Elon Musk and The End of Reality 

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true then all is spectacle. 

Jonathan Taplin starts The End of Reality with this quote from Timothy Synder, arguing that today’s Technocrats have abandoned all facts. Yet, I cannot help but think that Jonathan Taplin has abandoned the facts in his one-sided treatment of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreeson. He claims that these four individuals have intentionally created this fantasy future of the metaverse, mars, crypto, and transhumanism, responsible for the radical inequality and American society on the precipice of another civil war.  

I think these Big 4 are just riding the wave. They have made incredible fortunes, and the merits of some of their projects can be debated, but they have also built incredible things that have created plenty of good despite some bad.  

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. 

Guy DeBord, quoted above, recognized this phenomenon in 1967. And Jean Baudrillard, back in 1950 writing Pataphysics talked about the end of history, quoting Elias Canetti to start his short essay.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we  supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would 'be forced to abide in our present destruction.  

Kurt Andersen in Fantasyland detailed that hucksters and conmen have been part of America since its beginning 500 years ago. Bruno Macaes in History has Begun describes this fantasy as a feature that makes America great, not a bug. 

The point is that the end of reality is not new, nor did Musk, Zucks, Thiel, and Andreeson start it. 

But it has accelerated, which makes The End of Reality an interesting premise to explore as everyone seems to talking about what is real these days, from what is now a mature age of fake news and post-truth journalism to a breakdown of legacy media to generative AI. However, the book quickly moves from ideas to malice towards the individual men behind those ideas as he makes the case that they are singularly responsible for the bad. This premise that Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreeson, and Thiel are to blame is not well argued, falling into a Luddite trope of tech simply being bad, bad, bad. In some ways, it represents the reality we live in regarding these figures; to many without nuance, they represent an evil empire.  

Much of the book focuses on Elon Musk, who Taplin rightfully concedes is the seminal figure of our age, and such that he just received an anointing by Walter Isaacson to be in the company of Da Vinci, Einstein, and Steve Jobs. I will use the Issacson biography as a contrast to the case Taplin is making. His assessment is far from 100% laudatory, highlighting Musk’s hard driving of employees, and placing emphasis on bizarre and unnecessary behavior post Twitter acquisition, but even so it was not harsh enough according to recent articles in the Verge and the New Yorker.    

Pro-Tech or anti-Tech, pro-Elon or anti-Elon, we should change the constitution and make him president or he is the roo of evil, Elon exists in this duality. When I even say Elon’s name, I notice some people seem to recoil; thus, this rather flawed book is still valuable as a starting point for examining why that is. DHH in a recent review of the Isaacson book emphasizes how great a business book this biography is and he is right, you can really see the Elon Musk production function over the course of 600+ pages. 

I struggle to see the world and human beings who are inherently complex in such stark good and evil terms as Taplin does. Elon wants to go to Mars, and the focus is less on the merits of such a project, instead putting forth this view that Elon knows we can’t make it there and is intentionally lying about that fact to simply make money from the project that will be funded by taxpayer support. 

I use the term techno-determinism to describe the path the Technocrats have dictated for our country because they have sold, and we have bought into, the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future, and we tend to ignore any facts that seem to contradict this story. The future they are now selling us-crypto fortunes, living to two hundred, spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars-is a lie, just as historian Timothy Snyder has shown that Donald Trump "was lying not so much to deny the truth as to invite people into an alternative reality." But when we surrender to the lies of a Trump or a Musk, we yield power to those with the fortunes and magnetism to create spectacle in the place of truth.

Reading Walter Issacson’s biography, it seems rather clear that Elon believes in these projects both that he can accomplish them and that they benefit society. There is a drive for things that do not exist, but this is in the context of a broader path of overall progress. Repeatedly Isaacson describes situations with Elon putting his companies and work over his health and relationships, putting back profits into new businesses, taking his compensation directly tied to the success of his company, all to accomplish this big goals. Elon did not take TARP money like Ford and GM did. In a chapter titled On the Brink, Elon borrows from friends and family to keep Tesla and Space X going. He nearly breaks down from the pace and the stress of it all. This does not add up that he is doing it for the money, or that Isaacson who spent 2 years embedded with Musk was completely deceived.  

