What We’re Reading (Week Ending 05 September 2021) - 05 Sep 2021
Reading helps us learn about the world and it is a really important aspect of investing. The legendary Charlie Munger even goes so far as to say that “I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading.” We (the co-founders of Compounder Fund) read widely across a range of topics, including investing, business, technology, and the world in general. We want to regularly share the best articles we’ve come across recently. Here they are (for the week ending 05 September 2021):
1. Jude Blanchette on the Enduring Intellectual Puzzle of China – James Chater and Jude Blanchette
You wrote recently in Foreign Affairs about Xi’s “gamble” over the next 10 to 15 years. It was an interesting title because I don’t think the word “gamble” then appeared in the body of the text. What is Xi’s “gamble” and how does it relate to the central tensions facing China in the next 10 to 15 years you just alluded to?
If I had editorial control over the headline, I would have likely titled it: what’s driving Xi’s sense of urgency? For me, standard explanations for the Xi administration’s behavior over the past several years had fallen short in a way that was meaningful enough to bite into. Discussions about rejuvenation, or 2049, are far too abstract to be functionally meaningful in terms of how senior officials actually plan. I imagine that the idea of “rejuvenation” is about as operative in current Chinese planning as the idea of “liberty” is in terms of how the Department of Defense or White House thinks about U.S. global strategy. There may be an ideological component to articulating a set of overall values, but it won’t have much purchase in day-to-day government planning meetings or strategy sessions.
So, if I don’t think that’s really what’s driving them, then what is? And I became interested in this year 2035, which we saw as central to a proliferating number of planning and policy documents. That felt to me like a framework which authoritarian political systems, such as the one that Xi is leading, might be able to orient towards, because it’s really talking about the next 10 to 15 years, a timeline within which Xi Jinping will likely be alive and maybe still even in power. That was combined with seeing that when you start thinking about this next 10 years, first of all, a number of the long-standing challenges that China has been able to can-kick, mitigate or constrain through rapid economic growth — debt, demographics and declining productivity — are now going to come to bite in a way that they haven’t yet; and that the international environment is clearly undergoing an important shift that will constrain the development space that China has had.
With, admittedly, a little bit of analytical imagination, I then began to think this makes sense, or this explains better the drive and urgency behind the Xi administration; there’s a window of important opportunities to gain an edge in areas that the United States is either immature or distracted. But this is also a critical window for finally making headway on solving some of the challenges that previous leaders felt like they had more time on. That element of time had, to me, been missing from a lot of the strategic discussion about China; it had been more about goals. But goals absent of time are just meaningless concepts…
…Going back to 2012-2013, do you have any sense of how this process of centralization was achieved? And from that, just how sui generis is what we have now? Who are those key stakeholders within elite politics now and are they different from the pre-Xi era?
The two dominant explanations for how Xi became so powerful, so quickly are mandate and mendacity. Mandate is the argument that if you look at where the party was by 2012, you had an almost untenable number of problems within the bureaucratic system and organizational structure. And then, throughout Chinese society, there was growing distrust [of the CCP], the role of technological tools like Weibo to foment and transmit dissent and dissatisfaction, corruption within the party, Bo Xilai, the Arab Spring, color revolutions, you name it. Xi Jinping was handed a mandate by senior leaders and retired leaders to essentially rectify the system. That gave breathing room for Xi to move in a way that Hu Jintao did not have when he could feel the breath of Jiang Zemin on the back of his neck.
The other argument is mendacity, namely, Xi Jinping leveraged that sense of crisis within the system, and moved to weaponize institutions like the CCDI [Central Commission for Discipline Inspection] to essentially asymmetrically grab power and move an agenda in a way that no-one was predicting. A combination of the two makes sense to me, insofar as he clearly had the mandate which he then pushed farther than the status quo expected. And once he had essentially figured out some of the effective tools, then began the centralization that we see today.
The reason I think the mandate explanation is insufficient is if it had been known how far Xi Jinping was going to push, then, of course, individuals like Xu Caihou and Zhou Yongkang, would never have accepted the mandate and would have raised holy hell at the beginning. You had a whole senior and sub-elite tier of the party who had their iron rice bowls smashed by Xi. And as far as we can tell, they didn’t have much by way of warning that they were targets, because if they had, you can imagine that the pushback would have been more visible and fierce than it was.
So, it’s some combination of, never let a crisis go to waste, combined with Xi being a much more effective bureaucratic actor and far more Machiavellian once ensconced in power. This, then also transcending the mandate by a fair degree makes more sense to me as an explainer than either one of the extremes of, “Oh, it was mandate” or “Oh, it was mendacity.” Both of those have shortcomings…
…What are the long-term ramifications of this coalescing of power around Xi? What happens after Xi?
You can think about the change that China underwent after the death of Mao, which I think surprised almost everyone in how quickly — within a matter of four years or so — it moved towards official normalization of relations with the U.S., and the beginning of this extraordinary campaign of economic reform. So that’s always possible. But I think it depends on the circumstances in which whoever inherits the mantle from Xi assumes that power. On the one hand, you can imagine a leader now assuming power that no previous Chinese leaders had, because Xi Jinping has redefined what the position of the General Secretary is in China, in a way that has returned to the level of authority that it hasn’t had since Mao.
On the other hand, Mao was a singular leader who was not commanding a very strong bureaucracy. Xi has centralized power and personalized power, but at the same time, tried to reforge the Leninist organizational integrity of the Communist Party. That combination of a supremely powerful general secretary and a now far more organized Leninist party bureaucracy is a combination I don’t think we’ve seen yet in CCP history. How does a future General Secretary wield that power?
2. How Pinterest Learned to Control Cloud Costs – Kevin McLaughlin and Jeremy King
The Information: There’s a debate going on in the enterprise tech industry about whether using cloud providers remains cost effective after a company reaches a certain scale, and whether it’s better to repatriate certain computing jobs to private data centers. Where do you stand on that?
King: The biggest barrier [is that] the switching costs are so high that it’s almost better to stay where you are if you have the ability to do it. The challenge that many companies have when they’re running their own clouds internally [is that] they haven’t invested in the ability to get the pricing [for servers and other hardware] that they need.
You need to build your own hardware, you need to be able to cycle and life-cycle your products, [and] you need to have a [platform as a service] layer that orchestrates the utilization of those resources, like you can with a cloud provider. Otherwise, you’re never going to get to the point where you’re cheaper than the cloud.
But [there are] companies that have built their own data centers—like Twitter and eBay—that have awesome teams focused on the infrastructure side. For them, switching to cloud is almost as painful as somebody going from cloud back to [private data centers]. [Editor’s note: Twitter has evolved its approach in recent years, striking deals with Google Cloud and AWS to offload more of its computing tasks to the cloud.]
I would have to build a dedicated team with a minimum of 100 people to be able to build that technology stack for us. We’re talking about a million-plus [processor] cores that run Pinterest. Just building those data centers alone and dealing with [multiple] regions, this is complicated stuff. So we’re going to stay in the cloud for the foreseeable future.
Our cloud bill is huge when you look at it. You can imagine it’s several hundred million [dollars] a year. So at some point [you start thinking,] “Hey, could I save money on these dollar amounts?” and that would be something we’d have to look into. But it’ll be several years before we even consider that.
In 2019 we reported that several top AWS customers were seeing higher-than-expected cloud bills, and Pinterest was one of the companies we mentioned. How are things today? Has Pinterest got a better handle on forecasting its capacity needs in advance?
Yeah, we have a wonderful team on this. In order to go to the cloud, there’s two things you need to worry about. Number one, you need to have a finance partner that isn’t as deep into…the way you utilize the cloud provider as the engineering teams [are]. Because you really can make big mistakes in how you utilize capabilities of the cloud that aren’t part of a discount that you’ve gotten and that sort of thing. So you really have to have a great finance partner.
Oftentimes, when people talk about the problems they’re having with cloud bills, their production environments are usually pretty well managed and they’re keeping a good eye on it. But they usually lose control over [software development and testing]. What happens is an engineer will spin up an environment, or a set of environments, and run a machine-learning program for five days, and then they’ll get the bill and go, “Oh my god, that cost $100,000 to run.”
So you really need to build some discipline internally as well that most companies don’t currently have.
3. Gabby Dizon – Mapping the Metaverse Economy – Patrick O’Shaughnessy and Gabby Dizon
Patrick: [00:03:34] We just met a few days ago, but I’ve been so damn excited for this conversation because I think you’re building one of the more interesting and different businesses in the world right now. You’re in Manila. I’m in New York. That’s the nature of things these days. I absolutely love it. Maybe just since a lot of people won’t be familiar with Yield Guild Games, you could just give an overview of what the company does today before we retrace your steps and the company’s steps back in time. I think that’s a good place to begin.
Gabby: [00:04:00] Yield Guild Games is what we call a play-to-earn gaming guild. In a way I call it similar to a world of Warcraft Guild with a balance sheet. So we were a group of gamers or set up as a bow or the central autonomous organization, and we invest in assets in different blockchain games. So Axie Infinity is the main one that we are playing in. We buy these Axies. These NFTs are used inside the games to earn some form of yield. So in this case, it’s SLP tokens. These are used by players to earn an income.
Patrick: [00:04:30] I think we need to talk about play-to-earn in some detail upfront because without that foundation, it’s going to be hard for people to follow what the hell an SLP is and why anyone cares. I’ve heard you talk elsewhere about how there’s sort of like a westward expansion happening in the digital world right now. Maybe it’s a gold rush. Maybe it’s a land grab. And there’s a lot of terms from like early physical exploration and settling that we could use in this discussion, but just talk us through what play-to-earn means, how it relates to this fun concept of the metaverse and digital assets. Give us a primer on this concept.
Gabby: [00:05:04] I guess we have to start with blockchain games, these games where some of the assets are NFTs. And because these are NFTs that earn the blockchains such as Ethereum, then the players on these assets, it’s not owned by the game anymore. And when you play these blockchain games, it reads your wallet to see what the NFTs you own and then it represents them in the game. So that’s kind of the basic layer.
And then play-to-earn is kind of a step beyond that where you are using these assets that you own to earn some kind of token reward. So for example, in Axie if I have three Axies in my wallet, I play a match inside the game and I win, I earn an SLP token and this SLP token is something that I can sync into my wallet as a token and then I can interact the DeFi world, turn it into Ether, for example, or turn it into fiat money, into dollars or Philippine Pesos, and I can go get spend up money. So in effect, I am using these games to play and then earn money so that I can then cash out in the real world.
Patrick: [00:06:08] I think we could talk about this concept of assets, because again, for some people that don’t play these games or are not spending all their time thinking about crypto or blockchain, it’s really important to understand the categories that these things might be in. What are the major ones? People probably have heard of like cosmetic purchases, cool skin in Fortnite or something. How would you categorize the major kinds of assets that exist today and may exist in the near term future?
Gabby: [00:06:32] NFTs can be generally unique assets that are inside the games that you’re playing. So they can be skins, they can be items, for example, like arm or swords. They can be unique characters inside the game. In the case of Axie, they’re like unique digital pet similar to a Pokemon. So the idea is the game generates unique kinds of assets that can then own by the player as NFTs on a blockchain which they can then own and trade with one another for value in the real world…
…Patrick: [00:12:42] One of the most interesting things that’s happening in your ecosystem as a result of your business specifically is people in the Philippines, I think in Venezuela and some other places like this, all of a sudden earning a lot more money by doing something that there’s demand for, which is whether that’s breeding these things in the game, which are valuable to people and value is value. If people want them and are willing to pay, that’s value. Obviously that can fluctuate. The Axies could tank to $5 from $500, which is something we should talk about, but talk through how this is changing people’s behavior, let’s just say in your native, the Philippines. What kind of change in earnings does it represent for people that are doing this? How many people are doing this? I’m just fascinated by how this is a new kind of job.
Gabby: [00:13:24] Right now, there are over 1 million daily active users in Axie Infinity. Probably somewhere between 40% to 50% of this is in the Philippines. So that represents hundreds of thousands of people who are now basically working in the metaverse. They’re working in Axie Infinity. And the interesting thing about this is that Axie doesn’t care whether you live in the Philippines or in America or in Venezuela. It basically pays you a flat wage depending on how much SLPs you can produce. Now you’re earning based on how good you are in the crypto economy of Axie Infinity and not based on what location you’re in.
What’s happened with the in-game economy so far is that it has produced, I would say like revenue or income opportunity for these players that are multiples of what a typical minimum wage job is in the Philippines. So for example, here in the Philippines, a minimum wage share might be $200. It’s actually a lot lower in Venezuela. I think it’s like $50, and people are earning maybe somewhere between $500 to $1,000 a month playing Axie Infinity. And that’s just really changed a lot of lives where people have had this scale that they didn’t think was worth any money, this gaming scale. A lot of us have gaming scale and we’ve become pretty good at it growing up.
We never really thought it was a scale that could be monetized and now they’re finding out that the scale that they’ve earned in their teenage years that their moms have yelled at them for is actually a skill that can be monetized by playing these play-to-earn games. And the result is astounding of people who are jobless or have held down minimum wage are earning like three, four or five times the amount that they used to.
Patrick: [00:15:04] I think that this is a topic in our conversation that we need to linger on because I want to understand how this might look five years from now in good and bad ways. So, first of all, who can argue with the fact that people that were making $200 are now making $1,000 and at scale like you mentioned? That maybe a hundred thousand or more people in the Philippines whose lives have changed as a result of this. I want to understand what drives the durability of that opportunity. So in crypto, as everyone knows that’s listening, there’s a lot of volatility. Assets go very high, then they can crash very low. This happens over and over again. If let’s just say an Axie goes from being worth, a team of Axies goes from being worth $1,000 to being worth $10, what happens? Do other games spring up? What are the risks to the pool of demand that creates these jobs and the flow of capital that creates these jobs? What are the opportunities? What do you think this looks like in five years?
Gabby: [00:15:57] The way to think of each play-to-earn game is that in a way it’s its own self-contained economy. We even call them like digital nations, which means that people go there to play to work. There must be people who are investing something inside the game economy for people to do some kind of work unit and take something out. So in Axie, it’s breeding that creates these because you need these Axies to come in and create the SLP, but long-term, there needs to be many different reasons why people would put money in the game. For example, are there sponsorships? Are brands willing to put money in the game and maybe sponsor prizes for people to do tournaments? Right now the economy of Axie Infinity is based on new user growth because every new user that comes in has to buy three Axies, which means that the breeders are making money selling Axies to these users coming in.
Of course, at some point we don’t know whether it’s one year, two years, five years, the new user growth will slow down and there needs to be spending like currency users inside the game or external parties such as maybe brands, for example, who would want to advertise or give prizes to the population of the people in that game. So in a way, I even think of each game economy as having its own GDP. So that’s why we talked about settling the metaverse or settling this digital dimensions. In a way, these people are, I may be in the Philippines and then I go to this online game to start working and I’m not in my local economy anymore. I’m now in the economy of this game or virtual world. And I perform actions there that I earn value and then I take that money home, be it SLP or whatever kind of game currency, and then I take it out back as Philippian Pesos.
So it’s actually not that different from a migrant worker from the Philippines that has to go to America or to Europe to earn a higher living wage and then take that money back home, except I’m going to these different video game worlds instead.
4. The Barings collapse 25 years on: What the industry learned after one man broke a bank – Elliot Smith
Exactly 25 years ago, Britain’s oldest investment bank, which listed Queen Elizabeth II among its clients, was declared insolvent.
The collapse of Barings Bank was caused by colossal losses incurred by a single rogue trader.
