In a world where you can make anything, you must make things that matter.

This is the core idea behind The Bougnat. The Bougnat is about ideas for progress, peace, and beauty. Friday Night Working Hours is the next logical step: taking action to turn such ideas into things that matter. Thinking and making belong together. Ideas that never become things stay ideas, and things made without ideas rarely matter. Friday Night Working Hours is where The Bougnat moves from writing and reading to making.

Now, the interesting part. Friday night is when you do what you actually want to do: go out with friends, party, run, play games, watch a movie. Finding people in Geneva who sincerely want to spend that night working hard on something they really care about is not easy (or is it?). But I know they exist. Those people are who Friday Night Working Hours is for.

The criterion is not a specific category of work. It’s a behavioral signal: using your Friday night for work, no pay, no attention. It’s a signal that it matters to you. And if it matters to you, there is a decent chance that it will matter to other people too.

What you get at Friday Night Working Hours is fuel for your project ⛽️: WIFI, food, drinks, people.

What will you be working on? I don’t know. That’s for you to decide. Basically anything. The form is open and the possibilities are infinite.

So here we go. The Bougnat is starting a new chapter: Friday Night Working Hours.

It starts next week. Friday, 24th of April. Flocky La Loutre, 19:00, until you want to go home or party.

I am aware that the text below is quite intense and maybe not that enjoyable to read for some of you. Because of that, I made a comprehensive video which you can find at the end of the text. The video is not perfect but brings across the main arguments of my text quite well.

Thank you for sticking around and enjoy the read.

The world I see is governed by cause and effect. Every event is the result of the events that came before it. If we accept this deterministic view, we must also accept that for any clearly defined goal, there exists a single, mathematically superior next move at any given moment. This optimal move is not a matter of opinion. It is a physical reality dictated by the current state of all matter and energy. However, for the vast majority of goals, the challenge stems from the fact that while an optimal move exists, no individual possesses enough information to see it.

The core of this worldview lies in the distinction between the universal optimum and the personal optimum. The universal optimum is the move that would be made by an individual with total knowledge of every variable in existence. In contrast, the personal optimum is the best possible move an individual can make based on the limited information they currently possess.

Because we are finite beings, we are permanently separated from the universal optimum. We operate in a state of partial blindness, making choices based on a small fraction of the total information. This means that even when we make the most logical choice possible, it may still lead to failure because of unknown unknowns, which are factors that were physically real but hidden from our view.

Within this worldview, learning serves as the bridge between our limited perspective and the hidden reality of the universe. It is the deterministic mechanism by which an individual upgrades their internal models of cause and effect. Learning does not change the universal optimum directly, but it fundamentally alters the personal optimum. By acquiring new information and refining our logic, we become less ignorant. Every time we learn, we are reducing the total amount of information we are missing, allowing our personal decisions to align more closely with the reality of the universe. Without learning, an individual is stagnant, with it, they become a more accurate processor of reality.

Personal goals are the inevitable result of an individual’s total history. Biology, experience, and environment converge to create a specific trajectory. A goal is simply the manifestation of who a person is. Because the self generates the goal, it also defines the optimal path and the constraints that shape it. While no two people share the same history or optimal path, different individuals can still arrive at the exact same best next move.

The search for the best next move is complicated by the fact that both the individual and the universe are in a state of constant change. Information gathering and learning are essential for narrowing the gap between the personal and universal optimum, but they are not free resources. They cost time, and time means change. As time passes, the optimal move changes. A move that was perfect a moment ago may become useless as the environment shifts. Furthermore, as an individual learns and gathers more information, they themselves change. This internal change can shift the goal itself. Consequently, the true optimal move is a balance: it is the choice that uses enough information but happens quickly enough to be relevant. Waiting for perfect certainty is, in itself, a sub-optimal move because it ignores the reality of time.

This worldview redefines the quality of human decision-making by anchoring judgment to the outcome. In a deterministic universe, the value of a decision is validated by its results. Because success and failure are physical facts, good judgment is defined as the identification and execution of a personal optimum that successfully reaches the intended goal. It does not require alignment with the universal optimum, as a move can be effective without being the best move in existence.

A move that fails to reach the goal is, by definition, bad judgment. Such a failure represents a disconnect between the individual’s internal model and the physical reality of the situation. This occurs when the personal optimum fails to account for the deterministic nature of the world, whether through flawed logic, insufficient information, or an inability to act within the constraints of time. In this context, judgment is a technical evaluation of reliability. Consistent success demonstrates that an individual’s internal processor is calibrated to reality, while failure proves a lack of calibration.

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“At Kilometre Zero we are working on bringing people together around three ideals: beauty, progress, and humanity. That’s our mission.” or “At Kilometre Zero we are working on bringing people together to build projects in pursuit of three ideals: beauty, progress, and humanity. That’s our mission.”