They piled into a Tesla with custom wheels, and then a large elevator dropped them down forty feet into the tunnel. "Let's go as fast as we can!" he said to Kuhn, who was driving. Grimes protested a bit, asking that they take it easy. Musk reverted to engineer mode, explaining why "the probability of longitudinal impact is extremely low." And so Kuhn gunned it. "This is crazy," Musk exulted. "This is going to change everything."

It didn't change everything. In fact, it became an example of a Musk idea that was overhyped. The Boring Company completed a 1.7-mile tunnel in Las Vegas in 2021 that transported riders in Teslas from the airport and through the convention center, and it began negotiations for projects in other cities. But by 2023, none of them had gotten underway.

Isaacson acknowledges this idea was overhyped, but it is placed in the bigger context of other success. Musk thinks to dream big, and you will not accomplish everything, but you will accomplish some things. Taplin leans on highlighting only the failures to prove his case.  

There is a chapter in The End of Reality about the Marvel Universe and the role fantasy plays more broadly in society. Taplin himself is feeding into that narrative of good vs evil. Ethan Strauss recently addressed this in the Dave Portnoy vs Washington Post reporting around his pizza festival; everyone seemed to be having a good time enjoying an afternoon of pizza; just because you think Portnoy is a jerk should not be a reason to try to cancel this event.  He clearly offends some with this humor, but he saved a lot of small businesses during the pandemic. Or the reporting around Trever Bauer, also written about by Stauss, who was suspended 193 days from baseball for now seemingly made-up accusations. No one is suggesting Bauer is a great guy, but the recent reporting barely mentions this massive mistake that was made.  Elon is much the same, people can’t seem to separate disliking the person and his accomplishments.

Elon is not perfect, and Isaacson’s biography seeks to answer like he did with Steve Jobs the question of, was the bad (i.e. driving employees to work all night, or immediately firing them when aggressive goals were not met) necessary to accomplish the good (building awesome electric vehicles and rockets, Starlink so that you can have internet anywhere), but not whether there was any good at all as Taplin presumes without any debate. 

Just look at the difference in viewpoints of Jonathan Taplin:

For years there has been a myth that the Big Tech leaders are progressive heroes, but I will show that the Technocrats are actually part a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within Big Tech, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their monopolies unchallenged and their multibillion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. 

And Walter Isaacsan. 

Why?

It's useful to pause for a moment and note how wild it was for a thirty-year-old entrepreneur who had been ousted from two tech startups to decide to build rockets that could go to Mars. What drove him, other than an aversion to vacations and a childlike love of rockets, sci-fi, and A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? To his bemused friends at the time, and consistently in conversations over the ensuing years, he gave three reasons.

He found it surprising and frightening that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide. America had gone to the moon. But then came the grounding of the Shuttle missions and an end to progress. "Do we want to tell our children that going to the moon is the best we did, and then we gave up?" he asks. Ancient Egyptians learned how to build the pyramids, but then that knowledge was lost. The same happened to Rome, which built aqueducts and other wonders that were lost in the Dark Ages. Was that happening to America? "People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves," he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. "It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better."

Another motivation was that colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet. It may someday be destroyed by an asteroid or climate change or nuclear war. He had become fascinated by Fermi's Paradox, named after the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi, who in a discussion of alien life in the universe said, "But where is everyone?" Mathematically it seemed logical there were other civilizations, but the lack of any evidence raised the uncomfortable possibility that the Earth's human species might be the only example of consciousness. "We've got this delicate candle of consciousness flickering here, and it may be the only instance of consciousness, so it's essential we preserve it," Musk says. "If we are able to go to other planets, the probable lifespan of human conscious- ness is going to be far greater than if we are stuck on one planet that could get hit by an asteroid or destroy its civilization."

His third motivation was more inspirational. It came from his heritage in a family of adventurers and his decision as a teenager to move to a country that had bred into its essence the spirit of pioneers. "The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of ex- ploration," he "This is a land of adventurers." That spirit needed says. to be rekindled in America, he felt, and the best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonize Mars. "To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States. But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world." Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. "That's what can get us up in the morning."

Faring to other planets would be, Musk believed, one of the significant advances in the story of humanity. "There are only a handful of really big milestones: single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness," he says. "On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multiplanetary." There was something exhilarating, and also a bit unnerving, about Musk's ability to see his endeavors as having epoch-making significance. As Max Levchin drily puts it, "One of Elon's greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven."

