Rabbi's 🧠Deli W2 June 2020
Self-Realisation As a Service, Civil Wars ⚔, Apple converts the Chinese and Pitching YouTube📺
🧟♀️Zombies 🧟♂️
The graph below is what saving the economy looks like. The small guys have been given another chance to live regardless of their balance sheet quality. Creative destruction fans won’t like it. Uncompetitive companies that are kept alive through cheap credit markets are often called Zombies. I would argue that with 20+ million unemployed you rather have some zombie companies that people can return too or theses people quickly become zombies in your city.
Humans have a need to be productive since it brings meaning to their lives. Stripped of the meaning of a job we quickly get bored and would look for a way to fill that void with new meaning.
It’s not really on the news anymore but I would like to remind you of the many young men in Syria and Libya who found meaning in “The Revolution”.
From my POV the resurgence or call it the popularity of the BLM movement is linked to the fact people are angry and many have nothing else to do since they lost their jobs.
Many organizations recruit desperate people to further their own agenda’s. Which brings us to Cults.
🛸Cults 🛸
First some 👵 knowledge:
Defenetion of a Cult according to EOD:
cult (of something) a way of life, an attitude, an idea, etc. that has become very popular
a small group of people who have extreme religious beliefs and who are not part of any established religion
a system of religious beliefs and practices
You are the average of the five people you hang out with the most.
Cults are a failed Religion.
I find cults fascinating. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Charles Mason, Donald Trump all share some common characteristics. From the top of my head, I think everyone will agree with all of them:
Make Big Claims
Future-Oriented
Tell followers to distrust other sources of information
Love crowds and attention more than most.
Praise the Ego of their followers by telling them they are part of something
Are men
Here are the reasons I find cults so interesting
I am scared to become part of one
I am scared someone I love becomes part of one
Some impressive people are part of one
Virtually all organisations apply some cult-like persuasion techniques
How the techniques they use are so effective on people who are in a slum.
They shape new realities, often through narrative
Some have a powerful influence in politics
Once in it becomes really hard to leave
They are somewhat protected from scrutiny through freedom of religion laws
I think what allows cults to recruit so well, and why we will probably never get rid of them, is that they offer a very attractive package to the members. Cults allow people to “Reinvent themselves” they provide members meaning, a “Raison d'être”, enforced through rituals and a common vision of a future. This bounds its members together and creates a sense of belonging and community. And of course, cults also provide members with the possibility to attain a certain status. In effect, they offer the complete “self-realization as a service” package. A service many people are willing to buy in general and especially when they are hurt, confused and vulnerable.
Back in 2016 Nassim Taleb wrote a really great essay “The Minority Rule” where he explains how a small but loud (intolerant) minority can impose its will on a majority. I wish I understood this earlier. Societal change never happens all of a sudden even if we sometimes perceive it as such. Even worse, if like me you were taught the simple reasons that started WW1 was the assassination of an Austrian Prince, June 28, 1914. It sounds very plausible at age 12-15 but when you grow wiser you know there must have been more than just that, and that the assassination was just the thing that broke an already fragile European peace. The saying “Gradually, then suddenly” perfectly describes the famous Lenin Quote “There are decades when nothing happens and weeks where decades happen”. Taylor Pearson wrote a good essay to help us make sense of how this works, and why it keeps happening.
Gradually then suddenly is the most successful path for a minority to bring change. Let me remind you it took Lenin a long time for him to become the Lenin we all know. To get to the political change you want you need to know it will be a marathon and not a sprint. If you are still not convinced, Christianity is an old religion that started as a cult but it took them a solid thousand years to achieve the height of their powers.
Do not be discouraged by these two examples, you don’t need to have the majority to bring change, you need to be willing, intolerant and patient so you can gradually win concessions from the majority and eventually co-opt them in your plans. However, the path is long. To bring Change requires you to have the stamina of a marathon sprinter and hopefully, running it is worth it.
Now, obviously I am not the only person who finds cults interesting. Some people have dedicated their lives to this very topic. Currently, we are collectively living through a special time, and many groups around us are creating FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Distraction) which breeds a perfect hunting ground for cults and cult-like organizations to recruit new members and/or advance their agenda’s. So here are some stories and recourses worth sharing about them, so that you hopefully don’t fall prey to their sirens:
How a young woman left the Westboro Baptist church.
A massive 📚 catalogue on cults per topic
Another 📚 list recommended by cult research
A 📕 about Brainwashing in China
If you haven’t watched it Watch the movie Going Clear about Scientology.
