Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 302 - August 2025

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 302 – August 2025

Have you ever wondered why in American English the full stop goes inside the quotation marks, like this: “example.” Even when it defies logic?

I’ve never liked this rule and usually ignore it. Now I have a good reason to do so.

It seems, in the days of lead type, tiny punctuation marks broke easily at line ends. Typesetters tucked them inside quotes to prevent damage. What began as a workaround eventually turned into a convention, then a rule, even after the technology moved on.

This is path dependency: past constraints shaping present practice. A fragile full stop, long obsolete, still decides where we place our punctuation. The QWERTY keyboard is another better known example.

1. Talk Better
   How small shifts in conversation can change everything
2. Sam Altman's Anti-Coworking Spaces Rant
   How early judgment can smother breakthrough thinking
3. Discovering Schismogenesis
   A concept from Gregory Bateson on how divisions grow
4. Sam Harris and the the Great Problem of Our Time
   The choice between conversation and violence
5. Summarizing Audio with ChatGPT
   From audio to transcript to summary in just a few minutes
6. Help Keep My Work Alive
7. Coaching
8. Unsubscribe
9. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

I recently came across a review of Talk by Alison Wood Brooks, a book that examines why conversation is more complicated than we think.

The review highlights ten research-backed insights that are both surprising and useful, particularly if we are concerned about enhancing our ability to connect with others. These are the key points:

• Preparing topics in advance makes conversations better
• Our intuitions about which topics make for rewarding conversation are wrong
• Switching topics more frequently makes conversations more enjoyable
• People who ask questions are more likable
• We’re more hesitant to make jokes than we should be
• We underestimate the power of compliments
• Apologies make us look good
• We think we understand each other more than we do
• We have a hard time believing that people who disagree with us are actually listening
• Conversations rarely end when anyone wants them to

Good conversations aren't about being clever or saying the right thing. They come from being curious, paying attention, and dropping some of the assumptions that get in the way.

Before becoming CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman led Y Combinator, one of the world’s most well-known startup accelerators. He joined YC in 2011 and became its president in 2014, helping hundreds of startups get off the ground.

In a 2019 interview, he shared a blunt view on coworking spaces and why they might be the worst place to build truly bold ideas.

"Coworking spaces have two big classes of problems. Number one, they are a band-pass filter. Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you're in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It's true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too.

The other thing is the average level of ambition and willingness to work hard at a coworking space is incredibly low. There's this reversion to the mean that is not what you want in your life."

Source: Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent

I recently received an invitation from Nora Bateson to attend a Warm Data course in North Carolina this September. The invitation introduced me to a word I hadn't come across before: schismogenesis.

The term was coined by her father, Gregory Bateson, and refers to the creation of division through patterns of interaction. He described two main types: symmetrical, where both sides escalate in a similar manner, such as a rivalry that keeps intensifying; and complementary, where each side reinforces the other's role, like dominance provoking submission or criticism triggering defensiveness. Both types form feedback loops that widen the divide.

I’ve been reflecting on this issue for years, but now I've a name for it and a reason to explore Gregory Bateson's work more thoroughly. His definition of information, for instance, as a difference that makes a difference, is especially persuasive.

A further draw is that Daniel Schmachtenberger will be giving an evening talk on schismogenesis.

It sounds like a valuable and relevant event. I won't be able to attend, but you might find it worthwhile.

I've been thinking a lot about something Sam Harris said in a recent Big Think talk:

"We live in perpetual choice between conversation and violence."

If you’re not familiar with Sam Harris, he's a neuroscientist, writer, and podcaster who’s spent years exploring the intersections of reason, belief, and human behavior. In this talk, The Great Problem of Our Time, he lays out what he sees as a growing crisis of meaning.

According to Harris, technology has shattered our shared cultural space, leaving us isolated in digital bubbles. This fragmentation is making it harder to have genuine conversations—ones that encourage understanding rather than conflict.

This is where I think Conversational Leadership has something important to offer. It's not a grand solution, but it's a grounded, everyday approach. It's about how we speak to one another, with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to withhold judgment, allowing the conversation to unfold.

This post from my blook highlights some of the key points from Harris's talk and connects them to the practice of Conversational Leadership. I hope you'll give it a listen or a read. If we want to avoid the more destructive paths ahead, it begins with how we talk to each other today.

I've been enjoying exploring what this new wave of AI technology can do. Recently, for example, I wanted to record an audio passage from the web, transcribe it, and summarize it using ChatGPT.

I asked ChatGPT how to get started, and it suggested using Audacity, a free and easy-to-use audio recording tool, to capture the audio. This approach worked without a hitch, and within minutes, I had an MP3 file.

Next, I asked ChatGPT to transcribe the file. While it couldn't do that directly, it offered to generate code that uses the ChatGPT API for transcription. Since I already had an API account, I asked for the code as a WordPress shortcode. It generated it instantly. All I had to do was add my API key, upload the file, and run the shortcode on a page. Seconds later, I had a clean transcript of the audio.

From there, I simply pasted the text into ChatGPT for summarizing. And if I were feeling a bit more ambitious, I could probably automate that final step as well.

The entire process took less than 30 minutes, and I didn't require any specialized technical skills. It's remarkable how accessible and capable these tools have become. A year or two ago, I wouldn't have even attempted this as it would have seemed too complex and time-consuming.

For almost 25 years, I've been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I'd be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

Thank you to the 50+ patrons who have already supported me - your generosity means a great deal.

If you're curious about how a more conversational approach might shift the way you work with others, whether in leading, learning, or collaborating, I offer one-to-one coaching tailored to your context.

We explore real challenges and possibilities through dialogue, helping you develop your own way of practicing Conversational Leadership in daily work.

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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom