Category: Psychology

Volatile Investor Goaded WeWork Entrepreneur “to Think Bigger”

(p. B1) Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son were negotiating a possible $20 billion check when Mr. Son pulled up an image of Yoda on his iPad.

It was summer 2018 and Mr. Son’s tech conglomerate, SoftBank Group Corp., had already pumped over $4 billion into WeWork, the shared office space startup Mr. Neumann co-founded eight years earlier. Now Mr. Neumann was trying to get Mr. Son to buy a majority stake in WeWork. It would have been the largest acquisition ever of a startup, part of a bid to turbocharge a three-pronged strategy to dominate global real estate.

Mr. Son, a risk-taking investor who likened his gut-based strategy of “use the force” to that of the bat-eared Star Wars Jedi, was visibly excited that his new disciple was pushing for such an ambitious plan. Mr. Neumann, more than 20 years younger than Mr. Son and roughly a foot taller, charted out (p. B6) gargantuan growth projections in presentation after presentation throughout the summer. Mr. Son, scribbling on his iPad, calculated WeWork would be worth $10 trillion in a decade, more than 10 times the price tag of Apple at the time, the world’s most valuable company.

Still, Mr. Son kept urging Mr. Neumann to think bigger.

WeWork’s salespeople, real estate professionals and buildings numbered in the low hundreds. Mr. Son, though, told Mr. Neumann each category needed to grow—to 10,000. On his iPad, he commemorated the dictate.

“10k, 10k, 10k!” Mr. Son wrote in yellow, above Yoda grasping a green lightsaber. He signed below: “Masa.”

Fourteen months later, WeWork underwent one of the most spectacular corporate meltdowns of the decade.

. . .

Mr. Neumann, a long-haired, energetic entrepreneur, started WeWork after struggling to build a baby-clothes business in New York, where he moved from Israel in 2001.

. . .

Following a dinner with Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs, he gathered staff around to read a complimentary email from the author. He told his employees he wanted Mr. Isaacson to write a biography about him.

. . .

Playing a role in Mr. Neumann’s growing ambitions was Mr. Son, who was frequently needling Mr. Neumann to think bigger.

At a meal in Tokyo with Mr. Son and Cheng Wei, CEO of Chinese ridehail giant Didi Global Inc., Mr. Son told Mr. Neumann that the Didi CEO beat out Uber Technologies Inc. in China not because he was smarter than Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Mr. Cheng was crazier, Mr. Son said.

On the same Tokyo trip, Mr. Son asked Mr. Neumann who would win a fight between a smart guy and a crazy guy, according to people familiar with the conversation. He told Mr. Neumann that being crazy is how you win and that Mr. Neumann was not crazy enough, according to these people.

Roughly a year later at another meeting in Tokyo, Mr. Son clicked on a promotional video of SoftBank-backed Oyo Hotels & Homes, led by the then 24-year-old Ritesh Agarwal. Oyo was growing far faster than WeWork, Mr. Son told Mr. Neumann, ribbing him about lagging behind his SoftBank-backed counterpart, whom Mr. Son equated with a sibling.

“Your little brother is going to beat you,” Mr. Son told Mr. Neumann, according to people familiar with the conversation. “He is being bolder than you.”

Following meetings like this, Mr. Neumann often pushed for bigger ideas, aides said.

For the full commentary, see:

Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. “The We That Didn’t Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 17, 2021): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the same date as the print version, and has the title “The We That Didn’t Work at WeWork.”)

The commentary quoted above is based on the authors’ book:

Brown, Eliot, and Maureen Farrell. The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion. New York: Crown, 2021.

As Chinese Marxists Limit Liberty, the Young Show “Silent Resistance” by “Lying Down”

(p. 4) Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”

“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April [2021], describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”

He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.

. . .

Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.”

. . .

The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China.

. . .

Mr. Luo was born in rural Jiande County, in eastern Zhejiang Province. In 2007, he dropped out of a vocational high school and started working in factories. One job involved working 12-hour shifts at a tire factory. By the end of the day, he had blisters all over his feet, he said.

In 2014, he found a job as a product inspector in a factory but didn’t like it. He quit after two years and took on the occasional acting gig to make ends meet. (In 2018, he played a corpse in a Chinese movie by, of course, lying flat.)

Today, he lives with his family and spends his days reading philosophy and news and working out. He said it was an ideal lifestyle, allowing him to live minimally and “think and express freely.” He encourages his followers, who call him “the Master of Lying Down,” to do the same.

After hearing about Mr. Luo’s tangping post on a Chinese podcast, Zhang Xinmin, 36, was inspired to write a song about it.

. . .

