Synthesis Episode 2: unNatural Selection • Nic Encina
The Toilet Paper Thesis: How Innovation Creates a New Evolution
What if you could take a crash course on innovation—one taught not in a classroom, but by the foremost pioneers across dozens of radically different domains? What might you learn? What patterns would emerge when the FBI, NASA, genomics leaders, policy architects, opera sopranos, and world-champion coaches all answered the same underlying question: How does innovation really work?
What began as a simple observation about a roll of toilet paper quickly spiraled into a 46-episode expedition across wildly different fields. As we interviewed 45 pioneers, the patterns of a human-driven evolution—what we call unNatural Selection—became undeniable.
In this Season 1 synthesis, we deliver The Evolution Playbook: the comprehensive framework distilled from these diverse experiences. We connect early signals into a clear map of how innovation behaves across two critical levels:
Macro: The Four Evolutionary Patterns. The cross-industry forces—Adaptability, Asymmetry, Culture as Infrastructure, and Dual Time Horizons—that define how ideas compete, how systems adapt, and how cultural evolution unfolds across society.
Micro: The Three Tactical Playbooks. The high-impact strategies you can implement today, built on the lessons of System Architecture, Trust-as-a-Moat, and the Mastery Mindset.
If Natural Selection explains how species evolve, this finale decodes how society evolves by design. This is not a grand conclusion, but a living thesis—a map for tracing the forces that strengthen, disrupt, and define the future of human ingenuity.
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Thank you, Aisha, very kind mostly.
And yes, it's true.
The Great Toilet Paper Epiphany circa 2025.
I noticed a strange wavy texture on a roll and thought someone designed that someone consciously evolved toilet paper.
2:45
And that's when it hit me.
First of all, if natural selection is how species evolve, then unnatural selection is how societies evolve.
And then secondly, I thought I should probably spend more time in the bathroom.
But seriously, I noticed the new squiggly ripple lines on a roll one day and thought even that is an act of evolution.
3:06
You know it.
Like, it really hit me.
It's like even toilet paper companies evolve and innovate.
It's someone consciously optimizing for a new selective pressure.
Maybe to stop the paper from tearing incorrectly?
I don't know.
That's what it seemed like to me.
3:22
But if unNatural selection is about the preservation of favorable variations in species, then innovation is the dominant evolutionary force of the modern world.
That's unnatural selection, at least from my perspective.
3:35
Beyond the 'How': Understanding Innovation's Core 'Why'
And that toilet paper moment spiraled into what is now a 46 episode cross industry expedition into innovation, competition and human ingenuity.
And for the record, that seemingly straightforward observation of squiggly lines and toilet paper opens a whole can of worms regarding what quote UN quote innovation actually means.
3:56
I mean, if I sell red toy widgets that bounce up and down, does it count as innovation if I change the color to blue?
I think that this is where we have to measure across the spectrum, where at the low end we have routine or incremental evolution and all the way to the far other end where we have radical innovation.
4:14
But here's the thing, over 45 episodes we collected the raw data of this human driven evolution and when we showed up to explain the technology the how, we kept running into deeper questions.
4:27
Speaker 2
Which started all the way back with Kodak in your first episode.
Nick, tell them Stephen Sasson's story.
4:34
Speaker 1
He invented the digital camera, and when he presented it, he expected questions about the technology instead.
So I expected a conversation on the how.
But nobody asked me how.
They asked me why.
Nobody wanted to talk about how.
They wanted to ask why.
Why did you do this?
4:50
What problem are you trying to solve?
What exactly is wrong with conventional photography?
The why is the selective pressure.
The how is the adaptation.
That transition is what we're here to decode, and these trends across 45 guests became portals into a much bigger pattern.
5:08
Embrace Self-Cannibalism: Adapt or Be Disrupted
Macro analysis The four evolutionary patterns.
Time to zoom out people.
This is where Nick delivers, the analysts report.
This is the part where Nick makes sense of the chaos pattern 1 Adaptability and self cannibalism.
5:21
Speaker 1
Real innovators plan for the future, even if it means disrupting your successful past before someone else does form.
It's about winning, and survival doesn't care about legacy.
If your winning model today is sacred, then it'll make for a solemn obituary, as Michael Quigley, the CSO of Sanofi, said.
5:39
Speaker 2
I'd rather cannibalize our own.
5:40
Speaker 1
Innovation internally than have someone else come in and do it for us externally.
That's not to say that the past doesn't matter, of course it does.
But if we put weights on the signals coming from the past compared to the signals pointing toward the future, then we must prioritize for competing in a future state.
5:57
The past must inform that path, but it shouldn't define it.
A strategy is a.
6:02
Speaker 2
Discipline of focus, knowing what are some of the things to keep and how to let them.
6:07
Speaker 1
Go is a difficult choice.
Difficult choices have to be made, and Phillips has been doing so and evolving for 130 years.
On the other hand, look at Kodak.
When Stephen Sasson showed the digital camera executives asked about what would happen to the Global Photo Finishing Network, he said.
6:24
I said, well, they could sell batteries.
They looked at him as he was suggesting they burn down their own factories.
That systemic internal resistance evolution's version of.
But we've always done it this way.
You need to have a culture that I think embraces smart people are annoying because they they tell us things we don't want to hear.
6:46
And the world is annoying because it keeps changing.
The world that I grew up with is different today.
The music is different, the technologies are different.
So having a culture of adaptability becomes important.
6:59
Breakthroughs at Intersections: Innovation from Asymmetry
Pattern 2 innovation flows from asymmetry at intersections.
7:04
Speaker 1
You don't win by being slightly better at the existing game.
You win by changing the rules through cross pollination.
The biggest breakthroughs happen at the intersections of disciplines.
Unapologetically multidisciplinary.
Almost everybody in the lab is themselves cross trained.
7:19
Speaker 2
In more than one.
7:20
Speaker 1
Field.
I think it's hard to build a multidisciplinary team with only disciplinarians.
George Church is unapologetically multidisciplinary.
NASA borrows from race car engineering.
Biotech learns from cloud infrastructure.
Athletes learn from behavioral science.
7:37
Breakthroughs happen when you commit high quality intellectual theft.
It's about understanding the fundamental and most defining elements of a problem and drawing connections to adjacent fields with similar patterns.
You know your problem and your brain will latch onto a solution when it sees it, even if it's in a different form with different language or different jargon describing it.
7:58
I remember when getting my computer science degree, we spent a lot of time working out computer science theory problems, and the hardest were the so-called NP completeness proofs, where in order to prove that one problem is NP complete, we would demonstrate that an already known NP complete problem can be efficiently converted or mapped to our existing problem.
8:17
This is called polynomial time reduction or just reduction.
But the concept is similar and that by understanding the defining elements of a problem, we can not only map it to other unsolvable problems like NP completeness, but we can also map it to existing solutions elsewhere.
8:33
It's kind of like the nerdy way of saying if the shoe fits, maybe I should just said that from the beginning.
8:38
Speaker 2
Or as the rugby coaches put it.
8:40
Speaker 1
Coaches are the best thieves.
That's certainly a valid strategy, Alex, but it's important to note here that we use copying and stealing in context of finding patterns across domains.
Copying and stealing within a domain is a different matter entirely.
And as long as it's legal, then it can also begin that quick race to the bottom where you begin transferring seller power to buying power and then market forces take over.
9:02
That's a whole different discussion.
9:06
Build Culture as Infrastructure: Fueling Human Innovation
Pattern three, culture is infrastructure.
9:09
Speaker 1
Technology doesn't innovate.
People do.
And people innovate when they feel safe, aligned and purpose driven.
Your technology is only as strong as a human system that supports it.
This is about building the culture that acts as your internal selection mechanism for ideas, Robert Langer told us.
9:25
And you order them to work hard.
And I say no, I don't do that at all.
I always tell them I'd always hope that I get across to people that if they're successful, that that will make a giant difference to the world.
To a lot of people, the true internal selection pressure is culture.
9:42
Today's leaders need to be ecosystem architects who actively manage fear.
Our guest, Doctor Robert Langer, one of the most prolific biomedical inventors of all time, in fact, he's the most sighted engineer in human history, spoke about building teams just a second ago.
9:57
You can't just mandate innovation, you have to positively reinforce it, and you have to create the substrate or the foundation and the environment for it to flourish in.
It's about managing the greatest internal friction point, which is the fear of social judgement.
10:13
The thing that scares people more than anything else, more even than public speaking or death, is other people.
Again, you can't force people to innovate.
You have to think systematically about how you establish and reinforce the conditions by which it is enabled.
10:28
These leaders prioritize building systems where trust and incentive alignment are the ultimate competitive modes.
This effort is cemented by the use of storytelling.
A strategic alignment, a compelling narrative, acts as a shared genetic code that coordinates complex teams.
10:44
People in stressful environments such as war, for example, aren't typically innovating in the classic sense.
Your mind goes into auto drive when you're in a high, intense and anxious situations.
Innovation thrives where imagination and creativity collide with collaboration.
11:02
But office environments aren't designed with that in mind.
You can't walk into an IKEA and say, please direct me to your office furniture.
For innovators, IKEA can provide everything but the last two words.
As far as the innovation part, that's the magic sauce that takes planning and reinforcement, right?
11:18
The FBI has so many amazing experts on AI and, you know, computer science and, you know, and variety of frauds and crypto and all of these things.
And they work closely together, right?
11:34
Speaker 2
Pattern 4 Mastery demands dual time horizons.
11:39
Navigating Now and Future: The Dual Time Horizon Mastery
Great leaders can hold 2 clocks in their heads, the right now, which are defined by metrics, experiments and daily or weekly sprints, and the far future, which are decades long bets or moonshots, Governor Healey of Massachusetts said.
11:56
The intensity of the times.
11:57
Speaker 2
The urgency of the times is.
11:59
Speaker 1
Forcing all of us to do things in new and different ways.
And, you know, I'm talking to an audience of innovators and folks who understand the entrepreneurial spirit and understand what it means, you know, to be.
12:11
Speaker 2
Challenged, where you're forced and sometimes you.
12:13
Speaker 1
Fail and you're.
12:14
Speaker 2
Forced to innovate.
12:15
Speaker 1
And and leapfrog ahead and you know that's.
12:18
Speaker 2
That's how I view.
12:19
Speaker 1
This moment.
12:19
Speaker 2
Right now for our state and the opportunity that we have.
12:23
Speaker 1
The best pioneers manage multiple time horizons simultaneously.
They are focused on today's metrics while maintaining visibility and decades long moonshots.
This is easier said than done, particularly in public companies for successes measured in quarterly earnings.
This is where enlightened CEO's must carve out space for long term investment.
12:42
That's not to downplay the effort acquiring innovation, but if they want innovation to be part of the fabric of their company, to flourish and not dissipate the moment that it gets acquired, then innovation should be invested internally.
This requires investing in short and long term horizons.
12:58
Everything's going to change and you have to spend a little bit of time in your average day thinking about the coming change.
13:06
Speaker 2
Some people check the weather.
Innovators check the future.
13:10
Speaker 1
The ability to see the deep future while still executing the high velocity, now that's a challenge.
But it's super important to have a North Star by which you gauge and assess change.
It factors into your journey.
It's impossible to track all change, and in fact, it's imperative to know what things won't change.
13:25
I mean, people need to eat, machines need energy to run, and societies need laws, etcetera.
So you need a filter by which to assess your landscape and evaluate the opportunities or threats to your long term interests.
That is why it's so critical to be clear and disciplined about why your company exists.
13:43
It starts with a mission statement and then it should infuse and permeate every aspect of your culture and business so that decisions become easier to make at scale.
If you're primed to address a fundamental societal need, whether if it's changing or not, then you'll be beautifully prepared when something of true consequence crosses your path.
14:01
So you have to be ready.
You have to be prepared, you have to be perfectly adapted to your environment.
For most of my life, one of the most influential sayings that is stuck with me has been one from Louis Pasteur.
Chance Favour is the prepared mind.
14:17
The System Architect: Building Trust as Your Core Design
Microanalysis.
Tactical Playbooks, Nick, That was the analysts report the four exposed patterns of this new evolution.
But let's be real, people need a CHEAT SHEET.
They need a weapon.
Time to take those laws and translate them into a few things they can steal today.
14:33
OK, let's move from the cosmic view to the tactical plays.
