Ryan Holiday joined Shane Parrish to talk about his (newest) book Ego is the Enemy. Holiday has been on this blog twice before, back when these posts had numbers; #18, #108.
This post will be all about how Ryan Holiday works.
Holiday started out by dropping out. Kinda. He told Parrish that he left college because the opportunity cost was too high. He was working on three things where, “if you told me when I was graduating that I could choose one of them, college was worth it.” He left college.
Life was busy, but worth it. Holiday said the work was exhausting, but also a compulsion. One of those jobs was as a researcher for Robert Green. This job was “transcribing interviews and reading books he (Greene) didn’t want to read.” It paid off. Greene taught Holiday how book indexes are constructed and how he wrote books.
This reminded me of how Louis C.K. approached his new show Horace and Pete. Louis, like Holiday, collected skills. Louis explained it using The Matrix as a metaphor.
“When there is a helicopter and he says to her, you know how to play helicopter. And she goes wait a minute and she loads the program. Now I do. Well, anyone can do that. It just takes longer. You can just load a program. So, now I know how to create a multi-camera drama and mount it the same week that I shot it. And how to direct many great actors which I had never done before.”
One of Holiday’s merit badges was the notecard method. He’s explained the system before, but what he emphasized to Parrish was that it’s not Evernote. “It’s physical notecards for a reason.” Holiday works better with a tangible, non-searchable system. “People overestimate the perfect optimized thing,” Holiday said, “not having it searchable has not held me back.”
What matters? Doing the work.
What doesn’t matter? The perfect system or gear.
Casey Neistat makes awesome movies and preaches that the gear doesn’t matter. B.J. Novak writes on notebooks and in Microsoft Word. You don’t need RED cameras or fancy software. You just need to do the work. That’s what Holiday has done.
Holiday guessed that this work for Greene and others compressed his 10,000 hours of practice into four years. In choosing the work options over school Holiday recognized opportunity cost.
This can be hard to weigh in our decisions. Dan Ariely studied our (error-prone) mental calculations. The XMBA requires you understand opportunity cost. John Nagl studied the opportunity cost in war. Whatever the domain, understand there’s something on the other side of each choice.
Holiday told Parrish that eventually this got out of control. He used to take every opportunity. Eventually though he realized that all the energy he put out wasn’t coming back in one form or another. “I never asked ‘what’s the opportunity cost’ and sometimes you have to touch the stove and get burned.” So Holiday scaled back.
He changed how he works with clients. He’s focused his business. He realized, much like Brad Feld that you don’t need to get on every flight and put out every fire.
Scaling back and making changes doesn’t necessarily mean Holiday works less. “I couldn’t turn off my brain,” he told Parrish. His typical routine is to wake at 7, write from 8-11 and then work with clients until 3. After that Holiday runs or swims where ideas “come loose” in his head. He stops official work at 5 or 6, except for email.
Both Holiday and Parrish say that writing “is draining,” and Holiday can pivot to working on something else. Successful people have something to work on. Holiday shifts from writing to consulting to running Brass Check. Nate Silver does this. Casey Neistat does it too. When they get exhausted in one area, they switch to something that draws on a different reservoir of effort.
Holiday’s schedule reflects deliberate choices. It means swimming next to your goats.
Yesterday’s swim. A fence-walking goat showed up at about three quarters of a mile in. Photo… https://t.co/UiKRVFPAyS
Your choices should be intentional, he warned Parrish. “My whole life was about not showing up to an office,” yet he was saying yes to everything and kept ending up in offices. So he cut back. “If you don’t make the decisions about what’s important to you will end up very far from what makes you happy,” Holiday said.
Part of Holiday’s designed life is writing and he looks to his readers for ideas. Holiday treats emails like “frequently asked questions, a sign that someone wants to know something.” Other writers have done this too; Jocko Willink, Austin Kleon, and Steven Kotler all turned audience questions into books.
As Holiday (and Parrish) have succeeded, so have solicitations. If you reach out to them, don’t offer to buy coffee. The five bucks isn’t worth it. The obstacle for busy people, Tyler Cowen noted, isn’t the money but the time. Cowen said that he doesn’t take another research assistant because it would be too much work to supervise them.
What can you learn about business and life from a Navy Seal? A lot. Jocko Willink (@JockoWillink ) joined Tim Ferriss to talk about life, business, and war. I missed this episode when it first came out (September 2015), but that’s fine. Things that are good and true stay good and true. This podcast certainly was. Here are a 8 lessons for life from Jocko Willink.
1/ Experiment. Willink said before his SEAL teams used certain techniques they were tested other places first. What Willink reminded me of most though is that experimentation is messy. “It’s not a movie, so everything was not perfect.” If we knew what to do, we would just do it. We don’t though and we must experiment.
John Nagl found that British success against guerlilla fighers was thanks to experimentation. Louis C.K. exerimented his way through Horace and Pete. David Chang experiments with his restaurant menus, policies, and size.
Experimentation – from the monumental to inconsequential – is a good way to figure out what we should do
2/ Have two perspectives. Willink said that part of the reason he was a good soldier was because he could detach himself from a situation. He tried to train his soldiers so that “failure to detach and step up and away from the problem would result in failure.” A peer told him “ it’s so easy when you’re not in it.”
Willink simultaneously held the inside and outside view.
This can be difficult footing. Bob Seawright found it only when he questioned his predictions. Bethany McLean found it when she talked to short sellers and salesmen. Bill Simmons is both well connected and local homer. When the inside view of intuition meets the outside view of historical fact we often make better decisions.
3/ Be passionate. “If you are super passionate about it there’s a very good chance you’re going to be one of the top performers,” Willink said about the SEAL teams he worked with.
Passion is not ex nihilo. It’s more like fuel for a car. No matter how much gas you have, you need the engine first. Willink’s SEAL teams and teammates had a foundation thanks to their personality, life experiences, and boot camp and only then did passion propelled them to success.
Don’t be fooled by only the sirens of passion, those are empty promises.
Daymond John used passion to sell hats outside a mall. He wasn’t passionate about the specifics (standing outside in the cold). He was passionate about where that would get him.
Tren Griffin addressed it like this; “one trick related to passion is that you are not likely to be passionate about something you do not understand…the more you know about some topics, the more passionate you will get.” Ramit Sethi said the same thing.
Penn Jillette said to follow your anti-passions. Find something you hate so much you want to make it better. I’m guessing this is the angle that SEALS like Willink hold. They don’t like destroying things per se, but making the world a better place.
4/ The greatness of being average. Willink said that during BUD/S training he was never the best. That’s okay. Sometimes it’s better to be good at a few things rather than great at one. Ferriss said about Madonna, “it’s the collection of those tools that makes you world class.”
Charles Lindberg wasn’t the best pilot – but had a collection of tools (barnstorming, mindset, low overhead). Dave McClure started his VC fund because he had the engineering and marketing sides and “there weren’t that may people doing investing that had both disciplines.”
