Bedside Manner

...and a Nikola Tesla collaboration with another author

When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain... and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
Nikola Tesla, 1926

This sounds like a made-up quote from a hundred years ago, right? If I was the editor looking at a sci-fi novel and this quote was referenced as predicting the world of 2025, I’d say it was a little too on-the-nose.

Tesla was, in many ways, a man born in the wrong century. He saw that wireless communication would be able to empower near-instantaneous communication all over the world, and he was right—just a little early.

Communication was Nikola Tesla’s passion, and it was also his curse. Let me step back for a moment.

Before I get too into Tesla today, I want you to know that this is a part of a collaboration with

Keva Epale

, who publishes

Your Creative Letter

here on Substack. Keva and I bonded almost immediately over our shared enthusiasm for creative endeavors, and we are excited to finally be able to work together on a project like this. Tesla’s story is the perfect shared medium for us to explore. As a result, we’ve timed the publication of these two joint pieces—each tackles a completely different aspect of the story.

The funny thing about communication is that you can work on it your whole life, and still run into the same sorts of issues. Consider me as an example: I’ve inadvertently practiced communicating for nearly my entire life.

I began tutoring kids in high school math class, and I pretty much never stopped teaching or helping other folks. I created zines and DIY publications in physical form at first, then on the web as the internet made so many of my dreams come true.

I’ve stood in front of groups of people thousands of times, communicating a message I hope is clear to my audience—maybe it’s a jiu jitsu class, or maybe it’s a regular meeting with business partners. I’ve also written millions of words (probably about a million here on Substack)—some of it has been correspondence, but a lot more has been me trying to communicate a message to an audience.

The two things I’ve come to realize are that I’m still terrible at getting what’s inside my own head into someone else’s head, and: communication is really, really hard. Language is one of our greatest technologies, but words are not ideas, and no two people hear exactly the same thing when they hear a word.

Sometimes, I like to fantasize about the ways technology can help us bridge that communication chasm. I think about how there are real-time voice translators out there now, helping people who speak two different native languages (like Keva and me) to be able to communicate seamlessly. I also think about how BCIs (Brain Computer Interfaces) are already helping people who would not be able to speak or write to be able to be heard and understood by others.

I wonder if we might get to the point where we can bypass human language entirely, and communicate with ideas instead. I’ve daydreamed about this for decades.

I’m in good company, as it turns out.

Back to Tesla’s own daydreaming now: he envisioned the modern connected world we see today, and he even saw a future where what I described is possible: communication with ideas, not with mere language that describes the ideas.

Something funny happens under the hood of modern LLMs when they are asked to translate a language they’ve never seen before. They typically begin by translating that language into a universal code no human can understand, then they translate that into the other language.

Computers do this, too, when they turn our human language instructions into ones and zeros for processing purposes. At our core, everything is either yes or no, but human language isn’t really like that.

As an immigrant to the US, Tesla’s first language was Serbian, and he was also fluent in German. In spite of working hard to become fluent in English and to both write and speak effectively, Tesla faced serious challenges with communicating his most complex ideas—and even more challenges with persuading people his ideas were good.

Tesla’s challenges with communicating went far beyond the language barrier, though. He was reclusive and very difficult to reach at times, and at other times he was belligerent. I have to be a bit careful here how I say this—I know Tesla is often lionized as a great hero to worship, and he was truly a brilliant pioneer—but I don’t really take the same lessons away from his life story that most others do.

For one thing, he badly misread how the system worked. Sure, he was all about making the world a better place by not protecting his ideas. Yet by ignoring the fact that nobody else was going to play by the same set of rules he was playing by, he was effectively handcuffing his potential to a very limited set of possibilities.

He became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Aspiration is not reality, and merely behaving the way you want everyone else to behave is not enough to exact lasting, meaningful change.

Tesla was also very uncomfortable with promoting his own work. I get it! I hate talking about myself, and you can read all about the way things were two years ago when I wrote my bio here. Every time I update a resume or talk about myself favorably, I get the worst chills.

Instead of finishing by talking about myself here, let me instead encourage you to check out Keva’s work next. I noticed her passion for creativity and her desire to help others succeed early on, and we’ve been one one another’s radars for a long time now. Here’s an embedded link to her piece on Tesla, the perfect place to go next:

Do you have a pioneer mindset?