YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Simler

lines on the record: 62
first: 2016-11-22
most recent: 2016-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's a disconnect between that and everything it means to be human. Which we don't like to think of as mechanical, even though there must be some story that connects those two. But if you think of the world as fundamentally playful, which is just a metaphor, it's no more or less true than being fundamentally an artifact, because in both cases there's probably no gods who've made it in a certain way. But if you think of it as playful, it's more Fun to be in, yeah.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alan Watts contrasts that metaphor with the dominant metaphor we have in the west of our creation myth. It's not God playing hide and seek with himself for the fun of it. It's God making a machine for a certain purpose, which is unspecified. Very top down. Top down, and first he does the earth, and then he does the ocean, then he does the light. I don't remember the order, and then he does the man and woman and breathes life into them, and it's this piece of clockwork. And that's an interesting metaphor. I'm not trying to be disparaging of that metaphor because that plausibly is what led the West to Newton and Einstein and all these ideas about how we can use math to unlock the inner workings of the world. And that's great. If that's how you think of the world as fundamentally mechanical,”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few hundred times I heard that idea because I used to listen to these Alan Watts lectures when I was a kid. And I would just listen to this one lecture over and over again because it did something for me. I didn't really believe it. He's got a great voice and he's got this great sense of humor. So he's worth listening to. And so I'd hear this idea that the universe is fundamentally playful, that God is playing hide and seek with himself, as though that were some reality, as though there were some real God who was doing that. I was like, this is nonsense. And it has taken me a lot of growing up and loosening up to be able to appreciate that idea as As a metaphor, and I don't know in its native culture if it's taken literally or not, but taken metaphorically, it is so enchanting.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that leads you ultimately to whatever the obsession that gets you to, well, is there a God or isn't there? Or what's the meaning of life? Like if you're just happy doing and experimenting and playing, then it's kind of liberating.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that so much. And I don't know if you're getting that from Alan Watts, but that's where I was introduced to this idea that you can just look at the universe as playful in some deep underlying truthy way. I always cringe a little bit when people talk about the true nature of reality is playful. If they said something like that, because the true nature of reality is a heavy term to use. And if there is any answer to that, it's just like atoms in the void as far as I'm concerned. But there are these ways that you can look at the world or human experience where if you just chose almost on a lurk to say, what if I decided to think of the world as fundamentally playful, then it gives you a whole new appreciation for what's going on? What are the different games that we're participating in? Nothing's all that serious. Why don't I just make some art? Because that's part of the game. You don't have to then have this. It frees you from the need to have these reasons for doing it.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they are to reject some ultimate meaning, that then they have to become hedonists. Where hedonism is about well-being, but it's this very narrow sense, or you almost want to use it in a derogatory way where it's just like food, sex, money, you know, just like this. You'll become this animal or something. And that's a way of kind of narrowing the question of well-being. But if you understand it more expansively as human flourishing like our brains weren't just built for food and sex, they were built for collaborating with other people or exploring or making art. Like all of these things are part of well-being and you want to be able to enjoy all those experiences and participate in them. And so you don't have to, it's not a question of just this narrow hedonism versus what God's purpose for me. There's a lot of sort of”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was certainly speculating that it was adaptive in that way of having been For all I know, it's a byproduct of other adaptations.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are ever trapped in an environment or a work job or something that feels meaningless, it's probably because you are intuiting that the overall effects of your actions are going nowhere, and that's really useful so that you can break out of that job and find a more meaningful job, which is going to be more impactful, which will hopefully benefit you somehow in the future. to apply that lens to a human life or to humanity at large doesn't seem particularly important to me”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so this essay for me was an attempt to make sense of how other people use this term and why they seem so caught up on questions of whether their life is or isn't meaningful or in what ways it might be meaningful. So for me, I've never really cared about that question. It just never seemed to bother me that my life did not seem meaningful in some grand epic sense or some trying to get outside myself and do something bigger than myself that was never a major motivational factor for me. And so this essay was my attempt to figure out why other people care so much about it. And I don't know what I figured out exactly other than the fact that it's probably an adaptive drive for us to try to have influence on things that are larger than us.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And once you see it, you can't unsee it And you will forever be self conscious about certain things after reading, especially that status chapter”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Educational experiences and just the way that the author is such a contrarian, independent thinker, it's fun to hear him talk about the teachers and the way they would teach and whether that was helpful to his kind of mind or not. The second chapter is probably the chapter that gets the most play out in the world, which is the chapter on status, which just forces you to think about this thing that we're doing with each other all the time, but we're not fully conscious of that chapter will make you fully conscious of it for better or for worse.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess mention impro by Keith Johnstone. It was certainly formative for me. It's also a cult classic. Everyone I've recommended this book too seems to just really get off on it. And somehow it became popular recently, even though I think it was published decades ago. And it's an obscure improv teacher writing a sort of handbook almost for other improv teachers for how exercises for their students to do to get better at improvisational comedy. And so it has no business being this amazing, useful book that business people read and get a lot of value out of. But it has been for me and for many other people. I think there's like five chapters in this book and each one of them is totally different and totally delicious in a different way. One of them is him talking about his early”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put a mouthful and the title doesn't make sense until after you've read it, but that's. It's not that the ideas in that book are so fundamental or even true that you need to understand those things. It's that reading it expands my mind in ways that are extremely useful for thinking about other questions and thinking about consciousness and cognitive psychology and just what it's like to be a person. We have this notion of that it's We have our experiences and other people have their experiences and all the people we interact with are within this like narrow range of the human experience and Jane's like helps you see how there are like radical breaks from that at least that's one of the things that I really got from him”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On how to think in evolutionary terms and how that whole thing works. Dawkins' selfish gene is another one of these that's, I don't think I could get by without having read those two books. Jane's, Julian Jane's, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I think I got that title right.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I thought you might ask this question, so I was kind of prepping myself with my bookshelf over there. I feel like each of these books that I... That I love are just these old friends that I cherish dearly. So all of the books that really do it for me are these conceptual books that have loaded some new idea into my head or some new way, more than a new idea. It's in my head as though my head were a container as a new way of looking at the world. So these new lenses that I can use to see how things work. I think just I don't think you can be a person in the modern world who thinks carefully about things without understanding evolution and natural selection and sexual selection. And so like a really formative early book for me was Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. He's a philosopher, but he's written this book about evolution and it's kind of a college level course is worth of information and ideas and if you just read that you'll be completely up to speed on”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person or people on the team. And I was fortunate enough to have a coworker whom this was his singular gift. He was just a source of endless creative ideas and the energy to put them together and to corral other people and say, this sounds weird, but let's do this. You have to have one of those people and you have to facilitate that or reward them. The company can't say Don't do that. There's dangerous liability. I mean, the company has to say some of those things, but the more leeway it can give people for that organic expression of the joy of being on a team, the more joyful the team will be.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just won't feel right for all sorts of reasons. It has to be an organic expression of the people and what they want to do. And so our weird one was sleeping in the office. It doesn't have to be that. It probably shouldn't be that for any other group. But whatever people naturally feel would be fun play, just having a good time, it can't be that can't be forced on you. The ski trip is not forced on you, but it just feels like, well, everyone goes on a ski trip. So I guess we'll do that too. Whereas if there's some creative energy that goes into this, someone, you have to have the right.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To graph that onto nothing that extreme could be grafted onto an existing culture, but elements of it can be. And I think you're absolutely right that traditional off sites feel wrong in all sorts of ways. I mean, it's nice to get away and you play with certain dimensions a little bit feel for your coworkers in different situations. But the more radical you can make that experience for people, the more interesting it's going to be and the more it will legitimately facilitate team bonding. There's also, I think, this is a big part of the philosophy of how those of us who were planning these rituals or whatever you want to call them at Palantir was that they needed to be bottom up, grassroots endeavors, not top-down. OHR says you need to have an offsite once every six months or whatever it is. If it's planned sort of in this bureaucratic way,”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reset some things or just get a different feel for how people behave. I mean, lots of things fall under this definition, I think. Just having rowdy drinking with your buddies is kind of you let go of certain strictures of society and obviously abiding by many of them as well. So you get to see which of the degrees of culture are flexible and which ones are absolutely you can't be violent even during these events. So that's a bedrock rule. But all these other ones kind of give a little bit. And so it also creates, I felt like doing all of these extracurriculars with my coworkers created a much flatter organization because it's not the kind of thing that you normally do with your boss.