The Arc of a Career
The High Flying Life of Joshua Cooper Ramo
Welcome back, and welcome to all the new readers who've joined us! It's been six months since our last essay—longer than we intended, but we've been working on some projects behind the scenes that have kept us fully heads-down.
As we build the next arc of Mortimus (some interesting new formats coming soon…), here’s a profile feature on someone whose approach to complexity and systems thinking captures what we're all about.
More to come soon. Stay tuned.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO has spent his lifetime in a quest for the edge.
He understands that success requires grasping the shape of the system he inhabits. So he keeps a mental inventory. Computing power—he can see it in the server farms that hum across Virginia and Oregon, in the chips that cost more than houses. Talent—the twenty-six-year-olds who speak in algorithms and sleep four hours a night. Data—endless streams of it, flowing like rivers into reservoirs that grow deeper by the petabyte. These are the elements that matter now, the constituent parts of the age we are entering. Ramo studies them the way a geologist studies strata, looking for the patterns that reveal how the landscape will shift. He has noticed that the tools of power multiply faster than anyone can master them, and he suspects that the next crucial lever—the one that will make or break companies, that will separate the prescient from the surprised—has not yet been named.
Understanding complex systems has been an ongoing concern for Ramo, and it may have started in the cockpit. As a pilot, he learned to read a dozen instruments while wrestling with wind shear that could flip a polar bear. The fact that he did it as a competitive aerobatic pilot meant flying became a three-dimensional puzzle solved at two hundred miles per hour—blindfolded. An aerobatic plane is a system with clear controls: stick, rudder, throttle. But on every flight Joshua could face surprise variables; immense cloud covers that prohibit landing, a maneuver that is missed merely by a hair, an undetected mechanical failure deep in the plane’s wings. Not accounting for these could be the difference between landing safely, and not landing at all.
Joshua however, has survived. Aided most undoubtedly by his curiosity and thirst for adventures of the physical and intellectual kind. Just like his aerobatic feats, Joshua’s career has a surprising arc. He embodies the phrase “not well-known, but known well” and counts among his friends and acquaintances Reid Hoffman, Fareed Zakaria, Walter Isaacson—and the notorious Henry Kissinger. Many know him as the author of two books, “The Age of the Unthinkable” (2009) and “The Seventh Sense” (2016), both New York Times bestsellers. Others know him as the co-CEO of Kissinger Associates, the geo-strategic advisory firm founded by Henry Kissinger where he helped companies with cross-border M&A and advised on commercial transactions. And a handful know him as their point-man in China, where he spent more than a decade of his life after a stint as TIME Magazine’s youngest Foreign Editor.
However, for a person with sharp, media-honed features, Joshua has maintained a low profile since 2019. He makes a couple of appearances here and there—at DLD’22, at a Sino-US forum hosted at Peking University, hosting a talk with Reid Hoffman at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2023, attending a dinner in the company of Annie Duke, Daniel Kahneman, Jim Chanos and others hosted by Lux Capital at New York’s Zuma. But these appearances are selective, suggesting deliberate retreat, rather than irrelevance.
Maybe he’s contemplating the next arc of his career. Contemplation is important for Joshua, who’s been a practitioner of Rinzai Buddhism since he was sixteen, spurred on by courses he took when he was in high school. “The birth of a new instinct—for justice or truth or beauty,” Joshua writes, “requires a rewiring of our minds, and this can be done only at the slow pace of contemplation.”
RAMO’S EARLY YEARS were spent in New Mexico, where the high desert meets ancient pueblo ruins and the sky runs unbroken to every horizon.
During his teens, he was deeply influenced by the ideas of his outdoor education teacher John Braman, who used to teach him at Albuquerque Academy—a private high-school in New Mexico. A proponent of experiential learning, Mr. Braman changed Joshua’s life and instilled in him a love for nature, and the outdoors. “I found myself, camping and hiking and rock-climbing, sleeping under the stars and lighting fires.” Years later, when he would find himself in China, the spatial awareness that he cultivated in his early years would help him navigate his new, foreign surroundings. “The way you survive in the wilderness”, Joshua says, “is to look all around you all the time.”
In Albuquerque, he was surrounded by a loving, respectable family with strong community ties. The Cooper-Ramo’s were quintessentially American, rooted in strong family ideals. His father, Barry Ramo, is a staff cardiologist for the New Mexico Heart Institute and his mother, Roberta Ramo is an accomplished lawyer who has the honor of being the first female president of the American Bar Association.
