Various info that is interesting to me, but not generally interesting

1

How did I come up with that number? The book was released in 2015, and it's shockingly hard to find total number of sales for an individual book. I'm sure the authors know, since they get paid based on that. But still, I found some data showing that January to September of 2018 there were 476,676,000 books sold. The precision of the numbers is going to lead us astray, so I'll multiple 1.33 (to cover the rest of the year) and round up to 700,000,000 to cover a surge in holidays. This represents a 2.5% increase over 2017, but let's set an upper bound. If we assume 700,000,000 books a year from 2015 (publication date) and today we're at 2.8B books. Now, in 2018 206,312,000 were adult non-fiction, which is where our book fits. This represents 43% of total sales. Now, sadly our book doesn't make the top 50 of most important business books, but Amazon has it as #25 in Business Planning & Forecasting, and #30,063 overall. Now, we're going to assume Amazon has a big enough sample size to smooth out anomalies. This is already going too long, so we're going to make a poor choice and say, worst case, upper bound, that all of the top 30,000 books over 4 years sell the same amount. This is probably grossly wrong, as I expect the 80/20 rule to come into effect. If we take 2.8 billion / 30k we're at 93000 per place. So, for the 4 years that puts us at 360,000 copies. Now, we could do more work, but if we go with a US population of 327 million for 2018 means we get a 1.14 percent chance that someone has read the book. Close enough to 2% that I'm pretty confident of my 98% number being the maximum. 99% would probably be a better approximation.

2

Ok, there are a few cases I can imagine. The first is that an organization has a group they intend to jettison. The existing manager was fired/left and they need someone to fill that role so they don't have to worry about it while the figure out strategy, where they know this group won't exist anymore. Safe to say, you don't want to be in that role. Second, you have a leader who is incompetent. This one you can figure out. Look who they have made managers in the past, and how successful they've been. If that hasn't worked out on more than one occasion, recognize a few things. First, they're bad at this. Second, you're in a bad position. Third, they're unlikely to be there long-term.

3

These are my more detailed notes for the Joe Mansueto podcast. I wrote them out, but they're too long for the podcast page itself, but I think I'll still want to reference them, so including them here.

• Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
• Heuristic around transaction cost: Money. Time. Effort. Cleanest way to setup a business to to reduce that transaction cost.
• Discussion on "float". How can you use money you have today to fund your business tomorrow.
• Preference of of repurchase over dividend. I think this is a key discussion. Do you have discipline in understanding what the impact to your shareholders is, or not? Simple answer is not the correct answer.
• Management style:
  • Hire great people
  • Surround yourself with great people
  • Delegate to those people
  • Give people autonomy
  • People get more job satisfaction if they can make decisions in their domain
• What to do as a leader:
  • At the beginning I'm doing everything: programming, hiring the leaders, doing the ad copy
  • But quickly you need to realize your goals are to build an major enterprise, and to do that you have to hire a team.
    • Step out of "how do you do that"
    • Learn as a leader how do you grow? How do you handle acquisitions? How do you do business abroad?
• Basic style is still the same:
  • Hire great people
  • Delegate
• What are common traits you look for in hiring?
  • Single most important thing you do
  • Grow talent from within
  • People who like to learn
  • Demonstrated record of success. There are a lot of bright people who are idle.
• Look at Grit by Angela Duckworth
• Are there negative screens?
  • Job hoppers. People who don't stick with things over 18 months.
• Innovation is never the job of one organization
• Be willing to say "No."
  • You need to realize that as you move on in life, you want to help, but by doing one thing you can not do another.
  • People are generally pretty receptive to it, as long as you are thoughtful about it.
  • Be protective of your time.
  • Don't try to satisfy all comers.

4

These are my more detailed notes for the Danny Moses podcast.

• What are the most common traits if you were going to hire a 20-23 year old?
  • Be an out of the box thinker
    • It's not so much being cynical as being skeptical
      • Don't just rely on people to tell you that you're right. You want people who tell you when you're wrong.
    • People who want to succeed because they're "smart" as opposed to people who just want to learn and do. Focus on people with hunger versus goals.
  • Integrity
    • You can't judge meeting someone for the first time, but you can see it in their life
• History on how it happened and how you could see it happening from the math
  • You could see that the cost on the shorts was more than simply doing the credit default swaps
• Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital by Lowenstien
  • No trade is as good as it appears
  • Leverage will always bury you in the end
  • Egos always get in the way of a good story
  • How do people get paid? Selling people warranties at a register? In the end these are all 'ill-gotten gains' and in the end are not sustainable long-term.
• The use of non-GAAP can not work long term. Over S&P 500 is trading over 20 on a GAAP basis.

5

These are my more detailed notes for the Tim Urban podcast.

• Detailed discussion on compounding
• Die progress unit. How far to you have to go into the future in order to simply die due to the shock of the progress/change that has happened?
• Artifical intelligence
  • Right now we're at narrow AI, where it is good at a very specific slide
  • The bar on things "only a human can do" has been shifting rapidly
  • When general intelligence happens it will be better at that than us, just like it already is for narrow intelligence
• Cook versus chef (cooks follow recipes, chefs experiment and create them)
  • Objective of Tesla's existence: Accelerate the advent of a sustainable energy world
  • Objective of SpaceX's existence: Reduce cost of space travel so humanity can be a spacefaring race and make us a multiplanetary civilization
  • Why is it that Elon is able to do what he can do?
    • It's about how he thinks and reasons. It is not about being smart and rich and driven, because there are thousands of people who fit that criteria.
      • Reason from first principles instead of reasoning from analogy
        • Most people reason from analogy because it's an evolutionary adaptation to create a shortcut
      • Because he reasons from first principles he will push through all the reasons that people think things can not be done because the first principles say it can be done.
  • People want to fit in, but that's something that you can easily reason past. The key is just the self-awareness to understand your own tribal psychology and the delusion that comes along with it and realizing that conventional wisdom is now wisdom for a reality that doesn't exist anymore.
    • Conventional wisdowm is normally wrong.
  • Although it feels safer to be the cook, with AI coming, it's actually safer to be a chef because recipes are easy for narrow intelligence.
• Discussion on discovery process for innovation
  • Find a topic
  • Do a broad search/reading/watching on the topic. Youtube. Wikipedia. Blog posts. Do it broadly and absorb... for ... maybe 40 hours.
  • Start to get a feel of the consensus and where there are holes
  • From there start to coalesce, but figure out what your story arc is
• To have a plan to succeed long term you need to pretend that everyone is going to be selfish forever and make it so that is part of the key to your success
• People mistake risk for courage and genius
• Tribalism is the greatest impediment to our success.
• "Grand Theft Life" - People would be more successful and happier if they could breakaway from the fear of consequences that are more tribal than real
  • Pretend your a videogame character to give yourself the freedom to ignore what your monkey brain is afraid of
• Objective of Neuralink: Prevent AI from becoming the "other". Humans become AI. It will be a a third system in your brain that works with the existing limbic and frontal cortex systems. High bandwidth between your brain and machines.
• Knowledge is a tree. If you don't have the trunk when you get knowledge that is a leaf or a branch it will simply fall, because you don't have context to anchor it

6

Ok, just check yourself on the math. I will generally write 8 pages and the final content will be 4. So, it is (Actual - Standard)/Standard which is (8-4)/4 = 1 = 100%. You can also say that the final product is 50% of my first draft (4-8)/8 = -.5 = -50%.