Tag: this time is different

This Time is Different: College Football

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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?).

So, is this time different?

Answer 1: Nothing changed! Something is always happening. Each year some team, through a combination of skill and luck, overachieves. The most parsimonious explanation is that Colorado is that team.

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.

TTID: Submariners

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And, finally, in what was easily the most emotional aspect of the trans-formation, Rickover made it clear that  most of the officers who had previously served in diesel submarines (the same officers who had just popularly “won the war in the Pacific” were not welcome in nuclear submarines.

David Oliver, Against the Tide

Our this time is different series builds on the idea that system changes dictate when things are different.

Ask, Have the rules changed?

Nuclear submarines were different from their diesel counterparts, writes Oliver. In the Pacific theater, during WWII, the diesel submarines got “within rock throwing range”. That strategy and “the stress of war distinguished the ducks from the drakes in the submarine officer corps”.

Those captains were cowboys.

Which is what Hyman Rickover did not need.

Nuclear submarine captains needed to be smart and prudent. They had to be wise and calculating. They needed less gung-ho and more ho-hum.

This time was different because the system of war had changed.

Resolutions fail because…

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In her book, How to Change, Katy Milkman writes:

“We’re more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation: the sense that we’ve failed before and will, thus, fail again.”

New year, new week, new me. It’s a birthday. It’s a new job. This time is different. 

But it’s only different when the structure changes. 

Reliance on fresh starts fails because only the narrative changes, not the structure. 

Milkman writes about a study of college transfers. Some kids transferred from the local two-year school while others came in from out of town. The local kids made fewer changes – good and bad! Fresh starts with a different structure push the variance of the changes outward. Sometimes the changes are a desired direction and sometimes not.  

“When we hope to change,” Milkman writes, “we have an opportunity to try reshaping our environment to help us disrupt old routines and ways of thinking.” 

Successful resolutions are an issue of design, not mindset. Like the high jump, the physical surroundings matter!

Want to stick with resolutions? Change the rules.

Have You Heard the One About Ozempic?

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Every idea arrives in a person’s life at a certain stage in the idea’s life. I heard about the cryptocurrency Luna on January 4, 2022. One-hundred days later it crashed. I heard about $LSF in August 2022. It’s fallen fifty percent since then.

Where am I in the investing lifecycle? Late apparently. My awareness negatively correlates with price.

That’s helpful information!

In late 2022 I heard about Ozempic (semaglutide). By February it was on the Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss. Let’s see where this goes.

Tracking ideas is just one meta-idea from Weiss’ work.

Why is this so cheap? Weiss wonders. The average weight loss on Ozempic is 15% of body weight. There must be side effects, right? Remember, we are storytellers. To sell something cheaply, tell customers it’s because we don’t offer any perks.

Too good to be true. A classic red flag, especially to avoid errors of omission. TGTBT will be helpful to AI.

This time is different, only when the rules of the system change. Weight loss is physiological, social, financial, and psychological. If enough of those rules change – for instance, Ozempic is covered by insurance for weight loss, it’s not currently – then things will be different.

Arguing well is difficult. In the podcast, Weiss hosts a trio of experts – who mostly talk past each other. For an organization to find the best path they must argue well and to do that they need to have a strong relationship.

…

This post was created in February 2023. It was published in August 2023. How did Ozempic do?

All-Star Differences

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“At some level, you have to rethink the all-star game in its entirety. If you think about its origins when barely any games were televised and you could only see American League or National League games if your local team was in that league. The all-star game was the only time you got to see players from the other league.” – Adi Wyner 

This time is different states that things are different when the rules change. The covid vaccine is different because the rules for vaccines changed. The 2010s technology boom was different because of accessible technology like AWS. But rules changes accumulate in ‘looser’ domains as well.

All-star games are different because the economic, social, and technological rules have changed. Major League Baseball held its first all-star game in 1933! How things have changed indeed.   

Now, Wyner wonders, how can we get players to care? – or the equivalent. The home run derby is fun, but the game is less so. The three-point contest is fun, but the game is not. We’ve always done it this way. So what! This time is different

Helpful Lessons & Directions

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Why is India a good place to walk, Tyler Cowen asks Paul Salopek as he retraces the steps of the first human migration.

India is good, Salopek says, because the people there have walked the walk.

“Whereas in motorized societies — and I’ve written about this — it’s pointless to talk to somebody in a car — if you’re on foot — about directions because the scale of their sense of landscape is limited to these strips of asphalt that are a few meters wide that wheeled vehicles can go on. Beyond that, it’s just this moving tableau that’s an abstraction.

“In India, people can tell you shortcuts. They can tell you where the best tree is to take a break, where the best temple is to sleep at night, where the next jug of water waiting the foot traveler lies ahead. India was marvelous. I felt among a brotherhood and sisterhood of walkers there.”

