Byrne Hobart: evaluation

Transcript context

…That particular question about trying to predict if somebody is overstepping or if they're making the best bet of their life is something that I've been trying to think about and I really have no reasonable method. If you think about what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is this like Napoleon trying to conquer Russia and it's this super ego filled, pride filled, completely illogical bet from somebody who has just had 20 consecutive wins in a row and he thinks he's invincible? Or is it like Elon Musk 20 years ago where he's like, “Yeah. I did PayPal and now let's build some rockets and let's build some electric vehicles.” In each of these cases there's so many analogies to complete bust and there's so many analogies to — “Oh. This is just part one of this grand plan.” How do you figure out which one is happening? How do you distinguish the visionary from the collapsing star? The cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and then you write about how it was obvious all along. There are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous. Alexander conquered most of the world that people knew of around where he grew up and then just goes to Babylon and drinks himself to death and that's the end. There could have been an alternate story where he gets his life together a little bit and runs a giant sprawling empire. On the other hand, reading the story battle to battle, a lot of it actually is basically this Ponzi scheme where every time he conquers a city he gets enough loot to pay off the people he hired to help him conquer the city and then has to move to the next city because they want to get paid again. So he sort of was being chased by his obligations the entire way through until he finally got just ahead of them enough to get a lot of loot and a lot of land that he could give people instead of just giving money. Even in that story it's very hard to say that he rolled the dice a bunch of times and won every time so clearly he was just one of those people who's born to win. Maybe he actually backed himself into a bunch of corners over and over and over again and then desperately fought his way out every single time and then was just completely sick of it and burnt out by the time he was in his early 30s. In terms of how you would figure it out in advance, I think some of it comes down to getting a sense of whether they're responding to circumstances or whether they actually have a long-term plan. But then there's probably nothing more dangerous than a long-term plan that someone actually has the means to execute. Five-year plan does not have a good connotation, Stalin had some of those and they didn't turn out well for a lot of people. Even within that there's some difficulty in evaluating. There's kind of that meta-cynical layer where if they don't know what they're doing then probably it's dumb luck that they keep succeeding. On the other hand if they do know what they're doing then maybe you hope that the world is lucky enough that they get unlucky and can't actually pull off whatever it is that they're planning to do. I guess another thing would be — Is there an end state that they can get to? Because Alexander basically just kept going until he couldn't go any farther, until his troops were basically on the point of mutiny and then just turned around and went to the nicest place halfway home and hung out there and partied. If the story is less about conquest and more about reconquest and restoration of something then there are these natural limits. You can say, “You go this far and you don't go any farther.” because you've actually finished your task. For example, the Generals who chased Napoleon out of Russia. For them the master plan was not — “We're going to conquer all of Europe. on't go any farther.” because you've actually finished your task. For example, the Generals who chased Napoleon out of Russia. For them the master plan was not — “We're going to conquer all of Europe. The master plan was — “We're getting our country back and then we're going to chase him far enough that he doesn't feel like he can just wait a year and do this again when it's not winter.” So maybe that's another way to constrain it but then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people. One way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions. In that case those people are also stuck responding to circumstances. Maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances they have. They have their skills, they have their opportunities, they can they can go after some things, maybe they achieve great things maybe they fail but either way eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying to keep being bolder until you eventually fail. On Musk particularly, I don't really understand it. I think there's a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas for how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount and if you cut headcount enough then you you end up with with a profitable business. it could also just have been fun. Seems fun so far. The pursuit of fun is not to be discounted. If you're super rich you can afford to do all sorts of things to varying levels of entertainment. It may be that the only thing that is actually truly novel and a thrill seeking fun opportunity is to do something like buy Twitter and then turn it into what it is. I think [unclear] had this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these faceless bureaucracies. Now if Twitter does something you don't like, there's actually a specific person you can blame and because you have Twitter you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer. Whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious, there's no recourse. There's nothing lower status than arguing with someone in authority about how seriously they should take your jokes. And it works both ways. I started noticing this years ago because there are these _txt twitter accounts where they're just posting out of context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged. In a lot of cases to me the comments read as someone who is doing a bit. They're playing a role, they know it's funny, they're exaggerating for their friends and then you take it out of context and read it as totally serious and then you get to say these people are all like this, they're all crazy.…

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