Roberta can be credited for Joshua’s first interactions with the concept of systems. In 1975 Roberta Ramo wrote “System for the Law Office” a comprehensive guide for law firms to streamline their operations. In Joshua’s case, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree—Joshua would later go on to dedicate much of his career to systems thinking.
An appreciation for multiculturalism can also be traced back to his family’s approach to community. “I hope for an America that is like my New Mexico in its appreciation for people of many cultures,” remarked Roberta Ramo, “celebrating our joyous differences while working to strengthen our far more common bonds.” Joshua would echo this sentiment when he would be- come “one of China’s leading foreign-born scholars”—a conduit between two contrasting cultures.
In college, Joshua wanted to become an astronaut. “I had a curiosity about the world we share and about the things outside of it that we cannot see,” he wrote. “Partly this was a love of math and physics and flying. There was a broken heart thrown in there too, and the appealing idea of distances so vast.” The surest pathway in his mind was to join the Marines, but they wanted ten years of his life in exchange for time in their jets. “The decade terrified me. It scared the astronaut right out of my plans. I chose another, less expensive life.” This less expensive life involved going from a hobbyist pilot to becoming a “serious competitive aerobatic pilot”, a journey he chronicled in his 2004 book “No Visible Horizon”.
Journalism was soon added to his collection of interests. His first foray came in 1987 as a production assistant at Brandeis's student newspaper, the Justice. Within a year, he had risen to Production Editor—early evidence of the rapid advancement that would mark his later career at TIME Magazine.
But college journalism also taught him hard lessons. When he wrote about medical school admissions, the subjects fired back in a letter to the editor: 'Mr. Ramo did meet briefly with us, [but] he misconstrued and misquoted most of what we discussed, did not take the time to learn our names or roles.' This was an early encounter with the consequences of imprecise reporting.
AT 28, JOSHUA was hired by Walter Isaacson (then managing editor) at TIME Magazine, after having worked at Newsweek. This was a time back when “it mattered who The Man of The Year was”. Joshua joined as Senior Editor, helping Walter and the editorial team with profiles and accounts of maverick individuals moving society forward. During Isaacson’s tenure at TIME (he started in 1978), the normally sober news-weekly was starting to frequently cover tech advances and pop-culture trends. Isaacson’s experience in writing biographies meshed well with TIME’s personality driven journalism. “Portraying interesting people,” Isaacson wrote in the Letter to the Reader in TIME’s January 15th 1996 issue, “is a good way to make the world come alive.” The study of people as carriers of ideas was good editorial practice at TIME, and something that Joshua would later hone in his profiles of Andy Grove, Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and others.
“TIME did not invent personality journalism,” the co-founder of the magazine Henry Luce used to say, “the Bible did.”
At TIME, Joshua would spend the next six years, working as their Digital Editor and eventually being promoted to Foreign Editor. Here, he was a chronicler of interesting lives lived at the collision of new and old things—a place where ‘mashups’ occurred that challenged the perceptions of the old guard. Photos from this era depict him in his signature wide-grin, decked in nineties sartorial chic (wide ties, pleated trousers). In one he’s holding a gadget that looks eerily similar to Apple’s Vision Pro (as envisioned by Sony). On his desk is a ‘Remove Before Flight’ tag—a favored piece of memorabilia from his aviation days, acting as a reminder of the extreme attention to detail required to succeed in high-flying careers.
His fascination with networks—the web of interconnections that spin all around us—can most likely be traced to his writings at TIME. In the December 16th, 1996 edition he writes about believers connecting to the internet. If a monastery deep in the deserts of New Mexico can be connected to the internet, even though it sits twenty miles from the nearest power line, then other remote outposts can all be a click away. What sort of world does that create? If a banished bishop can conduct a virtual diocese free from the Pope's authority, what does that tell us about the future of power? “The Net has no center from which Will can be applied,” Bishop Jacques Gaillot would say. Joshua could see the pulsating fiber-optic cables of the internet mesh together unacquainted places in real time, and his adventuring spirit ached to be there. The internet was becoming a high-speed bazaar: spiritual, economical, and soon physical. He wanted to be at the center of it all, to observe it from ‘zero-distance range’.
