I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about

memes and meme theory, that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology

and conjecture and criticism. And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth, the set of physical

transformations that you can affect. That takes into account both capital and knowledge, and it clearly shows that knowledge is a bigger component.

And then that can be brought into business and applied into your everyday life.

It can apply to the wealth of nations, and it can apply to the wealth of individuals.

So there are a lot of parts that interconnect together.

He says that good explanations are hard to vary.

So when you look back on a good explanation,

you say, well, how could it have been otherwise? This is the only way this thing could have

worked. All these different parts fit together and constrain each other in such a way that there's

now some emergent property or some complexity or some outcome that you didn't expect,

some explanation that neatly explains everything. That doesn't just apply to good explanations. It applies

to product development. Good products are hard to vary. Go look at the iPhone, this smooth, perfect,

beautiful jewel, the form factor hasn't really changed that much since the original one. It's all

around the single screen, the multi-touch, embedding the battery, making it fit into your pocket,

making it smooth and sliding in your hand, essentially creating the platonic ideal of the truly

personal, pocketable computer. So that product is hard to vary. Both Apple and its competitors

have tried to vary it across 16 generations of iPhone, and they haven't been able to

materially vary it. They've been able to

improve the components and improve some of the underlying capabilities, but materially, the form

factor is hard to vary. They designed the right thing. There's the famous saying, I think from

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