Scott Adams succeeded this way too. Adams wrote:
“I’m a perfect example of the power of leveraging multiple mediocre skills. I’m a rich and famous cartoonist who doesn’t draw well. At social gatherings I’m usually not the funniest person in the room. My writing skills are good, not great. But what I have that most artists and cartoonists do not have is years of corporate business experience plus an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.”
5/ Don’t confuse games for life. Willink said that there are three things that made him feel complete; jujitsu, combat, and marriage and kids. Each of those things were like a checkbox, and once Willink did it he felt he could handle anything in that domain. Ferriss asked about how a civilian might replicate combat.
You could do paintball, but, said Willink “there’s no real risk in paintball, there’s not the fear of death.” Simulations are good, but they can miss crucial parts.
In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb termed this the Ludic Fallacy:
“the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”
On one level paintballing is like combat. You have a gun. You shoot at people. People shoot at you. If you get hit, you’re out. War (and life) is more complex. You can’t simulate the same details nor can you account for the things you don’t know you can account for.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t train, only not to extrapolate training as more than it is.
6/ Write a book based on the questions people ask. Willink and Leif Babin wrote Extreme Ownership because people wanted a manual of sorts. This is a gold mine for authors.
Steven Kotler wrote The Rise of Superman based on the questions from his Abundance book tour. Austin Kleon did the same. On The Knowledge Project podcast, Ryan Holiday said that he takes the questions people email him as a barometer of what people want him to write about.
7/ Backups are “space.” “Two is one and one is none,” Willink tells Ferriss. This is a powerful idea. Charlie Munger called this “a very powerful idea.”
Benjamin Graham has so much backup/space, Munger said, “that even with an elderly alcoholic running a stodgy business, this significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good things can happen to you. You had a huge margin of safety—as he put it—by having this big excess value going for you.”
8/ Use Twitter well. “I never liked people who talked for no reason… if people ask me questions we can have a conversation,” Willink said.
We can update our list of ways to use Twitter well: connect with peers, get opinions from a Devil’s advocate, create positive confirmation biases, and connect with fans.
10 things I learned about life from reading about warfare.
In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, John Nagl writes about the difference in counterinsurgency techniques between the British in Malaya and the United States in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
What amazed me most was that many non-military theories intertwined with counterinsurgency warfare, like; organizational culture, philosophy, disruption theory, and economics.
1/ You have to be there. “General Templer was smart enough to go out into the jungle with the Gurkhas to find out for himself.”
When Samuel Zemurray took over the United States banana industry his rallying cry was“they’re there, we’re here.” His competitor, United Fruit, made their decisions from the offices in Boston whereas Zemurray was on the docks of New Orleans and plantations of Honduras.
When John Chatterton found a U-Boat off the New Jersey shore, he walked through a similar one at a museum to get a feel for the ship. Sarah Tavel said that technology start-ups need to be in Silicon Valley, fin-tech and fashion ones in New York. Stanley McChrystal visisted a vineyard in Afghanistan before he understood the true fighting conditions.
2/ Incentives matter. “Templer required each household to submit a (secret) ballot providing information on Communists or their supporters.” “Harnessing nationalism as an issue for the government against the insurgents was the single most vital part of winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population.”
Nagl lists other examples of incentives – like rewards for surrender of yourself or weapons – but the most interesting part was the spectrum. From local farmers to guerilla fighters to imperialist troops – everyone was motivated by incentives, but not the same amounts or ratio. For some it was money, others it was freedom, choice, or safety. The most valued incentives were a powerful force.
Part-of-the-reason Charles Lindberg had his plane made quickly was because the incentives of the manufactorer were aligned with his.
3/ Strength are weaknesses and weaknesses are strengths. “The demands of conventional and unconventional warfare different so greatly that an organization optimized to succeeding one will have great difficulty in fighting the other.”
This notion twisted the tumbler that opened the lock to Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory. When a business moves up the value chain to more profitable areas, the theory goes, they often surrender the less profitable areas to other companies. Eventually though they can’t move higher up the chain and have been disrupted from below. What was a strength for a business (high margin areas) becomes a weakness and what was a weakenss (low margin areas) becomes a strength for the compeitors.
This Yin and yang nature is elsewhere too. Jim Chanos said that “short selling is an important check on the marketplace.” Napoleon Bonaparte was an excellent agressive general but couldn’t fight a defenseive battle (to save his life). You can’t be good at everything, and by building up some strength you also create some weakness. Which brings us to the next point, opportunity costs.
4/ Consider the opportunity costs. A major theme in Nagl’s book is difference between traditional theories of warfare to new ones. That is, to shift resources from the former to the latter. Nagl suggested that this balance transfer was too slow.
Opportunity cost in everything. It’s a central tenent to the XMBA and part of the reason people like Elizabeth Gilbert and David Chang pursued it.
Opportunity cost is also hard to articulate. Dan Ariely found that people are often too narrow about it. When he asked people at a car dealership what else they could buy if they didn’t buy a car, they often just said a different brand of car. Rather, the full opportunity cost was anything that could be done with that money.
It’s a challenge to compute all the opportunity cost considerations, especially when they are unproven. Add to that the system around the decision.
5/ Institutions are systems (and systems have internal rules). “(Edward Katzenbach) discovered that emotional faith in battle-tested systems; the hierarchy of the military culture, the lack of peacetime pressure to make changes whose actual importance to the state becomes clear only in war, and the lack of desire of civilian leadership to spend money on military change in peacetime all conspired to keep horses in the cavalry.”
Systems have well worn grooves that influence certain choices, like a horse cavalry. Sometimes this is good. Nagl noted that certain military branches fought better because their systems were better matches for the conditions. Some worse.
There is also institutional memory in our systems. Sometimes this is good, other times it’s not. Nagl noted that the lack of institutional memory in the British Army meant they tried different things. The United States Army however, had annihilation as part of their memory and acted as such.
6/ POTRT. To succeed in counterinsurgency warfare, you have to align three groups: the people, the army, and the government.
This is part-of-the-reason-thinking (POTRT). It was mental model #04 and introduced by Sanjay Bakshi. Whether in war, finance, or parenthood, every domain has answers with many reason.
7/ Trail markings and path dependence. “These themes…contributed over time to a uniquely British approach to warfare.” “(Hugh Carleton Greene) argued that the policy of ‘string them up, no matter what’ gave him nothing to offered and left the insurgents with no choice but to fight on.”
The first quote referenced why the British were well adapted to the fight in Malaya. The “British approach” was one of experimentation and optionality. The second referenced Greene’s pleas to have more options for his propaganda. In both cases, path dependence worked best when they led to a place with options.
Contrast this with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Historian Jim Blight said that Castro believed attack was imminent when American warships arrived in the Caribbean. He reached out to the Russians for help. Like a cornered mongoose, the only option left was to attack.
Our takeaway then is to not end up on a path where we get cornered. In areas we know a lot about, we can use intuition to guide us. In unfamiliar areas we should lean on learning from others.
8/ Good ideas come from anywhere. “The British army demonstrated a remarkable openness to learning…bottom-up input was welcomed, from tactical innovations, such as walking backward, through operational ones such as food denial operations.”