I do feel a preference for the second version. It’s closer to the whole truth and more complete.

In march 2025 we launched Kilometre Zero Running Club and went from zero to 3 Geneva based membership offers, and 2 Paris based membership offers. 10 months later, in December 2025, we estimated our numbers to be the following:

We are very satisfied with that but what’s more important is that we stuck with our values (beauty, progress, humanity) without exceptions because its these values that define the people we attract and the culture we create. We also wanted to delegate some tasks to other club members from the beginning and let them take some responsibilities. We also prioritized speed and growth for the project to enter the Kilometre Zero 2.0 phase asap. We mostly managed to do that, with some occasional hiccups.

Kilometre Zero 2.0 is the phase in which we are broadening our focus, from running only, to applying our ideals and values to other areas and ultimately bringing them all together. In fact, Jehanne and I have been working on some other projects in parallel for years and we now want to make sure that these projects and all the people involved can supercharge each other and benefit from each other by organizing and coordinating around the same mission, the Kilometre Zero 2.0 mission. The Bougnat (blog), JehJeh (graphic design), ACT Capital (incubation and investment), and the 000 creative collective (creative studio) will all feed into the work and the mission of Kilometre Zero 2.0.

One more word on Kilometre Zero’s vision for the very long term. It might seem a little (or very) crazy but we believe if we do things right that Kilometre Zero could evolve into something truly fascinating, namely something similar to a network state.

My slightly modified definition of the network state: “A network state is a highly aligned community/ecosystem/network/club with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” This definition is slightly different from Balaji Srinivasan’s original definition (the person who came up with this idea).

Right now we are in the community and collective action phase. We will start with the territory phase in 2026 if everything goes well by opening a café in Geneva which will allow Kilometre Zero to have its first fully mission aligned “home base”.

I believe these are the most important ideas about Kilometre Zero 2.0. For the curious minds I encourage you to join one of our runs in Geneva or Paris, to check out Kilometre Zero’s Instagram page, and to keep an eye out for our website that we will be launching soon. Also, the network state website is a fascinating idea which I encourage you to explore if you are courageous enough, and have some time and energy. It’s a lot to take in.

That difference matters because change is automatic. Progress is not.

If you want to change outcomes, you need a model of what produces them. In plain terms, the world is made of parts that interact. When you understand the parts and the interactions, you can intervene. Not perfectly, not fully, but meaningfully. This is why understanding is power: it lets you touch the levers. But there is a crucial twist people miss. Parts do not just “have” properties; their properties get shaped by the environment over time. Education, incentives, scarcity, norms, tools, trauma, culture, technology, opportunity, and the stories people live inside all change what a person is capable of and what they will do. A lot of what gets called “human nature” is really “human nature under these conditions.” So changing the world often looks like changing conditions. You do not always persuade a person out of a behavior. Sometimes you change the incentives around the behavior and the behavior changes.

The thing doing this modeling and intervening is what we casually call a mind: an agent that predicts, chooses, and acts. You do not need heavy philosophy for this. You only need the basic idea that minds are what make bodies do things on purpose. Minds are what make humans active rather than passive. And because minds drive action, minds drive change.

Change is a physical fact. Better is a judgment. You can measure change with a ruler, a clock, a bank account, a sensor, a before and after photo. But you cannot measure “better” without bringing values into the picture. That is why arguments about progress go nowhere when people pretend “better” is objective. It is not. People care about different things: freedom versus security, tradition versus novelty, equality versus merit, stability versus exploration, nature versus civilization. Even when two people use the same word, they might be aiming at different outcomes.

At the same time, humans do agree on a lot. Not because morality is universal like gravity, but because humans are similar creatures with similar needs. Health, safety, respect, purpose, love, and control over one’s life create overlap. But overlap is not alignment. Which leads to the first uncomfortable truth: a world can change dramatically and still not “progress,” because progress depends on who is judging.

So here is a definition that avoids the usual confusion. Progress is when an agent looks at the world after an intervention and judges it to be better than before. Two consequences follow immediately. Progress is comparative, because it is always before versus after. Progress is value dependent, because it is always better for whom and by what standard. This is also why “progress” gets abused. People use it as a magic word that means “the future I want.” But if you are serious, you have to say what you are optimizing for, and you need feedback from reality, not applause from your tribe.

Now things get harder. Technology increases leverage. A single person can now affect millions through software, media, finance, biotech, and automation. That sounds like progress, but it is really power. When power increases, the upside gets bigger. You can cure, build, connect, educate, and scale. The downside also gets bigger. You can manipulate, polarize, surveil, destabilize, and automate harm. Add a second trend on top. As people experience different environments, they become more different. Their values diverge. Their sense of “good” diverges. That creates the second uncomfortable truth: more change plus more diversity of values can mean less shared progress. Not because nothing improved, but because improvement stopped being widely recognized as improvement.

This is why the dream of progress that makes everyone better off is mostly a fantasy. You can absolutely create changes that help almost everyone. Public sanitation, vaccines, cheap energy, reliable logistics, and literacy are massive. But everyone? Probably not. Some people define “better” as closer to nature. Others define it as more control over nature. Some want spiritual purity. Others want medical intervention. Some want openness. Others want borders. If your definition of progress requires unanimous applause, you will end up doing nothing. Progress is not consensus. Progress is responsibility under uncertainty.

Even when intention is clean, consequences do not ask permission. You build a technology that saves time, it changes labor markets, shifts power, breaks a community, and creates a new dependency. You lower costs, you increase consumption, you stress resources. You make a system “efficient,” you remove slack, and it becomes fragile. This is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to stop being naive. The world is a network of feedback loops. You push here, it bulges there. Often the people who pay the costs are not the people who get the benefits. So if you are serious about progress, you do not only ask “does this work?” You ask “who wins, who loses, and how do we notice fast?” The moral burden is not “never harm.” That is impossible. The moral burden is to pay attention, learn fast, and correct course.

This becomes even clearer when you notice that progress without a destination is the only honest version for humanity. If you have a clear destination, progress is easy to score. You want to run a 10K under a certain time, you either got closer or you did not. For humanity, there is no agreed finish line. No final state. So progress becomes iterative. You act based on your best current model. You observe outcomes, including second and third order effects. You update your model and your values if reality forces you. Then you act again. People hate this because it demands mental flexibility. It is easier to pick a banner and march forever. It is harder to keep checking whether your banner produces what you claim it produces. But if “progress” means anything, it means this loop.

And this is where the real enemy shows up: the frozen mind. The mind that cannot update. The mind that turns discomfort into denial. The mind that confuses consistency with truth. The mind that refuses to hold contradictions long enough to resolve them. If you cannot change your mind, you cannot claim to work toward progress. You can only claim to defend a position.

So where do we actually put our hands on the lever? One of the biggest levers is capital allocation. If you want to shape the future, you do not just debate ideas. You move resources. Capital is a coordination technology. It decides what gets built, who gets time, which experiments survive, which people get leverage, and which incentives dominate. Most capital flows toward what is safe, what is fashionable, what has short term metrics, and what can be narrated convincingly. That does not automatically produce progress. It often produces optimized stories and fragile systems.

So what does progress oriented capital look like? It starts with time. Many of the best outcomes compound slowly: trust, infrastructure, talent, research, and culture. If your structure forces short term exits, you will pick short term problems and short term solutions. It requires skin in the game, because if you win when others lose, you will eventually produce a world that hates you, and probably a world that breaks. It benefits from permanent capital, because a Berkshire style holding company model changes behavior. You can hold through volatility. You can invest in capability instead of optics. You can choose projects that look dumb in year one and inevitable in year ten. It demands outcomes over narratives, because if you cannot define “better” operationally, meaning what you will look at, what you will measure, and how you will notice harm, you will drift into storytelling. It respects reversibility, because the world is too complex for all in irreversible moves unless you are extremely sure. None of this is ethics theater. It is robust strategy under uncertainty.

There is also a part people avoid because it is boring: thinking is physical. If your sleep is bad, your judgment degrades. If you do not move your body, your mood lies to you. If you do not have real relationships, you start believing your own propaganda. So if you claim you want to work toward progress, there is a baseline that is not glamorous but is real. Sleep. Eat like an adult. Exercise. Love people and let them love you back. Keep your mind unfrozen. That is not self help. It is maintenance for the only instrument you have: the mind that models the world and chooses actions.

And after all the complexity, the ending is still simple. If progress cannot please everyone and outcomes are uncertain, why try? Because the alternative is worse. If you do not aim at making lives better, you aim at nothing. “Nothing” usually means defaulting to whatever incentives are already running. Many default incentives do not care about humans. They care about extraction, status, fear, and short term wins.

Trying to make the world better is better than not caring. Refusing to update your mind while you act is how you turn “progress” into harm. Progress is not a destination. It is a discipline: judgment, action, feedback, correction, over and over again.

Disclaimer: I co-wrote this article with AI. The arguments and ideas are mine. The final structure, some phrasing, and some vocabulary come from the AI. The truth is it’s already better than me at polishing text, and it makes for a better reading experience.

First, it’s very hard to get a thought or an idea from one person’s mind into another person’s mind. One reason is that ideas tend to adapt to the context they land in, like a chameleon changing colors in different environments. Ideas are also fragile. During packaging and transport they can easily break, like glass, or get reshaped like clay. Finally, ideas also need a reliable delivery method, but that part is not always reliable. Think of delivery methods as language, images, gestures, writing, voice, in person conversations, phone calls, and so on.

Second, it’s very hard to feel strong emotions but not act on them. I only recently became really aware of this. We all do it to some extent, but I have struggled to put words to it. Lots of people give huge weight to their emotions and let those feelings guide most of their decisions. Others numb their emotions and barely feel anything, and we tend to describe them as cold. What seems most useful is to feel strong emotions but still be able to choose whether we act on them or not. In that case feelings become a message or a data point we can integrate into our decision making.

This situation, while not being optimal, is a very interesting one, because it exposes some fundamental personality traits in people. Two of them that I want to talk about in this post are: integrity and conscientiousness.

A highly conscientious person is someone who is reliable, they keep their promises and do what they say they will do. They have self-discipline, manage to resist distractions and stick to plans. They are organized, meaning they know how to structure their environments and tasks efficiently. They pay attention to detail and quality. And finally, they are extremely goal-oriented, meaning they work persistently toward long-term goals. In other words, they do whatever needs to be done to achieve the things they said they wanted to achieve.

A person with high integrity is someone who does the right thing. There is an alignment between their strong moral and ethical principles and values, what they say they want to achieve, and the actions they take to achieve it. Basically, it’s someone whose actions are guided by strong moral and ethical principles and values.

Now, when we put integrity and conscientiousness together in a matrix we get 4 types of operators:

The idealistic dreamer - low conscientiousness, high integrity

This person knows what the right thing to do is, might even say that they are going to do it, but time after time fails to execute. In the US this type of behaviour is more and more common as you can see on the chart below. This results in a cohort which talks a lot, has a lot of the right opinions, and good intentions, but doesn’t do much about it. This makes life quite a lot harder for these people because a lot of the time life is about following through.

Below we zoom in on some sub-categories that make up the conscientiousness personality trait. As you can see they all get worse.

Unfortunately, even if a person has a good heart with the right values (high integrity) but is low on conscientiousness, there is a good chance that they will be seen as someone with low integrity. In fact, low conscientiousness increases integrity risk because it creates a lack of trust, and if you trust someone less, smaller inconsistencies can lead to larger decreases in perceived integrity.

That’s how quickly we find ourselves in the most “useless“ quadrant of the matrix: the slacker/con artist.

The slacker/con artist - low conscientiousness, low integrity

While being the most useless one it’s not the worst for society in my opinion. This person doesn’t operate based on good values and principles but they are also not doing much. So they only cause minimal direct harm. However, they indirectly cause a lot of harm, mostly because they leave a lot of space and make it acceptable for the Machiavellian operators to do their thing. The latter, being the worst and most dangerous one.

The Machiavellian operator - high conscientiousness, low integrity

The one liner that applies to this person is: the ends justify the means. They will do what’s necessary to reach their goal. For them it doesn’t matter whether their actions are morally and ethically sound and whether anyone gets hurt on the way.

Another bad thing here is that highly conscientious people are very good at learning and figuring things out on the fly, so this person will acquire the skills necessary to execute, no matter what.

The good news is that people’s personality is malleable. Integrity and conscientiousness can be learned. And so what we have to aim for and work towards, is the virtuous achiever.

The virtuous achiever - high conscientiousness, high integrity

This person achieves things while making sure that the actions they take to get there are the right ones. This is necessary for creating long-term value. Getting things done, guided by strong values and principles. Virtuous achievers are rare but they exist. We want them and we can “make them”.

We are starting off with 10 runners but are aiming to have 24 runners in total, made up of 12 women and 12 men. We also want to have at least two people at all times who have more or less the same level of performance, so that no one ends up doing their long runs and interval sessions alone.

This team is a performance-oriented group which will represent Kilometre Zero in the competitive running world. It will focus on distances such as 5k, 10k, 21k and 42k. These races are open to everyone who signs up but zero.performance shows up at these races as individual athletes, part of a team.

Also part of the team are physiotherapists, a coach, and a dietician, for now. The coach is necessary of course but the other two roles appeared a little by chance since some runners practice these jobs outside of running. These coincidences will be, we believe, a big strength for this team and not something most amateurs have easy access to.

All athletes in the team will have similar race goals and train together twice a week, minimum once a week. They will also be wearing the Kilometre Zero colours and embody the Kilometre Zero values. The 10 founding athletes were selected based on these values and, as I will describe later, their internal desire for progress.

Behind the existence of zero.performance is a strong belief that performance matters and that participating isn’t everything, whether that’s in sports or in life. In fact, sport is a great learning ground where we can practice what it takes to perform and then take these learnings and apply them in the real world.

We believe that performance is an important decision we can make. It means that we bring our best to the table, every time. And in the context of zero.performance, to perform is to give our best to improve, and help the team improve. As long as we do that, we are doing the right thing. If at the end the outcome is still not what we wanted that’s fine and a learning lesson we take with us to progress further. This is how we improve performance.

Performance also implies courage because to improve, to push back our limits, we must face pain and fears and overcome them. Practicing being courageous will allow us to perform better in every other area of our lives. Ultimately, it will improve how much we can show up in life for others and for ourselves. It will allow us to give more of ourselves to whatever the other things are that we are doing.

Without performance there wouldn’t be progress. A zero.performance athlete is someone who feels a deep need and determination to progress. We believe that zero.performance will nurture this need. Doing so successfully will “shape” people who are better prepared to create meaningful progress in the real world.

The need for progress is also what will keep us going when we have to suffer and be courageous during hard workouts. If what drives us are our insecurities, Strava stats, Instagram likes, bragging rights, or anything similar, we won’t last. But most importantly, we will be worthless, when it really matters, and for the people who need us.

That’s all I have to say about zero.performance for now. I will leave you with a quote from Caleb Olson, the winner of the 2025 edition of the Western States 100. He’s an incredible athlete and a very articulate writer.

Last week my grandfather told me that the reason my grandmother and he have never come close to even thinking about divorce is because they have always been able to discuss things and communicate no matter the challenge or obstacle they were facing during their almost 65 years of marriage. This reminded me that at the heart of every path forward lies the exchange of ideas and information through communication and discussion. No problem can be solved and no creation is being made without the exchange of information and ideas between people.

This also applies to tech companies, and science and research projects. NASA, Space X, or Google have become what they are today, and achieved incredible things, not because of a single genius but because of a lot of smart and creative people who have collaborated towards a visionary goal.

The same goes for brands. They too communicate with people, not through words, but through the creations that make the brand who they are. Clients who identify with a brand, receive and understand its message. The success of a brand comes from good communication and the resulting collaboration between the brand and its clients.

Discussions and conversations don’t have to happen in one place with a specific group of people. They happen at different scales of space and time. It’s well known that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. I think about these giants as everlasting conversations happening between the people that came before us, whose work and ideas are still around today, and every person building on it today and in the future.

When I’m writing down my thoughts and reflections, I know that I’m having a discussion with you, my readers, but since I’m publishing this openly on the internet I do not know who the people or the machines will be who might be joining this conversation in the future. This is in large part why I’m publishing these articles. You never know. Right now it might just be me and you. But who knows, maybe we will be joining some larger, longer, and lasting conversations in the future, which might be really impactful and important to have for people and humanity.

You have to get the right people to do the right thing at the right time.

Right is defined in relation to a goal and a context. Doing the right thing is about getting closer to a goal, knowing and anticipating the change in context that is occurring at the same time. Right defines the best possible action to take.

The right people are people with specific characteristics and skills. What’s even more important are their values. In the equation of reaching a particular goal, people are definitely the most complex and unpredictable variable. But when you get it right, when you choose the right people, it’s also the most powerful one.

The right time, means that the best action an hour ago might not be the best action to take right now, or two hours from now.

For anything, for any goal, if you get these three things right, over and over and over again, you can be certain to achieve your goal.

What an amazing world that would be. One in which caring for others doesn’t only fulfil your heart but also enables you to pay the bills, months or years in advance.

Making things for each other because we care for each other. That’s the philosophy behind 000.cc a newly launched creative collective by Kilometre Zero. The people we want to attract here are the best in their field of creation, and we believe that the best creatives are those who truly care. No creative can truly be great without deep care for others. If you don’t care you won’t be able to create what really matters to people - real beauty. And ultimately, real beauty is in everything that moves humanity forward.

The list below shows the skills we will start with based on the skills that we are expecting to need for upcoming projects. We also think that this list will expand rapidly.

You can find us on Instagram: @000.c.co

Humans are extremely good at detecting bullshit in others when interacting physically. Funny enough humans are also extremely bad at bullshitting others when interacting physically. Combine these two facts and you can see why bullshitting someone in the physical world is really hard.

I’ve thought about this quite a lot lately, especially in relation to Kilometre Zero Running Club, the people we want to attract, the brand, the values we want to embody and transmit, and more generally: what makes a brand which relies on people meeting physically a success?

At Kilometre Zero Running Club we want to embody three values: humanity, beauty, and performance. This in every way you can think of. So far we think that the people who have connected with us and who have come back to run regularly, embody these values. And we are really proud and happy about that.

But, how did we get there? Let me speculate. We did not know about or define these values initially. We started by listening to ourselves, to our wants, and then looked for how to meet these wants. Wants are what defines people and their behaviours. And so, what resulted was Kilometre Zero, a genuine embodiment of who we are, meaning what we wanted —beauty, humanity, and performance. We created something we wanted first and abstracted what it is through words second.