14:37
Speaker 1
The patterns are the principles.
The playbooks are the actions.
These are the three high impact strategies built from our 45 episodes that are immediately applicable.
14:48
Speaker 2
Playbook One the system architect build trust into the design.
14:54
Speaker 1
You win by designing systems that eliminate conflict of interest and a reward collaboration.
You design the ecosystem.
Alloy Therapeutics blew the doors off the industry by deciding so I believe something else that's crazy.
We truly don't compete with anyone.
We are all just in a collaboration to defeat disease.
15:12
Speaker 2
This is where Alloy Therapeutics blew our minds.
They decided to only provide the tools for drug discovery and never develop their own drugs.
Why was that such a brilliant move?
15:21
Speaker 1
They literally removed the internal selection pressure that kills partnerships, as their CEO Eric Anderson said.
We're a key enabler for everybody in the ecosystem because we decided never to compete with our own partners.
That elimination of internal conflict allows them to time hack the drug discovery process.
15:38
Trust is their Moat.
No conflict of interest, no hidden agenda, just pure ecosystem alignment.
It's innovation.
If you trust as architecture, how would this new set of technologies, we can rethink these processes that in many ways are broken and not scalable, to redesign the process in a way that's optimal.
15:59
And system architecture also plays into your product design as well.
As David Roux, chief medical officer of Microsoft, just said, designing new systems can often be as simple as making things more convenient as well.
We defined our businesses convenience, and convenience will never die.
16:14
People will always need convenience.
So your job, Jim, is find things that people need conveniently.
And I did, and it worked well, said James Keys.
16:26
Speaker 2
Playbook 2 The competitive advantage This playbook is for fighting the attention war and transforming traditional services using software as the Moat.
16:35
Gain Competitive Advantage: Software, Emotion, and Soft Skills
We're talking about moving the value proposition.
It's the difference between selling a camera and selling a photo.
Experience Remedy, for example, is shifting their core competitive mode from selling lab machines to positioning their signal software franchise as the engine of discovery.
16:52
Because we were really changing the focus of.
16:54
Speaker 2
The company.
16:55
Speaker 1
The end markets.
16:56
Speaker 2
That you are going to play in the portfolio transformation that was coming together and it did.
17:03
Speaker 1
Require a.
17:04
Speaker 2
Change in mindset, in name and an identity.
17:08
Speaker 1
But competition isn't always data-driven.
On the flip side, Great Wolf Lodge and other manage experience platforms such as Xbox compete through emotional design, where joy and empathy are core design principles.
I.
17:21
Speaker 2
Thought I saw my.
17:23
Speaker 1
Parents and grandparents playing together.
17:25
Speaker 2
What I thought was the best of the innovation, it wasn't.
It was.
17:30
Speaker 1
It turned him into a 7 year old kid who believed in magic again.
17:34
Speaker 2
A competitive Moat built on joy and magic.
I love it and.
17:38
Speaker 1
In a world where AI is displacing many hard skills, innovators in education and social movements are prioritizing soft skills as hard assets.
Soft skills like problem solving and critical thinking are deemed invaluable and irreplaceable tenants in the age of AI.
17:54
Speaker 2
We need to be comfortable being uncomfortable because, you know, in this discomfort comes change.
With change comes innovation.
With innovation comes improvement.
18:08
Cultivate Mastery: Durability and Resilience for Relentless Pressure
Playbook 3 Durability equals mastery Durability and resilience are the key to surviving relentless pressure.
This is about the mental and cultural frameworks that ensure you last.
18:20
Speaker 1
Every champion we met in music, sports, tech, journalism came back to one thing, the mastery mindset.
We heard this from Rick Macy, who coached 5 #1 tennis champions.
His lesson on resilience was so simple but so powerful.
18:36
It still resonates in my mind.
Rick Macy said.
It's the mental part, you know?
You control the situation, don't let it control you, OK?
Your attitude is the most important thing and you got to love the competition.
You got to love the competition.
18:54
That's why you're doing it.
He taught us the difference between learning a lesson and caring emotional baggage.
You need the memory for the lesson, but he must strategically forget the failure to ensure your focus on the next point.
That's the mental durability of a champion.