The idea of a secret ballot was from a junior officer. Contrary ideas too (like red teaming ) were welcomed. The British succeed – in part – thanks to an openness of ides. They avoided exclusive top-down decision making.
9/ Conditions matter. “Economic grievances provided kindling for nationalistic fires in young men like (Ho Chi Minh).”
Wars are the result when conditions tip from peace to violence. Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, was a product of his times.
It isn’t only war though. Music changed from physical albums to digital singles because of the conditions, a story told in How Music Got Free. Investing too. Benjamin Graham’s value system worked best in the 1930’s and 40’s. Charlie Munger noted that the same system don’t work in today’s conditions.
10/ Measure the right things. War needed a measuring stick of some kind, Nagl pointed out just a few. Poor metrics were things like positions or territory. Retreat was a tactic, not a loss for the guerillas. Kidnappings, assassinations, and road safety were all more accurate measurements.
This problem (also) came from the types of systems soldiers operated in. In the World Wars, territory mattered, and so that’s what the Army measured.
We tend to do this too. Look at time and money. Mellody Hobson said that “people undervalue time and over value money.” Seneca wrote much the same thing: “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” Seymour Schulich wrote “the word ‘billionaire’ is a very crude and inaccurate measure of how well I have played the game of life.”
The right metrics are valuable to have, but not always so easy to figure out.
As promised, here’s a brief update about my latest podcast season. Mike’s Mental Models is a series about the mental models I use. Five episodes are available so far, each about 10 minutes in length. Show notes and details are at https://medium.com/mikes-mental-models.
#04 – Part of the reason thinking.
#03 – The three filters.
#02 – Alternative histories.
#01 – Gordian knots and Chesterton fences.
#00 – An introduction to the season.
Thanks for reading, I’m on Twitter, @mikedariano and at 559-464-5393 .
In 2015 Louis C.K. filmed the final episode of his FX series, Louie. Five seasons and many Emmy nominations and awards later and it was time for a break. Not a total break, but with television projects like Baskets with Zach Galifianakis and Better Things with Pamela Adlon, and plans for a movie, Louis needed to stop Louie. He told Marc Maron, “I don’t know if I’ll make another one and it needs to be okay if I never do.”
“I walked away from Louie and I had a month where I didn’t know what I was going to do next,” Louis told Howard Stern. That’s okay, he added, because gaps are “where good ideas come from.”
Later that summer, Louis met his friend Dino Stamatopoulos and told him “I saw this little thing called Abigail’s Party.” This along with Annie Baker’s play, The Flick ,ignited what would become the web released show Horace and Pete.
It seems obvious that the comedian who pioneered concert ticket sales and downloads of stand-up specials, would reconstruct everything about a television show, but that process wasn’t bestowed upon Louis. It took luck, time, hustle, and a roster of talented people for Louis to pull the whole thing off. That’s the story we’ll look at, how Louis C.K. made Horace and Pete.
Clear the decks.
To start, Louis had to clear the decks. “I threw everything away,” he told Howard Stern. Abigail’s Party was so good, it inspired something that would take all his time. “God dammit, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Louis told Stern. “I want to make a show that operates on this frequency.” Louis considered making it for FX. He had just signed a new contract with the network and he wanted to do something for them, but Horace and Pete couldn’t be it.
The things that drew Louis to Abigail’s Party and The Flick were things that wouldn’t work on television. There were no ad breaks, ample profanity, and long scenes were the square peg that couldn’t fit in the round hole of television. Louis also didn’t want to promote it. “I didn’t want the audience to smell this show before they got it,” he told Marc Maron.
Once he decided it couldn’t work on FX, he thought about other options. “Originally I thought I’ll never cut,” Louis told Stern. He soon realized that wasn’t going to work, and “I let go of the never cutting thing.” Other ideas developed and faded. He wanted a single set, but two scenes. That meant a business below a residence. What kind of business? A family business. What kind of family business? A bar.
Louis told Charlie Rose, “I feel like I found this family in my head somewhere.” He just the “stenographer.” “I open the bar in the morning and just start writing what happens,” he explained to Marc Maron.
In episode 7, Louis’s character is perplexed. Another character teased something that could be true or not. Louis told Charlie Rose he still isn’t sure what the truth is. “Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground,” wrote Stephen King, and it’s an approximation for Louis’s process too.
Louis kept digging. He thought about it, refined it and turned it around. He told Charlie Rose, “before I write it I walk around, driving myself crazy thinking about it. I carve — I do all the carving up here. And I know what’s going to happen. I think about what it means in each interaction and what direction it’s going to go. And I think about all of that for a long time. It’s like being pregnant and finally I regurgitate it on to the page.”
As he carved a few things became clear.
He wanted a multi-camera show, unlike his FX show Louie, a single camera show. He told Marc Maron that with this type of filmmaking “you move on a dialogue or the moment a person’s mood shifts.” He told Charlie Rose he wanted that “live feeling.”
He wanted no laughter. It “discredits a sitcom,” he told Bill Simmons. Or explicit jokes. The show could be funny, but not Jokey. “Jokes are conversation stoppers,” Louis Simmons, “jokes have a corrosive nature to them.”
He wanted no promotion. Whether for experimentation, financial, productivity, or other reasons — I couldn’t find — Louis didn’t want to feel “beholden” to promote the show.
He wanted to experiment with the distribution. “I kept it a secret,” he told Charlie Rose. Louis and Simmons joked that releasing it on a Saturday was even more obscure than a Friday afternoon news dump because it wasn’t part of the workweek.
As he worked, Louis kept asking “does this write?” He told Rose, “I have had a lot of ideas for different kinds of shows but there is this test — does it write? Like can you actually get out the scripts? And I started writing it this summer. And it just kept coming. Episode after episode. And I realized I’m writing something that is worth shooting. So, I started to get it under works producing it.”
Louis had scripts for episodes 1 and 2, now he just needed actors, a place to film, crew, the rest of the scripts, and everything else. There was still a lot of work to be done.
The Who and Where.
Louis asked his Louie producer to see if the Penn Hotel Studio was available. It was. He put down a deposit and figured it was a win win. He would use it, or sell it to someone else for a — speculative — profit.
First to join the crew was Steve Buscemi. Boardwalk Empire had just ended and Buscemi called Louis to ask if he’d volunteer for a charity Buscemi worked with. Louis said sure, and hung up. A moment later he rang Buscemi back and asked “do you want to do this show that I’m doing?” Buscemi said sure.
It was good timing, Louis pointed out to Charlie Rose. “If I come up this idea a year before it wouldn’t have existed. But he (Buscemi) had just come off this big show and I said, what are you doing. And he said ‘nothing, I’m looking for stuff to do.’”
Next on Louis’s radar was Edie Falco, and it had to be Falco. Louis read an interview in the June issue of Variety where Falco said she loved to work, but that she wanted to choose the right thing.
“I need to be moved,” Falco said. “There are people who can feed their whole soul with comedy. I really need to feel like there’s some deeper subterranean movement in the piece… I’m reading all kinds of stuff… but nothing’s grabbing me.”
