Our annual reminder to revisit Dan Carlin’s podcast on the Cuban Missile Crisis: Destroyer of Worlds. I’m amazed that when talking to people who lived 62 years ago, most don’t bring up this event as “significant” in their lives.
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was one of the near misses throughout history.
Our neck of the woods has a lot of bike riders. There’s a large retirement community, with many people who have or get, new hobbies. Pickleball, water volleyball, and golf are the three largest, but we see plenty of riders.
And many of them are e-bikes.
Purists (in the jtbd world this is supply side innovation) scoff. They might even mumble: ‘that’s not real bike riding’. But e-bikes changed how people cycle. We used to see many tandem riders, almost always couples who wanted to ‘ride together’ but didn’t ride at the same speed.
Now we see almost none.
Similarly, a friend said that a guy from his group got an e-bike. At first, like friends do, they gave him a hard time. But the bike lets the guy stay with the group. Rather than aging out, and into another group, the e-bike lets him stay with the pack.
In what ways will AI/LLM change work? Will we see people ‘ride together’? Will workers be older or will the adoption curve be steep and young people’s skills accelerate?
No one knows, much like no one predicted the e-bike adoption.
But, work will come back to Newport’s question: What is rare and valuable?
Note: I tried to run an outline through a LLM to create a blog post. None of the versions were the desired voice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A friend told me his goal was to collect 100% of his potential customer’s contact information.
I told him that was wrong.
It’s difficult to identify your potential customers. Sure, everyone owns a refrigerator, but that doesn’t make everyone a potential customer for Maytag. That’s inefficient strategy.
What’s ideal is something we first identified from Warren Buffett’s letters. These marketing missives brought in Buffett’s brand of capital. They were people who thought like him and became his permanent capital base.
A few likely customers are better than many unlikely customers. This is not a Large N small p problem.
For hiring, Tyler Cowen recommends this, attraction. Books like, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google, are a condition of correlation. Is it that Google hires people who are good at puzzles or is it that people who are good at puzzles drift to Google?
“Well, the Teal Fellows Program has a very good record of picking winners. But I think the biggest part of interviewing is not how you interview, but rather which candidates do you attract. So it’s what you’ve done before the interview to make yourself exciting so the good people want to come to you, be looking for you.
And the same is true of Google. A lot of the questions they asked back then actually are not very robust or very relevant. But what Google did succeed in doing was establishing themselves as the exciting place to be for obvious reasons, and they attracted talent.
And if you get talent coming to you, it’s actually not that hard to be at least a pretty good interviewer. So that’s the part of the problem I would focus on.”
From Ben Thompson speaking on Sharp Tech in June 2024 about the Apple Intelligence demo from WWDC.
“No, what I found striking from the Apple event was it was a vision of how this will work in normal people’s lives, and it was a clearly articulated vision. Like if Siri cannot ingest all your old text messages and tell you what someone’s address is, or if Siri can work across emails and calendars.
That was the single best demo, was the woman who needed to pick up her mom…And there was information scattered across text messages and email. It was so relatable. Like we have all been in that situation.
What time is the flight? Where was the dinner reservation? Having to sort of go across apps and just being able to find the stuff.”
Thompson references this video, where Steve Jobs notes what Apple needs to do: “and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds, it’s not to talk about bits and megahertz, it’s not to talk about why we’re better than windows.”
A helpful question to regularly ask is: What do these numbers really mean? I used to love looking through the Sunday Best Buy ad and comparing computer hardware. RAM, hard drive, monitor size – all catnip to a teenage boy in the 90s.
But what did those numbers actually mean?
Jobs theory is about finding the meaning behind something. See “90 calories” and, click-whirr, must be healthy. That’s the meaning we associate. But is that the right connection?
Or is Eddie correct? Is number of ingredients a better signal?
Metrics, numbers, figures — whatever our attention catches is not accidental. Someone chose that, they framed the context around that scene. It’s up to us to ask, is this right?
Jobs to be done is built on the customers language. How do they define problems? How do they frame Solutions? How do they interpret the context?
Comedy is the customers language. Laughter is customer language. Comedians, says MORGAN Housel, are brilliant. 
“Comedy is a way to show you’re smart without being arrogant…the best comedians are some of the smartest people in society.
They understand psychology.