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I guess there's like, I don't know where that term comes from, but there's Carnival in Brazil, there's Burning Man is one of these. Halloween even in the US, it's a place where you can play with the boundaries of culture”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a great way of thinking about it. I think there's this anthropological concept of carnival where it's a time set aside to upend all the usual rules of society. I never knew that.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the kind of thing that really forged what I think is an amazing team. And so I like to think that that was useful, that it was good for the company for us to put our energies into that. But whether it was or it wasn't, it's not like we were stealing time from the company to do it. So it seems like it was just a win there. And it's also the only kind of thing that someone only in their 20s or maybe early 30s is going to really want to do. And so it's not something that Bank of America should be adopting.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's that feeling of kind of intimacy that you don't get when you're spending money to have a big room all on your own in a big anonymous hotel and then a wait staff that waits on you anonymously. But a smaller little bed and breakfast where you get to know the proprietor and the space is a little tighter and you can maybe hear through the walls, but it creates this intimacy. And I feel like we had this intimacy that comes from waking up in the morning in our pajamas or our regular clothes or whatever and brushing your teeth with your coworkers. I mean, that's not something you normally do. And so it's certainly weird. There's no getting around that. But it's also...”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to reclaim this space as ours, even if it's not perfect, we're going to make it our home. So we had moved and there was all this packaging material. So we would kind of build these sleeping arrangements for ourselves. It was called Shanty Town. I wasn't comfortable. But that's also part of the charm is Burning Man is out in the desert and the environment is hostile and uncomfortable. You have to bring all your own, I haven't been, so I'm speaking just from hearing my friends talk about it. There's something about being in that harsh climate and suffering together that makes it even more of an interesting social experience because there's some New York Times article I read once by one of the columnists talks about this, calls it Hamish. We'll see if that's the right term later.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were sleeping in little shanties that we made out of cardboard. It evolved out of the time that we decided to do this the first time was we were moving from an office space. This is my team. This is not all of Palantir. We were a small tight-knit team about 11 people at that point, I think. And we had inhabited this octagonally shaped building that just had all these interesting angles and great light. And it felt like a studio rather than a factory. That's the term I always use. The desks were at interesting angles relative to each other and the lighting was like soft incandescent lighting rather than harsh overhead fluorescent lighting. So we're moving from this great space where we had just bonded in this little crucible and we were moving to a kind of an office building with a lot less characters, just had different floors and fluorescent lights overhead and all the angles were rectilinear and we were just kind of bummed about that and so this was our way of saying okay”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just the amount of creative energy that went into this, it was more or less an annual thing that we tried to do over many years that probably stands out as one of the highlights of my time there.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting things and make art, and in our case, you know, trying to make our office space more than just desks and computers and conference rooms, like a place that we had incubated some culture in and so making art and putting it on the walls or kind of sculptury things that we would put out in the lobby and having activities during this week that were like, oh, we're going to have office mini golf. So that's both an art project and an activity.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if anyone day stands out. We did have, and this ties back to some of the ways that I, some of my reading and some of my experiences at Palantir seem to harmonize with each other. We had a lot of, for lack of a better word, rituals that we would enact and participate in and invent. And one of those was a sort of week-long festival where people who wanted to, totally optional, whoever wanted to could just sleep at the office for a week. And it was kind of maybe inspired by Burning Man. Not that I think a lot of people had gone to it at that point, but just the idea that you kind of set aside a week in the desert.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So lying is hard, and that's why most of us don't do more of it. And in order to then have a successful strategy where you're lying a lot of the time and keeping track of those lies and saying them with a straight face and remembering whom you've told what to, you have to have a brain that's capable of that. And so it would be a losing strategy to build the lying sociopathic brain around a low IQ, I think. Seems plausible.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a pregnant insight into the world. One of the topics I was reading about recently is sociopaths and just viewing them through the lens of people who specialize in cheating in human interaction and not as a lot of people view sociopaths as it's a clinical disease that certain brains fall into as though it were a mistake that nature made some brains that are sociopathic. Whereas I think the more interesting way to look at it is there's always a niche for cheating and there will always be some brains that either have the right genes that cause them to be built that way or certain triggers in early environment cause their brains to grow to fill that niche.