The interviewer asked about theater. “I love the idea of doing stage,” Falco said, “But my standards have changed. Theater in particular is really grueling. You’re never home in the evening, you never get to say goodnight to your kids. Your weekends are blown. That schedule is hard on a family.”
Imagine Louis as he read this. He has a script with deep subterranean movements. It’s like theater, only it’s filmed. Louis wants Falco for the part, and she, like Buscemi, likes to work but wasn’t working. Louis joked to Marc Maron, “I looked at her face in the magazine and said, out loud like a psycho, ‘you’re going to be on my show.’”
September rolled around and Louis saw Falco at the Emmy Awards. There was an open seat next to her. “I thought fuck it and I sat down,” Louis told Howard Stern. He explained the show, and she said to mail her a script.
Then Louis ran into Jessica Lange. This wasn’t uncommon, both were actors on FX shows. “She liked sitting next to me because I would make her laugh,” Louis told Bill Simmons. “There’s always a kind of even exchange between glamorous actresses and comedians, which is that, we’re happy to sit next to you if you’re a glamorous actress and she gets entertained.”
After the Emmy Awards Louis dropped off scripts for Falco and Lange, with a note and his number. Two days later he got this message; “Hi, this Edie, I’m in. When do we start?” Lange was in too.
Things were going well, three characters written, three characters cast. Up next, Joe Pesci. Unlike Buscemi, Falco, and Lange — Pesci said ‘no.’ Not without adding a few ideas though. Louis spent an entire day with Pesci, and used some things from their conversation on the show. The problem, Pesci said, was that the show was too good. “I think your show is going to be very successful,” Pesci told Louis, “and for that reason I’m going to decline it.”
After he declined, Pesci still helped. Louis told Marc Maron: “I still sent him a couple of scripts and he would call me and go, ‘listen you dummy, you’re going to write Archie Bunker again? This character has no depth and is a fucking idiot and it’s been done, so are you going to listen to me?’ And I’m like ‘Yes Joe, tell me what’s wrong with Uncle Pete.’”
Louis’s second choice was Jack Nicholson. He asked Lorne Michaels to arrange a call. One day Louis’s phone rang and a voice said, “I’m looking for Louis C.K.. I’m calling for Jack Nicholson. If this isn’t you, I’m hanging up immediately.” Louis said he was Louis and got on the phone with Nicholson. “The writing’s terrific,” Nicholson said, “but I’m not going to do it.” Louis tried to convince him, but Nicholson countered, “do you know what I did today? I went out to the tree in my yard, and I sat under it, and I read a book, and when I was done I went back inside.”
No Pesci, no Nicholson. Louis asked Christopher Walken. He liked it too, but thought it was too similar to other guys he’d portrayed. Walken suggested Louis find someone unexpected for the part. Walken and Lange’s agent was Toni Howard, who suggested Alan Alda.
No, Louis thought, that won’t work. Just talk to him, Howard said, “Alan loves to work.” Louis relented. They men met and Louis asked how Alda might play it. Alda said he doesn’t work like that, he’s more of an in-the-moment actor.
“I’m trying to see Uncle Pete in him.”
Louis was concerned, “I’m trying to see Uncle Pete in him,” he told Marc Maron, but he relented because, “I love every single thing he’s done and he wants this, so I said, let’s just do it.” It worked out well. “He invented that fucking character, it’s not what I had in my head, it’s something a billion times better.”
The set was booked, the actors had committed, all that was left was the music. Louis wanted Paul Simon. “You asked Paul Simon?” exclaimed Howard Stern. How? “I have this new method,” Louis explained. “I write an email to a guy like Paul Simon, saying, ’I’m making a new show. I want you to write the theme song, it’d set the tone perfectly.’”
“That’s it?” asked Stern. “That’s all, just ask,” advised Louis.
All the while Louis kept writing. He wrote episodes 3–8, and had ideas for 9 and 10, but wanted to hold off to see if something better came to him. He also got more details for the show.
He visited bars during the day. He “talked to a doctor of psychology to run some of this shit by him,” Louis told Maron. He wanted his character to be “a nothing guy.” “I wanted to play a guy who makes terrible choices and blew it with his kids,” Louis told Maron.
Charlie Rose asked how Louis’s writing was so relatable. Louis said it’s because he’s an “ordinary guy.” Really asked Rose. “Yes,” Louis said. “You know, my gut is hanging out of my t-shirt half the time. I will put ice cream on my chest like Tony Soprano and eat and watch, you know, Shark Tank.” You know, Louis told Bill Simmons, “I was poor for 40 years, I’ve been better off for 5.”
Louis talked to experts, drew on his own experiences, and talked with other writers. “The biggest help,” Louis told Simmons “is when someone sits on my couch.” He expanded on this with his interview with Marc Maron, “The way that I use help as a writer is to have somebody sit on my couch to talk to.” Sometimes it was Vernon Chapman, Steven Wright, or Pamela Adlon. For Horace and Pete the biggest help was Annie Baker, who helped Louis figure out a key character and idea for episode three.
As he wrote, Louis also wanted a way for the show to feel current, so he left sections open for discussions of current events, trusting the actors he had. Scripts 1–8 were ready, now it was just time to film the thing.
It’s time to film the thing.
Louis had given up on the no-cutting idea, but there were still problems. Louis’s FX show Louie was shot with one camera, and the episode was stitched together after. Horace and Pete had four, and Louis wanted long takes. To untangle this mess, Louis went through the script with four different colored highlighters, one color for each camera. Each highlighted line of dialogue had a camera assigned to it.
He told Charlie Rose, that Horace and Pete was “so different” from Louie:
“It was indoors in a studio, all day…Louie was a single camera which means that you shoot little pieces… and then you sew them together through the magic of editing. This thing we shot like 20 pages without stopping. We did it like a play. We let people feel like they were at a play performance…so it was about rehearsing and preparing and then just letting it happen. It’s a completely different kind of directing.”
Louis’s dislike for laugher also helped move things along. His friend Dino Stamatopoulos helped out and observed, “I never saw more than three or four takes being done. Because there’s no audience, you don’t have to do it again and tell the audience to laugh again.”
Another perk of no laughter was the flexibility of pace. “The laughs are so disruptive to me when I watch a sitcom,” Louis told Howard Stern. “If you take the laughs out you can get faster and slower, faster and slower.”
With the cameras aligned and lack of laughter, it was fertile ground for the actors to shine. Louis repeated over and over how great everyone was. Somedays he would tell actors that this take was it, and if they wanted to do something good they should do it now. “Pressure is really good for good actors,” Louis told Simmons.
Stamatopoulos added, “I know the actors all loved working on it. It was such a fun experience. When I was there they would finish shooting halfway through the day, which is unheard of. Louis would look around and say, ‘I guess that’s it, we can all go home!’ It went so smoothly.”
Efficient filming was good, because it was expensive. Louis’s initial plan was to film four episodes, at a cost of $500,000 each. “I can spend two million bucks on this show, and it’ll hurt, and it’ll leave me with no cushion in life,” Louis said, “but I’ll go on the road after that and make it back.”
Easy and simple enough. Then 4 episodes became 10, and Louis had to take out a line of credit to pay for the show. Making it, Louis said, was like being an ATM machine. Howard Stern summarized it as “money shooting out of your asshole.”
It wasn’t as if he couldn’t get the money. Stern asks why he didn’t just take Horace and Pete to FX. Lorne Michaels begged him to get financial backers. Louis wanted to do this on his own for a few reasons.
Experimentation. What if this is released on a Saturday? What if it’s only available from a website? What if each episode is filmed in a week? What if a season is filmed in ten? What is it like to own a TV show? Louis wanted to experiment his way to these answers.
Beholden to executives. While Louis liked FX, he didn’t want to answer to anyone for this show. Television, Louis noted to Marc Maron, has a certain economic structure.
“I want to do this show for years I thought, but every time I took a big dramatic or tragic turn on the show, I thought, the only thing that keeps you from doing that in a sitcom or any series is that you need to stay within the margins so the show stays the same and so it can stay on the air. The decision to make big moves on a television show is economic.” Louis didn’t want the show’s path to be dictated by the reins of advertising.
Louis added, that the content was extreme, and “I didn’t want to convince anyone of anything or risk their money when I knew I was taking a deep risk.”
Responsible to employees. When Louis said he wouldn’t return for another seasons of Louie it was hard. He was the center of a universe of employees. If he left, that universe would collapse.
He kept doing Louie for so long because, “I wanted to pay them off as long as I could and once we were getting Emmys and stuff, that means a lot to them. So I milked that as long as I could and some of the people that worked for me, that make a living working on my show…. It was very hard to tell them you’re all fired. And tell all these people, I quit. That’s very hard to do. That’s a lot of pressure.”
Louis’s go-it-alone loan was risky, but he had a plan. For starters, there was no promotion budget, which can exceed the production budget. More important, Louis owns a television show.
In his interview, Bill Simmons called it the current media alley “an Anchorman style fight for content.” Louis framed it like an investment. One that looks to be doing well. “By the summer, the whole show will have paid itself off,” Louis told Howard Stern.
The initial media hullabaloo missed these nuances Simmons joked about buying Louis lunch, and he responded, “I’m so not broke,” however, “it’s not a bad place for the story to start.” Louis expected this response, “Louis C.K. lost all his money on Horace and Pete and it was a total failure is a very clickable story.” Normally a network will have someone that enlightens the media about what’s going on, Louis kept them in the dark.
What’s money for anyway? Louis told Charlie Rose, “to me it’s more interesting to do something than to have it stored up somewhere, you know, sitting, accruing interest. I could be dead tomorrow.”
This all only worked the way it did because of the confluence of Louis’s skills. He knows how write, produce, film, act, direct, edit, and publish shows. He may be the only one. Louis told Charlie Rose that he thinks of his set of skills like merit badges or a more techno-friendly metaphor, like the Matrix.
“When there is a helicopter and he says to her, you know how to play helicopter. And she goes wait a minute and she loads the program. Now I do. Well, anyone can do that. It just takes longer. You can just load a program. So, now I know how to create a multi-camera drama and mount it the same week that I shot it. And how to direct many great actors which I had never done before.”
This “loading” took a lot of time to learn. Louis and Marc Maron reminisced about how long they struggled to make it.
“We fucking slogged,” Louis said, “with no hope of reaching it, for each of us, 25–30 years of running in place, of building skill and not know if anything was going to work out and that the odds were very against us.”
With the right skills, money in the bank, actors on set, and — highlighted — scripts in hand, what did a normal week look like?
They found this rhythm in the first week, thanks in part to the skills of the actors. The cast did a table read on Monday, rehearsals on Tuesday, shooting Wednesday, Thursday, edits on Friday and each episode was emailed out on Saturday.
Saturday was a very deliberate choice. Louis told Bill Simmons that it’s even more obscure that a ‘Friday news dump’ because it’s not even part of the workweek. Charlie Rose questioned this choice too, saying, “you didn’t roll this out with a lot of fanfare.” No, said Louis, “it was the opposite, I made it a secret.” Why?
Louis told Bill Simmons, “the event of the show was meant to be an intimate experience.” If you were watching along you weren’t supposed to know if an episode would come, or when, or how long it would be. Louis explained to Charlie Rose, “one of the things they liked about ‘Horace and Pete’ was that they got an email from me, that I sent to them saying the next episode is ready…it was very bespoke.”
This intimate release was exemplified by the ending. Episode 10 was the final episode, but no one knew this when it was published. Louis wanted people to watch the ending without knowing it. The last episode was emotional for the cast too.
Louis told Rose: “When we shot the last episode it took me awhile to recover from it. I never had an experience like that. Because I didn’t have to act, I didn’t have to conjure something from my past or figure out how to get there. I was just very upset for real. And all of us, we traded e-mails me and Alan and Edie and Steve, traded e-mails.”
The process also stirred up other ideas. “It really inspired me. When I got off that show, I came back to my studio and wrote a whole screenplay,” Louis said.
Louis’s experiment will continue. After releasing the final episode on April 2, he appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He did an interview tour too, sitting with; Marc Maron, Bill Simmons, Charlie Rose, and Howard Stern. Louis has plans to eventually sell the show to a network or online distributor. He also submitted the show for an Emmy.
Awards and money don’t really matter though. If this doesn’t become a critical or financial success, that’s okay. Louis isn’t worried about failing at something new. “I’ve done other things I haven’t done before,” Louis told Charlie Rose, “And also if this doesn’t go well, what’s the big deal?”
For now, Louis says he needs to get back into standup. “I’m going on the road now for a year. I’m clearing the decks,” Louis told Rose, because “I haven’t been as good at stand-up as I was in like 2008 to ‘10.”
This bothers Louis because he feels like his profession is stand-up comedian. “It’s an awful feeling, yes. It feels like I’m betraying the audience and also I’m betraying the thing I’m doing.”
Jim Chanos was interviewed on the Financial Times podcast. I’d not heard of Chanos and am glad I listened. For background I found Tren Griffin’s post and Barry Ritholtz’s interview helpful. Also, thanks to Patrick O’Shaughnessy who suggested this podcast.
Here’s what I learned from Jim Chanos.
1/ Know the pot and the payout.
Summaries of short sellers typically concludes with a warning that shorted positions are asymmetrical. Gains are limited by the shorted prices, but losses are uncapped.
In theory.
In reality, Chanos says he’s “seen far more stocks go to zero than infinity.”
“Any damn fool can see that a horse carrying a light weight with a wonderful win rate and a good post position etc., etc. is way more likely to win than a horse with a terrible record and extra weight and so on and so on. But if you look at the odds, the bad horse pays 100 to 1, whereas the good horse pays 3 to 2. Then it’s not clear which is statistically the best bet using the mathematics of Fermat and Pascal.”
“I want to ask one of my two older kids (age 12)… ‘Does this (merger arbitrage) sound like a good idea to you?’…There’s about a 98 percent chance they say, ‘No. That sounds like a terrible idea to me, you can lose a lot, you can make a little. Who wants to do that?’ I’d be the proudest pop on Earth if either one of them kind of paused and said, ‘how often do both of those two things happen, Dad?’ Because, that’s the proper question.”
