BRAIN DRAIN

The Great Remembering

2026-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

The progress of human civilization is necessarily a process of constant improvement. Along the way, we end upboth embracing new and occasionally bold ideas and letting go of old and outdated ones. But what if in that process of letting go we've actually lost some of the wisdom that our forebears could only ever articulate given the limitations of their time? This is the intriguing question June Cohen explores in her book The Great Remembering: Powerful Ancient Practices–And the New Science Bringing Them Back.

"I started to wonder," Cohen writes,

"Is it possible our ancestors—all of them, in every era—encoded their knowledge not just in words but in actions? In practices that can be taught and learned and embodied? The more I looked, the more I saw evidence of this everywhere […]. I came to call these wisdom systems."

In that regard, Cohen investigates several wisdom systems, unearthing the purposes they served in earlier cultures and the benefits that people derived from experiencing them. Some of these are experiencing a renaissance of sorts today, such as the "epic physical challenge" or the sauna and cold plunge. The appeal of others are also explained: festivals are viewed in a different light as "systems for communal awe" for bringing people together, while traditional rituals following the passing of a loved one are framed as mechanisms for processing communal grief. Interestingly/unexpectedly/unnecessarily (depending on your persuasion), the book also includes chapters on psychedelics as well as "wisdom systems for the bedchamber" ('nuff said).

Given the subject matter, it's remarkable that Cohen doesn't write what in less capable hands may very well have ended up as a new age treatise. While some themes she touches upon can only be described as a little "woo-woo," for the most part she draws readers in more as a curious observer than as an advocate, although by the end of the book there is a hint of advocacy in her tone. Overall, her point is less "we should practice these things!" and more of "[such-and-such] is why this thing works," and to that end she does stress that there is science beginning to back up these points.

That said though, it would be an overstatement to infer (as the book's subtitle appears to assert), that the science is there in support of these wisdom systems. That is not exactly the case. Cohen is upfront that it is not easy to study many of the phenomena examined in the book, whether social or biological. For the most part, whatever "science" there is remains nascent at best, if at all.

Regardless of the science, though, there is a clear throughline about why people seem to be rediscovering the value of these wisdom systems: connection. Maybe it's just comforting to be part of something much larger than yourself, knowing that many others before you have been in the same situation and have gone through the same things before. After all, that's what community is all about. Perhaps it's the desire to reconnect with that sense of community, and the wisdom contained therein, that is the real impetus behind this Great Remembering.

Where Credit is Due

2026-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

As the saying goes, success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

Anyone who’s ever had to work with others to accomplish anything should be able to empathize.

In my younger days, in part to psych myself up and not have it bother me, I’d tell myself that it didn’t matter who gets the credit because everyone will know who did the work.

You know what, though? It turns out that’s not exactly true.

In reality, the people who get the credit are the ones who make others believe they did the work.

There’s the rub.

The fact of the matter is that there are any number of ambitious characters who would take credit for whatever they can at the drop of a hat.

In contrast, there are fewer people willing to step up and take responsibility when the situation calls for it.

And as we all know, taking credit and taking responsibility are two different things.

At the end of the day, it’s the people prepared to take responsibility that you know you can count on, credit be damned.

Hot Take

2026-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

No one needs to know your opinion, especially if:

You are not involved, affected, or accountable.

You have nothing to contribute to further the discussion.

Your bases are feelings and not facts.

You are not prepared to be wrong.

(But the basic point? Nobody needs to know your opinion. Really. And yes: not even this one.)

The Knot

2026-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

For avid followers of Seth Godin's work, The Knot is sure to be another classic.

It's a book about getting unstuck and solving problems that matter. Or rather it's about getting unstuck in order to solve problems that matter.

That's the knot at the center of Godin's metaphor: what might appear to be an inscrutable mess can be unwound with the right perspective and effort--if we can get out of our own way to see things clearly and do what's necessary.

The key to this is first understanding that not everything is a problem. Some things are really just situations—circumstances over which we have no control—while problems are precisely things that we can do something about. Assuming we can tell the difference, we can make meaningful headway towards unwinding the knot, as it were, by making sure our own entanglements—things such as legacy, sunk costs, biases, and accountabilities—don't get in the way of our working towards a solution.

