367: Disney Drama, Oil, F-150 EV, Military Semiconductors, and AI Training & Emergent Capabilities

"Mr. Iger hovered in the wings"

Trust actions not words. Talk is cheap. Expect most people who say “yes” to mean no. It’s best if you can grok this without hating humanity. -Sarah Constantin

😴 🛏️ 🗓️ I wear an Oura sleep tracker. The app gave me a review for 2022:

Not too bad. I wish I had a tracker for the first year of life of both my kids, I bet the picture would look quite different…

🏅 Nobel Disease:

We idolize those who excel in a particular field, inflating their egos and afflicting them with the hubris to opine on matters they know little about. 

By celebrating people for their intelligence, we make them stupid.

h/t Bhogal Guwinder

This is what Charlie Munger would call the ‘shoe button complex’:

Munger’s grandfather had managed to corner the market on shoe buttons back around 1900. The grandfather exercised a virtual monopoly over their production and sale. — and he preached and proclaimed at length on such. Munger and Buffett named the syndrome the Shoe Button Complex, and they encountered it frequently in their dealings with successful business practitioners.

To be fair, I don’t believe the effect is that one-sided.

I mean that part of the blame probably comes from the public. I suspect that many of these people believed and said the same things before becoming famous & celebrated, but we just start listening to them a lot more after they won a big prize or became successful in business or sports or whatever.

Before we blame it all on others, let’s always make sure to look in the mirror first.

🛀 📉 The market in 2022 is the Inverse Lake Wobegon Effect: Everybody feels below average.

🇨🇳 危机 Here’s another common misconception:

The Chinese word for "crisis" (危机) is not composed of the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity"; the first does represent danger, but the second instead means "inflection point" (the original meaning of the word "crisis").

The myth was perpetuated mainly by a campaign speech from John F. Kennedy.

🤖 Naval wrote:

It’s not so much people moving the goalposts on what an AI is, it’s more AI moving the goalposts on what a human is.

Aside from being a pithy inversion, there’s some food for thought here.

Humans have long defined ourselves in relation to the rest of life on Earth based on our relative intelligence and creativity — but what happens when we start to feel less smart and creative as machines become capable of doing what we singularly used to be able to do?

👟🦶 I don’t like close-up photos of other people’s feet (but hey, if you do, I don’t judge), but this video is still worth watching. It’s a good overview of a lot of info about minimalist ‘barefoot style’ shoes:

It’s a rabbit hole I’ve been following for a little while — and a very worthwhile one.

The point about how it’s not just about our feet, but that problems with feet reverberate all the way up our biomechanics — in knees, hips, backs, even up to our necks — is particularly important. Our bodies haven’t evolved for elevated heels, lots of padding, and heel striking…

I feel that switching to Xero shoes has been a life upgrade (I have these models: HFS as my everyday shoes during the warm season, Terraflex II when I need more grip and waterproofness, and the Alpine as my winter boots).

If you want to learn more about the biomechanics of feet, I recommend this podcast (it’s really good):

• 🎧 Irene Davis, Ph.D.: Evolution of the foot, running injuries, and minimalist shoes

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🤴🐭 🏰 More Games of Thrones at Disney 🔪 🤷‍♂️ 🗡️

I almost had to re-use the Mickey Mouse + Game of Thrones graphic I made for edition #356 after reading this: