“You Can See Everything” is one of the great film-making experiences of my lifetime. That’s not even a particilularly hot take these days. If you need a recommendation, yes, four stars, you should see it. The singular dominant theme, for my money, was the grand telephone game that “truth” is distilled through as it skips from source to source, medium to medium. By the end of the film you may find that, like me, you have updated your priors a half dozen times, left with your hands up in the air as the crushing weight of subjective reality threatens to abandon you in a fog of nihilism. Then you get home, rewatch the documentary (“The Inventor: Out for Blood”), scroll through a few bullet points of the actual case and remind yourself that no, this person is very much a crook.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is confidence.
We are told, repeatedly and with hardly any caveat, that confidence is a good thing. An admirable thing. A sexy thing. But confidence can very much be a trap, particularly if confidence becomes your comparative advantage.
The parable of the young genius has become rooted in the tale of frustrated and constrained greatness. They are precocious and unruly, possibly with a history of mild behavioral issues or sullen solitude. They follow the “normal” track for a few years, often to a prestigious college, where they catch a glimpse of great possibility and simply can’t be held back any longer. They drop out and become an entrepreneur. They pursue investment and promise unblinking greatness and unfathomable innovation with the kind of a committed sureness that only youth can provide.
They are not tradditional frauds, at least not yet, because they believe it everything they say. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve never been wrong. The first time they stepped into an environment where they might be challenged they left before any incontrovertible truths might be controverted. Let’s stop the story here because it rarely actually starts in such a way and, if it does, it usually ends quickly. Which is for the best. It’s not crazy to suggest that the best thing that can happen at this stage is failure. Whether it’s an expert in your field explaining the fallacy underlying your grand promises or venture capitalists simply sniffing out a bad investment, the train stops and you can return to building yourself. You had a good life experience, a new perspective on your own education and skills, and the a greater appreciation for what it means to have something to contribute. No harm, no foul.
But that’s not what happens to a lot of people. Not just undergraduate drop outs either. It’s what can happy to anyone that the market anoints as special. That hype can fuel you until you’ve been running on it for so long you realize, perhaps too late, that you’re no longer selling a product or even yourself. Your selling the story of you. You change you’re title on LinkedIn to “thought leader”, “visionary”, or “futurist”. You think you are selling yourself, but you’re not. There’s nothing there to sell.
And this where the trap is. What you are selling is your confidence in the words coming out of your mouth. The problem is that the words themselves don’t have any value. You don’t know how things work. You don’t know, actually know, biochemistry. Or stochastic modeling. Or tokenization and neural network modeling. You know of them and how to reference them in a manner that obscures your own lack of understanding. The only thing you know is your continued exististence in this market is dependent on continuing to dazzle others with the kind of confidence they can only dream of posessing. You’re a carnival barker without a carnival. And eventually someone’s going to walk into an empty tent and they’re going to be pissed.
And that is terrifying.
When you watch “You Can See Everything”, pay attention to how hard they are working to maintain the image that they know what they are talking about. The 3X speed videos, the vocabularly internalization. They know of chemical reagents. And mechanism design. And blood. And lasers. And whatever it is they desperately need to convince people they know about. And notice to who they scrupulously avoid ever interacting with: anyone with actual scientific or technical expertise. They are always cramming for a exam they didn’t study for. I’d call them dilettantes, but dilettante implies non-trivial, if thin, knowledge about a lot of things. Genuine knowledge. They aren’t dilletantes, they’re frauds.
Imagine Elizabeth Holmes was never sent to prison. What would she be doing right now? It’s pretty obvious to me that she’d be doing exactly the same thing. Selling grand visions wrapped unwavering confidence because that is the only thing she knows how to do.
I’m not saying being confident is going to turn you into a fraud. What I’m saying is that you need to have the skills, knowledge, and other forms of human capital first so that you can offer those skills to the world confidently. Confidence is a social lubricant in a market full of imperfect information. It’s useful as a complement, often necessary but never sufficient. To sell naked, untethered confidence itself is to be a confidence person.
You know. A con man.
Lasers!
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