Jonathan Brun

Fighting Envy

I am currently reading the book The Curve of Time which is a journal by a widowed mother who spent her summers coasting the waters near Vancouver Island with her four children in the 1930s. The book is a lovely tribute to a bygone era of abandoned Indian villages, limited technology, soaring mountains and endless days that blend with each other. In our frenetic and always connected world of 2025, the book reminds me that there are other ways to live and experience the planet we inhabit. For the past few summers, my family has taken a few days to canoe camp with friends and disconnect. It is a splendid respite from the non-stop bustle of the modern world.

Many years ago I attended a lecture by David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist, scientist, public speaker and advocate for the planet. The talk was held at McGill University around 2010 in the context of sustainability conference. During his talk he spoke of the rising tides and temperatures, the perils for the planet, the need to change our ways and the risks we are taking with our overconsumption and pollution. Of all the things he said, one item stood out. David Suzuki highlighted how the average home in Canada had dramatically grown in size over the past few decades. In his youth in the 1950s and 60s, homes were often no larger than 1200-1500 square feet. Today, the average house is often over 2500 square feet. The same growth in size can be found in our cars, wardrobes and many other things. Suzuki argued that to solve our sustainability issues, all we had to do was go back to our old habits which at the time, were perfectly adequate for most people.

The famed investor Charlie Munger was once asked what drove the world and our need to consume. The natural response many of us will have to this question is greed, money, lust, or other emotions that push us to fight for top place and dictate our relations with other people. Munger asserted the main emotion driving our world was in fact Envy. Our envy for what others have is what pushes us to buy more, go bigger and chase an elusive goal that may never really be achievable. This envy is more prevalent today than ever before thanks to the internet, Instagram, influencers and our brains being bombarded with the perfect lives of our friends, relations and celebrities. ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ is nothing new, but I feel it is an overwhelming emotion today that in many ways drives non-optimal decisions. As far as I can tell, too many of us consume too much, save too little and cannot resist the urge to YOLO.

Growing up in a wealthy neighbourhood and at a private school, it was clear that the disease of envy spared no one, especially not the upper classes. If your friend had an Audi, you needed a Porsche. I recently heard of a study (there are so many) that demonstrated that no matter what a person had in income or wealth, they always thought that twice that amount would be the right amount to have. If you had 100$ in your bank account, 200$ would make all the difference. If you had 1 million dollars, 2 million would be enough. I recently know someone who made about 3 million dollars selling their business, they now want 10 million. The lack of satisfaction is what drives us and despite the negative aspects to chasing money, there are positive sides to this human urge to have more.

Without this envy for what others have, our desire to compete and our need to show off, we may still be living in mud huts on the savanna. Though there are many negative aspects to chasing cash, we must admit that it has numerous positive effects too. Someone famously quipped, “Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat”. True. But the rat race has helped us invent new liberating machines that do so much work for us, develop air travel that brings the world together and dramatically extend our lifespans and improve our quality of life. The trick, I suppose, is to know when enough is enough for you.

There is no shortage of evidence that people on their deathbeds do not lament the jet they never had. Nearly all the time, they seek the people they love or loved and regret the things they said and did that impacted their human relationships. The challenge is not to knowledge and understand the realities we face at death, but rather to live our life on a day to day basis that leads to the end we know we seek. Today, more then ever before, we are subject to constant temptation. Algorithms play us like a fine tuned violin – leading us to waste time watching meaningless videos instead of calling family and friends, buying things we certainly do not need and making decisions we should not make. The economic precarity that so many people face only exacerbates this situation as we seek some form of temporary balm from the knowledge that our financial position is not good and unlikely to improve.

Discipline and focus are the only bulwark against this assault on our senses. These two skills should be taught at our schools from a young age and reinforced as much as possible. As Steve Jobs said, the most important thing you do is what you say No to. The exercise I always recommend to my friends who ask about their career choices or situation is the white paper vivid vision. The task is to take a blank sheet of paper and write out in narrative form the life you want or the vision you have. This can be a big challenge, but its rewards are tremendous. This task of visioning your life and then living your vision is an urgent task because you just never know when things might end or how fate and fortune may decide your life. An old friend of mine who I had travelled with recently passed away at only 50 years old. He left behind the life he wanted – a wife, three kids and great job. He had everything he had sought, but he hit some very bad luck. This can happen to any of us and knowing what we truly want and trying to live it on a daily basis is the only defence we have against unpredictable misfortune and external influence.

Crossing the Rubicon

Tribalism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. For tens of thousands of years, humans evolved and survived only thanks to their participation in a tribe. Very few people can survive without the support of others, finding food, hunting, shelter and protection from attacking tribes requires group effort and coalescence. Even today, though more and more people live solitary lives with work from home and a near persistent attachment to a glowing screen, we still remain part of tribes – be they virtual or real.

In ancient times, one of the most serious punishments for crimes, aside from death or torture, was to be banished from your tribe and cast into the wilderness to near certain death. This happened regularly in traditional societies who sent a strong message that breaking tribal norms was not acceptable. Even antiquity saw people who caused nuisance banished from the city – from Athens to Rome to 19th century France, forced emigration was a common form of punishment and an important tool in maintaining the integrity of society along the lines of what the leaders sought. Despite a changed society, tribalism remains alive and well.

Certain societies claimed and attempted to rid themselves of tribalism. This was most commonly done by communist societies who sought internationalism. Communists believed that only by transcending our tribal divisions could we all be brothers and sisters and move humanity forwards. Even the national anthem of the communist cause was called l’Internationale. Through this dogmatic approach to anti-tribalism a new form of tribalism was created, one centered around the communist party and its leadership apparatus. Oh, the irony!

Liberal societies have also attempted to eliminate or reduce tribalism. Today, it is all too common hear people say they do not see the color of people’s skin, that they are not racist or that they believe in equality for all. More aggressive efforts around this belief that we can break down artificial barriers has taken the institutional form of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) programs that seek to create opportunity for those who were historically excluded from wealth and power. This modern form of affirmative action was aimed at creating a more balanced representation in power structures. These efforts have received widespread backlash and the recent election in 2024 of Donald Trump and other right wing people around the world. A large part of the population has clearly repudiated the breaking up of their tribe. The most liberal and individualistic of all societies, the United States of America has taken the lead in many ways. My only reasonable conclusion is quite simple: People want tribes.

One of the guiding lights in this DEI effort was the writer Ibrahim X. Mendi who wrote a book titled How to be an Anti-Racist. Without delving into this interesting book, suffice to say that the philosophical framework that he proposes has a number of problems. He attempts to identify all the layers of racism and bias within society and quickly discovers that there are a lot of intersecting layers of shit. Black people in white society are obviously discriminated against, but black men discriminate against black women, black women discriminate against lesbian black women who discriminate against black men. The circular nature of all societies inevitably leads to circular discrimination and when taken to the individual level, we get lost in a sea of bias and tribes. In many ways, people want to feel superior to others and they will find a way to feel that if at all possible. Whether they acknowledge that they are supercilious is an entirely different story. It is impossible to clearly navigate yourself out of such a swamp of bias.

Ultimately, the only way a rational human seeking a “normal” life can operate is to adhere to a tribe that is broadly theirs and then hang on for dear life. This is how we have survived so far and it seems unlikely to change. How many people change their tribe, their religion, their fundamental believes or their social environment when compared with their parents?

This brings me to my main issue, which is the clear and remarkable cohesion of the communities in the face of overwhelming evidence of the most horrific of all human endeavors: genocide. A rational person might make the ridiculous mistake of thinking that a tribe who was subject to genocide only 80 years ago would have an elevated sense of humanity. This tribe would understand the horrors of another tribe trying to wipe them off the face of the planet. This tribe would understand not only what can lead to genocide, but also how other groups would react and how a genocide could be stopped – or not. If you were to make such a mistake, like me, you are excused. What seems to be the case is that being subject to genocide in fact creates the exact opposite effect. The collective intergenerational trauma from one genocide has enabled a next generation to inflict a genocide on others. Looking at history now, this seems stupidly obvious.