To be sure, The Knot presents simple framework for addressing problems and/or understanding why we often find ourselves stuck in a rut vis-a-vis doing work that matters. But it's told in that manner that only Seth Godin can, which makes all the difference.

Restoring Childhood

2026-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

There's abundant evidence of heightened anxiety, depression, and overall life dissatisfaction among today's youth. While such feelings tend to ebb and flow in cycles, it's plain to see that there's something different about what's affecting the youth of today.

What could be the cause of such malaise? Peter Gray offers a plausible explanation in his book Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety: that society has unwittingly deprived children of the play they desperately need in order to mature into well-functioning adults.

Central to Gray's thesis is that children have a natural way of discovering the world (and their place in it) that we have interfered with owing to changing cultural mores. "There are certain normal ways for children to behave, which are part of the natural part of growing up," writes Gray, "and as a society we are restricting children from behaving in those ways. To restore childhood we need to restore an environment that enables the natural process of growing up."

Crucial to that "natural process of growing up" is play, which ultimately accounts for how children learn to navigate their environment as well as to get along with others of similar age. He expounds:

Play, as I and many other play researchers define it, is an activity that has the following four characteristics: it is (1) chosen and directed by the players themselves; (2) intrinsically motivated; (3) structured by mental rules; and (4) always creative and often highly imaginative (emphasis in original).

This will sound very familiar to people of a certain age whose experience of childhood was getting together with the neighborhood kids to keep themselves entertained away from the watchful gaze of an adult. Yet as people moved into highly urbanized settings and with the pressures of the modern economy, childhood has inevitably become more regimented and less spontaneous. Indeed, even children's activities like pee-wee sports leagues become less a venue for kids to socialize and have fun and more like junior training camp often as desired by the parent rather than the child.

In the American context, Gray highlights a number of factors that have aggravated the situation. Naturally, there's the moral panic/mass hysteria surrounding highly publicized cases of harm to children that have caused parents to become more protective. He more specifically zeroes in on the implementation of the Common Core curriculum, with its emphasis on standardization and testing, as having had arguably the most profound impact upon removing play from the learning process. Indeed, as it is often said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

On the other hand, one factor that Gray does not hold to account for the apparent ongoing mental health emergency of today's youth is social media, as famously argued by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in the book The Anxious Generation. Indeed, Gray is explicitly critical of Haidt's assertions, noting that the latter relies on mere correlation and that there is no evidence to support the view that social media is harmful to the youth psyche. Instead, Gray is quick to point out the different ways that technology and social media in fact facilitate play given the circumstances of today's children. As such, Gray all but characterizes Haidt's work as yet another moral panic brought about by sensationalized cases.

This is surprising considering that both Gray and Haidt fundamentally agree that a shift away from a play-based childhood is at the center of the youth's mental health crisis. Gray may be correct to point out that correlation is not causation, but it's equally flawed to assert that absence of evidence is evidence of absence (in this case, of the harms that social media can do). Certainly, the matter is worth more rigorous study, especially since the technologies in question are also rapidly evolving and it will take time to suss out their effects (if any). In the meantime readers can interpret for themselves what the data does and does not say and make their own judgments accordingly.

Waxing nostalgic can always come across as Pollyanna-ish, especially when an author argues that they had a better childhood (or parts thereof) than kids these days. While this wasn't necessarily the point that Gray wanted to get across with Restoring Childhood, it is among the messages conveyed. It's not wrong, however. Restoring Childhood presents a convincing case for bringing back good old-fashioned play to the childhood experience; we would all do well to take note.

Right/Wrong

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Right is right.

Wright is wrong.

(But if it happens to be your name, may also be right.)

Wrong is wrong.

Yet in that sense, it’s also right.

Rong is wrong.

(Unless it happens to be your name, in which case Rong is also right!)

The Geek Way

2026-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

There's a bold claim worth pondering at the center of Andrew McAfee's book, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results. "We've paid a lot of attention to the computer revolution kicked off by the geeks," he writes. "But I think we've been misunderstanding the other revolution they initiated: a still-unfolding revolution in the company itself."

This revolution is what McAfee refers to as the "geek way," or the particular manner that today's most successful organizations--nearly all of which are technology companies--utilize speed, ownership, science, and openness to drive their superior results.