💰Business 💰
How Apple Converted the Chinese
Last week I learned about Chinese Government strategy and since I just talked about cults, here is the story of how Apple converted new souls in China. Not an easy task! It’s a long read in total there are 9 parts. Lucky you author updated the post and provided a summary:
Apple is the only non-Chinese smartphone maker and non-Chinese operator of Internet services in China and dominates the high-end.
Apple’s unique business model of selling software-differentiated hardware is uniquely suited to overcome the many challenges of the Chinese market that hamstrung other US tech companies.
The iPhone achieved product-zeitgeist fit in China: its high-end positioning coincided with the emergence of the world’s largest, mobile-first middle class with an appetite for luxury products.
Apple’s software and hardware localizations aimed at Chinese consumers are minimal at best and many of the most significant changes appear to be motivated by other reasons (e.g. dealing with Chinese state-owned enterprises).
Apple’s services in China do very poorly. Many of them are banned, regulated or generally perform poorly relative to Chinese companies providing similar services.
One of these companies is Tencent, which is simultaneously one of Apple’s largest and most important developers and Apple’s largest threat to maintaining product differentiation in China.
Apple has incurred significant costs to overcome complexities of the Chinese market, such as dealing with coordinated media campaigns by state media, suffering state-linked cyber-attacks and so on.
In order to comply with local laws and regulations, Apple has made significant compromises to its Chinese App Store and iCloud operations.
Apple’s peculiar investment in DiDi could only be explained by a desire to demonstrate its commitment to the Chinese market.
For other non-Chinese (technology) companies looking to replicate Apple’s success, even without considering execution, the company must first have a business model that is a good fit with China’s business environment and overall zeitgeist.
As you can see China doesn’t sell its Souls on the Cheepo. And it looks like Apple had to pay parts of it soul to the CCP so that it could do business in the middle kingdom.
Something Facebook and Google haven’t been willing or able to do?
Anyhow, If you want to know more than that read the full story here.
Pitching YouTube
Throwback at an internal pitch for YouTube at Sequoia:
This part is amazing:
What basically set youtube apart was the technology that allowed them to scale it up at a super low cost (very close to zero).
I also learned that the guys that started YouTube had worked for PayPal.
Its incredible how many of the ex PayPal employees set out to create Billion dollar businesses.
Read the full pitch here.
Civil War ⚔
Above I shared two lists full of books on cults.
I once read parts of a book on civil wars. Because I wanted to know what happens when a nation implodes. Spoiler: nothing good.
I recommend you take a look at Civil Wars A History of Ideas.
Now as I said I read parts of it. And let me tell you why. The goal of the book is to make sense of what a civil war is rather than exposing actors of different civil wars. It’s about the Idea of civil war and how that evolved since the Romans (this is where the author starts). The book discusses when a conflict is called a civil war. Since it is not at all filled with specific stories about famous civil wars which I was hoping for I quit reading.
Here are some takeaways I got from the book:
Civil War tends to be rebranded by the winning side of a Revolution once the dust has settled. An example of how the past is often rewritten to fit the present.
States will avoid using the word War when discussing internal conflict because if you formally call something a war, you have to abide to the Geneva convention rules.
Shaping the narrative of the conflict is very important for all sides since it will influence how outsiders will react, think the “humanitarian conflict” of the Arab Spring.
These conflicts tend to kill far more people than a war between countries. Implosion is worse than Explosion (let’s exclude imperialism in the death count).
These conflicts take ages to be resolved and leave deep scars.
If you know of another book besides the comments of Burke on the French revolution that discusses civil wars please share.
Things I wrote ✏
None, instead here re some things that made me go:
😲
what a great “Are you a Robot?” test
Indiana Jones still exists;
This picture above is from Italy where they found this beautiful mosaic floor.
I got it from a fellow called Dapper Historian on twitter. He shares a lot of this type of content if you are into it.
Other good news: Stocks are back up YTD, Nasdaq breached 10K again and Twitter world looks happier.
Have a good rest of the week and remember:
The mere existence of millions of books on love, parenting, Business and self-help is proof that there is NO ONE ANSWER. ~ Josh Wolfe
👋
P.S Feel free to forward this to anyone you like. And I love hearing from all of you (otherwise it can feel like sending emails into the void). Do email me at 2broketraders@gmail.com or better, tweet @Rabbijacob16.