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

Kennedy used to be admired (I recently heard it being suggested that he was a right-wing figure now) and doing hard things for the sake of them used to be admired. Musk, Thiel, and Andreeson are the few carrying this banner of the future now. Taplin argues it is a false future and a waste, with no other purpose than to further entrench the wealth of these four.  The argument is that this is all a lie, but then a better case has to be made that Elon Musk is just making up his wanting to go to Mars when his life story points to reinvesting his profits into new ventures and genuinely feeling this way about the future. 

For all the Jill Lepore and Ronan Farrow naysayers, many are inspired by Musk, in this age when there are so few heroes. 

From Packy McCormick’s Not Boring - We have the opportunity to live in an Age of Miracles. Cheap energy. Abundant intelligence. Supersonic transportation. Distributed opportunity. Longer, healthier lives for billions.

Or this tweet: 

Tesla: $1+ Trillion valuation

SpaceX: $100+ Billion valuation

Neuralink: $1 Billion valuation

Boring Company: $5.6 Billion valuation

Elon is truly trying to do good for the humanity. Elon loves humanity. @elonmusk

The vision is real. Like David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity, knowledge is making things better. Or Ben’s Thompson’s barbell phrasing of technology, even if you can’t afford to go to the Sphere now, downstream you will be able to get the same effect in VR. It raises the floor for everyone. It would be nice if everyone could just go to the Sphere, but building in the real world is expensive. Taplin argues that only the wealthy can afford Tesla’s but Elon has been consistently lowering the cost. Even if these four are also motivated by wealth and power, I cannot believe that they are lying about wanting to create a better future. End of Reality’s view of Elon seems laughable until you realize that this is exactly how the left and many see him as someone, if we could just tax his wealth we would be able to solve all these problems like homelessness or climate change. It is that conclusion that does not seem based in reality not real to me.  

There was too much detail for that Issacson packed in about the Elon Musk production function, even if you are not a fan of him. A- for Elon, highly recommended. C- for The End of Reality, but still worth a read.

How to read and why

Justin Murphy recently has been talking about a return to reading the great books, something I have myself been feeling deep in my soul the last couple of years but wasn't able to articulate. 

The case goes something like this, reading new non-fiction is often just rearranging older books, a lot of Twitter is aphorisms of ideas that originated with the great books, so why not just read the great books and put together your own insights because really that is what everything else is doing. 

There is so much easy content out there now, less and less people are reading books that take time, that are hard, so the alpha is even greater. You in fact have a duty to keep the great books alive and pass on the knowledge. This follows Tyler Cowen and Henry Oliver saying similar things about reading the canon. Ergo, the rule of 3 says to go in this direction.  

Via Farnam Street - 

This excerpt from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami perfectly encapsulates a core truth about reading.
And so we became friends. This happened in October.
The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. “That’s the only kind of book I can trust,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”
“What kind of authors do you like?” I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior. “Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,” he answered without hesitation.
“Not exactly fashionable.”
“That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”
This took me off guard. “How can you say that?”
“’ Cause it’s true. I know. I can see it. It’s like we have marks on our foreheads. …”
Which brings us to Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, a perfect starting point or refresher on the joy of reading the canon. 

Murphy summarizes Bloom 4 key points as these:

Rule #1: Clear your mind of can't - form your own interpretation of the text and don’t be guided by other people cliches

Rule #2: Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neigh­borhood by what or how you read - reading is selfish, submit to the masters 

Rule #3: A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light - but in the end you and everyone else will be better for it - if you try to force this knowledge down your neighbors throats it is probably not going to work, but if you just read the books and become a better person in the end the influence will find them  

Rule #4: One must be an inventor to read well - don’t completely make up something but form your own interpretations 

As I read TC’s rules of advice for reading the canon, I started to think about my own rules for reading. Some overlap and some are different, here are a few, have to have a think on whether there is more. 

Don’t be afraid to do audio, or audio and the physical book at the same time. Audio doesn’t let you stop but books with a lot of dialogue in which it is confusing who is speaking often have two different voices which can be helpful. James Joyce’s Ulysses is an audio book for which I found this to be helpful. 

• The great books are usually hard, and they are hard even for smart people. Don’t be afraid to read multiple times, and don’t be embarrassed to find them difficult. TC recommends auto rereading the first 50 pages. 

