Ep46 – Seeking Signal in the Mud Space of Privilege, Credibility, and NFTs

In today’s episode, we explore some exciting topics. We start off by talking about the muddied world of tribal thinking and then discuss how tribal thought often overrides the concepts of authority and credibility.

That line of thought then carries us into the concept of financialization. Here we ask how a focus on stock price maximization has turned many American companies from global innovators into financial zombies. Then we revisit the idea of meritocracy and explore a new way of thinking about the concept of privilege. We close the episode with more talk about value and the NFT space.

This episode is an exciting ride where we started with a topic and saw where it takes us. Sit back and enjoy it.

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And remember, the process you follow to reach a conclusion is more important than the conclusion itself.

Resources

1. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

2. Elizabeth Warren Oil Company Tweet

3. Modern Monetary Theory

   1. Here’s What You Need to Know About The Deficit Myth

   2. MMT #2 - Has MMT Won the Fiscal Policy Debate?

4. Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt

5. Basic Economics: ACitizen'ss Guide to the Economy, by Thomas Sowell

6. Joe Biden accused of falling asleep during Cop26 climate summit speeches

7. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, by Seth Godin

8. Vampires at the Gate?

9. No, We Shouldn't Bail Out Boeing

10. Inside the $2.5 Trillion Debt Binge That Has Taken S&P Titans Including Boeing and AT&T from Blue Chips to Near Junk

11. The 2021 Forbes 400 List Of Richest Americans: Facts And Figures

Mental Models

1. Second-Order Consequences

2. Appeal to authority

3. Authority & Credibility

4. The concept of two realities

5. First, do no harm

6. Incentives matter

Top Takeaways

1. Tribalism has led us to judge credibility based on who the person is and what team they’re on. This leads to appeals to authority and forgetting to ask the critical question of how much credibility the authority has. Does each tribe live in its own reality and have those realities reach a point where they can’t mix? And do we give authorities a pass when they’re members of our tribe?

2. It’s a fallacy to think that the policies of the U.S. Government, the most significant, most powerful government in history, don’t impact our economy.

3. We’ve become more focused on financial incentives rather than creating value to improve the world.

4. We think about success in terms of a single generation, and doing so raises many questions about privilege. But what is privilege exactly, and how much do we need to think about. And does our view of privilege change if we look at success as a slow and steady multi-generational process rather than a meteoric, single-generation rise from rags to riches?

5. NFTs are a new product many in the crypto world think is the next big thing. But is there any value in NFTs, and from where does the value come?

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