Of course, each of these elements has to be understood in the particular sense as used in the book. Speed, for instance, pertains more to a company's ability to iterate processes and products to serve their markets. Ownership has to do with allowing executives and employees alike to have both autonomy and accountability in their respective roles. Science refers to data-driven decision making. Openness, in this context, involves creating a culture that values being receptive to counter-arguments, re-evaluations, and changes in direction in the pursuit of organizational objectives.

From a broader perspective, there are few who would argue that companies wouldn't benefit from such characteristics. But it's a bit of a stretch to assert that there is a radical reconceptualization of how to do business along these lines. The notion is teed up, but it's not entirely clear that McAfee sticks the landing. For that matter, neither is it clear that the setup itself was particularly well-executed.

The reason for this is that McAfee literally begs the question that the success of today's technology titans are owed to these specific characteristics. In a sense, The Geek Way argues the point that these are good things for companies to demonstrate and takes for granted that the likes of Microsoft or Netflix or Amazon demonstrate such characteristics. Which they do. But do they remain successful primarily because they are fast, scientific, demonstrate ownership, and are open to change? Or does their success owe to being in segments that the market has decided are valuable? And isn't their staying power now more a function of the fact that they operate at a scale that makes it difficult for newcomers to compete against?

This can sound like nitpicking, and indeed it is. But the truth is that no one would argue that the four elements of the "geek way" are bad; indeed, organizations all over the likely already exhibit these characteristics to a greater or lesser extent. So why are some more successful than others? Alas, this questions is touched upon at best tangientially, if at all.

As such, McAfee's "geek way" is arguably a clunky metaphor, both in the telling and in its construction, for thinking about management practice and culture. But that doesn't make it an unhelpful metaphor. In truth, McAfee draws from a much broader literature of concepts (think psychological safety and design thinking) that are already part and parcel of the lexicon of business, not to mention authors (think Seth Godin, Eric Ries, or Adam Grant) who have also contributed much to our understanding of what makes organizations tick.

In that regard, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking in The Geek Way. It's a lot of the same from the business and management literature, albeit presented from a slightly different perspective.

Just Because

2026-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

Just because you're smart, it doesn't mean you'll be successful.

Just because you're successful, it doesn't mean you'll be rich.

Just because you're rich, it doesn't mean you'll be happy.

Make of this what you will.

LEGO 2K Drive

2026-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

In no time at all, LEGO 2K Drive became the video game of the summer in our household.

I'd added it to my library thank to PlayStation Plus some time back, but kept putting off playing it for one reason or another. Then out of the blue I received notice that the game's servers would soon be shutdown, meaning that its online multiplayer to be wound up in due course. Ordinarily this wouldn't have mattered to me--except that game had one trophy tied to online multiplayer, without which I'd never be able to get the game's Platinum trophy.

Thus, I figured it was as good a time as any to play 2K Drive. Or to be more precise, I thought it would be worth the effort at least to download the game and just secure that one trophy.

That was the plan, anyway. What I didn't expect was for my kids to catch me in the act and decide that they wanted in on the action, too. Thus, what was supposed to be maybe a full hour just to secure one online trophy transformed into 80+ hours over the summer, racing around virtually with my kids in LEGO cars that defy the laws of physics, transform, and also occasionally blow up.

Oh, it was a blast!

The tagline of LEGO 2K Drive is "Racing but awesomer" and for all intents and purposes it's exactly that. Anyone who's ever played Mario Kart or games of its ilk will find 2K Drive familiar, because that's what it is: a kart game with (multiple) LEGO twists. All the vehicles are LEGO and in fact you get to have a loadout consisting of a road vehicle, and off-road vehicle, and a boat. A lot of the elements in the environments are also made out of LEGO, which you can smash to your heart's content. There's a story mode that will have you progressing through races of increasing difficulty in order to unlock more vehicles and racers. Naturally, all races include not just weird obstacles but also offensive and defensive power-ups to make it more interesting. To top everything off, the game is set up for couch coop-etition (if you catch my drift) involving two players or even more in its soon to be defunct multiplayer.

These, so far, are just table stakes. What makes the game "racing but awesomer" is what makes the game quintessentially LEGO: you can build or augment your own vehicles (if you wanted to) and transform between any vehicle in your loadout either automatically or at will. Objectively, building a vehicle from scratch, while amazing, is also incredibly tedious. On the other hand, having a race car that transforms into Chicken Truck or speedboat on the fly never gets old.

