Tom Morgan is Director of Communications and Content for the Knall/Cohen/Pence (KCP) Group at Stifel. He writes a weekly missive called The Attention Span, which curates and synthesizes content, ideas and frameworks to help readers make sense of an increasingly complex world.

Tom, Richard, Mike and Adam wandered into a wide range of topics, but the central theme orbited around humanity’s universal craving for meaning and connection in the vacuum created by the post-modernist Western focus on empirical rationalism. Along the way we touched on the following subjects:

• The central importance of authenticity and following your passion to stand out and build community in an increasingly hostile information ecosystem
• The importance of intuition as a connection to the “extended mind” and the example of George Soros’ sore back
• The human obsession with the sacred and the profane, and how this need manifests in tribalism in the absence of religious context
• The West’s devilish obsession with left-brain priorities like data, taxonomies, definitions, and process, which are devoid of context and meaning
• The critical role of emergent dynamics in shaping our world from the bottom-up
• The potential for evolutionary processes to converge on awful solutions
• Potential dangers in applying constraints or directions in complex dynamic systems
• How asymmetrically powerful actors like Facebook’s engagement AIs might corrupt natural evolutionary processes and lead us down a dark path
• Why we are accelerating toward universal irrelevancy and must soon rethink the value of individuals and our social contracts
• How to “dance” with complexity and find the joy in adapting rather than controlling
• Why all meaningful change happens at the border of order and chaos
• Why the most important leaps forward always seem insane right up to the point when they are universally accepted

This is obviously a long list, but there is so much more between the lines and in the connective tissue of the discussion. The ReSolve crew had a lot of fun with this conversation and we think you will too.

Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week.

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day, hosted by Adam Butler, Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo of ReSolve Global* and Richard Laterman of ReSolve Asset Management.

*ReSolve Global refers to ReSolve Asset Management SEZC (Cayman) which is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator. This registration is administered through the National Futures Association (“NFA”). Further, ReSolve Global is a registered person with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.