It is a "performance art", like a stand-up comic, an actor, a politician, a presentation, or a congressional hearing. Some people do not want to rehearse as they feel it "empties them". He was known to meticulously practice the delivery of keynotes so he could hit things on time, as if it were a play, if I recall correctly.
You can see that there's a good part of storytelling. If you watch Elon Musk videos, there often is repetition on the three things he focused on in college: the internet, multi-planetary life, and sustainable energy.
In more recent videos, the narrative has shifted to five things he focused on during college, and an addition of genetics and artificial intelligence made it to the list. This is a bit different, like a git history change, which goes unnoticed by most interviewers. However, people think about a lot of things and nobody would be able to list all their ideas or thoughts, let alone someone like him.
One of the best interviewers in the space is Sarah Lacy, in my opinion. She has enough raport with her guests in Pando Monthly videos (there are bout fifty of them, and I invite everyone to watch them), but she doesn't hesitate to invite her guests to better recall the events, timeline, or context... "Yes, but X had invested before and you had replaced so and so on the board at that time, so that must have been before Z". Way better interviews because she has the context, as opposed to someone just looking "just" for an interview. The interviews are really good and dive into decisions founders and VCs took and what had motivated them, etc.
Interesting: He was never summoned by Congress. All the other technical directors have been: Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, even Larry Ellison from Oracle. Maybe having the upper hand in being well-understood and well-spoken, goes as far as to have a smoother relationship with the general public?
Tim Cook has been. On a related note, I am convinced that Zuckerberg would have an easier time with these matters with a different haircut..
This is not a personal attack on Zuckerberg, but I think the haircut is damaging his image and makes him less trustworthy than he may be. Joel Kaplan, Myriah Jordan, and their teams may have prepped him well for these hearings (and the famous picture of the talking points left open accidentally-on-purpose is just funny), but he seems to provoke a visceral reaction in people that others do not.
Many see Gates, Dorsey, Ellison, etc as CEOs with certain traits, like nerdy, charming, well-spoken, funny/outspoken/brash, etc, but I don't think they assume they are evil.
Again, this is not an attack on physique or on the person, but an observation based on what a lot of comments on these hearings are about. They mostly are about him, not others, drawing comparisons to animals or robots, dehumanizing him, etc. This leads me to think it's a matter of perception and image and I'm wondering what impact the latter would have on the former.
Sure but the presumption in your comment is that he has the ability to have a dramatically different haircut. My sense is he's struggling with hair loss (take a look at his father https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190201121030-facebook...), and in this context, he might have a very limited set of haircuts available to him.
I don't mean to get into an argument about this, but as someone who also doesn't have great hair genetics and has looked some into it, "solving" hairloss isn't turnkey and doesn't produce the same results for everyone. There's genetics at play and things we don't know (if any startup/company does solve it, there's a pile of gold waiting for them).
If you want a counter example to your Elon, take a look at Lebron James.
Anyways it's entirely possible Mark has looked into it and doing it what he can (and we're seeing the results of it), or simply he doesn't care as much and is okay with what he has, or I'm off base and he picked this haircut despite having an abundance of hair available to him.
> Many see Gates, Dorsey, Ellison, etc as CEOs with certain traits, like nerdy, charming, well-spoken, funny/outspoken/brash, etc, but I don't think they assume they are evil.
I’m really from the other side of the world, then ;) Gates’ 1998 hearings made him look extremely bad; the modern Gates is charming, but so charming it’s made up (people are used to PR stunts, teenage now distinguish ads hiding as memes very quickly, same goes for any PR stunt); Dorsey is seen as quite evil for those who know him in my circles, rather like a Taliban in his last congressional hearing, reminding of Bin Laden: https://media-vanityfair-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/media.va...
I reckon beautiful hair can have a lot of impact on perception. Philosophers have long hair. I’ve also read somewhere that we intuitively estimate people’s intelligence to the size of the displayed forehead (Some Slavic haircuts with hair down, have negative prejudices associated), and maybe a part of your point about Zuckerberg’s haircut is doesn’t display a large enough forehead.
Superficial, but masses have collective behaviors.
"When working on her doctoral dissertation in psychology, Robin Abrahams dreamed one night that she was asked to be the editor of a prestigious psychology journal with a singular editorial policy: all articles must mention Steven Pinker's luxuriant, flowing hair. ...She told Marc Abrahams about this dream and the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists was born.
The first member, chosen by acclamation, was psychologist Steven Pinker, whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study. From that lone, Pinkerian seed, there has grown a spreading chestnut, black, blond, and red-haired membership tree. ...