As racing games go, 2K Drive offers a respectable racing experience. It's not quite as polished as Mario Kart, and in fact feels a lot more unpredictable and out of control. Yet that strikes me as a feature instead of a bug: if the game weren't a little out of control, or a lot even, it would take the fun out of crashing into obstacles and having LEGO pieces fly all over the place. That said, it's near impossible to drive around the game's various road and off-road networks while staying on course 100% no matter how hard you try, which from a driving perspective is a real shame.

LEGO 2K Drive is largely as accessible as most LEGO video games, the only difference being that you have to do everything inside a vehicle. There are collectibles and side quests galore, plus a ton of dad jokes thrown into the mix (which, I am not ashamed to admit, I really appreciated). Most importantly? My kids loved it! I have never heard them spontaneously laugh with as much glee as when their cars careened out of control or when trying their hand at some race or another--and I was happy to simply take a back seat and watch them have at it.

It's a pity that the game's servers and online multiplayer will soon be shut down, as all good things do. Nevertheless, the game's single player mode remains perfectly playable on its own, and even after every nook and cranny of 2K Drive has been explored and its last collectible obtained there's still the pure joy of simply driving around. I speak from experience: there's a circuit around the airport in the game's Big Butte level that I've come to enjoy and keep coming back to whenever I fire up the game.

Because at the end of the day, what makes a game "racing but awesomer" work is enjoying the drive.

Success is the Best Revenge

2026-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Everyone wants to be successful. No one wants to go through life as a failure.
Success is a journey, not a destination. Do not confuse your wins and achievements with being successful. Do not conclude that just because you have made mistakes or stumbles that you can never be successful.
Do not confuse luck with success.
Success is the product of your mindset, your habits, and choices. You are what you think. You are what you repeatedly do. You are the sum total of your choices and experiences.
Success is not entirely up to you.
Even successful people fail; they may in fact fail more often than they succeed. But the reason they are successful is that the impact of their successes outweigh their failures.
Oftentimes, it is your failures that set you up for success.
Equate success with wealth at your own peril. Equate success with happiness at your own peril. Equate success with purpose at your own peril. Correlation does not mean causation.
Being successful and being a good person are two entirely different things. It is possible to be successful and also a POS/SOB. Such is life. Given the choice, though, better to be successful as a good person.

Intentionality

2026-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

The main argument put forward by Jack Raines in his book Young Money was that young people should live their lives in such a way as to maximize "intentionality" precisely because there is value to being young.

Certainly, that advice may not be for everyone or may need to be taken with a grain of salt. For my part, however, I stepped away from the book intrigued by the very concept of intentionality.

In Raines' scheme of things, intentionality is the interplay between adventure and ambition. "At first glance, 'adventure' and 'ambition' might appear to be diametrically opposed," he writes. "The former manifests itself as a rejection of structure for the pursuit of novelty, whereas the latter manifests itself as an embrace of structure for the pursuit of success. But they are really two sides of the same coin: the pursuit of intentionality."

Taking that at face value, and given my proclivity for coming up with diagrams (especially when they can be presented in a 2x2 chart), I thought it would be useful to illustrate intentionality thus:

The four quandrants lend themselves to easy interpretation:

High on Adventure, High on Ambition. Sounds like your typical Type-A personalities and Theory Y kind of people: the dynamic and hard-charging sort.

High on Adventure, Low on Ambition. Wanderers or the "journey is more important than the destination" type of persons. They may even come across as aimless.

Low on Adventure, High on Ambition. Dreamers. They know what they want (ambitious!) but may not necessarily go out there to get it. Or they will provided it's narrowly defined.

Low on Adventure, Low on Ambition. Sounds like a Type-B personality (or whatever the opposite of Type-A is) and Theory Y sort.

Of course, each of these dimensions exists along a spectrum, so logically it's always a matter of being more of one type or another.

I would also argue that there's no rank preference in terms of where a person should be, though it stands to reason that perhaps those who fall in the basket "up-and-to-the-right" might achive more success in life. So maybe in that sense we could all be a little bit more ambitious and adventurous; after all, life is finite and the world is our oyster!

Young Money

2026-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

As a mid-career man approaching late middle-age, I am clearly not the target demographic for Young Money, a book that then-twenty-eight-year-old author Jack Raines describes as "really a letter to my twenty-three-year-old self…unpacking the uncertainties of a young person's personal and professional journey through their twenties." Indeed, I'm well past that stage of my life and have no real desire to revisit it.