In 1997, TIME Magazine named Intel’s CEO and founder Andy Grove as their Man of the Year. Joshua spent weeks studying the company and visited Intel chip plants on three continents to paint a portrait of a company transforming how the world computes. His proximity to Andy and the alchemy conducted by the engineers and technicians of Intel stirred something in him. For Andy to have foreseen and created the chip revolution he had to be in Silicon Valley. Joshua felt a similar urge—to have a front row seat to another revolution. A new, giant force was emerging that was changing the rules of the game. Unlike chips and the internet— whose industrial juggernauts were quaintly nested in Silicon Valley—this emerging change was happening far, far from home. It was happening in China.
In 2002 he decided to pack his bags and moved. China was an unknown land with thirteen hundred million people speaking dozens of dialects, an economy growing at ten percent annually while still operating collective farms, a place where you could find a Samsung factory next to a village that had never seen a paved road. “I had a little bit of an academic streak in my personality.” Joshua once remarked to Charlie Rose, “And as I looked around the world and I saw what was going on, I said, you know, it would be fascinating to know more about China. And I moved there.”
Wrestling with something as complex as China was not a stretch for a person who loved flying inverted Cessnas. Joshua was looking for a challenge so that his brain could ‘stay limber’. “A mind that doesn’t adjust is doomed,” he wrote.
Why not stay in the U.S? Why not learn from the comfort of his own home under the tutelage of Walter Issacson? To Joshua, an office was no place to view a rapidly changing world. “You simply cannot see [the interesting stuff in the world that’s happening] sitting inside your office,” he remarked to a room full of conference attendees. “You cannot see that sitting in front of storyboards, you can only see that by going out and actually watching it happen”.
He wanted to experience change as up close as possible, something he was intimately accustomed to from his flying days. 'You know, the emergence of a new superpower is kind of a once-every-two-or-three-hundred-year phenomenon in the international system,' he told Charlie Rose. 'But the chance to sort of observe that from zero-distance range is a really very special historical experience.
China was a complex system still in its early days, and it needed obsessive people like Ramo to untangle it. “What I could never have anticipated is that I would fall in love with the country, and it would be as gripping as it is.” China gave him the chance to do things he would never have dreamed of doing.
Unbeknownst to him, this obsession would consume him for the better part of a decade—a commitment he was unable to make when dreaming of becoming an astronaut.
DURING HIS EARLIEST years in China, Joshua took a year long sabbatical where his only priority was to learn Mandarin eight hours a day. However, learning the language was only one small part of his journey and Joshua knew that engrossing himself in the culture was just as important. “Before I moved to China, somebody gave me this advice,” he later wrote. “As important as being bilingual is, it is [equally] as important to be bicultural.”
Drawing from Isaacson's approach at TIME, Joshua spent an equal amount of time studying the interesting characters and personalities of Chinese history. "You can't understand China without looking at the personal biographies of Xi Jinping, Wang Huning, Wang Qishan," Joshua remarked. To commit to understanding this system, he needed to understand how the individual parts mingled together. This was the only way to pierce the Chinese veil.
China mirrors the nested power architecture of the Forbidden City—a place filled with secret sanctums, where diplomats mingle with businessmen and politicians in hushed tones. To become the conduit of information between disparate cultures he needed unfiltered access to the thoughts, actions and emotions of the people that inhabited China, at every level.
Building these relationships proved more challenging than he expected. “What I learned when I first moved there was discovering that just because you meet someone once or twice you aren’t necessarily friends with them”. The process required patience and persistence—qualities that served him well when he met John L. Thornton, who would become his eventual boss. Mr. Thornton had retired as the ambitious co-president of Goldman Sachs to become a professor at Tsinghua University (the second foreign-born person to do so). Joshua joined as a Managing Partner in Mr. Thornton’s office and did advisory work focusing on political, economic and business areas on issues relating to China.
FOUR YEARS INTO his time in China, Joshua met Master Nan—a wise, elusive figure who was the secret teacher to many of China’s leaders, diplomats and businessmen. Master Nan was a Buddhist monastic, associated with the school of Rinzai Zen which occupies itself with untangling koans —knotty puzzles that require both logic and instinct to solve them. “The aim of Rinzai meditation and learning,” Joshua wrote, “is to arrive at a sudden and complete under- standing of the true nature of the world.”
