1/ Today @stripepress is releasing the first two mini-documentaries in a series we’re calling Tacit. They’re vignettes of craftspeople who provide a pretty compelling answer to the question, “after AI, does mastery still matter?” This episode features Christophe Laudamiel, master perfumer at Osmo. Christophe is the creator or co-creator of dozens of scents, most notably, Polo Blue by Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie Fierce, and Tom Ford Amber Absolute. We spent a week with Christophe, following him from his office, to his home (which too, looks suspiciously like an office), observing him as he built fragrances essentially from scratch, isolated problematic notes (TIL: certain fragrance notes, when put together, can produce an unfortunate ‘wet dog’ smell), and even discovered new molecules. Christophe is an archetype of individual we’re obsessed with: *he’s* obsessed with mastery for its own sake. For the past 30 years he’s been at the forefront of perfumery, and now he wonders if and how computers can augment his craft.

2/ We made Tacit for two main reasons. The first is straightforward: nearly everything worth paying attention to was made by someone who cared deeply about their craft. Caring enough to pursue mastery over years is how tacit knowledge develops. We wanted to capture that care in action. The second is that tacit knowledge is also economically foundational. For years @stripepress has published books arguing that seemingly marginal improvements compound into the forces that determine whether societies become rich or stay poor. Most recently, The Origins of Efficiency showed that production improvements—the accumulated know-how of companies refining and scaling processes—are what made goods cheaper over time, which is the basic story of economic growth. Our next book, Maintenance: of Everything, makes the same case for the upkeep required to keep the complex systems that we depend on running. Tacit knowledge and its accumulation (or, alternatively, deterioration) is another seemingly trivial but ultimately important determinant of economic outcomes. When tacit knowledge chains break, entire industries can collapse. There are more astronauts than master perfumers around today...and there's no clear way to train more.