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their population decreases and the actual venomous snake then becomes more prevalent relative to the mimic. And so there's just always, depending on all the variables, some tension between these two populations.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like an example of a dishonest signal in the biological world, it starts out as not necessarily an honest signal, but a signal that is true. It's a snake that has a certain warning coloration scheme and that it evolves this, it's a unique and high contrast. And because it's poisonous, other animals quickly learn to avoid it. But there's nothing intrinsically tying those warning colors to the fangs and the venom. And so another snake can just point out, evolve the same colors, and then that's a mimic, and there's always some sort of ecological balance between these two, because if there's too many mimics, then all the predators will learn this is not a scary thing, and then they'll be able to snack on all the mimics. But then the...”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It are such that it's just impossible to lie, so that the gorilla beating its chest, that's a perfect example. It's pounding the fists against the rib cage. That just makes the sound. Another animal will see that, and it's not that the animals are doing some conscious calculation of is that fake or not, but the way that natural selection and the feedback processes work is if that were dishonest signal or a signal that it was possible to fake, then some guerrillas would evolve to fake that signal and then other animals would evolve to not trust that signal. And so really almost all the signals we find in nature at least have a basis for honesty. And there's always some gamesmanship, but the honesty is this. It keeps the game.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a whole pregnant field of ideas here. So this is not my work at all. This is huge literature on this signaling theory. So signaling is where I'm trying to show certain qualities about myself to another person or to an audience. So some examples from the biological world are birds who have shiny feathers, are healthy, and so they're using their feathers to sort of show off their health to other birds. You have a gorilla who gets up on its hind legs and beats its chest. It's showing that it's big and powerful. And the beating of the chest shows that it just has this big body cavity. It's making this nice hollow sound. And the principle of honesty here are the ways that you are trying to communicate a certain quality of yours to others that cannot be faked because it's too expensive or because the mechanics of the way that you're communicating.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you definitely get a lot of cheaters. People who want to look at it as cheating, you first have to see that there are honest means of earning status, which I like to think of as the things that are, it's like a meritocracy. What is good for the whole group or the community or the company or whatever it is? And if you're earning status for having skills or having done things that do improve everyone's lives, then that's a quote-unquote honest or legitimate source of prestige. Whereas if you are merely angling to get on TV or manipulate your image or, God forbid, lying about your achievements, these are dishonest forms of getting prestige.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do have achieved something in the world. They have a platform and maybe more to the point everyone else respects them or they have a position such that you can imagine that everyone else respects them. And that even if you don't personally feel, oh, this person is worthy of my respect and my attention because of their first order skills. They still have influence over a lot of other people, and you, modeling that influence almost subconsciously, then think, okay, well, even if they don't have first-order skills that I love, they have second-order skills that I love, which is the ability to influence a lot of people.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you continually take more than you give from everyone in this community, each of the people that you take more from is going to slowly stop thinking you're the hot thing. And slowly that will erode.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is at the heart of the question of whether it's appropriate to look at status as an economic mechanism. If you can spend it without losing it, then it doesn't behave like money. So I completely grant that there are cases where on the basis of your prestige, good things happen for you, other people give you things and don't really expect much in return. But I think that if you use your prestige to get things to just get favors and favors and never repay them, you will slowly lose in this bank account. Now the bank account is not that there's this one value of your status that you keep with yourself. It's really spread out throughout the community. And so it's what John thinks of you and Mary thinks of you and Sally thinks of you and how much influence you have over all of the people in your community.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of social status and the way that you can spend and accumulate status, I think that's primarily the prestige component, reputation, respect, the softer kind of influence. Dominance probably factors in there a little bit, but the way that you earn dominance are by taking or beefing yourself up and then using that to just grab at things. Seems less economic to me than military or there would be a different metaphor to be used there.