As Sam Hinkie also noted, San Francisco is a great place to live – and an expensive one. The pot for SF was high (no pun), but so was the buy in.
2/ Have the numerate filter at the ready. Chanos is at a meeting about China when he stops a young analyst for confusing square meters and square feet.
No, says the analysis, “I double checked. It’s 5.6 billion square metres.”
Whoa, Chanos thought, “that’s a five foot by five foot office cubicle for every man, woman and child in China.”
To be numerate you just need to be good enough with numbers. To know that 1 square meter is 10 square feet. To know the population of China. To know how to divide one large number by another.
Charlie Munger said that if you don’t get this basic algebra down, “you go through a long life like a one legged man in an asskicking contest.”
Tyler Cowen noted that numbers are not always answers. “Statistics are often telling you what the questions are, not the answers.”
You just have to know enough math, and be ready and able to use it.
3/ Know your history. Wow, does Chanos’s knowledge of history show. He references the 1980’s housing bubble, the Japanese housing bubble, Tyco, Worldcom, and many others. He calls this “pattern recognition.”
This value in pattern recognition is why people like David Chang say, “I can learn more from a history book or autobiography about someone that make a ton of mistakes,” as compared to a book on management.
There’s good reason. Nassim Taleb writes in his review for The Hour Between Dog and Wolf “Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar. Bravo!”
The more history we know, the wider our “pattern recognition.”
4/ Have red flags. “I’m always wary of accountants who become CEOs too. That’s always a bad sign for me,” Chanos said.
Another red flag, people who call meetings to say everything is fine. “I remember that my head of stock loan went to a meeting that Bear Stearns had with its prime broker clients to put them at ease. My partner came back and he was of course less at ease based on that meeting.”
I’ve collected my favorite red flags but missing in that link is the one Chamath Palihapitiya told Kara Swisher. He said that when an early believer bails, it’s a red flag. I found the same thing in my book about start-ups that failed. If a seed round investor didn’t lead the A round, no one else would join in.
5/ Skin in the game. “When it comes to finance, you have this bizarre idea that ‘we just can’t hold individuals responsible for their actions, we have to look at the corporation.’”
The flaw in the criminal justice system, says Chanos, is no skin in the game. This leads to moral hazard and we should know better. Mellody Hobson said her company looks to invest in “leaders who are aligned with the shareholder. If we see CEO’s that don’t own any stock that’s just not good. If we see CEO’s that pay themselves too much, that’s not good.”
When Tim Ferriss played poker with his own money, he played different. Jason Zweig suggested skin in the game as necessary to better predictions and decision making. Nassim Taleb has written A LOT about it.
Decisions change with skin in the game, and Chanos believes for the better.
6/ Ultimate backstop. “Who watches the watchmen?” is the tagline for the Watchmen comic, but is relevant here is well. In finance the question is, ‘who insurers the insurers?’
If Chanos didn’t know, he stayed away, “We thought about it (shorting the US housing crisis). And my fear was: I was worried that we wouldn’t get paid.”
In his book FoolproofGreg Ip addresses this problem of insurance. Who is the insurer of last resort Ip asks? Hurricanes in Florida meant the state got involved. In California the disaster was differed by the state stepped up. Flood insurance is offered through the United States Government.
For large enough disasters – financial, natural, or otherwise – everyone steps up to insure everyone else. When Chanos wasn’t sure who would “step up,” he stepped away.
Another biases needed it’s own page, the Rosy Retrospection bias, our tendency to shade the past in a more favorable light.
This isn’t always bad. In my podcast with Aaron Watson, I pointed out that bias awareness is more important that rejection. Sometimes our currents of bias are helpful. Our energy then, should focus on ensuring they move us in the direction we want to go.
We can bust Rosy Retrospection with objective observations of the past.
In One Summer, Bill Bryson writes that the 1920’s roared in a variety of ways:
“Citizens were imprisoned for criticizing the Red Cross at their own dinner tables… a clergyman in Vermont was given a fifteen year jail term for handing out half a dozen pacifist leaflets. In Indiana, a jury took just two minutes to acquit a man who had shot an immigrant for speaking ill of America…a filmmaker was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence…a black youth who fell asleep on a raft on Lake Michigan and drifted onto a white beach was stoned to death by a white crowd.”
The worst deflation in American history occurred in 1920, GNP fell 5%. The 1920’s weren’t always golden.
More modern examples abound. Charlie Munger said:
“I personally think that the world is better for having Wal-Mart. I mean you can idealize small town life. But I’ve spent a fair amount of time in small towns. And let me tell you you shouldn’t get too idealistic about all those businesses he destroyed.”
Wal-Mart didn’t displace just Mayberry, but trimmed away a lot of fat as well.
Even times we consider idyllic now, were bemoaned in favor of a more distant past. David McCullough writes about bicycles in 1900:
“Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”
Now parents would love to have their kids get outside and ride their bike.
We don’t even need to go that far. “The 1990s have a good image,” wrote Peter Thiel is Zero to One “but many of those years were not as cheerful as our nostalgia holds.”
The old days were good and bad. If you start thinking they were always one, be careful.
This blog began with podcast notes, but I’ve been on a real history kick (Wright brothers, Napoleon Bonaparte ) and we’ll continue with Charles Lindbergh. But, first Philip Tetlock will temper our thinking. This from the endnotes of Superforecasting:
“Don’t confuse your judgments of foresight with those of character. It should not matter whether you see the forecaster as an adulterer or an affable television host or a skilled speechwriter or a Wall Street insider or a Prussian imperialist or an Ivy League sexist.”
Tetlock wants us to compartmentalize people and evaluate their actions appropriately. Consider professional sports. Teachers cheer on players who flunked their class. Pastors will root for players who visit strip clubs. MADD moms will clap the same player they later scold. This is okay.
We can use Charlie Munger’s “cancer surgery formula” and apply it to people. About his investment in GEICO, Munger said:
“figure out if there’s anything sound left that can live on its own if they cut away everything else….All they (management) had to do was to cut out all the folly and go back to the perfectly wonderful business that was lying there.”
Lindbergh was both daring and unsavory, and here are a few things I learned about him from Bill Bryon’s – wonderful (!!) book – One Summer, America 1927.
1/ A transatlantic flight would have happened with or without Lindbergh. We noted this in episode #02 of the podcast, when we thought about alternative histories. Besides Lindbergh there were better funded and staffed teams on both sides of the Atlantic.
What Lindbergh had going for him was the right set of skills (see #2). Scott Adams introduces this as a Venn diagram of skills, and it’s what Lindbergh had. Sometimes to succeed you just need the right mix. For Adams that was average drawing and humor with a Haas MBA. Lindbergh too had a potpourri of skills. He earned them through an XMBA.
2/ Lindbergh got his XMBA. The eXperiential Masters of Business Administration values the experience over the administration. It’s about the sum of skills you get in one area versus another. It’s the opportunity cost to do, learn, build one thing and not another.