But I decided to pick up the book anyway because I felt it would give some insight into the mind of someone belonging to Gen Z (and maybe even Generation Alpha) and thereby learn a thing or two along the way.

What Raines seeks to address in his book is the age-old anxiety of anyone in their twenties: "What should I do with my life?" "Traditional" advice offered in that respect would be to spend those early years of adulthood by responsibly setting oneself up for long-term success and stability. Choosing the right school to attend for college. Applying to the right jobs. Saving money. And so on.

Counterintuitively, however, Raines makes the argument that single-mindedly preparing for future success undervalues the very fact of being young. "I'm not here to convince you that your terminal net worth will benefit from spending more money sooner," he writes. "I'm saying that optimizing for the highest possible terminal net worth is a stupid goal to begin with."

So what should a young adult's goal be? Simply put, to approach life with more intentionality, to be cognizant that time is a person's most valuable resource and that sometimes no monetary value can be attributed to time well spent. Raines explains it succinctly: "My unconventional financial advice is that many young people should invest less and spend more because when you're young, memories compound faster than dollars."

On the surface, it appears easy to poke holes into this train of thought (if not the the book in general). For instance, Raines' advice comes across as the sort geared towards a specific demographic—white, middle-class, American men in their twenties—and not really others, and Raines is aware of this fact. Adding to this, there's survivorship bias at work: sure, this sort of thing has worked out in Raines' life, but your mileage may vary. Besides, isn't this really the kind of thing you'd expect both from and for the YOLO generation?

I get all that. Yet even I have to admit that it's fairly decent advice, and Raines articulates all the nuance behind it quite well in his book.

Inasmuch as Young Money can come across like an advice book for Gen Z and younger, the truth is that the anxieties it seeks to address are practically universal for anyone in their twenties. After all, every twenty-something with their head screwed on straight has had to worry about making the right choices in life. What Raines has to offer in this regard is neither "Everything will turn out fine" or "Throw caution to the wind." Rather, it's more "Young adulthood also has value, make sure to also spend yours doing things you'll appreciate later on."

If you can see the difference, then you will—like me—appreciate the book for what it has say.

The Unaccountability Machine

2026-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

As I was reading The Unaccountability Machine it struck me that author Dan Davies comes across as akin to Archilochus' proverbial hedgehog (i.e., the one with the single big idea). Indeed, the book has all the energy of a man who realizes that he's decoded the secret to understanding the world and, thus burdened with such knowledge, is possessed by the desire to share that knowledge with anyone who'll listen.

Me? Oh, I was here for it. Or most of it, at any rate.

At its core, The Unaccountability Machine is a treatise/evaluation/exposition/argument regarding a simple question: Why is the world so terrible? From the get-go, Davis appears to have zeroed-in on the cause: the world's political economy appears to have expanded beyond human scale. He writes,

"When people are overwhelmed by information, they always react in the same way—by building systems. […] Because they narrow the information space, every decision-making system is, implicitly, a model. We deal with the chaos of reality by constructing an imaginary world, making decision about it and hoping they work out in reality[…].

"In order to manage an industrial society, you need decision-making systems that work on an industrial scale, and we don't seem psychologically equipped to handle this."

It is this germ of an idea—the consequences of adapting to the needs of an industrial (or post-industrial) society, that Davis explores throughout the length of the book. And the single most manifestation of our inability to cope is what he describes as the "accountability sink" or the dead-ends in processes that appear to absolve anyone of liability or blame.

We've all experienced something like this at a personal level, such as when trying to resolve something with an agent on customer service line (ugh!) or when listening politicians deftly pass the buck for whatever crisis of the day happens to be (also ugh!). "Surely there has to be a better way!" we tell ourselves, thinking that the system just happens to be broken. On the contrary, Davis argues: this is a feature and not a bug of how things are. "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link," he writes, "it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system."

Or to put it differently: because the modern world requires systems that can operate at scale, it can't get bogged down by each and every inefficiency or undesired outcome. So it must ignore as many of these as it can in order to continue to function.

Surely, it sounds dysfunctional. But also quite accurate. And that's why the The Unaccountability Machine makes for compelling reading.

That said, to articulate his argument and prosecute the point at length, Davis draws upon the field of cybernetics and specifically the body of work of Stafford Beer. As such, The Unaccountability Machine is really a book that applies a cybernetics lens to the modern world—thereby leveling valid criticisms about our present capitalist order.

It's here that Davis nearly lost me, and not just because I've heard many of these "flaws" of capitalism in general and of modern economics in particular before and don't necessarily agree (but to each his own). While I was happy to learn about management cybernetics, I couldn't help but feel that it was an artifact of its time, as if the world had moved on from its dated jargon and way of looking at things. Of course, that way of looking at things nonetheless has merit, but I would argue that as presented it has all the charm of trying to makes sense of the post-pandemic world with an Alvin Toffler-esque mien.

Which is to say: it can work but you will, at times, sound a few decades out of step. But you will be forgiven for being right.

And so it may very well be with The Unaccountability Machine.

All

2026-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Can you have it all?

Why, yes. You can, indeed.

But it will depend on how you define your “all.”

So the essential question isn’t really, “Can I have it all?”

Instead, the question you should be asking is, “What is my ‘all?’” as well as, “Why’s it important for me to have it?”

Answer those questions, and you will have made a meaningful step towards having it all.

The Practice of Not Reacting

2026-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

When I picked up Kusunagi Ryushun's The Practice of Not Reacting: Zen Wisdom for a Happy LIfe, I assumed that it was being figurative about the "Zen wisdom" it sought to impart.

Certainly the title caught my eye--because who wouldn't want to have a little more self-control in the face of difficulties, right?--and so I thought that if I could learn a thing or two how to be a little more Zen when things ruffled my feathers (so to speak), then all to the good.

It turns out, however, that Kusunagi was instead being very literal about the Zen wisdom part of his book, because he is in fact a Buddhist monk and his book is indeed about Buddhist philosophy.

As such, I have to say the book serves as a fine introduction to the tenets of Buddhism if you've never had the pleasure. It's appeal is that it reads like an easy conversation with a monk (or a conversation with a monk who's very easygoing) about the self-awareness one requires to find inner peace, as cliché as that sounds.

While I don't think the book will necessarily convince skeptics to necessarily follow in the Buddha's footsteps on the path to enlightenment, it explains the basics of the philosophy well and relatably enough to make readers appreciate the need for mindfulness in one's own life.

Same Difference

2026-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Something that's been on my mind:

At a high enough level of abstraction everything appears to be the same.

On the other hand, at a high enough level of detail everything appears to be different.

Strangely, however, this appears to be true for anything along the same spectrum.

Yes, at the end of the day, we're all atoms. But even atoms are different. Et cetera.

Or to put it differently:

So we're all stardust.

But what is stardust anyway?

And on and on it goes.

More Kindness, Not Less

2026-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

When people abuse our kindness, it’s only natural to respond by being a little less kind. Or a lot, even.

“Never again!” we might tell ourselves, foreswearing the possibility that someone may once more play us for the chump or the patsy again in the future.

All things considered, it’s perfectly normal. But also maybe a little bit wrong (or a lot, even).

Because a lot of the time, when people abuse another’s kindness it’s because they don’t see the kindness. Or they’ve forgotten what kindness is like. Or they’ve convinced themselves that they live in the sort of world where the only way to get by is to get one over others—to take as much as you can for yourself, consequences be damned!—likely because they have once before (or even more) been the chump or the pansy.

Ironically, though, the solution isn’t to join the bandwagon. Quite the opposite in fact:

All this should tell us that the world actually needs more kindness, not less.

If people have hardened their hearts or have forgotten what kindness looks like, then they need to be reminded. And the only way to do that is to try to make the world a little more kind.

Yes, I know this sounds a little wooh-wooh (or a lot, even). But I can’t see any other way around it.

It doesn’t mean having to play the chump or the patsy. At the very least we can be more discerning: show grace to the people we expect will reciprocate in kind. Realistically, we will sometimes be disappointed. But even then it will only teach us how to be better at judging other people’s character—and thereby be proven right in the long run.

And, yes, there will be some who will decide that it will always be “Kindness, come what may!” Only the most cynical won’t be rooting for them to be right.

So either way, we will end up with a kinder world—and be all the better for it.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

2026-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

What I used to love about X when it was still Twitter (or before it became toxic) was the serendipity of discovering and learning from interesting people or people with interesting ideas.