Mr. Zhang uploaded the song to his social media platforms on June 3, and within a day censors had deleted it from three websites. He was furious.

. . .

Lying down is really good
Lying down is wonderful
Lying down is the right thing to do
Lie down so you won’t fall anymore
Lying down means never falling down.

For the full story, see:

Elsie Chen. “For Young People in China, ‘Lying Flat’ Beats Working.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, July 4, 2021): 4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2021, and has the title “These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy.”)

When Does Selling an Entrepreneurial Vision Cross a Legal or Ethical Line?

(p. B4) I’m angry about start-up founders who over-promise, behave badly and sometimes crater their companies and walk away unscathed.

. . .

I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the glare on two start-up founders, Adam Neumann and Trevor Milton.

. . .

A new book details the ways that WeWork mostly just rented cubicles, burned through piles of other people’s money, treated employees like garbage and made Neumann stinking rich as the company nearly collapsed in 2019. WeWork has stuck around in less outlandish form without Neumann.

And last week, federal authorities charged Milton with duping investors in his electric truck start-up Nikola into believing that the company’s battery- and hydrogen-powered vehicle technology was far more capable than it really was. Among the allegations are that Milton ordered the doctoring of a promotional video to make a Nikola prototype truck appear to be fully functional when it was not.

. . .

Disproportionate rewards go to the entrepreneurs and companies that can sell a vision of billions of users and values in the trillions of dollars.

. . .

Those conditions tempt people to skirt the edges of what’s right and legal. But I also wonder if curtailing the excesses would also curb the ambition that we want. Sometimes the zeal to imagine ridiculously grand visions of the future brings us Theranos. And sometimes it brings us Google. Are these two sides of the same coin?

For the full commentary, see:

Shira Ovide. “Why Do Hucksters Come With the Territory?” The New York Times (Monday, August 9, 2021): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated August 4, 2021, and has the title “Innovation Invites Hucksters.”)

The book on WeWork mentioned in the above commentary is:

Brown, Eliot, and Maureen Farrell. The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion. New York: Crown, 2021.

Emerson’s Buoyancy and Resilience in Adversity

(p. C5) Life compelled Emerson to become something of an expert on resilience. As a young man he lost the love of his life, his wife Ellen, to tuberculosis when she was just 19. His oldest son, Waldo—a joyful child who seemed to concentrate in himself what was most uninhibitedly life-loving in his father—died of scarlet fever when he was 5 years old.

. . .

In the essay “Power,” Emerson writes that we carefully watch children to see if they possess “the recuperative force.” Those who instinctively retire to their rooms in sorrow when they’re slighted, miss the prize or lose the game will be at a serious disadvantage in adult life. “But,” Emerson continues, “if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the new moment,—the wounds cicatrize, and the fiber is the tougher for the hurt.”

When Waldo died, Emerson needed that kind of buoyancy and resistance to overcome the greatest sadness of his life.

. . .

Emerson’s resilience was shaped by his conviction that we are mortal and there is no other life than this. Nothing can redeem the time when you did not plunge forward and do what you had to do. The moral quality Emerson commends above all others isn’t love, faith or patriotism but a commitment to work. “But do your work and I shall know you,” he writes in “Self-Reliance.”

Emerson’s commitment to rapid recovery from loss isn’t gentle or humanitarian. But it is classically American in its insistence on affirming the future over the past. For all our faults, Americans are still people who look ahead, scope the territory, move forward. When we fail at something, we give it one more go and maybe get it half right.

For the full essay, see:

Mark Edmundson. “What Emerson Can Teach Us About Resilience.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 19, 2021): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date June 18, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” can be found in:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance and Other Essays. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

“Old Pittsburgh Industrial Fortune” Sustained “Anti-Materialist Conceit of Auroville”

(p. C7) Utopias are not, by definition, found on this side of paradise. Yet that truth hasn’t stopped visionaries and seekers—not to mention knaves and fools—from trying to build communities on lofty principles and quixotic aspirations. One such wonderland is Auroville, a commune in India’s Tamil south whose heady origins can be traced to the incense-and-raga days of the 1960s. Akash Kapur’s “Better to Have Gone” is a haunting and elegant account of this attempt at utopia and of his family’s deep connections to it.

. . .

Mr. Kapur and his wife, Auralice—a name given to her by the Mother, who asserted the right to name all children born to her flock—both grew up in Auroville. Auralice was born in 1972, Mr. Kapur two years later. Auralice’s mother, Diane Maes, was a woman from rural Flanders who’d arrived at Auroville as an 18-year-old. Headstrong and flirtatious, she soon separated from the biological father of her daughter and took up with another Auroville man named John Walker, in many ways the book’s most compelling (and infuriating) character.