• TC says read in clusters, this makes a lot of sense but many think just to go to one book on a topic. For fiction, say you are reading War and Peace, reading a bunch of background Non-Fiction will be helpful. 

• Recommendations will come from everywhere but be wary of reviews and the agendas behind them. I like the rule of two or three. The universe will bring books to you, if you see a title mentioned or recommended multiple times by different people in a short window the universe is trying to tell you something.  

• Read everyday and keep the momentum going. Push through the hard parks and reread as many times as necessary. 

• Read more than one book at once to keep the momentum going. 50 pages a day by any means necessary. 

• Ulysses was hard but I have a grasp on it now. Recently, The Recognitions was so hard and completely knocked me out.  Jonathan Franzen says the hardest he has ever read and he is way smarter than me.  I need to give it another go. Don’t give up! 

CHAOS Kings

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions In The New Age Of Crisis by Scott Patterson covers a lot of the same ground as the The Big Short by Michael Lewis and Nassim Nicholas Taleb books do about asymmetrical hedges against catastrophes that bleed small premiums day after day when the market is going up but will pay off huge when the market has a big drop.  

Chaos Kings adds the more recent events like the flash crash and the covid-19 pandemic to the timeline with an added focus on Mark Spitznagel, author of the Dao of Captial: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World (a Riva-Tez recommendation) and hedge fund partner of Taleb, and with Bill Ackman hedge fund manager of Pershing Square, who would make 2.6 Billion dollars as the stock market crashed 30% in the early days of the pandemic only to then double down plowing back that money into the stocks that were down. 

Ackman understood exponential spread and the non-linear math of compounding and would take to Twitter to implore President Trump to shut down the county for 30 days in the early days of 2020. Mark Spitznagle, the founder of Universa Investments, which was built for these moments of chaos, and built on the premise that a single large downturn matters far more than a long series of small gains, understanding that 1000 cut in half to 500 requires a 100% increase to get back to even, would also make 3 Billion dollars in a short amount of time. 

In many respects, we still live in a linear world, distance time, and velocity, and our brains hardwired for linear find the exponential hard to understand, but technology and globalization have caused acceleration and the world to increasingly be exponential. Taleb predicted back in 2010 in the Economist that the world would face “severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalization. He would again write about it in Antifragile in 2012 and in a 2014 paper called The Precautionary Principle, would write “the tightly connected global system implies a single deviation will eventually dominate the sum of their effects. Examples include pandemics, invasive species, and financial crises.” The precautionary principle interestingly supports skepticism of both GMOs and untested vaccines.

The last couple of chapters veer a little bit into the climate change debate that doesn't seem to quite fit with the finance component of the rest of the book but overall I enjoyed this journey through the last twenty years of black swans and tail risk. We are a zero-risk society but also a sick society. We need risk to solve these problems.  The world is getting weirder and we can expect more variance in finance and the events of the world at large. Chaos Kings helped me to understand what we have seen so far as well of what we can expect to see in the future. We cannot see the future but at least of the type of scenarios and the chaos they will bring.  

Other topics mentioned - Thomas Friedman - Thank You for Being Late, Peter Turchin - Ages of Discord, The Turbulent Twenties, Adam Tooze - the polycrisis, Barbell investing strategies, Complexity theory, Austrian economics, Statistics vs dynamic models, Brian Eno, Yaneer Bar-Yam - Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World, Blockchain and Insurance. 

Our Assessment: A quick read and solid. B. 

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family BY Thomas mann

The story of a German mercantile family in the 1800s and its slow decline over the course of four generations. The story starts in 1835 with a dinner party of friends and relatives in the new home in Lübeck of the patriarch of the family Johann Jr. and his wife Antoinette. This dinner will be peak Buddenbrooks. The son Johann III ("Jean") and his wife Elizabeth have three school-age children, sons Thomas and Christian, and daughter Antonie ("Tony"), later a fourth child Klara, who eventually will die early. The novel primarily focuses on Thomas, Christian, and Tony.

Tony (Shiv Roy), stubborn, married and divorced twice. The first marriage she did not want to do but did so for her father, but it turned out the husband married her for Johann Buddenbrook to bail him out of his business debts when her husband went bankrupt along with the fact that he did not love her to begin with so the father to make up for it told her to come home with her child Erika. The second marriage forced her to move to southern Germany (Munich) a working-class city where she did not fit in, she walked in on her husband forcing himself on one of the servants and then calls her a slut, and despite her brother's request to return to him he grants her a divorce.