That's how I first came to know of Naval Ravikant, often mononymously referred to simply as "Naval." Some time back, I noticed that his posts were being shared by accounts that I followed, and thus I came to understand that he commanded a certain amount of influence in Silicon Valley circles. And why not? He had achieved success as a tech entrepreneur and venture investor, and best I could tell from the material I'd seen he made a lot of sense.

Thus, when I discovered that there was a book compiling his thoughts on wealth and happiness, which were precisely the same material from him I'd often see shared around the internet, I knew it was something I'd want to check out (especially since it's available for free).

That book is The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. It's Naval's thoughts on those subjects as recorded in his tweets or on podcasts and essays, compiled and arranged and organized by Eric Jorgenson. (The title is likely a hat tip to a book regarding Charlie Munger, which has a similar format and which I've yet to get to on my pull list.) While the Silicon-Valley-guru-dishing-on-business-and-life has become a cliche, Naval has a knack for conveying sensible principles in straightforward and simple language.

This, more than anything, would probably be the book's main selling point. Among the Naval's nuggets that I appreciated the most include the following:

"Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won't have the right spirit, and you won't be dealing with people on the right level. Be optimistic, be positive. It's important. Optimists do better in the long run."

"Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired.

"I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It's very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money, but if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time, you won't have time to upgrade your lifestyle."

"The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be."

"Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality."

"A happy person isn't someone who's happy all the time. It's someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don't lose their inner peace."

"Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you."

"Don't spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It's not your problem."

And so on. Indeed, some great nuggets in there.

No doubt, Naval has said/written/posted some compelling stuff. Yet inasmuch as Jorgenson has exerted effort to put some order and coherence into Naval's words coming from varying sources, it would be a mistake to assume that the book represents a treatise thought through comprehensively. Notwithstanding the effort, the book retains a stream of consciousness "thinking out loud" quality to it that can come across as being underdeveloped. Precisely, when Naval said/wrote/posted some of these things, it was in some context that was more off-the-cuff than not. As such the book lacks the polish of, say, the work of either Sahil Bloom or Morgan Housel, which cover the same ground arguably in much more substantial fashion.

Still, I thought my time spent reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant was worthwhile as it's always nice to find material that manages to succinctly articulate ideas you struggle to put into words.

Joke Farming

2026-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Anyone who picks up a book about humor probably does so thinking it will be a good time.

I will readily admit that the thought did cross my mind when I decided to read Elliott Kalan's Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense. But truth be told, I wasn't interested in the book for comedy reasons––rather, I was curious to see if anything it had to offer would apply to communication more generally.

Humor is inherently fascinating to me. It takes a special kind of intelligence to, well, be funny; and when executed just right accomplishes the very things we expect from good communication. It can disarm an audience. It can convey a message. It's often memorable. And a lot of the time, when it connects, it just feels right and as if it speaks to your very soul.

Hence, if Joke Farming was a book about how to write comedy, then it seemed a good resource for learn how to accomplish any of these things for the purpose of becoming a better communicator.

Spoiler alert: the book was and it wasn't.

For me, the most interesting insight I gleaned from Joke Farming was the central premise: that if you want to have a successful career in comedy then you must have a system that puts you in a position to write jokes on demand. When we see comedians, the tendency is to assume that they're just naturally funny. This is true, to an extent. Yet audiences seldom see all the work that goes into what makes them funny, from the hours spent conceptualizing skits or gags to constantly iterating jokes to find the ones that work.

This is why Kalan's metaphor is precisely joke farming: you have to be systematic about these things. The seeds of jokes have to be planted and the fruits cultivated until you can finally reap the rewards. It's a grind you can't really escape if you want to be successful in comedy.

Kalan should know a thing or two about this, having been (among other things) head writer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. That's the kind of job that practically requires you to be funny on deadline and for which there is no better remedy than having a system in place. Thus, Joke Farming is really about Kalan sharing his own system and providing some earnest advice to aspiring comedians by way of paying it forward.

As such, from the standpoint of communication more generally, there's quite a few things Kalan has to say that applies analogously. In explaining that jokes have the same basic elements--structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience--it's plain to see how the same applies even outside of a comedy context. He also repeatedly emphasizes that one should always keep in mind three basic principles when writing comedy: brevity, clarity, and simplicity. It's not difficult to see how keeping all of this in mind can make anyone a better communicator when applied correctly.