. . .

Unlike the bucolic Maes, Walker was born into privilege, his father the heir to an old Pittsburgh industrial fortune.

. . .

It’s easy to be irritated, even incensed at times, by Walker’s blithe aura of entitlement. The hardship of the early days at Auroville—when there was no running water or electricity—is mitigated in Walker’s case by his renting an air-conditioned room at a comfortable hotel in nearby Pondicherry. Whenever funds ran low, he wrote to his father for more.

Much of this money helped sustain the anti-materialist conceit of Auroville. The community depended on the bounty of rich residents like Walker, who placed their trust funds at the disposal of the Mother. Walker’s money paid for the drilling of wells, the building of roads and houses, the salaries of laborers, even Auroville’s bakery. He did not, of course, begrudge this parasitic relationship with utopia. Why would he? All he had to do was holler for dad.

For the full review, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “Dawn of a New Humanity.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 24, 2021): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 23, 2021, and has the title “‘Better to Have Gone’ Review: Dawn of a New Humanity.”)

The book under review is:

Kapur, Akash. Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville. New York: Scribner, 2021.

Men Are More Likely to Risk Their Lives for Others

(p. A15) “T” does what all superb popular science must do: It entertains as it educates.

. . .

Ultimately, “T” is a vigorous defense of the scientific method itself. Ms. Hooven summarizes: “Multiple independent sources of evidence can combine to strongly support a hypothesis, whether it’s about the cause of a rattle in your car, why your soufflé has collapsed, or why someone blocked you on Twitter. It’s just like that in science.”

. . .

. . . she’s emphatic that high T levels do not lead inexorably to rape and murder; mountains of data disprove this fallacy. She also gives testosterone its due: Men are far more likely “to put their lives on the line for others, and are massively overrepresented in the most dangerous occupations.” She lauds the men who protected her while she conducted fieldwork in the jungles; heroism, for her, thrives at the molecular level.

For the full review, see:

Hamilton Cain. “The Hormone of the Hour.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, July 13, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 12, 2021, and has the title “‘T’ Review: Hormone of the Hour.”)

The book under review is:

Hooven, Carole. T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2021.

Dreams May Be a Byproduct of Brain Repair, Without Deep Meaning

(p. 20) Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and pioneering sleep researcher who disputed Freud’s view that dreams held hidden psychological meaning, died on July 7 [2021] at his home in East Burke, Vt.

. . .

“He showed that sleep isn’t a nothing state,” Ralph Lydic, who conducted research with Dr. Hobson in the 1980s and is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tennessee, said in a phone interview.

“He demonstrated that the brain is as active during R.E.M. sleep as it is during wakefulness,” he added, referring to sleep characterized by rapid eye movement. “We know as much about sleep as we do in part because of him.”

One of his most influential contributions to dream research came in 1977, when Dr. Hobson and a colleague, Robert McCarley, produced a cellular and mathematical model that they believed showed how dreams occur. Dreams, they said, are not mysterious codes sent by the subconscious but rather the brain’s attempt to attribute meaning to random firings of neurons in the brain.

This view, that dreams are the byproduct of chemical reactions, was a departure from psychological orthodoxy and heresy to Freudians, and it remains in dispute.

But to Dr. Hobson, the content of dreams was not as important as the electrical activity of the brain during the dream state.

. . .

“I’m skeptical about any absolute set of rules, scientific rules, moral rules, behavioral rules,” he said in a 2011 interview with The Boston Globe.

For the full obituary, see:

Katharine Q. Seelye. “J. Allan Hobson, 88, Who Took Sleep Seriously, Dies.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, August 1, 2021): 20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 28, 2021, and has the title “Dr. J. Allan Hobson, Who Studied the Dreaming Brain, Dies at 88.”)

AI Algorithms Use Massive Data to Do “Narrow Tasks”

(p. B2) A funny thing happens among engineers and researchers who build artificial intelligence once they attain a deep level of expertise in their field. Some of them—especially those who understand what actual, biological intelligences are capable of—conclude that there’s nothing “intelligent” about AI at all.

. . .

. . . the muddle that the term AI creates fuels a tech-industry drive to claim that every system involving the least bit of machine learning qualifies as AI, and is therefore potentially revolutionary. Calling these piles of complicated math with narrow and limited utility “intelligent” also contributes to wild claims that our “AI” will soon reach human-level intelligence. These claims can spur big rounds of investment and mislead the public and policy makers who must decide how to prepare national economies for new innovations.

. . .