Christian (Roman Roy) is a playboy, spending all his time at clubs and partying, cavorting with disreputable women, and always with an assortment of vague aches. At first, he had a job for the family business but it was more of a no-show job, he eventually started his own smaller firm with only slightly more success.

Thomas (Kendall Roy) the eldest is industrious and seems destined to take over the firm and when his father Johann dies, he does so, he works extremely hard which keeps the struggling business afloat but he makes bad business deals, builds an ostentatious house that immediately becomes a drain of money, while the old house falls into disrepair. He becomes a father but his son is more interested in the theater than the business and he is elected senator. But he only reluctantly is able to throw a party for the business's centennial as there does not seem to be much to celebrate. Eventually, all the work takes its toll and he dies early at 51, his will directs the business to be liquidated, the assets are sold at distressed prices. The novel ends with a view in the life of his son, but soon afterward he dies too at 15 from typhoid fever. Tony and Christian are still alive at the novel's end but the once-great family seems to be at an end.

I started to think about Succession while reading Buddenbrooks and then the New Yorker had an interview with writer Jesse Armstrong ahead of season 3 he mentioned that the Buddenbrooks family was more of an influence than say the Murdoch family that everyone immediately thinks of and even if it is just an amalgamation of some of the big media families. It is different of course, Succession has "more money and less grain," but the story about power and family relations are similar.

Our Assessment: This is deservedly a classic, A.

Lost in thought by zena hitz

Zena Hitz examines what it means to live an intellectual life. What does it mean to pursue learning for its own sake? In a time when so much is done for its utility, she makes the case that the examined life is a way back to community and connection with others. Activities are not worthwhile unless they culminate in something satisfying. These are the fundamental questions that Plato and Aristotle sought answers to. In the last year, many have been stuck in a Matrix-like pod where we work and entertain ourselves but can't do very much outside of that so the question of what is it all for is as relevant as ever. It's hard to figure out but through reading and learning, there is a path forward.

 Zena's journey starts out as an academic but 9/11 causes a mid-life crisis.

My frustration with my work, with the focus of my life, thus expanded both in breadth and depth. When I looked to the outside world, I saw tremendous suffering and disorder to which I could make no discernible difference. Nearer by, the shallowness of my academic life became gradually more obvious. Either I sought approval or status by performing well at the expense of others, or in small groups my fellow academics and I explained to one another our own superiority-our difference from the dumb, the wrong, the bad, and the ugly. I remember going to one academic dinner party among many and suddenly feeling queasy as we suggested that the central values in our lives were fine wines and trips to Europe.

She briefly quits academia, decides to become religious, and then joins a religious community before coming back to education focused on classical political philosophy. Zena shows how different people have wrestled with these questions using examples from fiction, film, history, philosophy, and biography, from the Ancient Greeks up to Elena Ferrante and Dorothy Day.  This short book was practical in discussing the current intellectual landscape as Zena weaves in her own story. I really enjoyed this one and it gave me some hope.

 Our Assessment: A

The Sovereign individual: mastering the tranistion to the information age by james dale davidson and lord william rees-mogg

Societies have had different stages, first, there were hunting-and-gathering societies, then agricultural societies, industrial societies, and now something new: information societies. This new information age is an age of upward mobility, if you are can educate, motivate yourself, and think clearly you can get rich. Those who cannot do these things will be left behind and become resentful while fighting perhaps violently to hold onto the old way. A cyber economy will emerge and those at the top will no longer need the nation-state which will then cause individuals to flee nations with high taxes. De-facto city-states will form throughout the world. This will be the age of the Sovereign Individual. The target for all this happening in the book is the year 2000, but I think in 2020 many of the ideas talked about are really starting to come to be. Blockchain is providing the opportunity for a cyber-economy. Everyone right now is talking about NFT's. The company is Elon Musk not Tesla. People are fans of Lebron James, the player, not the Lakers or the Heat of the Cavs. I saw some clips of a Soul Cycle instructor who has rebranded with her first name, Jaime Cycle. You see it happening all around and this book predicted much of it.

Our Assessment: B+, The idea is an A+, but a few chapters seemed outdated.

