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“THE ODYSSEY” HAS PERSISTED FOR NEARLY 3,000 YEARS. At this rate, it may get another 3,000. Everyone seems to be talking about it, prepping to watch it, or has already seen the current global film sensation.

I am not a scholar of Homer’s epic poem, but I love almost everything Christopher Nolan puts on the big screen (hello, “Memento,” “Interstellar” and “The Dark Knight;” others, like “Tenet” and “Inception,” left me confused).

For this installment of “X Teaches Sree About Y,” our new series (here’s Andy Rich teaching me how to sell anything; and Bobby Ghosh teaching me about the World Cup), I had Tara Maria Fernandez, Ph.D in the Teaching Literature, and my son, Krishna Sreenivasan, teach me about “The Odyssey” (the poem and the movie) and, as it happens, “The Iliad” as well.

Here’s the full half hour—I hope you learn something too. And please nominate yourself or a friend to teach me something.

The working document, in a sense, between Homer’s poem and the Nolan film is Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, published in 2017.

Nolan praised Wilson’s translation when discussing his film, but Wilson was…unimpressed with the big screen version. Wilson’s critique is certainly a fair one—and one that came up in our discussion—Nolan’s penchant for brooding men knows no bounds. The women of "The Odyssey are prominent, strong characters who have something to say. This is not the case in Nolan’s telling, and the same can be said for the non-white casting—there’s a lot of what Wilson calls “Black Best Friend” energy here. Speaking of such characters in the film, I am a fan of Himesh Patel, who apparently steals the show. He was the star of the little-seen Beatles fable “Yesterday” (please rent it immediately!) and has been cast as the male lead in the Ryan Coogler reboot of “The X-Files.”

Both Tara and Krishna recommend seeing the film—and both were quite sure they would be going again. Nolan is making films that have real staying power, and his version of “The Odyssey” is already that.

Have you seen “The Odyssey” yet? Do you plan to? LMK in the comments.

Nominate yourself or a friend to teach me something. Here’s a quick form you can share.

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🙌 Thank you to all our new paid subscribers! They and our sponsors help us do more—like sitting down with Bobby Ghosh to talk global politics, the World Cup, and more. The main newsletter will remain free, but our new virtual salon series will be for paid members. Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note, even if you can’t afford to pay.

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Above: The full video of Bobby and Krishna schooling me. Here is a folder that has AI-created scripts and two kinds of summaries of the show.

BOBBY GHOSH HAS REPORTED FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD (including as Baghdad bureau chief at the height of the Iraq War), but he’ll tell you that, on any given day, football (soccer) is his true passion. He can seamlessly blend the beautiful game with the world he has covered for decades — as he did with me and my football-knower son, Krishna Sreenivasan, 48 hours before the World Cup final (video above). Please subscribe to Bobby’s terrific Substack, : http://ghoshworld.substack.com

America’s host-country status for this tournament was unique solely because of the Trump presidency. In the lead-up, everything was in question. Would ICE disrupt things? Would people be denied visas? Was America capable of pulling it all off? Bobby’s thoughts on the World Cup are interesting on their own—even more so given the political environment.

Every four years I get into the World Cup, but never like this year. The story lines (from Norwegian and Scottish fans, to Cape Verde’s Cinderella story, to Lamine Yamal's 3-year-old half-brother, Keyne) were so compelling. But I have so many questions — no naive, some not; after all, to me, “football” is 🏈 not ⚽ — because I don’t know enough about the game, its flow, its rules, its history and its love of flopping. Hence the interview! Full questions and answers in the video. Here are some summarized answers.

What surprised him most about the World Cup?

The biggest surprise was the enthusiasm of American fans attending games in person. Despite concerns about visa restrictions and the political climate, the mood of the tournament was not greatly affected, suggesting that domestic American interest in football has grown significantly. The Cinderella performances of Cape Verde and Norway were also highlights — Cape Verde held both finalists (Spain and Argentina) to draws in regulation, which was remarkable for a team making its World Cup debut.

How did the treatment of the Iranian team affect the tournament?

