Wonderful read. So cool to me that this essay explains the Marchetti Constant (new to me): 'The average person spends ~an hour a day commuting regardless of the distance traveled.' It's not a new observation, but this piece—a founder offering 10,000 words on everything you need to know about flying cars—highlights the lovely convergence of business with learning and research. Today, companies and their founders increasingly surface powerful ideas, engage seriously with new theoretical and empirical work, explain what they have learned to wide audiences, and even maintain a dialogue with centuries-old traditions. In all of this they are way more engaged with the conversation about these ideas in the public domain. This kind of engagement has always existed in some form. If you look at the library of J. P. Morgan, see the way Edison engaged the public, or read about the history of accounting, it's clear that industrial giants or successful merchants were never completely shorn of richer traditions of knowledge. My sense, though, is that in the late 20th century, perhaps for many reasons at once, including managerial ones (see Burnham), the connections were not made as explicitly. Academia and corporations became increasingly separate worlds. You still found analysis that blended business, rigorous academia, and storytelling in The Economist, the FT, and the occasional standout Wired piece. But it occupied its own world. In the last 10 years, we've started to have a much healthier ecosystem (at least online) of dialogue across these boundaries. Founders, investors, and business communicators who explain, debate, and engage with serious ideas rather than standing apart from them. There's a lot driving this convergence of business and intellectual life. The ability to go direct to customers, employees, and investors. The importance of 'worldbuilding' for finding / forming an audience (see @Alex_Danco's essay on why he joined a16z). The increasing sophistication of companies at the frontier creating novel insights to share. Technology companies with large margins and capital to spare for experiments. There's also demand from customers and communities for their companies to speak to them in this way. When founders and their companies share complex ideas that are in dialogue with the broader history of science, technology, society, art, and philosophy, it can be a profound gift to offer to a community. It is also a kind of proof-of-work. A way to show authentic engagement with a real problem. This is not fully distinct from 'content marketing'—and obviously anyone talking about ideas related to their own business will be in the thick of it. Yet, when the ideas are clear enough and the explanations lucid, it simply becomes extremely hard to fake real understanding. The risk is more similar to the one a journalist or an academic runs when presenting a new idea. If their career or identity is bound up in a certain position, it can naturally colour their work. A careless reader may miss a jump in logic or a subtle, pervasive bias. It's real, but something we accept every day. This trend is still early. In the breadth of distribution as well as the depth and rigour of ideas, there is still a huge gap between the best products of the business world and the greatest intellectual work. Borrowing a phrase from Borges, William Egginton wrote in The Rigor of Angels that Kant and Heisenberg pushed so far towards a completely accurate description of reality that they ran up against the very limits of understanding. How many businesses have similar aspirations for the way they engage in public discussions? Could they? Even without the most outlandish version of this, I can imagine a very different, optimistic world where many communities are embedded in a wide ecosystem of ideas that owe a lot to companies and founders alongside the other traditional modes of learning. This may become its own kind of rich education — not just an education via access to facts, but one that exposes people to trained judgement and great teachers. The kind a previous generation might have assumed they had to be in university to access. A world that rhymes with the patronage, arts, and deep civic engagement you would see in Franklin's Philadelphia or the Medici's Florence.

One of the things that makes for a style rather than just a shared aesthetic is that the designers submit themselves to a set of, what can appear more or less arbitrary, rules so that they can be in genuine dialogue with the other designers working in that style. A style must take a philosophical stand and have invariant practices for how to express it. Gothic cathedrals are immediately recognisable because there was a driving philosophy of communion and clear rules that the architects knew and refused to break so that they remained within the tradition. Obviously, this includes pointed arches, but it also includes: a three-storey interior, cruciform plan, ambulatory around the choir, window tracery, ribbed vaults... The artistic expression that developed within this style was downstream of working according to this rulebook. And it was extremely varied! Chartres and King's College Chapel are worlds apart. Part of the reason that the Bauhaus-inspired modernist aesthetics that dominate modern architecture feel so bland is that they reject the constraints of style unequivocally. Yes, they all have a somewhat similar aesthetic in having flat roofs, boxes, grids, etc. But this is more because they refuse to engage with any specific kind of ornament, and so are reduced to bare forms. The architects themselves would say being part of a style would be a failure. As Gropius said: 'A “Bauhaus Style” would have been a confession of failure and a return to that very stagnation and devitalizing inertia which I had called it into being to combat.' If we are really going to develop a new style in architecture or any other art, the architects, the artists must take a stand on what that style requires. This building could be a glorious direction. A firm commitment to meaningful ornament independent of structural system, a recognition of continuity with biological and geological systems, and a deference to human public-realm experience. This might include: a massing that transitions from heavier, human-scaled ground floors up to double-height upper floors, consistent self-similar patterns at multiple scales, arched openings that are expressive rather than load-bearing, and repeating arcade rhythms. A single building is never enough on its own. Many buildings gesturing at something together might produce an aesthetic. If we want a style, we will need to rally behind some real constraints that architects are willing to defer to. This of course brings risks. It is so easy to end up worshipping ashes rather than having faith in something generative. But if we want to create beautiful places rather than just beautiful buildings, we have no choice but to do it eventually.