It's resilience without baggage, adaptation without ego.
19:12
Another thing that came out of the episode with Rick is that we have to love the process, not the goal.
This was also clear from our discussion on Opera with Meredith Hansen.
19:22
Speaker 2
The competition, it's pretty.
It's pretty intense.
I'm not going to even try to sugarcoat that.
19:29
Speaker 1
It's discouraging, it's brutal.
It's.
19:33
Speaker 2
Often unkind and unpretty and for some, and I would include myself in this.
It's also motivating.
You know, I see an artist that I really admire and it it makes me want to be a better.
19:49
Speaker 1
Artist myself, we learned that elite performer succeed not because they chase medals, but because they love the process and the competition itself.
Trophies come and go, competition is endless, and that endlessness fuels growth and continual improvement.
20:07
Unnatural Selection: A Living Thesis for Societal Evolution
Conclusion.
The Living Archive.
20:09
Speaker 1
So here we are, 45 episodes later.
Well, 46 with this one.
What started as a silly observation about toilet paper patterns evolved into a sweeping look at how humans adapt, compete and push society forward.
We didn't just collect stories, we built a living archive of modern evolution.
20:27
What we've created here is a growing archive of real world evolutionary dynamics, a living thesis where The Pioneers we spoke to are the building blocks.
The system that adapts best is the one built on internal culture coherence in a fearless mastery mindset.
And now we have the evolutionary playbook, which are.
20:45
Find your asymmetry and cross pollinate deliberately.
That is, stop playing the default game and change the rules.
Also build culture as your internal selection engine.
Treat culture as the internal selection mechanism that defines which ideas survive and live in two time horizons today plus 20 years from now.
21:06
Dedicate resources to thinking about generational shifts, and spend time every day looking at what's changed that could impact you.
And then, finally, treat failure as feedback.
Forget this thing.
Keep the lesson.
View failures not as a judgement, but as an advancement of knowledge that informs the next iterative step.
21:24
Speaker 2
And the best part?
This archive only gets better when you use it.
Go back to episodes.
Choose one aligned to your current challenge.
Share the one that hit you hardest.
Every bit of engagement is literally the selection pressure that evolves this show.
21:39
Speaker 1
The real lesson I take away is that the premise behind this podcast was only reinforced with every episode.
Humanity is now evolving by design.
Innovation in our social constructs are shaping our future faster and more profoundly than biology ever could.
If natural selection maps the evolution of species, then unnatural selection maps the evolution of societies.
22:00
Think about it.
In a single century, digital technology has replaced biological limits on communication, AI is transforming work, and our institutions dictate which communities thrive.
Innovation is the dominant evolutionary force of the modern world.
22:16
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Over 160 years ago, Charles Darwin gave us a universal pattern.
This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations I call natural selection.
It acts continuously, silently, and insensibly, favoring traits that improve survival and reproduction in relation to the organism's environment.
22:39
Darwin wasn't just describing biology, he was revealing the constant filtering of what works and what doesn't.
And that same pattern plays out on the world we built.
So with deep respect for Darwin's original framing, we offer a parallel concept to describe what we found this season.
22:55
This preservation and adoption of successful innovations and the rejection of ineffective ones we call unnatural selection.
It acts continuously, silently and systemically favouring behaviours and systems that strengthen society and drive the evolution of culture.
When we decode innovation, we're not just understanding how companies change, we're understanding how societies evolve.
23:17
As we close Season 1, I am humbled by how far this simple experiment has come.
Every insight, every breakthrough, every misstep became a cultural unit of inheritance, another building block in our evolutionary code.
I want to thank the extraordinary guests who share their wisdom.
23:33
I want to thank my family, friends, and colleagues.
And I want to thank you, the listeners, for being the external selection pressure that helped this podcast evolve into something more coherent and purposeful than I could have ever predicted.
This project is and will remain a living thesis, one that grows with every new episode.
23:51
I'll be reflecting on how to evolve this experiment for its next chapter in 2026, keeping the strongest traits and adapting to the New Horizons.
And with that, we close Season 1.
Thank you for being a part of this journey.
I can't wait to continue decoding this larger story with you in Season 2 coming in 2026.
24:09
And until then, keep evolving.