The Trump administration’s requirement that the Iranian team sleep in Mexico and fly in on game days was described as “utterly disgraceful.” As a World Cup host, the U.S. was obligated to accommodate all qualifying teams. Bobby credited Mexico for stepping up to host the Iranian delegation. He noted that even without these obstacles, Iran’s team was not strong enough to advance far, but the situation generated sympathy for them.

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Indeed, Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin made it a point to treat the Iranian football team as badly as possible at every turn. There is nothing uglier than spite, and these levels of it from the highest office in the land is, yet again, awful.

The pain of the war with Iran has been felt at home and abroad, and it is visceral. The U.S. has spent around $100 billion—we don’t know because we do not get information from the administration—and 17 American soldiers have died. The toll in Iran and Lebanon has been far more severe. This is clearly an abject failure and also happens to be yet another squandering of Americans’ amazing ability to generate a soft power juggernaut. This World Cup has repeatedly shown some of the best of what Americans can offer the world—inviting, fun, helpful and generally warm (that’s a link to my America at 250 essay on July 5, 2026).

As with football, politics leans heavily on expectations and example-setting. I thought this exchange on the prevalence of flopping was so indicative of so many things about our society. I had to ask my experts why flopping is so prevalent in professional football. Bobby condemned the practice categorically as “a form of cheating” and “one of the most disgraceful aspects of the sport.”

Enablement and permission structures matter across our society, from football to politics. Alas, we are seeing the corrosion of long-held standards everywhere.

NOTE: Bobby and Krishna schooling me in football history and present is part of a new, exclusive salon series that focuses on people teaching me things: "X TEACHES SREE ABOUT Y." Please come along with me as I learn from fab folks.

As a perk for our paid members, we record these in Zoom so you can come and ask questions, salon-style (or just sit back and watch) and then a few days later, put the resulting video on YT and Substack and LinkedIn for everyone else.

If you’d like to nominate you or someone else to teach me something, please do. And, yes, this is a poor man’s Pablo Torre Finds Out (the show that has broken global exclusives, won a Pulitzer Prize and is now distributed by the NYT’s The Athletic)!

REMINDER: Please subscribe to Bobby’s terrific Substack, .

One last thought: Bobby put Messi on the cover TIME in February 2012, and the description reads: King Leo. Lionel Messi is the best football player in the world—possibly of all time. So why won't his countrymen love him? By Bobby Ghosh. Messi eventually did win his country’s love and become the greatest of all time. The pointers to the stories inside include three stories as relevant as they are today as they were 14 years ago!

• Can Israel defuse Iran's nuclear threat?

• America's jobs gap BY FAREED ZAKARIA

• Is capitalism broken?

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

55% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 45% of the year? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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[Above: Video of Andy schooling me. And here is a folder that has AI-created scripts and two kinds of summaries of the show.]

🙏 Thank you to all our new paid subscribers! They and our sponsors help us do more—like this discussion with Andy Rich. The main newsletter will remain free, but our new virtual salon series will be for paid members. Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note, even if you can’t afford to pay.

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ANDY RICH HAS FORGOTTEN MORE ABOUT SALES THAN I WILL EVER KNOW. So, I figured it would be good to talk to him, learn from him, and spread the word.

This is part of my new virtual salon series that focuses on people teaching me things. As I learn from them, you can too. As a perk for our paid members, we record these in Zoom so you can come and ask questions, salon-style (or just sit back and watch) and then a few days later, put the resulting video on YouTube and Substack and LinkedIn for everyone else.

[ If you’d like to nominate you or someone else teach me something, please do. And, yes, this is a poor man’s Pablo Torre Finds Out (which has broken global exclusives, won a Pulitzer Prize and is now distributed by the NYT’s The Athletic). ]

First of all, I am a self-diagnosed terrible salesman. I give away too much (ask any of my Digimentors colleagues), I constantly low-ball myself and what I can offer, and I lack the aggressiveness needed to really sell hard.

Second, the modern world is all sales. It’s a core skill set that goes well beyond the stereotypical salesperson. Universities and nonprofits—two industries I work with more than any other—often fail to understand this concept at a core level, and it hurts them with recruitment, fundraising, talent acquisition and more. Presenting a compelling argument for someone to choose you—a donor, a prospective student, faculty, senior leadership, and so on—all of this is sales.

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Sales carries a negative reputation largely because most people’s exposure to it has been through unprofessional, pushy, or disrespectful salespeople. In our discussion, Andy drew a parallel to other professions: just as a bad experience with a doctor or lawyer is something you never forget, bad salespeople leave lasting negative impressions—and people encounter them far more frequently.

From the discussion:

Sree: You mentioned the “Scarlet S” — what do you mean by that?

Andy: People associate sales with cringy, high-pressure behavior—door-to-door salespeople, aggressive pitches. That image crushes people in business because if you’re not selling your ideas, your design, your vision—whether or not it’s on your business card—you have very little value. People need to get over it.

Sree: So even engineers and non-sales professionals need to sell?

Andy: Absolutely. If you’re an engineer, you’re selling your design, your technical judgment, your vision. You may not call it sales, but if you’re not doing it, you’re dead in the water.

One of Andy’s most crucial points was about the sales hero, and how the founder super-grind mentality tends to be ineffective over the long term. In essence, relying on one exceptional individual’s natural talent and energy cannot be scaled, taught, or replicated. Sure, born salespeople exist, but they typically cannot manage or train others because they lack a transferable process. From an investor’s perspective, a company built around one person’s heroism is a liability, not an asset. Investors want to see a repeatable system, not owner-dependent results.

Andy emphasized that, once a founder has even one other person on their team, they must shift from doing to leading, which requires a documented, teachable set of processes. Without it, CRM (customer relationship management) data becomes unreliable, revenue becomes unpredictable, and investor confidence erodes. Wall Street and small investors alike hate unpredictability.

The “cookbook” analogy is central here: if you know that 10 calls yield 3 appointments, and 3 appointments yield 1 presentation, and so on, you can predict outcomes and manage behavior accordingly. That is the foundation of a scalable sales operation.

From the discussion:

Sree: What does moving away from heroic selling mean for a small business owner or individual creator?

Andy: Heroes are great, but you can’t scale heroism. Once you have two people, you need to understand each other’s capabilities and build around a process. Investors don’t invest in heroes — they invest in CEOs who can build companies. If you can’t show a repeatable process, you won’t get capital.

Sree: Are there people who are naturally talented at sales?

Andy: Yes, but they often stink at managing salespeople because they can’t teach what they do instinctively. They’ll retire as the greatest salesperson in the world but never build a sales organization. Process is what makes leadership possible.

Know some who could be better at sales? Sure you do! Please hit forward now!

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

54% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 46% of the year? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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🎥 Above: Watch my entire discussion with Cristina DiGiacomo on the philosopher’s approach to human-AI coexistence.

👓 Scroll down to read our new tiny project: “One of The Best Things I’ve Ever Read” — and send in your own fave piece of writing.

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***
OUR SHARED HUMANITY HAS NEVER BEEN UNDER THREAT like it is right now. LLMs are generating (often misleading) content, being used as therapists and doctors, replacing teachers, starting to gut the entry-level job market, and so much more. AI is already hyper-present in our lives, and we seem to be at the beginning of the beginning.

The problem, of course, is that we have no idea where this is all going, and the people leading us into it are hellbent on forcing us into it anyway, consequences be damned. What’s worse is that the men (almost all white men, again) atop the tech oligarchy appear both unable and unwilling to engage with even the slightest skepticism.

I discussed this and more with Cristina DiGiacomo, philosopher and founder of 10P1 (consulting around ethical infrastructure & decision systems for AI leadership). Cristina’s goal is to promote a moral and ethical code for how people design, deploy, and live with AI. It’s a crucial space in a crucial moment.

I encourage you to watch the entire hour—it could have gone much longer, and I wish it had. If you are going to watch just one clip, make it this one:

It’s all about us. AI cannot destroy us. Humans will destroy ourselves with AI. As such, we can really improve prospects with AI, too. Every output you’ve ever seen from an LLM—every single one of them—is based on a corpus of human-built input. It all comes from us.

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Now, we are suddenly awash in manifestos from Big Tech. Predictably, every one of them is vacuous, and at least two of them are downright frightening.