The tendency for CEOs and researchers alike to say that their system “understands” a given input—whether it’s gigabytes of text, images or audio—or that it can “think” about those inputs, or that it has any intention at all, are examples of what Drew McDermott, a computer scientist at Yale, once called “wishful mnemonics.” That he coined this phrase in 1976 makes it no less applicable to the present day.

“I think AI is somewhat of a misnomer,” says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research on AI’s economic impacts requires a precise definition of the term. What we now call AI doesn’t fulfill the early dreams of the field’s founders—either to create a system that can reason as a person does, or to create tools that can augment our abilities. “Instead, it uses massive amounts of data to turn very, very narrow tasks into prediction problems,” he says.

When AI researchers say that their algorithms are good at “narrow” tasks, what they mean is that, with enough data, it’s possible to “train” their algorithms to, say, identify a cat. But unlike a human toddler, these algorithms tend not to be very adaptable. For example, if they haven’t seen cats in unusual circumstances—say, swimming—they might not be able to identify them in that context. And training an algorithm to identify cats generally doesn’t also increase its ability to identify any other kind of animal or object. Identifying dogs means more or less starting from scratch.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “AI’s Big Chill.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 31, 2021): B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 30, 2021, and has the title “Artificial Intelligence’s Big Chill.” When you click on the title in the search list internal to the WSJ, you get a different title on the page of the article itself: “Why Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Intelligent.”)

Scientist Phillippy Co-Led DNA Completion Because Gaps “Were Just Really Bugging Me”

People with different ways of thinking are better at doing different kinds of work. For instance those who are obsessive/compulsive or have some types of Asperger’s, may be better at careful detailed work that requires perfectionism. (I do not know anything about Phillippy beyond the article quoted below, so I am in no way suggesting that he is an examplar of either of these ways of thinking.)

(p. A10) Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.

. . .

In 2019, two scientists — Adam Phillippy, a computational biologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Karen Miga, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz — founded the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium to complete the genome.

Dr. Phillippy admitted that part of his motivation for such an audacious project was that the missing gaps annoyed him. “They were just really bugging me,” he said. “You take a beautiful landscape puzzle, pull out a hundred pieces, and look at it — that’s very bothersome to a perfectionist.”

Dr. Phillippy and Dr. Miga put out a call for scientists to join them to finish the puzzle. They ended up with 99 scientists working directly on sequencing the human genome, and dozens more pitching in to make sense of the data. The researchers worked remotely through the pandemic, coordinating their efforts over Slack, a messaging app.

. . .

Dr. Altemose plans on using the complete genome to explore a particularly mysterious region in each chromosome known as the centromere. Instead of storing genes, centromeres anchor proteins that move chromosomes around a cell as it divides. The centromere region contains thousands of repeated segments of DNA.

In their first look, Dr. Altemose and his colleagues were struck by how different centromere regions can be from one person to another. That observation suggests that centromeres have been evolving rapidly, as mutations insert new pieces of repeating DNA into the regions or cut other pieces out.

While some of this repeating DNA may play a role in pulling chromosomes apart, the researchers have also found new segments — some of them millions of bases long — that don’t appear to be involved. “We don’t know what they’re doing,” Dr. Altemose said.

But now that the empty zones of the genome are filled in, Dr. Altemose and his colleagues can study them up close. “I’m really excited moving forward to see all the things we can discover,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Carl Zimmer. “Scientists Have Finally Filled in All the Gaps in the Human Genome.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 24, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 26, 2021, and has the title “Scientists Finish the Human Genome at Last.”)

Entrepreneurs Hold “Business Showers” for Their Startups

(p. B1) Sid Singh, 36, was joking recently with a friend that everyone he knew seemed to be having their third baby while he was bringing something entirely different into the world. He had just quit his consulting job to build a financial coaching company. It dawned on him that he could have a baby shower for his new endeavor.

. . .

Across the United States, especially in New York City, entrepreneurs are appropriating the baby shower, an event previously reserved for expectant parents, usually mothers. The idea is that if building a business is just as compre-(p. B5)hensive (and expensive!) as having a baby, why not build in the same kind of communal support?

. . .

“I remember when I first started telling people I was pregnant, I had never been congratulated like this for anything in my life,” she said. “I know people were coming from a place of love and excitement, but for me, launching the business was that for me.”

. . .

Mr. Singh received some confused responses. “Some people thought I was hosting a baby shower for someone,” he said. “Others thought I was having a baby with someone.”

He laughed it off, but he did explain to his friends why he was doing this. “People need to understand I am basically committing my entire life to this,” he said. “I am taking the biggest risk I can.”

For the full story, see:

Alyson Krueger. “Congratulations! It’s a Start-Up.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 24, 2021): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 19, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)