Nick Leeson, the bank’s then 28-year-old head of derivatives in Singapore, gambled more than $1 billion in unhedged, unauthorized speculative trades, an amount which dwarfed the venerable merchant bank’s cash reserves.
Leeson’s assignment in Singapore was to execute “arbitrage” trade, generating small profits from buying and selling futures contracts on the Japanese Nikkei 225 in both the Osaka Securities Exchange and the Singapore International Monetary Exchange.
However, rather than initiating concurrent trades to capitalize on small differences in pricing between the two markets, he retained the contracts in the hope of creating much larger profits by betting on the rise of the underlying Nikkei index.
He had made vast sums for the bank in previous years, at one stage accounting for 10% of its entire profits, but the downturn in the Japanese market following the Kobe earthquake on January 17, 1995 rapidly unraveled his unhedged positions.
Through manipulating internal accounting systems, Leeson was able to misrepresent his losses and falsify trading records.
This enabled him to keep the bank’s London headquarters, and the financial markets, in the dark until a confession letter to Barings Chairman Peter Baring on February 23, 1995, at which point Leeson fled Singapore and kickstarted an international manhunt. Three days later, Britain’s oldest merchant bank, founded in 1762, ceased to exist.
Leeson was eventually captured and sentenced to six and a half years in jail in Singapore after pleading guilty to two counts of “deceiving the bank’s auditors and of cheating the Singapore exchange.”
One of the most glaring regulatory errors the bank made was having the same man at the helm of both the derivatives trading desk and the clearing, settling and accounting operation.
ACA Compliance Chief Services Officer Carlo di Florio, a former senior executive at both FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said this convergence of duties was tantamount having “the fox guarding the hen house.”
5. What It’s Like to Inherit Billions in Your Twenties – Hallam Bullock
At an age when most teenagers are swapping trading cards, Tyler Huang was involved in his father’s bid to buy a British football club. If they wanted to, his family could make a Monopoly board of London, purchasing properties on the roll of a dice. Tyler himself has the means to dine on wagyu for every meal. He is, if it wasn’t already obvious, unbelievably rich…
…Huang, who is now 23, inherited billions earlier this year when his parents died. But if you were to pass him on the street, you’d see a young man indistinguishable from any other, loafing around in his Crocs, head down, texting and tweeting as he walks.
Huang grew up in Knightsbridge, London, overlooking Hyde Park. “I was raised primarily by staff – maids, butlers, nannies,” he says. He spent most of his childhood in an isolated orbit, cushioned from the outside world by private jets, luxury homes and his family’s workforce. “As a kid, I never played with toys much,” he tells me. “Dad collected cars, so I used to spend a lot of my free time taking vintage cars out.”
Huang grew up with not one but two AMEX Centurion cards – one of the most exclusive credit cards in the world: “My mother gave me one for emergencies, and my father gave me another for anything else.”…
…Again, while that might sound like a privilege – and it absolutely is: you have to be massively privileged to even qualify for one – Huang believes that placing the power of unlimited spending in the hands of a teenager ultimately wasn’t the best idea.
“I wish I didn’t grow up with those cards, then I’d be able to understand how to appreciate money and others,” he says, before recalling a phone call he had with his father at the age of 16: “He called me up one morning when I was hungover and we laughed about the money I’d spent over the weekend – I didn’t remember much, but it turns out I got drunk and rented a yacht in Bangkok.”
Huang doesn’t recall this with a smirk or a sense of satisfaction, but with shame. “You would think, as a kid, never having to look at a price tag would be great – but it’s actually quite scary,” he says. Even as a child, he noticed his homes were surrounded by CCTV and security teams. “I knew what they were for – my parents didn’t like to attract attention, but there was always a sense of danger.”