This visit with Master Nan codified the intuition that drove him to China: that change is ceaseless and knowing facts alone won’t give you the edge. Training a ‘vigilant instinct’ however, would.
Master Nan foresaw a rupture (jie-shu) coming forth, and realized that only trained instincts would allow people to deal with it. Joshua wanted to cultivate this instinct. Like Clausewitz before him, he wanted to grasp the possibilities inherent in a dynamic environment, to have ‘Coup d’oeil’—an instant ‘apprehending glimpse of power waves’.
The monk's teaching resonated with what Joshua observed daily. Like the Shan Shui paintings he'd begun studying—with their winding rivers, ethereal mists, and looming mountains dwarfing tiny human figures—China revealed vast forces in motion while individuals navigated as best they could. The history he needed to master was coming at him at accelerating speed
China had already undergone massive change and was evolving at an accelerating pace. As Joshua himself recounts in his 2004 policy paper, “The Beijing Consensus”, Jiang Zemin, the outgoing paramount leader of the CCP used the word ‘new’ ninety times in his ninety minute speech at the 16th Party Congress. “Decades-old rhetoric about China makes no sense in a country where two-week old maps are out of date.”
Subtitled “Notes on the New Physics of Chinese Power”, Joshua’s paper quickly spread amongst policy circles as a relevant and vibrant work, igniting intense debates among economists and political scientists. His use of the term ‘New Physics’—an ode to the chaos brought about by the quantum physics of Heisenberg to the old physics of Newton—heralded the beginning of Joshua’s interest in complexity theory and its application to foreign relations. Master Nan’s ideas about instincts were fermenting in his brain.
WHEN JOSHUA SPENT time with Andy Grove for his Man of the Year profile, he spent two days traveling through Silicon Valley with the always unsettled executive. Some Stanford students mistook Joshua as a security man, and Grove nicknamed him Agent Ramo in jest. Many years later Joshua had indeed become Agent Ramo—a globetrotting man of letters who split his time between Shanghai and New York.
It was during these years that Henry Kissinger entered his orbit.
Kissinger had retired from public office in 1977 as a renowned and polarizing figure in American politics. His looming presence had clouded over U.S. foreign policy throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Since then he had maintained his stature as a ‘citizen-diplomat’ working with international clients to solve their geo-strategic concerns as part of his consulting firm Kissinger Associates, which he founded in 1982.
Dr. Kissinger had old ties to China, being the prominent deal-maker behind Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. Joshua joined the China office of Kissinger Associates in 2006 as Managing Director. Under the tutelage of Dr. Kissinger, he honed his ability to observe behavioral dynamics and how they impacted the current political, social and economic setting.
In 1830, when Alexis de Tocqueville was chronicling America and writing his magnum opus, “Democracy in America”, his mentor Francois Guizot insisted that Tocqueville consider ‘total history’. Francois Guizot (a historian’s historian, who was well-regarded by John Stuart Mill, Goethe and others) stated that history not only consisted of chronological events, but that each history had a ‘shape’. He insisted that understanding the vertices of this shape required a deep analysis of its driving forces, and a study of its key levers.
Years later as Joshua was trying to understand China, Kissinger became his Guizot—urging him to consider the terrain of things.
“When I started working [with Henry],” Joshua told Charlie Rose, “the most surprising [thing] to me [was] the amount of time we spent trying to understand the landscape.” Kissinger was teaching Joshua a diplomat’s perspective— “what’s the historical landscape, what’s the intellectual landscape, what’s the cultural landscape in which somebody operates?”
Even though Joshua was helping Kissinger Associate’s clients with commercial problems, he was developing a deeper grasp of the context to make things work. “You don’t look at a commercial problem because our firm is a commercial firm,” he says, “you really try to understand the context in which it is embedded.” He was honing his intuitive sense for the complexity of the age.
He developed these ideas in his book ‘The Age of the Unthinkable” which came out in 2009. Writing from four to eight every morning, he would grapple with abstract but powerful concepts like resilience, change, and the uncertainty of systems. It was also—similar to his previous work—a diatribe against the ‘end-of-history arrogance’ that gripped Washington decision-makers during that time. Joshua spent a lot of time detailing stories of innovators in far-flung places, from Shigeru Miyamoto in Japan, to Mike Moritz in Silicon Valley. He even profiled the Israeli Spy-Chief Aharon Farkash and members of Hezbollah in an attempt to understand their new power dynamic, something the old guard of power politics roaming dusty Washington hallways would never understand.
The ideas in this book were a not-so-subtle jab at Dr. Kissinger and his ilk of old-guard foreign policy diplomats. He even critiqued Dr. Kissinger’s teacher Hans Morgenthau, whose book “Politics Among Nations” remains a gold standard in international relations. Morgenthau’s world—where statesmen could work out issues of power in ‘wood-paneled rooms’—was obsolete. Similarly, Kissinger’s ideas on ‘deterrence’ would never work. “There’s no way to deter terrorists eager to die for their cause or diseases that start at the intersection of man and animal and spread by airplane,” Joshua wrote. The solution was to build resilience to manage crises.
As Kissinger adopted Morgenthau’s ideas—Joshua adopted and changed Kissinger’s ideas. At the launch party for Joshua’s book, Kissinger offered measured praise but couldn't resist addressing the generational critique: 'The one basic theme [in Joshua’s book] that is a little difficult for me is that my generation is sort of a bunch of dodos,' he quipped. Yet, Joshua continued to work with Dr. Kissinger until his death, even assisting him during his visit to China when he was ninety-nine.
WHEN JOSHUA INTERVIEWED Bob Rubin for TIME’s 1999 cover story, Mr. Rubin made a fascinating analogy:
“Global capital markets pose the same kinds of problems that jet planes do. They are faster, more comfortable, and they get you where you are going better. But the crashes are more spectacular.”
Rubin was describing the destructive power of a complex, interconnected system. “Connection changes the nature of an object,” Joshua would repeatedly say. A connected financial system means that a property price crash in Thailand can cause unforeseen ripple effects in Hong Kong, South Korea, and eventually make their way to Brazil.
Networks are powerful forces, and are not limited to the virtual world. “Networks can be defined by geography, or by language or currency or data protocols,” he writes. “People who live in Bangalore are a network. As are switches on the Internet or businesses transacting in rupiah.”
According to him, networks now govern Grand Strategy as much as anything. Joshua saw this dynamic play out in the 2016 election. Jeb Bush had traditional political assets—family presidents, four decades of experience, Republican Party connections. But Trump was plugged into different networks entirely: millions of Twitter followers and reality television audiences that represented a connection to a set of networks that were largely invisible to the traditional way of thinking. The result was clear: ignore networks at your own peril.
“A major state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in strategy.”
—Liu Yazhou (Chinese general), quoted in The Seventh Sense.
AFTER THE MEDIA cycle of his last book, Joshua stepped back from the public eye. He ended his tenure at Kissinger Associates as co-CEO and started his own private advisory firm “Sornay”. A mystical name—perhaps a reference to the village of Sornay in France, or an ode to a Persian wind instrument named the ‘Sorna’. The firm has no visible presence on the internet. For Sornay, Joshua has quietly raised ~$70M spread across two funds to invest in cutting edge technologies and entrepreneurs that embody what he calls the Seventh Sense—the instinct he has cultivated over the past few decades.
His investment focus remains broad, though healthcare appears central to his thinking. “What’s remarkable to me is the incredible dynamism of the innovation of products that are being developed in China,” he remarked at DLD '22. “Some of the activity we’ve done, in investments, is around health-tech... China is going to become a leader in next-generational health-tech.”
Joshua's current preoccupations remain largely private. But it seems certain he will continue to live at what he calls 'the razor's edge'. In his most personal book, “No Visible Horizon,” he captured this philosophy:
“At any moment you could slip to the other side, a gas leak, weather, fire in the cockpit. You would beat at the flames with your hands, burning them. To no avail. Sometimes what made the risks horrible was that you could watch them play out in front of you; like a little opera, you could hear all the arias of your mistakes singing at you as the earth swam up. A chorus of your guilt followed you down. Occasionally you were able to get out and describe to others what this music had been like.
But none of you ever stopped flying. That was the truly unthinkable thing.”
For Joshua Cooper Ramo, that remains as true today as it was in the cockpit.
Notes, Resources and More Readings
The Seventh Sense; by Joshua Cooper Ramo
The Age of the Unthinkable; by Joshua Cooper Ramo
No Visible Horizon; by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Joshua’s remarks at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference w/ Reid Hoffman (2023)
Onwards to Consilience!