George Carlin understood psychology, I think, better than Daniel Kahneman did. That’s a bold statement, but I think that is actually true. They are so smart at understanding how the world works, what makes people tick, how people think.
But they’re doing it in a way where they don’t want to just impress you with their intelligence. They want to make you laugh. What could be better than that?”
Our TTID series is built on the idea that this time is different when the structure of the system changes. In what ways have the participants, incentives, and “laws” shifted so that new things emerge?
High jump changed with the Fosbury flop because the landing area softened. A similar sport story may be happening in college football. With the rise of NIL, transfers, and [generic social media self-branding explanation here] the player’s incentives shifted.
In the fall of 2023 there were headlines like “Deon Sanders is the best coach in college football” and “Shaq says Deon reminds him of Phil Jackson”. Ex ante, bettors [predicted](https://www.vegasinsider.com/college-football/odds/win-totals/) Colorado to win three games. After notching two wins, their predicted total is 6.5. (Note: What might Laplace lead to?).
Answer 2: This time is different. Deon is a good coach and through NIL, transfers, and [generic explanation] his team is now excellent. Blue blood programs must now adapt or die.
Number 2 note: I’ve known about the red queen effect but just learned about the court jester effect. Where red queen is PVP, court jester is player vs environment, like in wonderful book, Beak of the Finch (5$ for a used paperback shipped to your door). College football may still be a PVP zero-sum “arms race”, but it’s interesting to think how it may be a macro influenced system too.
Use care explaining “this time is different” because usually it’s not. System, when healthy, change slowly. Like children growing taller, the daily difference is imperceptible. Only after time do we notice the growth.
In the 2023-2024 school year I was back in the classroom. It was a successful year. There were ups and downs, but the setbacks provided chances to grow and the successes led to further advances.
During the last eight days, after exams and projects, we played chess. It was a blast.
I’d last played this much chess in middle school. A friend brought a rolled up board to lunch and we would play over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple slices, and potato chips. Among our lunch table I was about average. I’m still about average. My strategy is winning by accident.
For instance, I didn’t know about “chess forks”:
From ChatGPT: In chess, a fork is a move where a single piece attacks two or more of your opponent’s pieces at the same time. This puts your opponent in a difficult situation because they can usually only move one piece to safety, leaving the other piece (or pieces) vulnerable to capture. Knights are particularly known for creating forks, but any piece can perform a fork. It’s a clever tactic to gain an advantage by threatening multiple pieces simultaneously.
To prevent forking, a player needs to stay out of trouble, unlike Amina.
The best selling fantasy adventure story The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is one fork after another. Amina, our buccaneer hero, faces one tradeoff after another. Unlike my chess skills, she wins not by accident but…., well no spoilers.
Does this happen in real life? Go to a meeting and deal with obstinate coworkers or skip the meeting and be left out? Have a difficult conversation with your loved ones or let the issues fester? Sell an investment for a loss or continue to psychologically carry the burden? Waste more time in a job or face the unexpected prospects of starting over?
One solution comes from Shane Parrish’s book, Clear Thinking, where warns against two-dimensional solution sets. This or that. Burgers or dogs. Good or bad. Day or night.
But, Parrish prods, get creative. Ask: what would it take for one of these options to be good? Can you empathize with the obstinate coworker? Can you have a hard talk with the goal of one step backwards two steps forward? Can you sell an investment as a tax-loss? Can you side-hustle while staying in the job?
Chess and fantasy adventure novels are too strict for this sort of Alchemy.
But life is flexible. It’s malleable. We should avoid getting forked. But if we do, maybe with a little work, there are 3D chess moves to make.
”I think Amazon may have made a mistake about the choice architecture of Amazon marketplace,” begins Rory Sutherland
”They have assumed everyone wants maximum choice. And actually, one of the great values of a physical retailer is curation. We won’t stock this, unless it is reasonably repeatedly shopped for.”
Was a saw: Weaknesses are strengths and strengths are weaknesses. Amazon is THE EVERYTHING STORE and what’s a drawback of that? It’s hard to find things.
Amazon addresses this well, but Rory points out the contrast and we can use that. Things are un/helpful, better/worse, un/necessary depending on the context.
Brands succeed, Rory writes, not because they are good but because they certainly aren’t bad. New entrants compete on a new angle – upside, new jobs, etc.
So, what’s really a strength, what’s really a weakness?
The Waiter's Pad 