pattern for as long as humans have been alive. History serves as a guide here, and there is no better story to highlight the power of language than a 235 word excerpt from the Bible itself: The Tower of Babel.


One of the most well known stories from Biblical lore, The Tower of Babel details God’s decision to prevent people from building a tower to heaven by confusing their speech. I find the mechanism He chose to do so telling - God could have easily destroyed the tower over and over again using various natural forces. An earthquake here, a lightning strike there. But of all the levers available to him, he instead chose to use language because of its power, and necessity, for coordination. Without it, the efforts to build the tower fell apart. By confounding their language, he in turn confounded their action.


The point is this: to coordinate effectively, we need to speak the same language as best as possible. Doing so requires a recognition that speaking and being heard are two entirely different things. Understanding is not something we should take for granted, because of a simple truth: speaking the same primary language is no guarantee of speaking the same secondary one.


What do I mean by this? The following: while we might all be using ‘English’ as our method of communication, the words within it will be understood differently by different people.


This is because while we think of English as a singular language, there are in fact infinite variations of it that exist. Each comes with an accompanying visibility to it - there are some words and phrases that make sense to me but not to you, and vice versa. Whether or not we understand certain language results from the experiential nature of language - our experience in the world shape the words we use to describe it. And as a result, the further our experiences diverge from one another, the further our language does as well.


This is a problem in the context of large organizations, due to how segmented they tend to be. More often than not, language is not so much organizationally specific as it is departmentally specific. It depends much more frequently on what you do on a day-to-day basis than anything else. And as a result, if your tasks are drastically different from those of people in other areas, it is likely that your language will be as well. The more siloed things become, the more siloed the language - and the harder it becomes to communicate as a result.


I learned this the hard way my first couple years being involved in the Draft process. Operating primarily in the player development space, my verbiage became very specific to what I did on a daily basis; my experiences shaped my language. The issue was that for others that had not had the same experiences as me - namely scouts and analysts - they had absolutely no clue what I was talking about when I opened my mouth. More often than not, I wasn’t speaking in terms of anything they could understand. And the result was a lot of blank stares and puzzled looks.


What I’ve figured out through trial and error over time is that you have to carry a thesaurus with you. I don’t mean one in the physical sense, like a copy of Webster’s, but rather in the theoretical sense: you need to be able to shape shift your language, swapping out words and phrases that make sense to you in favor of ones that make sense to others.


In other words, the path from speaking to being understood - and thus from understanding to coordination - comes through translation.


In my view, this is and always will be one of the greatest opportunities in the world: the ability to connect different perspectives by toggling back and forth between the languages native to each.


The more we look to understand the words others around us use, the better we can become at choosing our own in order to reach them.

This Week’s Finds

The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)

ChatGPT Unlocks the Most Powerful Force on Earth - Every (5 min)


A nice segway from the topic above. This was a great piece from earlier this year that I rediscovered after writing the above. In it, Dan makes an argument that AI tools (ChatGPT, in particular) can be valuable in serving as translators between various fields - connecting people that do not speak the same language and in turn enabling new-found coordination.


My favorite part:

“In other words, good translation equals human coordination. And human coordination is the most powerful force on Earth. We can see ChatGPT already beginning to unlock this superpower…. [creating] opportunity for people to work together that had previously been impossible, solely for the lack of a good translator.


Examples like this abound. Think of how many startups aren’t funded because the founders don’t speak the language of venture capital, or how much scientific knowledge goes unused because lay people don’t speak the language of statistics, or how many relationships break up because people speak in different languages of emotion.”

Personal Growth

Learn This Skill if You Want to Stay Relevant in 10 Years - Dan Koe (~14 min)


A good read on the value of independence in navigating the future. I found Dan’s perspective on acquiring new skills to be especially insightful, which he analogizes to the need to ‘learn to hunt’:

“To ‘hunt’ is to discover knowledge, skills, ideas, and opportunities that help you achieve the goals you set for yourself.


And once those goals become known, you must have another one ready so that you do not get lost.”

Reminds me of something that I’ve always believed to be true: there is no endpoint in the quest for knowledge. It is instead a continuous process of growth, a game that starts when we are born and doesn’t quit until we die. The hunt starts and never ends.

There are No More Hedgehogs - Luke Bergis (~12 min)


The best thing I read this week, by far. I’d highly recommend you read for yourself, but in the event you want the Cliff notes, here they are:


In the article, Luke makes a strong case that we should be thinking about our intellectual appetite in the same way that we do our appetite for food and drink, but with one exception: our minds never know what it is like to be fully satiated like our body does.


In the context of our modern world, this is a big problem. It can lead us on an endless pursuit of trivial knowledge that distracts us from things that are truly worth knowing. And in the process, the content we consume becomes an obstacle in the road holding us back from the best versions of ourselves.


Knowing for the sake of knowing is not the end in and of itself - we shouldn’t simply be trying to acquire knowledge like random power-ups in a video game. Instead, as Luke writes, we need a foundational vision that keeps us on track - else we risk losing ourselves along the way:

⁠”My fear is that in a content saturated world, we are stretched to become hyperfoxes, exhausted in the pursuit of every new piece of content, stretched thin with knowledge and thin with desires, never able to take the time to drop down and deeply understand anything, let alone develop any thick desires.⁠⁠


⁠⁠If we have thin desires, we are more easily captivated by thin knowledge—by the million things that present themselves to us daily as worthy of knowing when in fact maybe only one of them is. ⁠⁠


If we cultivate thick desires, however, the thickness of those desires becomes a filter for our knowledge. We desire to know that which gets us closer to the essential knowledge, and the timeless insight, that will help us live a life of meaning.


⁠⁠Only foxes chase rabbits; only foxes go down rabbit holes. Hedgehogs go down into dens.”

Mental Models/Principles

The American Millennium - Not Boring (~15 min)


A great and relevant read on this 4th of July week, especially in the aftermath of the recent presidential debate (if we can really call whatever that was a debate). This was a ‘rationally optimistic’ piece by Packy centered around the following question: if America is doing so poorly, why is America doing so well?


I don’t consider myself even remotely political, but as we head into debate/election season - the time in the year where each candidate’s job is to sell us on the idea that present America sucks and they are the only one capable of fixing it - I think this quote is an especially important model to keep in mind:

“There is a common pattern: America doesn’t just survive crises, it gets stronger because of them…..


It would be incredible to have deeply competent leaders, but in America, people can just choose to solve problems that the government can’t, doesn’t, or won’t. Accelerated progress despite government and instructional stagnation is exactly what makes America exceptional.”

So, sure - we’ll see who wins the election come November. But I’m not sure it matters because I ascribe to the same belief as Packy - “no matter who is in office, we will progress.” It’s just what we do.