David Rosenthal: recommendation

Transcript context

…I think after the war, 48% of Tokyo was homeless. Half the population's homes had been destroyed. Yeah, unbelievable. Yet, despite all that, I can't even imagine bigger headwinds against them, they built one of the most iconic companies in the world. It's not an understatement to say that these two men and Sony changed the course of Japanese history, changed the course of world history. Again, we talked about this in the episode, but Steve Jobs was mentioned earlier tonight. Akio Morita was the inspiration for Steve Jobs and he actually did this great talk. It was not a WWDC. It was an Apple keynote after Morita passed away, where he did a tribute to him. I think, no Morita, no Sony, no iPhone. The lesson that we take away from this is even if things are at their bleakest, it's rational to be an optimist. Because if you're not an optimist, it's the optimist who drives the world forward. Then if you're an investor, investing in optimism is the only way that you're actually going to make outsized returns and build great companies. It is genuinely the rational thing to do. All right, point one here or lesson one, touchy-feely, kind of feel-good, but let's back it up a little bit. We all know Moore's Law. In this next lesson, we wanted to basically visualize and talk about this trend in a little bit of a different way than it's normally talked about. The number of transistors on a chip—we all know this—tends to double every 18–24 months and with some quick compounding math, that means you get a 10X every seven years or so. As you can see on this graph that we made here, the X-axis is time, the Y-axis is the number of transistors on a leading consumer processor, notice that it's in log scale. You can see every seven years or so 10X improvement in processing power. I figured we'd take the greatest hits examples. Intel’s 386, 486, Pentium 4, Core 2 Duo which was in my first MacBook Pro, the A7 in the iPhone in 2013, and of course the recent Apple M1. Of course, if you look at it in linear and not log scale, it looks like this. It's way too difficult to actually observe any progress and it seems like basically nothing happened and then everything happened.…

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