In 1920 Lindbergh entered college, in 1922 he exited. He wanted to be a pilot. The conditions of flight, Bryson writes, were not great. “Flying was poorly paid, wildly unsafe, and unreliable a a career.” This quagmire though was perfect preparations for the perch Lindbergh would later occupy.
Pilots, Bryson notes, sometimes had to search for names of towns by swooping low to read railroad signs. “For weather reports, they mostly called ahead to railroad agents along the route and asked them to put their head out the door and tell them what they saw.” When Lindbergh delivered airmail, “he acquired the sort of resourcefulness that comes with flying cheap and temperamental planes through every possible type of adversity.”
Lindbergh built a set of skills without formal schooling (besides a 1 year course in the army air reserve). Elizabeth Gilbert put it best, when she noted that you can learn by doing (Option B, the XMBA), or learn by learning about doing (Option A, the MBA).
3/ Lindbergh understood incentives. In February 1927, he took a train to NYC to finalize his purchase of the Columbia for his transAtlantic attempt. Before closing though, the plane’s owner stipulated that he, not Lindbergh, would pick the pilot for the historical flight.
As the kids say, wha?
Lindbergh returned to St. Louis, and reset his search for a plane. He found a tiny company in California to build him a single seater (the Columbia had 3) for less than half his budget. “I need it 60 days,” Lindbergh wrote. “Done,” wrote back Ryan Airlines.
The reason that the two parties were able to work so well together was that their incentives were aligned. Ryan Airlines took the deal and worked so hard because, “Ryan had no orders and was on the verge of bankruptcy.”
Lindbergh needed a cheap, light, sturdy plane and he needed it quickly. Ryan Airlines needed a contract for something in their domain of expertise that would lead to more business. Both parties got what they wanted.
4/ Time was Lindbergh’s filter. Quoting Alex Spencer of the Smithsonian, Bryson writes, “Lindbergh didn’t want an innovative plane, he wanted nothing but tried and tested technology.”
5/ Lindbergh was an underdog. While the flight would prove that Lindbergh was the best pilot of the age, his support crew was anything but. He had a crew of three; a mechanic, a press agent, and an errand boy.
Another team had a staff of 40 which included; “mechanics, telegraph operators, even kitchen staff to run a private mess hall.” About Lindberg, another competitor said, “He was generally assumed to be out of his class.”
Lindbergh made it though. Using a plane from a company nearly out of business, a minimal crew, and his own skills as a pilot – Charles Lindbergh was the first to cross the Atlantic in a single flight.
The experience of the Wright Brothers mirrors this. They too were in a race for flight where they were the underdogs for resources, manpower, and government support. It didn’t matter.
Casey Neistat makes the modern day case when he spoke about the movie Pan.
“If all it took to be good was the right equipment, the people with the most money would always in…if all it took to make good stuff was the right equipment, whoever made that movies with their $155m budget had way better cameras than you could ever afford.”
6/ Lindbergh also had good fortune. He was never injured during the airmail crashes (though had to eject a number of times). He found backers in St. Louis, in part, because they wanted to market their city. The weather was bad enough to keep the other fliers grounded, but cleared up once Lindbergh arrived ready to fly.
We need to have good luck. Seth Godin, Jason Zweig, and Nate Silver (among many others) all noted that it helps to have good luck.
Nate Silver was on the Longform podcast in mid-April and talked about a whole slew of things we regularly highlight on this site. Rather than going long about a few things, like the recent post on Napoleon Bonaparte, this will be more rapid fire. Ready?
1/ Silver knows the side hustle. At a consulting job he didn’t like, he worked on a system for forecasting baseball players. Baseball Prospectus bought that system and hired Silver, who was already on to a another side hustle, online poker.
This blog started with notes about James Altucher’s podcast guests, though Altucher himself knew the side hustle too. He didn’t leave HBO until his website business reached the same income as his day job. Alexa von Tobel told the same story about starting LearnVest.
2/ Silver talked with people smarter than him. Silver is brilliant, but even he seeks out smarter people. During his online poker days he says, “I used to be active on the two plus two forum.” This was during the flourish of online poker, and Silver talked with other good players about how to play online. This worked because there were plenty of little fish for these big players to scoop up. As the system got tighter though, the amount that people talked declined.
If you want to get better at something, talking to someone better than you helps a lot. Simon Rich said he fills the TV writer’s rooms with people smarter than him. Dan Coyle called the sports version of this “talent hotbeds.” Austin Kleon praised Brian Eno’s term of “scenius.” Whatever the craft, a better craftsman will make you better as well.
3/ Silver knows that timing matters. Whether intentional or not, Silver has been in the barrel of the wave for a long time. He got into poker when there was easy(ish) money to be made. He started blogging at the right time too (“the barriers to entry were low and it was very meritocratic”). He wrote for Daily Kos and “it kind of blew up.” Moneyball thought was du jour and Silver knew the right recipes.
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. – Victor Hugo
Napoleon Bonaparte had great timing in war. Seth Godin and Mark Cuban had great timing in getting out of the stock market. Malcolm Gladwell noted that Dire Straits was probably extra successful thanks to their timing. From war to music, the personal to professional, timing matters.
4/ Silver believes in spectrum thinking. About that ‘moneyball’ wave, “it’s not like the stat-heads won a unilateral victory.” For all the talk about analytics, it’s not a panacea. Rather, Silver says, “it’s more like people are like ‘we have to be smarter about making decisions and use these different tools at our disposal.’” Advanced metrics – in any domain – is just another tool.
Be careful about silver bullet solutions. We’ve seen this warning before. Most situations have many reasons (we call that ‘part of the reason’ reasoning) and lie somewhere on a spectrum. Greg Ip gave us the problem solving boots of engineers and sandals of ecologists to put on. Charlie Munger warned us about the ‘easy to measure/hard to measure’ spectrum. There’s also the spectrum of skill versus luck
5/ Silver takes his work, but not himself seriously. “It’s like a rollercoaster,” Silver says about running his website. “I’m passionate about my work, and it’s interesting to me, and hopefully our predictions do well,” but he doesn’t take the perspective of perfect predictions into every part of his life.
James Corden said working with Meryl Streep was perfect, in part, “because she took her work seriously, but not herself.”
6/ Silver knows the wrong side of maybe. “In a perfectly rational world, if you make an 80/20 prediction, people should know, not only will this prediction not be right all the time, but you did something wrong if it’s never wrong. The 20% underdog should come through sometimes.”
But (bridge) players must also continually make peace with good decisions that lead to bad outcomes, both one’s own decisions and those of a partner. This peacemaking skill is required if one is to invest wisely in an unknowable world.” – Richard Zeckhauser.
The “wrong side of maybe mindset,” coined by Phillip Tetlock in Superforecasting, is a valuable skill. Weather predictors get the flack and jokes, but it happens in every career. In Smarter, Better, Faster, Charles Duhigg profiles Annie Duke who explains this framework for poker. I wrote about it in this analysis of Sam Hinkie’s resignation letter.