For Huang, an attempted kidnapping or burglary was something to be prepared for. His drivers were trained to escape criminals and, if he wanted, his father could arrange an entourage for him to get ice cream. “As a child, it’s terrifying,” he says. “When your father runs background checks on your friends’ families, it’s a reminder of just how different you are.”…
…Huang feels his mother measured the value of his life primarily by his academic performance. Concerned by her son’s half-hearted approach to his studies, she sent him to a psychiatrist, where he was diagnosed with clinical depression, autism and Asperger’s. Huang says his mother treated the diagnoses like a pick-and-mix, seeing his autism as an indication he was “gifted”, but rejecting the depression as him being “lazy and difficult”…
…When Huang finished school, he began serving in mandatory active duty as a full-time national serviceman in Singapore. However, at the age of 19, doctors found a glioblastoma – a grade 4 brain tumour – in his left frontal lobe, and he was discharged from the military. He was reluctant to tell his friends about his diagnosis, but in the space his silence made, speculation thrived and he was considered a “white horse” – someone who could escape military service through their family connections.
Following his discharge, Huang began showing real promise in the field of architecture. For a while, his mental and physical health problems sank to the bottom of his mind, but before long his depression would again break the surface.
Huang lost his brother to a car accident in 2017, his mother to cancer in 2020 and his father to another car accident in February of this year. Today, his depression is the most violent it has ever been. He has stepped back from his career in architecture, after his health conditions left him unable to work. Huang’s cancer is terminal, but he continues to receive treatment and has outlived his doctor’s five-year estimation from when the tumour was first discovered.
He consumes three pills for breakfast, 12 for lunch and eight for dinner. His other routines are more or less the same every day: when he wakes up, Huang likes to spend as little time as possible at his Singapore apartment. When he’s outside, the hustle and bustle of the street scatters his dark thoughts. It’s for this reason that he likes to spend time in public places. A rooftop bar is one of his favourite daily pilgrimages, where he sits with his laptop, girdled by life and laughter.
One evening, he calls me while he’s there, surrounded by plates of oysters, scallops, champagne bottles and a thinly sliced beef dish that is woven so intricately around itself, it looks at first like a decorative centrepiece for the table. As we speak, the sun is setting over Singapore, and it seems to me like the perfect way to spend an evening.
“It isn’t,” Huang says. “I’m all alone – I always am.”
6. Cancer’s ‘Achilles’ heel’ discovered by scientists – Study Finds
Scientists may be one step closer to defeating cancer after finding what researchers at the University of British Columbia call the disease’s “Achilles’ heel.”
Their study has uncovered a protein that fuels tumors when oxygen levels are low. It enables the cancerous growths to adapt and survive and become more aggressive.
The enzyme, called CAIX (Carbonic Anhydrase IX), helps diseased cells spread to other organs. It could hold the key to new treatments for the deadliest forms of the disease, including breast, pancreatic, lungs, bowel, and prostate cancers.
“Cancer cells depend on the CAIX enzyme to survive, which ultimately makes it their ‘Achilles heel.’ By inhibiting its activity, we can effectively stop the cells from growing,” says study senior author Professor Shoukat Dedhar in a university release.
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, will help researchers develop drugs that destroy solid tumors. These are the most common types that arise in the body. They rely on blood supply to deliver oxygen and nutrients which help tumors grow.
As the tumors advance, the blood vessels are unable to provide enough oxygen to every part. Over time, the low-oxygen environment leads to a buildup of acid inside the cells. They overcome the stress by unleashing proteins, or enzymes, that neutralize the acidic conditions.
This process is behind the spread, or metastasis, of cancer cells to other organs — which is what can kill patients. Finding a way to prevent cancer from metastasizing is the “Holy Grail” of cancer research. One of the enzymes which appears to do this is CAIX.
The Canadian team previously identified a unique compound known as SLC-0111 as a powerful inhibitor. It is currently being tested in clinical trials. Experiments in mice with breast, pancreatic, and brain cancers revealed its effectiveness.
7. How Learning Happens – David Perrell
Enjoyable learning begins with inspiration—both to get you started and to help you push through the struggles of knowledge acquisition. The way I see it, the need for inspiration inverts the learning process: instead of starting with the building blocks and moving toward curiosity, students start with curiosity and move towards the building blocks. Guided by the light of inspiration, the benefits of memorization become self-evident, and the motivation to learn comes intrinsically.