Groups of people who are subject to horrible violence have a shared and common response: coalesce. When your group is being attacked the natural human reaction is not to reflect, discuss, or think about the causes of this violence. The reaction is simple and clear, protect the group and reinforce the leadership so that they can do their best to protect the tribe. The examples of such a reaction are too numerous to count. When the British firebombed cities in Germany, they hoped to cause an uprising against Hitler and the Nazis. It had the exact opposite effect – people dug deeper into the Nazi cause. The same failed tactic was employed in Japan. When countries apply sanctions to countries like Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Russia with the hope of starving the leadership and driving an uprising, the exact opposite happens – people rally around the leadership who claim to protect the interests of the nation. This patten has been repeated over and over again and yet we learn nothing. More than anything else, humans are social animals and we will literally kill other people’s children rather than give up our position within our own tribe.

In the current genocide in Gaza I have been astonished by the Jewish community outside of Israel. It would be one thing for Israelis to whole heartedly support the massacre – which they broadly do (thought it is starting to slow), but the support by the North American Jewish Community for the massacre in Gaza has been rock solid. While there are groups such as Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) or Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) who advocate against the massacre of children (crazy!), all of the mainstream Jewish groups continue in December 2024 to push against any restriction whatsoever on ripping children to pieces. The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) just recently lambasted the Amnesty International conclusion that Israel is committing a genocide and insisted the Canadian government continue its policy of sending military equipment to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Within the religious organizations, almost no synagogue or temples have taken any meaningful action against the genocide or against the mainstream Jewish organizations. Even a highly progressive (on most issues) organization such the Mile-End Chavurah, where I live, refuses to take a position on killing tens or thousands of children or creating the largest group of amputees in history. Tribalism is a very deeply rooted part of society and it seems almost nothing can break its cohesion.

Organizations are difficult things to change. Because organizations are themselves a tribe with a leadership and a member body, they tend to have the same conservative and protective impulses as the broader tribe as the organization itself wants to protect the cohesion of the organization. Whether an organization is religious, secular, political or military in nature, they all seek stability before anything else. If we cannot set high expectations for organizations to take a stand on a moral issue, we could perhaps hope that liberal intellectuals who claim to seek enlightenment would shudder and then act when faced with overwhelming evidence of a genocide being conducted in their name. Self proclaimed luminaries who claim to fight tribalism, such as “anti-religion” television pundit Bill Maher, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker or Physicist David Deutsch have all spent decades claiming that tribalism and violence should be fought against. Yet, they all, still, remain firmly behind Israel as the massacres continue. These big men are in fact, quite small. Personally, I prefer to cross the proverbial Rubicon and distance myself from any tribe who finds it acceptable to kill children, even if that means losing some of my friends and family members as people of my tribe.

It seems very little can be done to prevent tribes from killing each other over and over again with no end in sight. Whether it was the Protestant-Catholic wars in Europe, the Tutsi-Hutu massacres in Rwanda, the communist-capitalist cold war battles or some other tribal conflict, humans have scarcely evolved. I wish I could offer some form of optimism amidst the surging increase in tribal conflicts in Sudan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere, but it is difficult to see much hope. The only solace I have found is in reading history and the stories of how despite all our past conflict, there was a slow and steady progress of humanism, with the torch of humanity often carried by a very small minority of people and luminaries from one generation to another. Let us hope that we avoid the worst in the years to come and somehow find a way to reduce tribal tensions and find our common humanity again.

Some thoughts on AI

AI is the talk of the town these days. Though the hype from OpenAI’s ChatGPT has now calmed a bit, there is still a general expectation that AI will revolutionize society, take jobs and solve many of our challenges. I must admit that even I was caught up in the fervor and felt that ChatGPT and large language models were a big step forward towards general artificial intelligence and the automation of many of our mundane tasks along with potential tools to make scientific breakthroughs. After a couple of years, my enthusiasm is more tempered.

