My Recent Podcast
My recent guest on Brave New World is Pippa Ehrlich, director and screenplay writer of the movie “My Octopus Teacher.” It was released during the height of the pandemic in the fall of 2020 on Netflix. The movie won the best documentary feature award at the Academy Awards the following year.
My Octopus Teacher completely blew my mind. You’ve probably watched it already, but if you haven’t, all I can say is “Nike,” as in, “just do it.” The relationship between the octopus and Craig Foster, the free diver who made contact with her, made me think anew about sentience, curiosity, intelligence, emotion, communication and trust in humans and animals. I certainly wasn’t aware of the level of intelligence and curiosity in the world of octopi, let alone emotion. I was reminded of a book by R.K. Narayan called A Tiger for Malgudi, about a Tiger in South India who talks in the first person and muses about humans and how little they understand him. He eventually befriends a monk with whom he has a lasting friendship.
I mentioned to Pippa that her film came up in my conversation with moral philosopher Peter Singer. Peter’s book, Animal Liberation Now, describes in detail the suffering we impose on sentient animals, and our obligations to other species on the planet. I told Pippa that I had given up meat after reading Singer’s book, and couldn’t imagine eating octopus after watching her movie. Evidently, it has wreaked havoc in the octopus meat industry. People seem to be having a hard time getting their heads around eating a creature that smart and emotional.
Pippa also brought my attention to a new film called “Deep Rising.” It’s about the trillions of tons of valuable metals on the floors of our oceans that could satisfy our voracious demand for battery technology to power the “green economy.” But at what cost to nature and other life forms? As one expert put it, all the bio diversity down there will be lost forever. The trailer of the film ends with an intriguing question: “Who owns the deep ocean, and who should benefit from it?”
Pippa and I had a free-flowing conversation about the film that went in several interesting directions, such as the importance of discipline in whatever path we pursue, and what it means to have an emotional relationship with other creatures. So, check out my conversation with Pippa:
What Does Success Mean?
I was a guest on a podcast earlier this week, which ended with some rapid-fire questions. The first question was “what does success mean to you?”
That was easy. “To be able to do what you enjoy doing in life.” But you need a little luck to get there, especially if you don’t know what you want. For this, I’ll share a piece of advice from Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, which I think applies to life more broadly. When I asked Michael about the purpose of higher education, he said “to maximize your serendipitous encounters.” That’s great advice. For Pippa, serendipity happened through her free diving community that led her to Craig Foster. We have to be active in creating our opportunities.
The dilemma of being young is that you haven’t much of a clue about the possibilities out there. “I should have studied biology,” Pippa said at one point during our conversation. She just didn’t know it as a student, and studied journalism instead. The good news is that life isn’t a sprint but a marathon. There’s time. Regardless of where you start, you have time to find your own path. Sometimes it can lead to recognition and make you famous, as it did Pippa. You then have the power to use the recognition in whatever way you want. For Pippa, it is agency to shape the future of our wildlife and oceans.
Fame or not, discipline stands out as a necessary ingredient for success. When Craig Foster taught Pippa how to free dive and observe, he stressed the need for discipline. There are some rules that must be followed. She had to go into the freezing water every day without exception. I think Malcolm Gladwell expressed the same idea in his book Outliers, where he reported that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of focus to achieve complete mastery of complex skills. That’s almost four years of eight-hour days. There’s no substitute for discipline.
The Swift Effect
I teach a class on “Systematic Investing” that starts with a discussion about the role of skill and luck in investing, and how to disentangle and quantify them. I begin with how skill and luck play out in sports. As part of the discussion, I ask students to rank the following sports according to the role that luck plays in the outcome of a game: baseball, basketball, football, soccer, and hockey. How are their outcomes impacted by randomness, or luck?
It’s always an interesting discussion. By the end of class, most people are convinced that luck plays the smallest role in basketball. The reasoning is that there are a large number of possessions, so an occasional turnover isn’t usually catastrophic. If a team has a slight edge, it tends to multiply the more the possessions, all else being equal. While there’s considerable disagreement about ranking the other four sports, most agree that luck plays a much larger role in them than in basketball. For example, in football, there are very few possessions, so if you get unlucky, say, by losing the ball near your goal line, it could be curtains for you regardless of how good you are.
Another way to think about skill and luck in sports is that when skill levels across teams are matched, luck plays a large role in outcomes.
It’s a nice coincidence that the Super Bowl is just around the corner when we do this exercise, so I ask students for their predictions and reasons. Not surprisingly, many turn out to wrong on both counts. People are often overconfident for the wrong reasons. We see the same phenomenon in investing, which I discussed with the behavioral finance guru Terry Odean on Brave New World a couple of years ago.
This year, the media is abuzz about whether Taylor Swift will make it back from Japan in time for the Super Bowl. If so, will the “Swift effect” be a factor in the outcome?
In a poll I took in class this week, almost everyone predicted the favored San Francisco Forty Niners will win. They don’t think the Swift factor matters. I’m not so sure. What I do predict is that serendipity will play a big role this Sunday, especially since the two teams are so well matched. In such circumstances, it invariably boils down to luck. I’m betting that the Chiefs have a good chance of pulling off an upset.