7/ Silver competes against non-consumption. “We have a keen sense for what is a FiveThirtyEight story and what isn’t…we are a different kind of shop.” Silver notes that this was hard at first (“the site wasn’t all that great in the first three to six months of its existence.”) Eventually they found a good spot, daily stories, rigorously researched, and meticulously presented.
There’s no one else that does what FiveThirtyEight does, so they compete against non-consumption. This fits into the rainforest model that people like James Allworth (@JamesAllworth ) use as an analogy for the economy. Many organizations, creatures, etc, find small niches to occupy and dominate.
8/ Silver understands historical bifurcations. “The demise of Grantland didn’t happen all at once. There were a number of turning points where things could have gone in a way that was helpful or harmful, and most of those forks were harmful.” It might be fun, though wrong, to compare Bill Simmons – captain of the Grantland ship – to Napoleon, so we won’t. But the idea foundation for the demise of Grantland to the rise of Napoleon is the same.
Napoleon only dominated Europe because of a number of turning points where things could have gone in a way that was helpful or harmful. (See #1 here: Napoleon Bonaparte ) Silver guesses that this is also part of the reason for the rise of Donald Trump. If A, B, and C all go one way instead of another, then Trump would be in the lead. Those things all happened. Note, the individual odds may be better than a coin toss, where the overall odds are not. If the odds of each happening were 75%, the odds of all three happening is only 42% (.75^3).
9/ Silver knows the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I was hoped that he would smash the statistical cherry-picking at ESPN like a birthday piñata, but he did not.
10/ Silver knows when good enough is good enough. If he goes to a New York Rangers game, Silver says he just cheers the team on (see #5, take the work, not yourself seriously). However, he’ll research dinner options.
There’s often a good enough threshold for most of life. My guess is that people successful people have clear ‘good enoughs’ in areas that matter less. Many great writers are also walkers. My guess is that walking is good enough for physical health. B.J. Novak and Casey Neistat both said that their tools are good enough for the work they need to do. Resources are finite, and something that fit a need good enough is something you don’t need to spend more time on.
Napoleon Bonaparte was not a nice man. I did not know this. A lot of the people and ideas on this blog exist in the idea of the “adjacent possible.” Introduced by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From it’s the idea that before you can see the future, you have to be next to it. It’s like having a flashlight in the woods. The beam of light gets you down the path, then once you are further down the path, so is the light, and you continue on. Elon Musk calls this idea “the semantic tree.” If you’ve ever read a Wikipedia article, not understood something, and clicked link to read more, you’ve see this idea.
We need a jumping off point.
Napoleon’s era was never an adjacent possible for me, but I wanted him to be. Thankfully, Paul Johnson wrote a packed little book, Napoleon. More books should be like this one. Here are a few things I learned about Napoleon.
1/ Historical bifurcations. We can add Napoleon’s name to the list of the great ‘what-ifs.’ We were close to never having a Napoleon.
Had he been born two years earlier, he wouldn’t have been a citizen of France.
Had he not read about Corsica Boswell, he wouldn’t have had revolutionary ideas.
Had he been accepted into the British Navy, he wouldn’t have joined the French.
Had the town ruler not had an (alleged) affair with his mother, he never would have gone to military school.
Had the French government made good on their financial promises after his first defeat, he may have toiled on as the King of Elba rather than heading to Waterloo.
Alternative histories are a helpful tool to think about outcomes. I wrote about this in the breakdown of Sam Hinkie’s resignation letter but a more popular treatment comes from Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens. There, Harari notes that if Charles Darwin hadn’t articulated natural selection, someone else would have.
This isn’t uncommon in science. The adjacent possible in Darwin’s day was a packed room, the doorway under the sign “Evolution” has people clambering over one another to get through.
Whether Napoleon specifically, or history generally, is like science (this probably would have happened anyway) or more like how the dollar became the world’s premier currency (hear NPR tell that story), I don’t know, but it is worth thinking about.
2/ Conditions matter. Paul Johnson writes, “revolutionary France of the 1790s provided the perfect background for an ambitious, politically conscious, and energetic soldier such as Bonaparte to make his way to the top.”
It was enough of a meritocracy, and Napoleon, thanks in part, to his military school education barely made it. There were also parts of Napoleon’s temperament that helped. “Few successful men,” Johnson writes, “have ever carried a lighter burden of ideology.” Napoleon wasn’t committed to any group. He wasn’t beholden to any ideas. This would prove to be his weakness in sustaining power, but strength in accumulating it.
There were also the physical conditions of war that influenced Bonaparte. In France, Italy, and Germany he chose the choicest spots for the butchers of war. In Spain and Russia, he did not. Johnson writes that the summers in the countries were “eaters of armies” and Napoleon ended up retreating through the Russian winter.
Conditions matter.
In a speech from Charlie Munger to the USC Business School, he explains that after the great depression, Benjamin Graham could “run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share.” A great deal.
Munger notes that this worked for Graham, but not for him and, partner Warren Buffett. “If we’d stayed with classic Graham the way Ben Graham did it, we would never have had the record we have. And that’s because Graham wasn’t trying to do what we did.”
The book, How Music Got Free explains the confluence of conditions too. There had to be new technology (mp3, high speed networks) AND a decline in album quality AND a certain approach from music executives for the digital music revolution to occur.
3/ A Venn Diagram of skills. Napoleon succeeded in specific ways because he was the only one at the time who had such skills. “He became a master map reader, with a gift amounting almost to genius for visualizing terrain… few young officers of his day had this skill or bothered to acquire it.”
“I’m a perfect example of the power of leveraging multiple mediocre skills. I’m a rich and famous cartoonist who doesn’t draw well. At social gatherings I’m usually not the funniest person in the room. My writing skills are good, not great. But what I have that most artists and cartoonists do not have is years of corporate business experience plus an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.”
Dave McClure started his VC fund because he had the engineering and marketing sides and “there weren’t that may people doing investing that had both disciplines.”
What Napoleon, Adams, and McClure have done is compete against non-consumption. They found a country, medium, and market they could dominate because no one of their skill level was there. It was their new approach to a problem that helped them succeed.
Toward the end of the book, Johnson notes that Napoleon could have gone even further. Had he tried to rule the America’s he would have had a better chance.
4/ Chesterton fences. Napoleon missed a Chesterton fence. Johnson writes, that in destroying the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon made a mistake. “The Holy Roman Empire filled a role. It was a driver for stressing the cultural unity of Germany while making it difficult to bring about its political and military unity.”
It reminded me of a story that Mardi Jo Link tells in Bootstrapper. Link’s hen house was a mess. The rooster, she thought, was terrorizing the hens. He was always pushing them out the way, taking their spots, waking them up. Enough of that Link thought, and she moved the rooster to another pen. That night a fox got in the hen house and killed a hen. She realized that the rooster served a purpose. His aggression kept the foxes away. She moved him back.
As I noted in episode #01 of mike’s mental models podcast, we should consider the history of something. Ask, why is this this way and not another? After we do that, we can then decide whether to overthrow the Holy Roman Empire, take out the rooster, or tear down the fence.
10 things I learned about life from reading about warfare.
The Waiter's Pad 