AI is a catch-all term for many different techniques and approaches to building a machine that can reason in some form or another. While the current Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided a new and novel way of interacting with extremely large bodies of written material, they remain a specific set of techniques and mathematical tools. My current conclusion today (August 7, 2024), is that LLMs are helpful, but are also fundamentally limited. It is my feeling that LLMs are basically a new and more advanced form of Search. They allow you to interact with very large sets of information and receive responses that have been digested and reformulated in a way that sounds human. Though the responses sound human, they are are just reformulations of information that is already contained within the large dataset. LLMs have not clearly shown an ability to reason our provide material that is not already in existence. Yes, LLMs are taking bits of information at multiple layers and sticking them together to create something that appears new and novel, but it is unclear that it is indeed anything new and novel.

To be completely fair, a large proportion of human work in both business, administration and even the arts is all about taking various bits and pieces of information, various sources of inspiration and then creating derivative works that seem new. The evidence for this int he music industry and in writing are numerous and frequent. In that sense, AI and LLMs will have a large role to play as they are doing tasks and work that humans are doing. However, just because the LLMs can do this type of rearrangement of information does not mean they can reason outside the dataset itself.

Chess is a game with a clear winner and loser and a scale that indicates the strength of players. The scale ranges from about 400 ELO to 3200 ELO for the World Champion. This fascinating study shows how an AI trained on lower level chess games (1000 ELO) can play Chess at a higher level than its training set (1500 ELO). On the surface this may indicate that an AI can move out and above its training set, but upon closer examination this is not correct. Very often 1000 ELO players make a move in chess that is worth a 1500 ELO, but the players do not consistently play at 1500. The AI is basically able to grab the best moves from these low level players and recompose the data to play consistently at 1500. Interesting, but not true intelligence. When the AI is trained on a data set of 1500 ELO, where the higher caliber players tend to be more consistent in their play, the AI cannot really exceed the 1500 ELO level.

Beyond the technical limitations of LLMs and AI, there are a number of social considerations we can think about when talking about AI and its potential adoption. AI is creating interesting artwork, but does it matter? Humans ultimately want a few basic things. They want community, they want to create something and they want to be recognized by their pears. AI has a role to play in society and can in many cases act in helpful ways – everything from online psychologists, tutors and personal assistants – but I am skeptical it can replace our core human needs.

To take the example of Art. Humans love to create things, we see this from a young age with drawings and paintings all the way to full grown adults who have attained enough material wealth to retire but decide to continue to work and create out of pleasure or egotistical need or both. AI can create infinite quantities of art, film, video games and more, but is it worth anything? If we specifically look at the art world for clues, it is clear that humans place value on authentic art work that has a social value. We are willing to spend million of dollars on a piece of work by a famous artists that is a unique piece and is recognized by society as valuable and a status symbol. Instead of buying the expensive artwork you could by a reproduction that is completely indistinguishable from the original work with the exception of its known authenticity. Even forgetting about the million dollar work, many people will not pay for non-unique works of art because they recognize that something that is available in near-free infinite quantity has no value. This is broadly true of AI generated work: it is infinitely available and therefore of little value.

What is true of the value of AI art is also likely true of much of the material AI can and will produce. There is no point in generating mountains of AI marketing material, white papers or other items if there is a set limit on consumption. In the past the cost of creating mediocre quality marketing material was the cost of labour. Today, anyone can create unlimited marketing material at a next to nothing cost. Therefore, the quality of marketing material will come to matter much more than quantity. There are only so many hours in the day for humans and there is now far more material than we can ever consume. Humans will turn to higher quality material produced by reputable brands. More than ever, brand matters. It is critical to not dilute brand through AI shortcuts or else you end up killing the golden goose. Having actual expertise and being able to effectively communicate that to other humans though services and products will become the defining element of success. This is not a fundamental change, expertise has always been highly valued, but the landscape in which we operate has changed with more noise that experts will need to wade through to have their message heard.