 2021

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Finally, read this Russian classic.

Our Assessment: C+

1Q84 by Haruki murakami

1Q84 takes place in Japan in an alternate version of the year 1984. In classic Murakami fashion it is multi-dimensional - part love story, part mystery and part fantasy novel. The story is revealed with a consistent pace, that makes you turnover pages quickly as you work through the 1000+ of them. It doesn't feel like a novel that is translated or takes place in another country, there are dozens of American cultural references.

Tengo is a writer/math tutor enlisted by his publisher to rewrite a debut novel of young Fuka-Eri. Fuka-Eri has escaped from a religious cult and dictates what is actually her story of escape. Aoname is a young woman, who assassinates men who have done bad things outside of the purview of the law. Tengo and Aoname fell in love with each other when they were 10 years but haven't seen each other in 20 years. When Aoname climbs down an emergency staircase this alternate version of 1984 becomes reality, one with two moons and which starts a path of a collision between Tengo and Aoname. In 1Q84 there is a lot of magical realism, an immaculate conception, little people that climb out of strange places, a religous cult leader who can read thoughts. Eventually, they escape united out of 1Q84 and back into 1984. Will we escape 2Q20 back into 2020?

Our Assessment: A-

The sun also rises by ernest hemingway

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Our Assessment: A-, rereading of a classic

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson

Eric Jorgenson compiles Naval Ravikant's best tweets and adds context. The foundation of this short book is that making money is a skill you can learn. This is outlined in the tweetstorm by Naval, How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) It starts with specifically seeking wealth instead of money or status. You will not get rich renting out your time, you must own something. If you can provide something at scale that the world wants you will become rich. The internet has massively broadened opportunities to do this. If you learn to sell and build you will be unstoppable. If you are doing something that interests you it will feel like play instead of work. To build a fortune requires leverage - this comes from capital, people, and products. Learn to build by coding, writing, telling stories. Produce and don't just consume. Read as much as possible. Become the best in the world at something using this framework. In two words, productize yourself.

Our Assessment: B

HAMNET BY MAGGIE O’FARRELL

I am dead:
Thou livest; .
... draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story
Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

A historical novel origin story of William Shakespeare and his play Hamlet, this is the fourth plague novel I have read in 2020 (The Plague by Albert Camus, Severance by Lin Ma, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel) and I think my favorite. It was refreshing to read an origin story these days not of the comic book variety. The novel sets the stage: "In the 1580s, a couple living on Henley Street, Stratford, had three children: Susanna, then Hamnet and Judith, who were twins. The boy, Hamnet, died in 1956, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet." While the names Hamnet and Hamlet the records show in this time and place were interchangeable, and then tragedy and wonder ensues.

Our Assessment: B+, The New York Times has this as one of their 10 best books of 2020, Tyler Cowen also loved it. I thought it was great too.

Putnam seeks to answer the questions of why we are so polarized and why have been gone from a "We" society to an "I" society. There are many similarities now to the Gilded Age at the beginning of the century, but we moved forward from that in the middle of the century. Inequality decreased, we achieved projects that required thousands of people working together, organizations thrived and there was trust in institutions. But in the last several decades we have regressed in many of these areas. The upswing is a longer lens, taking a 125-year data-based view, on many of the ideas put forth in Bowling Alone. In areas like economic equality, comity and compromise in politics, cohesion in social life, and altruism in cultural values, Putnam shows the trend in an inverted U over this span. That data shows that this was more than just coming together around World War II. Acknowledging that society was far from perfect the data shows America "had been transformed into a more egalitarian, cooperative, cohesive, and altruistic nation." In 1961, Kennedy described this spirit, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." As the decade wore on this ended up being a peak moment of community and not the start of a new era. In the last four years the divisions and the "I" spirit have become more apparent than ever and it seems clear that we need to somehow find a way back to a "We" society.

Our Assessment: C+, Stick with Bowling Along, I didn’t see a lot of new ground covered in this one despite the longer time horizon

Notes:
David Brooks

ILIUM, NEW YORK, is divided into three parts. In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines, and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.

In some ways, Paul Proteus, engineering manager, is similar to Bob Slocum in Something Happened, they both have it all yet aren't satisfied. They are tied together like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are tied together in that both characters do not have "enough". In Ilium, NY engineers are the only important people everyone else is provided and can do what they want but have no purpose.

