He answers the door in linen and walks straight past you to a desk in the corner. There is no preamble, no how-was-the-flight. There is a notebook open at a fresh page, a fountain pen uncapped, and the impression — entirely correct — that you have caught him mid-sentence. Land, labour, capital, entrepreneurship, he says, finishing the thought he was having when the bell rang. Those are the four classical factors of production. He looks up. They are missing a fifth, and the fifth is play.
He has been making this argument for six years and 500 books. The case is, on inspection, devastating. Play is what makes innovation possible at all; it is the room inside the day where unforced combinations happen. Remove it and the other four factors curdle. Add it back in and entire categories of value — the kind venture capital was invented to court and never quite catches — become visible. The boardroom has started to listen. Several of his apps, born of this thesis, are now used by central banks and by yoga studios. Ammanuel does not find this funny. He finds it correct.
"We measured the wrong things for a hundred years. Play was right in front of us, on the floor, where the children left it."
The arithmetic.
Five hundred books in six years is one book every 4.4 days. Three hundred apps is one app every week. The 1.2 million pieces of media is the part that rearranges the face, because it works out to roughly 550 things per day, every day, for six years. He says he sleeps. He says he reads more than he writes. We have stopped doubting him; one cannot fabricate this kind of output by the methods one would use to fabricate it.
Thirty-six traditions.
He has studied — and, more difficult, mastered — thirty-six spiritual traditions. Vedanta, Sufism, Zen, Zohar, Yoruba, Stoicism, Pragmatism, Theravāda, the desert fathers, the desert mothers, several lineages of tantra, two forms of process theology, the Quakers, the integral school, the somatic school, Spiral Dynamics, the Toltec, the Tao, and so on. He cross-references them the way a sommelier cross-references vintages: not to declare a winner, but to taste the difference. The output is a body of work that reads, comfortingly, like one mind speaking thirty-six languages, none of them poorly.
The missing verb.
Late in the interview he produces a small index card on which is written, in his own hand, the sentence survival of the most playful. He holds it up. Darwin, he says, had the noun. He missed the verb. We make a joke about putting the index card in the magazine. He says: please do.