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might behoove us to differentiate between prestige and dominance. I found that that helps. So there are a lot of thinkers who, when talking about social status, they want to make this particular distinction. So there's status that you earn by being kind of aggressive and threatening and using the potential for violence ultimately. And that's dominant status. And when you use that form of status, other people are afraid of you and they don't want to necessarily be around you. The other type of status is prestige, and that is the status of being impressive in some way and some non-threatening way doing good things for others or having skills that give you the potential to do good things for other people. And that is other people are attracted to you when you have prestige. And because of the attraction avoidance and other dichotomies, these two types of status behave differently. So when we talk about the economic”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“status. So if you're asking someone for a favor, you're saying, I respect you, I like you, you're not necessarily a higher social status than me, but I am temporarily elevating you with respect to me in exchange for this favor. If you just kind of make a request, it seems sort of neutral, whereas if you make a demand of someone, you're saying you're kind of lowering their status a little bit or you're trying to elevate your own. They may or may not respond well to that, but if they do just accede to your demand, you've sort of recalibrated your relative statuses in exchange for this favor or request or whatever the action is.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's social status it's lots of ways to define it, but you can define it roughly as someone's influence over other people in a certain context. And that is a variable. We don't have units for it, but it is the kind of thing that has a magnitude. You can have more or less influence over other people. And things that you do, actions you take, interactions you have with people, change that variable. So it then becomes possible and in some cases productive to look at this through the lens of an economy. People want more of this variable. What do they do to get it? And not only what do they do to get social status, but how can they spend their social status to get other things that they want? And so one example I use in this blog post, I think, is the way you might price favors with social”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the polite word for it because the part of the problem is that talking about social status, and I'm higher status than you or your higher status than me, or just it's the zero-sum game that seems to wig everyone out and gives people this mental block on thinking further through that idea.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there you, if you're not hiring people, Whose judgment you respect, then that's a problem. And if you do hire people whose judgment you respect, then you should want to impress them. And certainly there are lots of personality types. So some people are motivated by different things.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, there are all those examples of famous businesses where the leader told by everyone he talked to, this is not going to work, you're an idiot, founders of Palentin, I like to tell these stories. So there is certainly, if you are at the helm of one of these businesses, you cannot be doing it just to impress your investors or potential investors. I guess the dynamic I'm talking about is more within the company.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know I might be overendexing on my own psychology here, but I think the respect of one's peers is really underappreciated in these contexts. So much of what I did at work was not because my boss was measuring me on this or because there was some key I could tell myself about how if I do a really good job on this that it'll translate down the line into success on the product and that's my main goal and that's why everything I want in life or that's, you know, I can't be that focused on the ultimate prize. I'm much more focused on the near-term prize, which is if I do a shitty job with this, people are going to notice. I'm going to be ashamed. If I do a great job, hopefully the rewards will come from that. And I don't know what it's like working at a bigger company or at a low growth company, but look to you.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. Yeah. I guess there are always ways that you can break out of that, but there will be a tendency if other people around you or C players, that's going to sap your motivation to be an A player. They won't even recognize you for your skills as an A player. And I think”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This guy, I spent a lot of time reading online VenCat Rao of Ribbon Farm. It's a great blog. Just full of all sorts of new and fresh ideas. He has this old blog post about a crucible. That's his idea of this, I think he says, okay, you've got Dunbar's number at 150, but that's not the ideal size for a group where you're going to just really be fully engaged with them and kind of mutually learning from each other. So he talks about having a crucible of maybe like 11 people where you're just in it together and it's a trial by fire and there's a lot of energy, but just all that mutual respect and wanting to learn from and be infected by the passion of others and then also wanting to impress them. And so really just like that as a way of leveling up your skills is finding a little crucible of people that you can just work your ass.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's an ideal to strive for, and no one gets hit perfect and there's no winning formula, but you can tell when you look at two different companies that one is more of a meritocracy than another, and that's got to be good for it.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel it necessary to disclaim that I am just a guy and I worked at a great company. So I'm over-indexing a lot on my own experience on this. But yeah, I mean, a meritocracy is almost obvious as not to be worth stating because if you don't reward people for doing what's good for the company, then they're going to do things that aren't good for the company. And that's just, you know, you're going to be rowing around in circles or in the wrong direction. Other things that are really important, I think team chemistry and Having the trust of your team. And that was a big motivating factor for me. And I see it at all these great companies. I don't know, I'll throw this back to you. What are some other big factors that... In the finance world or elsewhere.”
2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source