Friday Ideas 11/22: Nick Cave on cynicism, Elon v. Sama, Bill Gurley on TAM, Errol Morris on investigation, Taj Mahal on the roots of the blues, Zuckerberg on starting small + more
Trying something new — sharing a wide range of things I enjoyed in the last two weeks ranging from podcasts to films and music. Some include transcribed highlights and others are simply links with quick comments.
Curious to see what you think. If you enjoy any of the ideas or links in particular please let me know.
Quick Links
If you read one thing this weekend may it be this from Nick Cave on cynicism and hopefulness.
Excerpt: "Cynicism is not a neutral position—and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils."
Kids can develop perfect pitch if you expose them to enough sufficiently complex music before the age of 5.
Thread on Doug Burgum — the current Governor of North Dakota and possible incoming Secretary of the Interior.
A novel written autonomously by 10 teams of 10 AI agents (GitHub repo)
Someone managed to digitize and “reprint” a scent.
“The most ambitious 16 year old builder in energy tech” Merge Club interview
Benchmark GP Bill Gurley on why “TAM conservatism” often hurts investors
These ideas from Gurley remind me of my essay Quaint startups become the next big thing. Source (with video): Startup Archive
I’ve found that TAM conservatism hurts you more than it helps you as an investor. If you feel like something is super disruptive and it’s unlocking things, your optionality to build on top of that is going to be pretty spectacular.”
Bill recalls NYU professor Aswath Damodaran’s conclusion that Uber was worth only $5.9 billion given the size of the taxi market.
There are multiple reasons why this is a flawed assumption. When you materially improve an offering, and create new features, functions, experiences, price points, and even enable new use cases, you can materially expand the market in the process. The past can be a poor guide for the future if the future offering is materially different than the past.”
Sizing the market for a disruptor based on an incumbent’s market is like sizing the car industry off how many horses there were in 1910.”
Mentava makes software to help pre-schoolers get to a 2nd grade reading level.
They also recently released a physical book: Alphabet Sounds. It went to #1 on the new Children’s Reading books and #15 overall best-selling children’s vocabulary book on Amazon. They sell the book at cost and it’s a great gift for friends with young kids. More about the book and their work on this X post by founder Niels.
Legendary documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on hope, investigation, and technological innovation.
Morris won an Oscar for Best Documentary Picture and pioneered a technique for documentary film called Interrotron which enables the subject to “look” directly at the interviewer/camera.
This is the technique used by every modern documentary where it feels like the subject is looking right into your eyes as they speak. There’s an fascinating page talking more about the technique that is no longer on the internet but here’s the backup on the Internet Archive.
Two ideas on filmmaking from a talk he gave earlier this evening:
When I go into making a film, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm an investigator at heart. I'm trying to figure it out.
It would be stupid to be confident that just because you make a movie, that it's going to make a difference. One makes these things, one reports on these things, out of a kind of hopefulness, insane hopefulness. But I'm always reminded of this conversation between Max Brod and Franz Kafka. Max said to Franz, “Surely you believe in hope?” and Franz said, “Yes, of course. Just not for us.”
Taj Mahal on the roots of the blues
I recently attended a film screening of Sounder (Tubi | Amazon) at the 4 Star Theater. You likely haven’t heard of this movie — I hadn’t — but it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1972. Unfortunately for Sounder’s cast and crew The Godfather also came out that year.
Taj Mahal put together the musical score and also played a small role in the film. If you’ve never heard Taj Mahal, he might be the finest living blues musician though describing him as such under-emphasizes the scope of his mastery of musical styles. I had the pleasure of sitting two seats down from him at the screening where he played a set to kick off the evening:
6 hour podcast on the history of Facebook/Meta
Excellent listen. I’ve transcribed a few of my favorite ideas below.
Acquired hosts on Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard:
Do you know what else Mark does on the same evening that they launch Columbia University [Weisser: Columbia was the 2nd school launched after Harvard]?
He goes to hear Bill Gates speak on campus. That was the same night. During the speech Bill mentions that he actually felt comfortable dropping out of Harvard because he discovered that Harvard had this really generous leave policy that you could take an infinite leave of absence and pursue something else and come back anytime you want. Mark would actually say later that Bill saying that at the event was part of what got him comfortable doing the same thing.
Sheryl Sandberg on going all-in on mobile
We just stopped caring about the right side ads on desktop. We took every engineering resource we could off of that and we put it on mobile and we knew we were going to miss the current quarter but this was us trading the present for the future and all we cared about was our future.
She was sitting there with Mark late at night when they arrived at this plan of foregoing a lot of desktop revenue to basically bet it all on figuring out mobile revenue.
She said:
Well Mark, nobody can fire you and only you can fire me. So if you're in, I'm in.
Later, after the facebook.com blew up, Mark told the Harvard Crimson in an interview:
I don’t really know what the next big thing is because I don’t spend my time making big things. I spend time making small things. And then when the time comes, I put them together.
Acquired hosts on Zuckerberg’s pathfinding:
It’s a very specific way of carrying yourself through the world where you don’t hold too tightly to the path you’re on. Obviously, Mark is incredibly driven to the goal of connecting all the people in the world and doing that through Meta, but he’s very, very open and flexible to the exact path that it’s going to take to get there.
That’s it for this installment. Hope the variety lives up to the Multitudes title.
Appreciate you pulling those gems from the Facebook podcast. This new trend of multi-hour podcasts is a bit much for me 😅