The Ocean Doesn't Care
About Your Swimming Lessons
Marlowe Keynes

Synthetic Brains & Steam Trains

Because the Next Big Technology Shift Is Happening
So It's Worth Knowing What Is Going On
David L. Steinberg  ·  Vol III
Scroll through 180 years
Railway Mania · 1840s Britain
"Suddenly, a parliamentary act becomes a series of lottery tickets."
Nearly 1,000 railway companies · £200 million invested · 150,000 families ruined
The Electrification of America · 1880–1920
"What actually happened? Well, at first, nothing. In fact, it was nothing for decades."
Sept 4, 1882 · Pearl Street Station · 400 bulbs light above J.P. Morgan's offices
Fiber-Optic Overbuilding · 1996–2001
"They were toll roads, picks and shovels… a lot like the railroads: the supposed safe play for the wise investor."
Roughly $2 trillion in losses · The internet got its infrastructure anyway
Artificial Intelligence · Now
"The question is not whether AI will matter. The question is who will be left holding the assets when it does."
Read the Field Notes Find It on Amazon
From the Introduction

Gutenberg Goes Broke

Gutenberg solved an incredibly complex problem. He figured out how to produce 300 copies of a book for roughly the cost of one book. That is not a small improvement. That is a restructuring of the economics of knowledge.

And so what does he do? He prints Bibles. However, he has 300 Bibles sitting in a room in Mainz. Then he discovers that he has an abundance, an overcapacity. In the landlocked German town where he lived, only a handful of people were legally permitted to read the Bible. Gutenberg's creation leads to his bankruptcy.

Then comes Johann Fust, a creditor who seizes the press. He decides to go into the printing business himself, since he now owns the equipment. He goes bankrupt too. Then Gutenberg's apprentices scatter across Europe and build their own presses. They go bankrupt. Build a printing press and go bankrupt, the same story over and over for decades.

"Remarkably, great innovation seems to begin with the bankruptcy of the innovators. It took 40 years before a printer anywhere in Europe could reliably make any money."
Field Notes

What the Book Argues

Eight passages, verbatim, from 180 years of building too much of the right thing.

I
"The space between capability and large dissemination is not some kind of anomaly. It is a pattern. It's always the pattern."
Introduction
II
"The most consequential technologies are often the most abstract: a blank piece of paper, an entirely new way of industrializing an economy through electricity."
Introduction
III
"When infrastructure is overbuilt but the long-term trend is still accurate, the bust sets conditions for the next boom."
Fiber-Optic Overbuilding, 1996–2001
IV
"Bubbles in capital allocation are in many ways one of the least discussed examples of how capitalism accidentally becomes a wonderful source of charitable giving."
Fiber-Optic Overbuilding, 1996–2001
V
"Our brain is a confabulation machine. It always has been a confabulation machine."
The Confabulation Machine!
VI
"You are equally confident about the wrong things as the right things. Because when something is presented as a fact, we believe it."
The Confabulation Machine!
VII
"Deep Blue was the gold medalist distilled for chess. Kasparov was a human being with range."
The Capability–Impact Disconnect
VIII
"The gold had required near-total optimization. The silver retained degrees of freedom."
The Capability–Impact Disconnect
Listen

Excerpts, Read Aloud

Five passages from the book, narrated in the author's voice.

The Book

A Field Guide to the Build-Out

Synthetic Brains & Steam Trains — front cover

Railway mania. The electrification of America. The fiber-optic boom. Three manias that bankrupted their builders and remade the world, and a clear-eyed field guide to the one we are living through now.

A book about scaling laws, capital cycles, and the difference between technologies that compound and technologies that merely transform.

ISBN 979-8-234-20310-6 · Marlowe Keynes
Available on Amazon
Volume III of the Series
The Ocean Doesn't Care About Your Swimming Lessons
VOL IVOL IIVOL III

About the Author

Educated at Yale, Cambridge, and Stanford, David Steinberg directed concentrated equity investments across industries at Soros under its CIO, the current U.S. Treasury Secretary. After his tenure, he launched a private investment partnership with a twelve-year record of compounding capital for foundations and single families. He anchors capital in multi-year equity positions, relying on the micro to inform the macro. Originally from Montreal, he operates in New York.