If we hadn’t done it in that order or had tried to create something that doesn’t represent us, and had tried to “sell” it anyway as being genuinely us, it wouldn’t have worked, precisely because people would have called bullshit.

I believe the lesson is: the closer the thing you create for people is something physical that people experience fully, the more it has to be genuine and close to who you are and what you want. There doesn’t seem to be another way that gets you the same results. Even if you are really good at pretending or you are lucky to come up and get started with something that people like without it being genuine, you won’t be able to make it last. You will get exposed sooner or later and people will lose trust and not forgive you. Your creation will fall apart.

So don’t bullshit people, especially when it’s about real physical experiences. It simply won’t work.

I was eight years old when I visited Leonardo’s birthplace in Vinci, near Florence. And I was sixteen when, together with my father, I climbed the steep mule track that leads from Fiesole to the top of Monte Ceceri. From this hill, 415 meters high, one could admire a beautiful panorama of Florence and much of the Arno River valley. I remember it was the height of summer, the heat was oppressive, and on a sun-faded sign, I read for the first time the legend of Leonardo's flying machine. According to tradition, around 1506, Leonardo had his friend Tommaso Masini—nicknamed "Zoroastro"—test a prototype of a machine inspired by the flight of birds. And for this, he chose Monte Ceceri as the launch site. It is said that, having leapt from the hill, Zoroastro glided for over a thousand meters, finally crashing near Fiesole and breaking both legs. Now, regardless of the fact that this episode is almost certainly false, I was deeply struck by the lesson of the story as a young boy, which would be this: beyond everything, and against every possible negative prediction, pursue your truth, try and try again, never discouraging yourself, until you achieve what you desire.

Leonardo, born in Vinci in 1452, was a multifaceted genius and a complex figure. The illegitimate son of the notary Ser Piero and Caterina (probably a Circassian slave), he was ambidextrous from birth, and thanks to a natural predisposition for drawing, he became an apprentice to the Florentine painter Verrocchio at an early age. His life and works were influenced by an insatiable curiosity and a dedication to continuous learning. Michael J. Gelb, in his book How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci (2000), identified seven key principles that embody Leonardo's genius and can be applied to everyday life.

1. Curiosity: Leonardo was known for his 360-degree thirst for knowledge. His "to-do lists" ranged from mathematical questions to hydraulic research. His curiosity even led him to dissect over thirty human bodies to fully understand anatomy. The lesson you, as a reader of these words, should take is: cultivate an insatiable curiosity and never take anything for granted. Ask fundamental questions ("Why?" "How does it work?") and be open to exploring fields of knowledge beyond your own, as deep understanding often arises from the interconnection of disciplines. Never stop learning.

2. Demonstration: Leonardo believed in the importance of verifying knowledge through experience. He was a "disciple of experience" and claimed that sciences were vain without it. One example is his experimental technique for painting The Last Supper (mixing tempera and oil on plaster instead of adopting the traditional fresco). The moral of the story: do not accept knowledge passively, but seek to verify it through practical experience. Be tenacious in the face of challenges and do not fear making mistakes; consider errors as valuable opportunities for learning and adaptation rather than definitive failures.

3. Sensation: Leonardo emphasized the importance of refining the senses, especially sight. He believed that the average person looks without seeing and listens without hearing. His ability to observe minute details is evident in his works. If you want to take inspiration from this principle, cultivate sensory awareness. Pay attention to the details of the world around you, not just with your eyes but with all your senses. This will help you perceive reality in a richer way and discover new nuances and inspirations.

4. Sfumato: This principle concerns the acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty. Many of Leonardo's works remained unfinished, reflecting his openness to the complexity and mystery of life. The lesson to be learned is simple: accept that not everything must be perfectly defined or "completed." Sometimes, leaving room for ambiguity and uncertainty can allow for greater depth, evolution, and openness to new interpretations, both in ideas and projects. Learn to navigate complexity without the need for immediate resolution.

5. Art/Science: Leonardo integrated science and art, logic and imagination. His map of Imola for Cesare Borgia (1502) is an example of how he combined cartographic precision with artistic sensitivity. If you want to benefit from Leonardo's experience, remember to integrate logic and creativity into every aspect of your life. Do not rigidly separate analytical thinking from imaginative thinking. Great innovations often arise when different perspectives are combined, drawing on both scientific rigor and artistic vision.

6. Body Awareness: Leonardo cultivated grace, ambidexterity, and physical fitness. He was known for his physical strength and his extensive anatomical studies, which aimed to understand the body as a coordinated system. Pay attention to your physical well-being and body awareness. Stay active and develop new physical skills. Recognize how health and bodily balance influence your mind and ability to think and create, and how the body is a fundamental vehicle for self-expression.