So, go ahead and read what Anthropic, OpenAI, and Palantir purport to “think”—they are companies, not people—and apply your own critical thinking to them.

Cristina sums them up nicely on her Substack:

All three are written from inside the machine. All three define the problem technically and solve it technically. Safety is an alignment problem. Equity is an access problem. Power is a capability problem. The questions are engineering questions. The answers are engineering answers.

All three assume, without examination, that the people writing the manifesto are the right people to be writing it. There is no moment in any of these documents where the authors ask: what would it mean if we’re wrong? Not wrong about a detail. Wrong about the whole thing. Wrong about who should be deciding.

And none of them ask who they are accountable to. Not in the way that question demands to be answered. Accountable to users is a product answer. Accountable to democracy is a policy answer. Neither is a moral answer. The moral answer requires a framework none of these documents possesses.

Accountability begins with intellectual accountability. I know we are in the “LOL, nothing matters” era, but I simply refuse to accept that. I also refuse to accept the purposeless, because-we-can, nihilistic attitudes of the men leading the charge.

Silicon Valley super investor Marc Andreesen is the king of know-nothingness masking as intellectualism. His worldview is toxic on a good day, and it’s also so badly misinformed that I doubt he can help it.

Watch this clip where he says he does no introspection (if you can stomach nearly two hours of Silicon Valley grind mentality talk, watch the whole thing).

The specific quote:

If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.

Roughly 2,400 years ago, Aristotle, a person we still talk about a lot, posited that self-reflection was the beginning of wisdom. For centuries, his musings on the topic have been debated, discussed, taught, and more… and here I am talking about them still. I have my doubts that anyone will be talking positively about anything Andreesen did in 50 years, let alone 2,400 (if we make it to either number). Imagine writing something called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and unironically including an enemies list like this:

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

What Andreesen, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, et al, have done is “playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Like with everything else MAGA and MAGA-aligned, they’re projecting.

I’ve never seen a better case for self-reflection made by someone who refuses to acknowledge the existence of self-reflection.

On the topic of memorable for all the wrong reasons, Palantir, the company harvesting and collating your data for untold government spyware and surveillance projects, has adopted the world view of its CEO Alex Karp as its own. We should all be afraid.

As Cristina notes, the Palantir item is probably the most honest of the manifestos. That in and of itself is not good. Read it for yourself, but I’ll focus on this little racist nugget:

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”

In short, the “white genocide” crowd is selling incredibly powerful technology to the police. Make of that what you will, but understand that this is a technology made by people, deployed by people, built to harm people. Even if you can excuse the technology as “important” or otherwise worth having, the company selling it is openly supporting an ethos meant to sow fear, terror, and general authoritarianism.

All of this requires action, of course, but to get to action we need to understand the why and how of it all. To do so, the teachings of Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Descartes (to name just a few) are foundational works.

If you want this in a more practical, digestible version, watch TV writer extraordinaire Michael Schur (The Office, The Good Place) talk about ethics. And, watch The Good Place! It may be a goofy little comedy, but it’s also a fantastic intellectual work on the fundamental teachings of ethics and moral philosophy. [And, yes, fans of “The Office” will know I’m recommending we listen to the man who played Mose Schrute, Dwight’s strange, neck-bearded cousin.]

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

32% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 68%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #1

We’re starting a new tiny project with the goal of creating the the best reading list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s Zach Peterson kicking things off with what he says is the thing to read if you are interested in the wonders of the animal kingdom. Enjoy—and submit your own selection below!

Title: “Do Elephants Have Souls?”

By: Caitrin Nicol Keiper, The New Atlantis (2013)

From Zach:

This is easily one of the best things I’ve ever read, and definitely the article I’ve shared the most with the most people, and it’s not close. It’s so moving, and so informative, and will affect how you look at animals across the spectrum, not just elephants. If you already hold elephants in high regard, this piece will show you that they are probably even more remarkable than you think they are. I just read it again after sharing it with someone, and it still gets to me. I remember the first time I read it, I started crying… and I was on public transit!

Zach Peterson, a writer and editor based in Prague, is a longtime Sree collaborator.

Submit Your Selection!

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com