My teachers didn’t give inspiration the respect it deserves. Too often, they dove straight into the test material before they sparked a flame of desire in us. I still remember learning about the Doppler effect because my junior year astrophysics teacher taught it so well…
…Instead, he started by making the subject come alive.
First, he gave us context: how the Doppler effect shows up in our lives. You experience it whenever an ambulance passes by, he said. Because of the Doppler effect, the sirens have a higher pitch when they’re coming towards you and a lower one as they drive away. The change in pitch reflects the change in wavelength created by the siren. He didn’t stop there. He told us how astrophysicists use this formula to measure how fast the universe is expanding. Together, these stories are so deeply embedded in my mind that I still think of them a decade later whenever I hear an ambulance pass by.
Inspiration is a uniquely human experience because it isn’t motivated by mere survival. It transcends the world of needs and lives in the world of wants. By doing so, inspiration stirs the mind. It’s no coincidence that the etymology of inspire is linked to “the breath of life.” As the sparkle of inspiration enters our bodies, we are animated with a video game style turbo-boost. Though a state of perpetual awe is the natural state for kids (which is why they learn so fast), it’s foreign to most adults. Too often, the wrinkles of age and the weight of responsibility silence the rush of epiphany.
Blinded by age, we can turn to cold rationality, valuing only what we can define and prioritize only what we can measure. When we do, we forget that the wisdom of an inspired spirit exceeds our ability to describe it. The less we insist on a justification for our curiosities, the more we can surrender to the engine of inspiration and let learning happen…
…Since the school system operates at scale, it tends to squash things that are hard to predict, even if they reflect a student’s unique interest. For an in-person curriculum to scale, students need to be doing the same thing at the same time. The individual nature of inspiration makes that impossible.
Inspiration is also hard to define. Even the most inspired people can’t always define the edges of their own interests—let alone explain them to others. Furthermore, we change. Surprise is in the nature of growth. But by insisting on such a structured approach, schools squash the ambitions of the very students they intend to serve. Ultimately, the kind of rigidity you need to pump millions of students through the school system every year is the antithesis of the kind of flexibility that nurtures inspiration.
Most of all, schools should embrace entertainment because it lets you scale inspiration. Since entertainment means something different to every person, let’s start with a definition: to engage a person’s attention in a way that makes the time pass pleasantly.
Entertainment is not amusement. Entertainment can be nutritious, but amusement never is. Amusement is defined by distraction. Like candy, it’s appealing in the short-term but has few long-term benefits. Usually, when educators criticize entertainment, they’re actually talking about amusement. Though the distinction is subtle, it’s the difference between an educated citizenry and the dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World.
Historically, educators have run away from entertainment because they assume it will lead to amusement. Throughout my childhood, I sensed an implicit assumption that learning needed to be boring in order for it to be effective. Take the assumption to its logical extreme and teachers face a dilemma of either locking students in a room and force-feeding them knowledge or letting them enjoy themselves, knowing they won’t learn anything.
If there’s anything I’ve learned by writing on the Internet, it’s that small tweaks in the way an idea is packaged can have an exponential impact on how much it resonates. The Greeks knew this intuitively. They wrapped their most important ideas in narratives instead of sharing them outright. Plays like The Iliad and The Odyssey weren’t just a form of entertainment. They provided cultural instruction too. Since they were passed along in speech instead of writing, they had to be memorized and known by heart.
Today, masters of storytelling come from Hollywood and, increasingly, YouTube. They use many of the same tools that the Greeks discovered. Their storytelling philosophy is among the most effective tools we’ve invented for inspiring people at scale, which is why a popular documentary will spark more interest in a subject than the best textbooks ever will. Hollywood techniques aren’t going to make anybody an expert in their subject, but they can kindle the flame of curiosity.
Disclaimer: None of the information or analysis presented is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation. Of all the companies mentioned, we currently have a vested interest in Alphabet (parent of Google Cloud) and Amazon (parent of AWS). Holdings are subject to change at any time.