7. Connection: Leonardo saw the interconnection of all things. The Vitruvian Man is a perfect example of how he linked human proportions to geometric proportions, uniting man with the universe. The most important lesson to be learned is to adopt a holistic perspective: seek to identify connections and analogies between phenomena, ideas, and people that at first glance seem unrelated. Understanding the web of relationships between things can lead to deep insights and innovative solutions that escape a sectoral approach.

The life and works of Leonardo continue to inspire and offer valuable lessons to anyone wishing to expand their mental and creative horizons. Betty Edwards, in her famous book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), explored brain plasticity and the functioning of the two hemispheres in relation to creativity and learning. The cerebral hemispheres are like two team members, each with their own playing style. The left hemisphere is the rational thinker, the lover of words and numbers, the one that analyses every detail and organizes information logically. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is the dreamer, the creative one, perceiving the world intuitively and visually. It is the master of images, emotions, and deep connections. According to Betty Edwards, many people tend to favour the left hemisphere because society places greater value on logical and analytical thinking. But training the right hemisphere, following Leonardo's example of curiosity and open-mindedness, can help cultivate one's own genius. The secret probably lies in maintaining a dynamic and never passive approach to the inputs you receive. In fact, elusiveness is the most distinctive trait of Genius. Everyone surely has their own personal inclinations, but Leonardo's case shows what can be achieved by stimulating the interconnection between the logical and the creative plane. So, it’s not impossible! Trying to reconcile one's deepest faculties, embracing the complexity of the world and the perceptions our brain draws from it, may be enough to reveal our own "inner Genius." And who better than you—the one reading—could truly understand yourself? Just try it, for once: throw yourself into the fray and experience first-hand the possibilities of continuous becoming. Leonardo knew this perfectly well, as he wrote in one of his most famous aphorisms:

If your daily activities demand good judgment or require you to evaluate reality, then movement is key. Since we all act in the world every day, it applies to everyone. Of course, for some a big salary might depend on it, while for others it’s just about not hitting their little toe against the sofa over and over again. Below, I want to share a couple of observations that make me believe that.

• The school years during which my mental performance was at its best, were the years when I was exercising regularly with my handball team. Even during the times when I was physically exhausted, I still had a very clear mind.

• The COVID-19 period led to fewer activities and less movement in my life. Looking back, it caused a slight disconnect from reality, and I actually believe it did so for a lot of people. This could be observed in the markets and the irrational predictions that were made about the future, reflected in company valuations.

• When I start my day with exercise, I feel that I can more intuitively distinguish between what’s real, the stories I tell myself or that others tell themselves, and fears and worries. I make fewer mistakes. It makes things easier and leads to better judgment and better actions.

• I rarely come across people who barely move and still demonstrate good judgment, no matter the situation they find themselves in.

• Movement between sessions of challenging mental work helps me come back fresh, with more clarity.

• I can’t help but be impressed by the clarity of thought some athletes show after their races. I noticed this last winter when I watched biathlon racing and listened to the post-race interviews. There is a sense of real experience in their words. The opposite often occurs when listening to interviews or talk shows featuring some politicians, for example.

An important message here is: if you feel that your judgment isn’t good, leading to unjustified fears, anxiety, or unsuccessful actions, a useful way to frame it is that you have lost touch with reality. In that case, a useful thing to try is more regular exercise, ideally in the morning, outdoors, and with people.

To me, movement is more impactful than food, reading, coffee, or any other method for better mental performance and good judgment. I also believe that laziness and obesity caused by a lack of movement are valid indicators for distrusting the judgment of many people who show these characteristics.

Of course, this isn’t something you should apply by default, but I think it’s worth considering. I also know that some people might be offended by that, but if you are, I challenge you to move more for a year or so and then come back to this article and let me know whether you noticed an improvement in your overall judgment and decision-making. I’m confident that you will.

From the universe, we emerged, as a part of it. With it came the capacity to create a mental model of the universe itself.

Our bodies, our physical selves and their properties, define the basic nature of the mental world model that we experience. They also determine which information about the universe we can gather in the first place. Our limited selves therefore receive only limited information, from the whole that is out there. The best way to describe this situation is as a limited informational model of the whole that exists.

Based on this information we then imagine the world around us. This is how we “build” everything we experience: we take in a stream of information and, through imagination, create a coherent whole in our minds. This mental model is the whole of our experience.

Our mental model defines our freedom, within it we can act freely. Yet the same model restricts us because it limits our experience of the universe as a whole.

The model evolves and adapts so we can get what we need and want, avoid danger, eat, reproduce, feel love, etc. We can also drive its evolution ourselves by actively learning. New information is the only path to discovering anything new about the universe. We either learn directly or invent tools unlike ourselves that can gather different information, which we can then absorb.