At my company Nimonik, we have built a Regulatory and Industry Standards AI Chatbot that allows you to interact with laws, regulations, standards and other compliance information. We have built this with a team of two people, open source technology and infrastructure from Amazon AWS and a few other sources. It is an inhouse product and does not use commercial tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT. The tests of our chatbot over the last few months with industry experts shows that it is quite good and helpful, though not perfect. The point of the story here is that it does not take that many resources to build a robust chatbot that is quite helpful. As many AI investors are currently finding out, there is minimal ‘moats’ around these businesses and their ability to stay afloat will come under tremendous pressure from competition and self built tools.

One use case that AI/Computers is really good at is interpolating data from known data sets. This was done for Google’s project around GO and then for the work to map the structure of proteins with AlphaFold. The AI models and software they built has accomplished work that would have taken humans decades. This is very helpful. It is not however quite as revolutionary as we might thing. Google has basically built a giant calculator for protein structures. It is an important milestone that will accelerate medical research and discover and we should celebrate this accomplishment, but the tool remains a human driven tool.

Last, but not least, I recently had the chance to test Tesla’s famous Full Self Driving. I have owned a Tesla for 3 years and love it, but we did not purchase the Full Self Driving due to its cost and our rather infrequent use of our car. Tesla offered us a 1 month trial of this technology that Elon Musk keeps claiming to be near perfect and able to drive us anywhere with minimal human intervention. I was not impressed. On the highway the car did fine, but as soon as we were in town or had some slightly abnormal configuration the FSD stumbled. This is despite the fact that there are a ton of Tesla’s in Québec (maybe about 300,000) and therefore Tesla should have a very good dataset of our roads and infrastructure. From everything I saw, Tesla’s FSD is not capable of extrapolating outside of its knowledge base and really struggles with surprises. This is a fundamental problem that no one seems to have solved. The only true self driving experience is Waymo and they have solved the problem not through complex AI, but through good old fashioned super detailed mapping of roads and infrastructure. It seems that even Elon has not outsmarted a more primitive and basic approach to self-driving.

AI remains interesting and promising, but my main conclusion is that we are still far off from General Artificial Intelligence and it remains debatable whether it is even possible. For now we continue to make substantial progress in computer science, mathematics and computational power. This has produced OpenAI and other helpful products. We have stuck a label of AI on these tools and companies, but in reality they seem to be very much a continuation of our previous work that created all the technology and software we use today. Progress will continue to be made in a progressive and iterative way, the way it has always been done. Do not hope for miracles, but do expect more progress on many fronts.

The Bloodbath Continues

After 300 days or so since the October 7th attacks in Israel, the genocide of Gaza and the Westbank continues largely uninterrupted. Other mass killings in Sudan and elsewhere also continue along with ongoing massacres in Ukraine. None of these conflicts have much hope in sight.

Coincidentally, during these conflicts I have been progressively reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. If there is one message about war that echoes through time it is that it is both horrible and also a self propelling force. Once started, conflict, war, death and self-sacrifice by perfectly normal people becomes a growing snowball that carries forward despite any efforts to slow or stop it. The momentum of a conflict only stops once one side is completely destroyed or a stalemate emerges. Ukraine is leaning towards a stalemate. Gaza is leaning towards complete destruction. In Tolstoy’s Russia, the Napoleonic wars only ended when Napoleon’s 600,000 strong army was reduced to 50,000 thanks to Russian efforts, the scale of Russia and particularly, Russia’s winter. After that debacle, the end of Napoleon was inevitable.

Despite all the protests and all the efforts by Palestinian and Human Rights advocates around the world, Israel continues to erase Palestine from the face of the Earth. As the French Holocaust survivor stated, at this point the only thing we can do is document and bear witness to the genocide so that one day, maybe, some people may be held accountable. Like the genocide in Rwanda, the massacres in East Timor or the deaths by Pol Pot, the current war is a train that cannot be stopped until everyone is dead or incapacitated. There seems to be no one from the outside that will or can intercede and as long as the United States keeps sending money and weaponry to Israel, the Israeli nationalists will continue working hard to fulfill their clearly stated aim of establishing a Greater Israel that includes all of Biblical Israel and maybe more, even if the country is built on the corpses of Palestinian women and children.