Paul Salopek, Conversations with Tyler

Our This Time is Different is about understanding this idea. Walkers and drivers travel through the same physical space but travel through different temporal spaces.

When there are different rules then this time is different.

ESPN’s innovation dilemma

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One pant leg on is a local maximum. One problem is solved but the larger set is not.

Clayton Christensen’s series on disruption and innovation is about local maximums.

Money machine go brrr is a strong incentive to keep printing. Maximizing a profitable business makes sense, which is the dilemma! Organizations find themselves looking good in one pant leg.

The solution to local maximums is exploration. But this is costly – money, status (uh oh), time, reputation. Plus the stakeholder’s opinions.

The solution, Clayton Christensen writes, is separation. Different groups with different strategies, finances, and when possible physical locations.

Solutions via exploration are important because customer and consumer preferences – their JTBD – change.

“We are all under the Disney umbrella,” Brian Burke said, “ESPN.com is a huge enterprise with an army of people and is a revenue generator in so many ways. It’s difficult to change course. FiveThirtyEight is agile, nimble, and experimental so (publishing there) was a great opportunity”.

ESPN.com go brrr.

Which is the dilemma, and Disney/ESPN uses FiveThirtyEight as the exploration solution. Who knows if Burke’s writing approach is better, but the publishing strategy is a solution to the innovator’s dilemma.

“The next ESPN.com” will be different. Whatever is next will have a different business model than the current Great Firms (Christensen’s subtitle). Whatever is next will have a different maximum. It will be a short vertical video or the degradation of the sport monoculture or something we can’t predict today.

Or even an analytic forward analysis from Brian Burke.

Scar tissue/this time is different

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The working model for ‘this time is different’ is that this time is different when the system changes. Our examples:

Usually TTID is used optimistically. Invest/do/act this way because this time is different! However, Marc Andreessen explains the opposite case. Someone learns the system’s rules but the rules change.

“One way to view your trajectory through life is touching hot stove after hot stove…a lot of people who work at startups that don’t work learn not to work at startups…It’s the most natural thing and it’s like scar tissue. So as you age you naturally build up this scar tissue of all these cautionary lessons and as a consequence your aperture of what you’re willing to explore shrinks.”

Marc Andreessen (The Knowledge Project, YouTube)

But things change! “What you see is that some kid shows up five, or ten, or fifteen years later and takes another swing at it and it becomes a gigantic success,” Andreessen added, “Webvan doesn’t work but now you have these giant successes in food delivery.”

It could be a sign of age, or just contrast, but throughout the talk Andreessen keeps calling them ‘kids’. Makes sense. What reveals more change than time?

…

Another, for Elon Musk, TTID was true for reusing rockets. But it is not true for traveling to Mars. Physics is law, everything else is just a recommendation, Musk noted.

This time is different: housing

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Forming macro opinions or listening to the macro or market predictions of others is a waste of time. Indeed, it is dangerous because it may blur your vision of the facts that are truly important. Warren Buffett 2014

The follow up to “this time is different” is to ask “Why?” Sometimes it is technology, the iPhone allowed location based apps. Sometimes it is the rules, like regulations. Sometimes it is the conditions of the system.

Conor Sen considered if the 202X housing market was like 2006 or if ‘this time is different’.

“The underwriting is so much better. We aren’t seeing the same construction as 2006 because of the supply chain issues. Builders are more conservative. The demographics are stronger. We have broader inflation. It’s harder to see what’s worse now versus then if you’re worried about a bubble situation. I don’t see it, yet. Maybe in a couple of years.”

Sen’s suggestion is that once the demographics change and there’s fewer people then the housing demand will change. The right framing for housing might be: what other ways is there a housing market collapse? We saw the 2006-2010 version:

TTID: Canadian software

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Our this time is different examples have noted that when the overall system (airline regulation) or when the technology within the system (high jump pads) changes then this time is different. While confirming evidence isn’t a perfect indicator, it’s nice to note:

“If you have a mining business then base rates can tell you something. But over the past ten years there’s a new crop of businesses that have no historical analogs. This sounds like ‘this time is different’ but sometimes it kind of is. These businesses (software SAAS) grow fast, they grow organically. In a couple years they have global reach and no capital requirements. They can click a few buttons on AWS and suddenly they have more servers. They have expensive stocks so they can hire the best engineers, all around the world because everything is remote.” – LibertyRPF, Infinite Loops, October 2021

Often, TTID is used to support a narrative claim, and in general it pays to ‘short the narrative’. But sometimes TTID is right, the world changes. It’s a bit like finding a needle in a haystack (if there even is one).

The base rate for TTID is low. But when systemic rules or new technology allow the job to be done we can look closer.

–
Liberty has a nice Substack.