In brief, I’m putting needs and wants at the centre of my line of reasoning. Imagination is what lets us create an experienced world. Understanding is finding patterns and explanations within this imagined whole. A well working body and brain let us imagine a more accurate world, spot those patterns, and act in ways that meet our needs and wants. Since our entire experience is this mental model, we must think of the universe at the most fundamental level as information, information we have and information we don’t have.

If you asked a doctor, it’s very likely that they would say that there is no way. But that’s because understanding why all diseases might be solvable has to do with physics, computers, and the nature of intelligence and less with the practice of medicine itself.

I’m using the word solvable and not curable because there is a difference between a solution to a problem and actually hands-on solving it. To illustrate, the procedure for a successful surgery isn’t the same as actually doing a surgery.

The person claiming to be able to solve all diseases by 2035 is Demis Hassabis. To understand why he does so and whether it’s a plausible claim, we have to get to know Demis and his goals first.

Demis’ life goal has been to understand the nature of reality; he’s on a search for truth, to find answers to the big questions. What’s time and consciousness? What is the meaning of it all? And how is it that our brains can understand and figure out things in the first place? He has thought about questions like that for 30+ years, and they have been his main driver on his path through life.

He’s asking the questions physicists have been asking forever and he believes in a multidisciplinary approach, experiencing several disciplines in depth to find useful concepts that he can use to answer his questions.

From being the captain of the England chess youth team, to designing and programming video games, becoming a computer scientist, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, founding DeepMind, and finally winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year, to say the least, he seems to creep closer to his goal.

Today, most people think of Demis as a CEO and artificial intelligence researcher. One with really strong beliefs in what AI will be able to achieve. He believes that AI will allow him to reach his goal: building a computer system so intelligent that it can answer his questions for him.

His PhD in neuroscience gave him the existence proof of intelligence in the human brain. He then founded DeepMind in 2010, with an ambitious mission, which at the time was stated as Step 1: solve intelligence; Step 2: use it to solve everything else. DeepMind gave themselves a 20 year timeline to create such a system that would be capable of solving everything else. Today, we are 15 years into this journey.

DeepMind has been able to keep up with its schedule. In the past years, they have created AlphaZero, AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, Gemini, one of the most accurate weather forecasting model in the world called GraphCast, and a few others. And then, very recently, Demis announced that he believes that by 2035 all diseases could be solved. For that, he created Isomorphic Labs with the mission statement: Solve all disease.

I believe that this is highly probable.

To achieve it, Demis and his companies must stay focused on his long-time goal. This is crucial considering he is probably the only one who has thought about this for 30+ years and who has been constantly achieving milestones. He probably has the best intuition of all people on earth, on what direction to take and what to do next. If someone is on the right path, then it’s probably him. So he must keep pushing forward.

Today’s AI systems can already go beyond what anybody teaches them. Meaning, they express some level of creative behaviour. They have some imagination. But their level is limited. Demis describes 3 levels of creativity:

• Level 1: Interpolation: for example, averaging images of cats and drawing a cat.

• Level 2: Extrapolation: for example, AlphaGo, move 37.

• Level 3: Invention: it could invent the game of Go or invent general relativity with the same information Einstein had at the time.

At the moment, no AI system is at level 3. However, it’s not sure that level 3 of creativity is needed to “solve all disease.” It seems more likely that level 2 is enough, the same level that was needed to solve protein folding.

It is true that a statement such as “Solve all disease” is useful to attract talent. And since Isomorphic Labs just raised 600 million, they are looking for the best talent in the world to go after their mission. However, given Demis’ history and achievements, he seems to be very accurate in his statements and predictions. On top of that, he already has access to all crucial resources: money and talent from DeepMind and Google, and support from Sergey and Larry, the two cofounders of Google who still today have absolute voting power at Google, which DeepMind is a part of. And they are 100% behind Demis.

There is one potential obstacle, however, which is simply bigger than anything Demis and his companies might be able to overcome. Namely, that the nature of the universe itself simply doesn’t allow them to solve all diseases. This has to do with the nature of the AI systems, which types of problems they are able to solve, and with the nature of complexity in the natural world.

For a problem to be solvable by today’s AI systems, the problem has to have a “massive combinatorial search space, a clear objective function (metric) to optimise against, and either lots of data and/or an accurate and efficient simulator.” Demis argues that every problem found in nature is such a problem. He believes that nature is full of patterns and structures that these AI systems will be able to recognize. This would include human health, which includes all diseases. But he of course has no proof for that and bases this belief on what he has been able to observe in his work and through the problems his previous AI systems have been able to solve.

I believe that he is right about being able to “solve all disease” because I believe in his view of what the best explanation is of what the world is made of, namely Information (more about that in my next article). I do not, however, have any idea about the timeline of when it will happen. I simply do not know enough about the actual happenings at AI companies. But if someone in this industry has to be taken seriously when mentioning goals or timelines, then that’s Demis.