"In order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them—the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect."

When Paul is forced to turn two of his friends in to mainten his place in the order he decides to start living instead. Downtown Josh Brown mentioned this one on the Compound podcast talking about the perils of Universal Basic Income and then Mike mentioned it while camping.

Our Assessment: B-, An important idea.

Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
-Kurt Vonnegut

You go by the rule of three or sometimes two depending upon who the people are doing the recommending or mentioning. If three people in a short period of time recommend or even just mention a book, then you read it. In the case of Something Happened, I had seen this Vonnegut poem a few times, then it was cited 5 separate times in Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissim.

And the third mention was part of a bigger conversation between Walter Kirn and Bret Easton Ellis on the B.E.E. podcast about the state of the novel. People don't write important novels anymore, and novels aren't read and talked about like they used to be. Something Happened is Joseph Heller's second novel, published 13 years after Catch 22 in 1974 and they are talking about how big a deal this book was as a follow up to Catch 22, Bret's parents had a copy. People just read a book like this, like I feel about the Undoing on HBO, just because it is on TV. The bigger context is the book is nearly 600 pages and barely anything happens until the end at which point something shocking does happen.

The book requires you to fight through 600 pages to get there and at first found myself losing interest, a struggle to read more than ten pages at a time. Eventually, I got into a grove or maybe was just able to read faster because of the repetitive nature. But like the discussion I had listened to I found it hard to imagine today people reading this book. Bob Slocum works for an insurance company and is living the American Dream in a cushy high paying middle management job with a wife and three kids in suburban Connecticut, and all the mistresses he wants. It is written in a stream of consciousness format with several long chapters that focus on Bob's relationship with his wife, then son, then daughter, but not much plot to connect any of the anecdotes together, and then you start to question whether it is all in Bob's imagination- not so unlike American Psycho. Ellis never mentions this connection but now that I think of it, it is right there.

Our Assessment: B

our assessment: a

Matthew McConaughey kept a diary for 36 years and put together a short volume with some great tales (trips to the Amazon and Europe), life highlights and words of wisdom told in a relatable manner. McConaughey from modest beginnings stumbled a little bit into acting in a role in Dazed in Confused that was only a few yet memorable lines, but had a lot of screen time. He seems to have avoided being changed by Hollywood. I rewatched Dazed and Confused the other day and it is a perfect movie, seamlessly flowing from one scene to the next. I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with McConaughey, Rogan pointed out that he has barroom whiskey wisdom. Greenlights has these bits of wisdom throughout like be "less impressed and more involved." Hearing him talk about them during the interview they seem thought out and lived and not just platitudes tossed out there. When he decided he wanted to get more serious roles instead of doing more romantic comedies he had the discipline to turn down the offers that keep on getting incrementally larger, going through a period without work but then coming out on the other side and winning the best actor Oscar for Dallas Buyer's Club while now having the choice of the roles he wanted. I remember being in Miami and watching his best actor's speech in a hotel room and being moved. At the end of the podcast, as he and Rogan talk about what is next and with all the Californians moving to Texas hoping to keep Texas, Texas. He hints at a plan, and with recent rumors of running for Governer I'd be alright with that.

Notes:
Joe Rogan

our assessment: B-

Modern Monetary Theory or MMT says that because we print our own currency we can spend as much as possible. The only limit is keeping inflation low. This is a huge mental leap forward to make because we are always being told about how big the federal deficit is and the burden we are placing on future generations, think that giant deficit clock in Times Square. We are also always being told the U.S. federal budget works no differently than a household budget and that we need taxes in order to be able to spend money. Taxes are important but not for revenue. They create an incentive for people to participate in the system or they can be used by the government to balance wealth inequality. Most people think we directly spend the money we take in from taxes. During the Clinton presidency, we briefly held a surplus and this was hailed as a great achievement but the reality is a surplus means money that is not going back to the people. MMT is still controversial but has gained a lot of traction recently amongst economists.

Notes:
The Deficit Matters…But Just Not Right Now
Does the U.S. Deficit Matter?

