355: CSI:FTX, Cloudflare, Podcasting Economics, John Malone, Streaming Wars, DeepMind, Masayoshi Son, and Steve Jobs

"Every rock turned reveals more craziness and depravity."

High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. —Jeff Bezos

😲 Bob Iger is back at Disney, succeeding his own successor! November 2022 is one of those months where decades happen…

❤️🖤 Ethan Mollick: “Small shifts in perspective make a big difference”

Ethan posted this in the context of how, when looking at scatterplots, people tend to interpret them as meaning that whatever is on the x-axis is causing whatever is on the y-axis, even when no causation is implied.

That’s a good point. We’re so conditioned by looking at graphs where X is time that when looking at graphs with different variables, most observers are likely to anchor on that. One possible solution would be to use diamond plots (on the right), which are more neutral (but take some time to get used to) 🤔

🤔 ☯️ Kanjun (🐙) really made me think about how my brain works:

Introversion and extroversion are not two ends of a spectrum. 

They’re two somewhat independent spectra. One can be simultaneously very introverted and very extroverted. Not understanding this confused me for a long time.

Extroversion is primarily defined by getting high reward from being around people. 

Introversion is primarily defined by getting high reward from reflection. 

One can get high reward both from being around people and from reflection.

Some psychologists define introverts as sensitive to stimuli & extroverts as tendency toward impulsiveness & sociability, thus seeking out stimuli. But I’m impulsive, sociable, and very sensitive to stimuli. To me, impulsiveness & sociability aren’t driven by need for stimulus.

I do observe that my marginal reward drops off after a few hours from socializing, & after a few days from reflection. Maybe this pegs me as mid-spectrum leaning introvert, but it doesn’t feel right. Often I feel I would enjoy socializing or reflection - they don’t feel at odds.

I’m not sure what to think of it, but it does seem to have higher explanatory power than introversion just being the opposite of extroversion, with both on a 1D sliding scale.

If I try to think of myself through this ‘two parallel tracks’ lens, I’d probably rate myself at something like 9/10 introverted and 4/10 extroverted. Something like that 🤔

How about you?

🏴‍☠️💔 It’s kind of incredible to see how soft some media outlets are going on Sam Bankman-Fried. Clearly, the pattern is that this is coming from the outlets that had the most glowing coverage before…

I suspect it’s a form of consistency bias.

Those who said positive things about him and FTX in the past, calling him the next Buffett or J.P. Morgan or whatever, have cognitive dissonance about it and are finding it hard to update, fighting it because it would mean clearly saying they were wrong and have been fooled and were part of the problem by giving the fraudster credibility.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🌊 Was Masayoshi Son swimming naked or is that a Speedo? 🏊‍♂️🩲