The age of the enthusiast

In the last four days, Hideo Kojima, the creator of the Metal Gear video game series, has seen Furiosa three times.

He’s also managed to track down a Japanese copy of An American Werewolf in London, squeeze in twenty episodes of a new Korean drama, and catch up with artist Harmony Korine.

Kojima is an enthusiast, as are many of the people who push forward the frontiers of their respective fields today.

Enthusiasm - and the obsession, energy and knowledge that comes with it - drives everything. As John Collison once put it: the world is a museum of passion projects.

Looking at LLM and GPU performance curves, however, it’s easy to feel like the enthusiast is a dying breed.

And that Kojima’s day to day life is simply providing training data for the much smarter, much faster, Kojima-GPT that will undoubtedly be coming down the pipeline soon.

I don’t think Kojima is wasting his time, and that some of us - the enthusiasts - will be able to play the knowledge game for much longer than we think, and for a much greater return.

Deep knowledge in a shallow world

What does it mean to be an enthusiast?

Whether it’s Zadie Smith casually dropping in an interview a whole new way of thinking about Finnegan’s Wake, or Chris Harris obsessing about the coating on the front grilles of a 997 Gen II GT3 RS, it’s one of the things where we know it when we see it.

It’s something that I think is becoming rarer, and therefore more impressive.

From a recent interview between author Sheila Heti and critic Lauren Oyler, in which Heti decided to (albeit in a very kind way), say the quiet part out loud:

“It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them.”

This internal world of references generates excellence. From the outside, this can look like sprezzatura. But you’ll find that true enthusiasts only display the tip of the iceberg.

Once director Edgar Wright asked Martin Scorsese if he might recommend one or two British films that had inspired him.

A few months later Wright received a voice memo. With about fifty films. I like to think I know my way around the BFI, but scanning the list right now, I’ve heard of about four of them.

The black and white room

Even then, it’s still worth wondering whether there’s anything Kojima himself would bring to the table above and beyond the Kojima-GPT I mentioned at the start of this note.

Let’s begin with a thought experiment the philosopher Frank Jackson posed in 1982.

Mary, a scientist, lives in a black and white room. Her field of study: colour. Indeed, she’s learnt everything there is to know about it. But she’s never left the room. The door opens, Mary leaves, she experiences colour for the first time. Has she learnt something new?

Some philosophers would disagree, but I think most of us would think she has.

I think this is where real Kojima’s edge comes from.

Humans are not just bundles of knowledge. We also have a lifetime of subjective experience: the things we, as embodied people, existing in the world, have observed and felt.

Who knows more about the Sistine Chapel - the person who’s read everything there is to read about, or the person who’s not only done that, but also seen it in the flesh?

Intuition, taste, call it what you want, but at heart it is the combination of what we know, and what we experience, that provides the alchemy needed for new ideas.

This is the domain of the enthusiast, and that is where I think Kojima-GPT, or Cusk-GPT, or Cowen-GPT, will be the slowest to catch up.

Until machines also have embodied experience, then LLMs - no matter how smart they are - remain trapped in the black and white room.

Working like an enthusiast

I think in the future work will look like what Kojima and Scorsese do all day.

First, lots of thinking.

Enthusiasts will be able to point ultra-smart agents in whatever direction they choose.. But they’ll still need to think about what direction to choose.

From the outside, this won’t look like much.

Morgan Housel wrote an essay - Lazy Work, Good Work - about this last week:

“Look at famous thinkers who didn’t have to impress anyone by looking busy, and you see a theme: They spent a lot of time doing stuff that didn’t look like work, but in fact was stupendously productive.

The second, building the library of deep knowledge, experience, and intuition needed to distinguish yourself from the machines.

Spending time reading books, experiencing art, and even going to the cinema, Don Draper style, is very different to what we think work traditionally is. But this is what truly moves the needle. It’s why Kojima’s twitter bio reads: “70% of my body is made of movies.”

Combine the two together, and you have the working life of an enthusiast.

Climbing the cognitive ladder

This will be an odd future for companies to adapt to. But since the industrial revolution, more and more people have been pushed up the cognitive ladder.

Take the life of the 19th century clerk. Their job was not to generate knowledge, but to copy it by hand, every day. They were just the first to do knowledge work that’s since been automated and replaced.

The best leaders and companies already work in this way. They are, themselves, enthusiasts.

Bill Gates has been doing Think Weeks - time he spends alone every year in a cabin just thinking - since the late 1980s.

Disney has an entire Creative Development team whose role it is to come up with new film ideas, spending most of their time arranging cultural deep dives and research trips.

Stripe even funds its own publishing arm and magazine.

You’re probably doing this already if you listen to podcasts like Acquired, which specialises in 3+ hour deep-dives of iconic businesses, or Founders, where each weekly episode is a study of a biography of an entrepreneur.

But unfortunately, unless you’re the boss, you don’t get to call it work.

Your struggle

This doesn’t mean that knowledge work gets easier. In fact, it probably gets harder. Coming up with new ideas - as writers and artists will tell you - is an incredibly hard thing to do.

The relationship between hours put in and success degrades further. Failure will be much more commonplace. Prepare accordingly.

Second, it doesn’t mean everyone will get to keep their jobs. Any role that’s routine and repeatable will be passed over to the machines.

Spreadsheets are over, just as looms were two centuries ago. What’s left will be captured by the enthusiasts.

And it doesn’t mean other things won’t matter too. Relationship building will be more important than ever. It’s why, as Peter Thiel undiplomatically put it last week: “AI will be much worse for the math people than the word people”

In creative work, collaboration matters more. As Jack Antonoff characterises it, good things are made only when everyone involved is looking at the same thing.

Finally, this is a gradual, not sudden change.

Enthusiasts have been reaping the returns of the internet for some time now: it’s what drives followings towards writers like Ben Thompson, platforms like Substack, or podcasts like Acquired and Founders.

You see it already in software (particularly SAAS), with the energy shifting away from monolithic companies and towards the artisan saas movement.

But it started even before the internet. The late Anthony Bourdain - a man whose career existed on TV, consisted solely of taste, and began in 2000 with his book Kitchen Confidential - had a twitter bio containing simply one word: enthusiast.

My argument is simply that the returns to enthusiasm will continue to increase, as the deep knowledge that underpins it becomes scarcer.

Because ultimately AI means a shallower world for most of us. Why learn or think deeply about something when an intelligent answer is a single voice command away?

An enthusiasm unknown to mankind

LA Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh has a mantra that he instils in every football team he coaches: that everything they do, should be done with “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind”.

He’s right to see enthusiasm as the ultimate advantage.

It’s why Ashore exists: we’re here to facilitate and support the transition to this new, very different way of working, providing spaces for enthusiasts everywhere to gather, focus, and create.

Put another way, we take thinking - and enthusiasm - seriously.

Because we believe that enthusiasts will be most resilient to the changes that we are living through.

And that the future belongs to them.

aled@ashore.io