The Chomp #029

Hey Everyone,

Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best content from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. Let’s dive into it.

---

Quick Bite

• Making Sense of Aliens, Jedi & Cults: Below is piece I wrote earlier this week. You can read it on a separate page by clicking the link. (2 Min)

  I recently came across Richard Burton’s mental model of aliens, Jedi & cults and can’t stop thinking about it. Reading through his Medium post on it was an aha! moment for me. An alien founder assembles a group of Jedi to start a cult and go on a mission together. At first glance, it sounds a little odd. But once you read through Richard's examples and start to piece together some of your own, it's amazing how powerful the model becomes.

  One field the model works quite well for is investing. A perfect example, although maybe a bit controversial, would be Tesla. You have an alien founder in Elon Musk who assembled a group of Jedi to build a start-up electric vehicle company that amassed a cult following. Had you identified this back when the Model S released in 2012 and Tesla was trading at $30, a $1,000 investment would now be worth $31,633. That’s a 3,063% percent return. Amazon is a great example as well. Jeff Bezos is an alien founder who put together a team of Jedi and built a cult brand into one of the most dominant companies on the planet. Steve Jobs and Apple is yet another prime example, and I'm sure you can think of many more.

  

  When used to gauge potential, this model can be a recipe for asymmetrical success. When you're right the upside is unlimited, and when you’re wrong the downside is limited to whatever time or money you put in. So while you might not have a 100% hit rate, your successes can far outweigh any losses. Hitting one Tesla can make up for 10 duds. This model has long been used in venture capital, where the entire industry runs on the concept of asymmetrical success. Investing in a company like Uber will make a VCs career regardless of how many misses he/she has in their portfolio.

  Along with investing, this mental model can also be immensely helpful for making career choices. If you get an opportunity to join a company that fits the alien, Jedi & cult criteria the potential upside can be astronomical. If everything clicks right, you'll find yourself on a rocketship.

  

  The best part about this model is that once you get it lodged in your mind you can't help but look out at the world through its lens. Soon after reading this, you'll be looking for aliens, Jedi & cults everywhere.

---

Deeper Dive

• Never-ending Niches: “What is important to note, though, is that while quality is relatively binary, the number of ways to be focused — that is, the number of niches in the world — are effectively infinite; success, in other words, is about delivering superior quality in your niche — the former is defined by the latter.” (11 Min)

  When it comes to tying together disparate thoughts into a coherent conclusion, nobody does it better in the tech world than Ben Thompson. On a line per line basis, it's difficult to find another writer you can extract as much insight from. Ben's most recent post on Stratechery is one of his best in recent memory. It wouldn't do this piece justice for me to try and summarize his thinking into a couple of paragraphs. Take some time to read this one in full.

---

Tweet of the Week

Taylor Pearson @TaylorPearsonMe

Social media is fantastic for bringing buried problems into the broader public awareness. It is terrible as a forum for dialogue to come up with solutions to those problems.

Song of the Week

Apple Music Link

---

Books

Currently Reading

Recently Read

• René Girard stated in an interview that Wolfgang Palaver's book, René Girard's Memetic Theory, was the most thorough overview of his mimetic theory available. That led me to pick this up as my next read on Girard. It certainly didn't disappoint. While at times a bit dense and technical, Palaver does an incredible job of breaking down and analyzing the mimetic theory. I highly recommend this for anyone with level 1 knowledge of Girard's work that would like to go deeper on his ideas.

---

Parting Thoughts

This Week in History

• On June 9, 1993, Jurassic Park premiered at the Uptown Theatre in Washington D.C. It went on to gross over $914M worldwide in its original theatrical run becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time, at the time. (Source)

“Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.”

—  Marcus Aurelius

If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.

-CM