OuR ASSESSMENT: b+, The idea is an a but the BOOK IS a little short

History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America proposes that America may not be in decline but entering a dramatic new era of self-reinterpretation. Since the earliest settlers from Europe landed, Americans have been endlessly reinventing themselves in an ongoing theater of accomplishment that has often fascinated the world. That drama zigzags but some of its best acts may yet to occur. Critics of America often lament a blurring between fact and entertainment. But America’s self-generated story, from Pilgrims to cowboys to social media and reality television, has proven endlessly creative and adaptable.

History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America is as Ross Douthat mentions a more optimistic, of sorts, version of the decadent society. The book proposes that America may not be in decline but entering a dramatic new era of self-reinterpretation. Like Kurt Anderson in Fantasyland, Bruno Maçães points out that America has always been this place of constant reinvention and fantasy. There is a perception that we are in this great stagnation as Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and others argue. President Trump is representative of that decline. But what if America is just reinventing itself, breaking away from Europe and the West out of necessity to compete with China and the East? This a new politics where narratives are more important than facts. It represents a politics that is between the radical nature of China/Russia and liberalism. If liberalism can be considered to be failing in the West, perhaps this is smart but it remains to be seen if this "hyperfreedom" will succeed in the long run.

"We are living in virtual reality right now, Trump offers the fantasy of an autocratic regime without the real consequences, the far left the fantasy of revolution without the real consequences. This is how is has always been in America, it has just accelerated."

My hypothesis — the subject of my new book, History Has Begun— is that American life continuously emphasizes its own artificiality in a way that leads participants to believe that they are living a fantasy. The pinnacle of this in is Trump looking at his victory in 2016 not as a political event but as the greatest moment in the history of television. Americans are learning to live in a realm of hyper freedom, possessing the power to create imaginary worlds and the freedom to unleash a kind of selfish and extravagant fantasy life. Americans no longer ask whether a book or television series would work in real life, they ask whether real life would work in a movie or television series.

Notes:
How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality In American Politics

Our assessment: A-

Piranesi lives in an alternate world, one with vast halls by the sea filled with statues, subject to the tides, at first there is only one other person in this world whom he calls the Other. He explores this world, writes notes in his journal, fishes and collects food, and honors the remains of 13 others. But one day a 16th person shows up. As it turns out this other world is a prison of sorts and Piranesi has lost his memory of who he used to be, and how he came to be here. He is rescued but must decide if he really wants to leave. This short fantasy novel was simply a lot of fun.

Our assessment: C-, Just Kinda boring arguments

Michael Anton describes the 2020 election as a Flight 93 election and warns against the dangers of one-party rule and blue-state politics. I saw Riva Tez reading this one on Instagram, so picked it up - a greatest hits of many of the current right-wing positions. It wasn't as interesting or nuanced as I was hoping for so ended up reading through it fast. There are chapters on California, the Constitution, our current government, the ruling class, immigration, the current path we are on, an alternative path we could take. Solutions start with reelecting Donald Trump and go on from there.

The Tyranny of Merit by michael j. sandel

The backdrop of The Tyranny of Merit starts with the populist nationalism that brought forth Brexit and President Trump in 2016. Some see this moment as xenophobic and racist, while others see it in purely economic terms. But actually, it is the elites that are responsible: "The diminished economic and cultural status of working people in recent decades is not the result of inexorable forces; it is the result of the way mainstream political parties and elites have governed." The Democrats have supported technocratic liberalism that is in favor of the professional classes and has alienated the working class. Recently all the gains have gone to the top. This has always been the case but it was tolerated because there was upward class mobility. However, it is becoming apparent that is no longer the case. Politicians on both sides from Ronald Reagon and Marco Rubio, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama most have all have doubled down on this idea emphasizing the equality of opportunity. But the reality is it is not very easy to simply "make it if you try." Trump notably doesn't talk in these terms, framing the world as one of winners and losers, which is why he resonated with so many of the working class.

We have this illusion that we live in a meritocracy. We think that the solution to acknowledge the problems of class and income inequality are more meritocracy. All the while "Morally, it is unclear why the talented deserve the outsize rewards that market-driven societies lavish on the successful." The downside of you can make if you try is that if you don't make it there is a real cost in social esteem. "It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too." And while the elites might have had success 1940 thru 1980, in the last four decades it's hard to even say they have governed very well. Michael Sandel makes that case that "To reinvigorate democratic politics, we need to find our way to a morally more robust public discourse, one that takes seriously the corrosive effect of meritocratic striving on the social bonds that constitute our common life."

Our Assessment: B-