There is little hope things will change, but let us at least document those are guilty and those who are complicit in these war crimes. One day we will look back on this massacre in the same way we look back on so many of our crimes.

The shame of it all

Next week I leave for a trip to China. Before COVID and before the war in Ukraine, you could fly direct from Montreal to Shanghai for less than $1,000 CAD. Today, a return trip is about $3,000 and you need to connect in another city, adding a least 10 hours or more to the trip. When I was last in China, about six months ago, you could feel the slow down of the economy and the change in tone. Things are not as buoyant as they once were.

Nearly twenty years ago in 2006, I made my first trip to China to work for Danieli Corus, a steel equipment manufacturer. That year I was a junior engineer working with the team in Beijing and helping in the small ways I could to support the senior engineers and sale staff. It was a truly remarkable experience. At that time the steel industry in China was red hot, with rapid expansion of capacity and modernization of equipment across the country. Beijing had only three metro lines and China had no high speed rail. Barely 20 years later, Beijing has 20 metro lines and China has twice as much high speed rail than the rest of the world combined. China was growing at insane rates and it was an exuberant atmosphere. Today, China is a modern and advanced country that offers a high quality of life to the vast majority of its citizens. The world around us has unfortunately changed somewhat.

With all the conflicts in the news – Gaza and Ukraine notably – it is easy to think the world is falling apart. I however took great solace in this article entitled “Beware of the Polycrisis” that outlines all the conflicts, wars, issues and nonsense we have survived in just the past 50 years. In short the world has muddled through innumerable conflicts from the cold war to genocide in Rwanda, conflict in the DRC, environmental disasters, rigged elections and much more. Are things worse than they were in the 1970s, 80s, 90s or 2000s – not really. For some people things are indeed much worse – notably Gaza and Ukraine today, but broadly speaking things are better for the vast majority of people. That is not to say that there are not tremendous problems in the world, but perhaps things are better than they seem?

What seems most worrying however is the apparent escalation in violence between large countries who have vast arsenals of weapons. The war in Ukraine is killing hundreds of thousands of people and is keeping Europe on the precipice of a broader conflict that is not prepared to fight. China is being pushed into a corner through trade wars and is turning towards Russia and the global south. Gazans are being exterminated and the support of the western political class for this massacre is creating a generational divide in many western countries. The violent suppression of student protests is making it abundantly clear that western governments have little tolerance for meaningful dissent and even less moral high ground. It certainly feels like the world is changing in a substantive way.

Geopolitical predictions are notoriously unreliable, but the person I currently most respect in geopolitics is John Mearsheimer who has laid bare the situation around the world. According to him, Ukraine will likely lose the war and cede parts of its territory. Gaza will be destroyed and its people will be killed or expelled. China will continue to rise and challenge the US. As for US domestic politics – who knows. Trump could very likely win, though that may help calm tensions on the geopolitical side. In Europe, the rise populist leaders and the right is real and scary. Debt is rapidly increasing due to interest rates. In short, we seem to be escalating unnecessary conflicts in a scary way.

What can be done? De-escalation needs to be our focus across the board. We need to de-escalate the actual violent conflicts in the world – notably Ukraine. This means negotiations and this is not appealing to western elites who think they can win, but it remains the only realistic hope for stopping a broader escalation or a long term problem in Europe. Gaza, sadly, is hopeless and the United States and the West seems intent on supporting Israel no matter what it does. Until that changes, there is not much that can be done. The biggest risk is of course US-China. This is where de-escalation matters most. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely this will happen, but we should aim to build greater bridges between the major powers in the world. In this respect, I do think China has a major role to play and I hope they take more leadership and leverage their relationships in the developing world. For my very small part, I continue to hope we can somehow calm the entire situation down. At home, we need to advocate for dialogue at the political levels and abroad we need to continue to travel, meet, discuss and attempt to build bridges wherever possible.