The public loves to see and applaud scientists who have luxuriant flowing hair, a luxuriant head of former hair, or luxuriant flowing facial hair. Therefore, all LFHCfS members who come to Improbable Research events are invited to take a bow, allowing the audience to shower them and their hair with applause."
Maybe check out their blog featuring new members, with their pics and them talking about their life and hair:
> "Dorsey is seen as quite evil for those who know him in my circles, rather like a Taliban in his last congressional hearing"
Do you mean people who know of him, not know him personally? That's the only way that makes sense because if they knew him personally I don't see what his looks in the hearing have anything to do with it.
Personally I'm surprised Dorsey isn't received better. He's clearly the most social mission oriented. Gave away 28% of his Square equity, Twitter is barely profitable, and his SF lifestyle is fairly modest in comparison to these other super-CEO's. He just doesn't strike me as one who cares much about personal wealth. But I guess the distaste comes from his tweeting for leftist causes.
I'm wondering about the perception of the majority of people who are privy to nothing other than the public image of these executives, not those who do have information on how Gates did/does business, or those who know Dorsey in your circles. If you were to see them through the eyes of that majority, what would you see?
Apple spent most of its existence as a well-known but not particularly dominant company in its fields, which goes a long way to explaining why Congress never took an interest in it.
Think back to 2008-9, when Jobs had to step back for health reasons. While Apple had made a solid turn-around and most of the pieces of its future were in place, it was far from the juggernaut it became. The iPhone was coming on like gangbusters, but Blackberry and Nokia were still a thing, Zunes were still a thing...
It was an interesting time. The iPod was a phenomenal success, iPod launch events were media circuses and the cultural as well as commercial success was huge.
Yet iPods themselves were really just music players. A more sophisticated Walkman.
The iPhone combined the computing flexibility and utility of an Apple computer with the convenience and user friendliness of an iPod. But by 2009 they were still just getting started with it.
He died before congress/tech press cared much about the big tech companies. And during a previous wave in the 90s (e.g. CDA era) Apple was just a hardware company.
>Seriously, what is this? GPT-3 output? How did you get from Steve Jobs to spending a very long paragraph on Sarah Lacy/Pando and then pushing her youtube videos?
Here's how: not all interviews are equal. Some are very good because the interviewer dives deep, and the guest answers the questions and allows themselves to be taken there and open up.
I have linked interviews of Steve Jobs and videos that I have considered of value, for example "The lost interview" where he dives in really interesting topics like building product, the ways he looked for venture capital, the differences between sales driven organizations and others, etc. That is someone very interesting sharing his thought process.
This naturally lead me to link to other similar videos where guests who have built very interesting products and organizations share similar insights. This kind of videos is rare, as it takes a guest willing to go there, and an interviewer who helps them get there. The Pando list contains a registry of these videos. Think hunter-gatherer vs. agriculture: going around gathering content in the wild, vs having a bunch of it in one place.
It is a "performance art", like a stand-up comic, an actor, a politician, a presentation, or a congressional hearing. Some people do not want to rehearse as they feel it "empties them". He was known to meticulously practice the delivery of keynotes so he could hit things on time, as if it were a play, if I recall correctly.
You can see that there's a good part of storytelling. If you watch Elon Musk videos, there often is repetition on the three things he focused on in college: the internet, multi-planetary life, and sustainable energy.
In more recent videos, the narrative has shifted to five things he focused on during college, and an addition of genetics and artificial intelligence made it to the list. This is a bit different, like a git history change, which goes unnoticed by most interviewers. However, people think about a lot of things and nobody would be able to list all their ideas or thoughts, let alone someone like him.
One of the best interviewers in the space is Sarah Lacy, in my opinion. She has enough raport with her guests in Pando Monthly videos (there are bout fifty of them, and I invite everyone to watch them), but she doesn't hesitate to invite her guests to better recall the events, timeline, or context... "Yes, but X had invested before and you had replaced so and so on the board at that time, so that must have been before Z". Way better interviews because she has the context, as opposed to someone just looking "just" for an interview. The interviews are really good and dive into decisions founders and VCs took and what had motivated them, etc.
Long videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7983B23CA8F80AFE
All, including short segments from these videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgHogDu1ewdkkWZjfKIuKXQ
One other interview is really good: "The lost interview" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDqQcmVqAm4
Here's an "internal" video for NEXT where he explains their strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
Here's a video of a NEXT brainstorming session in a retreat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kp9cSzbLFE