This being the case, and given that I felt the book was helpful, why do I also say that Joke Farming didn't quite meet my expectations as a book on communication? Ah, well, that would simply be because it's really written from start to finish as a book to help one out with comedy. It's laser-focused in that sense, as it's supposed to be. So the fault is not with Kalan but with me and my crazy expectations.

That said, I will say that I did have a good time Joke Farming. But even then, perhaps only up to a point. Kalan himself notes that humor itself is highly subjective, and thus while the book is peppered with levity I didn't feel all the jokes landed (but your mileage will vary). Also, given that plenty of the jokes are used to explain some of his broader points, it's inevitable for the sheen on the humor to come off, since there's nothing more unfunny than having to explain a joke.

All things considered, Joke Farming is still a fine way to learn a thing or two about comedy in particular and maybe communication more broadly, too. And, yes, depending on your own taste in humor, you may also come away from it having had a good time.

The Proof in the Code

2026-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

Mathematics can become inscrutable for many people beyond a certain point, for which reason subjects in the field don't make for easy recommendations as reading material for most audiences outside of, say, trivia books.

Yet Kevin Hartnett's The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI is one of those rare math books that's too good to ignore. It's a book about higher math, yes, but where the field intersects with computer science and artificial intelligence, and for all that it's probably as exciting as a math book can get.

The book is about interactive theorem provers (ITPs), or computer programs that help validate mathematical propositions. It turns out that when computers became powerful enough some mathematicians figured out that you could use them to prove some of the trickier theorems in the field by "brute force" and thus applications became designed for the purpose. Hence, The Proof in the Code zeroes in on the development of one such ITP, the open-source Lean Programming Language, and the various developers and mathematicians that helped bring it to life.

The development of Lean in particular happened to coincide with a problem that Microsoft was trying to solve: automating the error-checking process of computer code before an application got pushed into production. From Microsoft's perspective, cracking this nut could potentially save the company millions of dollars, and so it was an initiative worth supporting. It turns out, however, that the characteristics of programs for verifying that computer codes run correctly are the very same ones that are useful to determining whether mathematical theorems are correct. Hence, under Leo de Moura, Lean started out as research project greenlit by Microsoft, only later on to be adopted as a niche tool by the mathematics community.

The Proof in the Code often reads like an underdog story: a ragtag bunch of enthusiasts dedicated to developing their ITP have to find a way to work past their individual quirks but after many years of toil manage to achieve some measure of success. In order to tell their story effectively, author Harntett has to simplify a lot of the concepts related to mathematics, programming, and artificial intelligence. On balance, he strikes the reasonable compromise of providing just enough information to move the narrative along without losing readers along the way.

The corollary to the above is that the book proceeds in a manner that has to treat the inner working of both ITPs and math as a black box. This is understandable to the extent that, frankly, most readers would never be able to understand the finer details anyway. But it does leave the door open for some basic questions like, "If the math involved is so complex, how can anyone be sure it's been programmed properly?" Then again, raising the point of "Who validates the validators?" may be a fool's errand--one would need validators all the way down!--so perhaps readers would do well to think of this as akin to a mathematical postulate and accept it as a given.

Admittedly, The Proof in the Code isn't the kind of book that one will come away from having learned complex mathematics. That wasn't the point nor did it need to be. At best, it will leave readers a little more familiar with the sort of problems that continue to preoccupy mathematicians at the frontier of the field to this day. But by casting a welcome spotlight on what mathematics in the age of computers and artificial intelligence looks like, it leaves readers with an appreciation of how the field itself remains a vibrant area of human inquiry and collaboration.

Double Dragon Gaiden

2026-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Obviously, my video game adventures of late have been of the beat-'em-up variety. As such, it was probably only a matter of time until I threw my lot in with Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons.

As a child of the eighties, I played quiet a bit of Double Dragon II, and Double Dragon Gaiden feels very much the same albeit supercharged in all the right ways. The graphics hearken back to the old 8-bit console versions of the franchise, albeit with modern styling. There's now a whole host of characters to unlock and choose, and the game has each player picking any two to tag in/out during a playthrough. Each character has a unique moveset involving normal attacks, grappling attacks, and special attacks. The best part? Just like the older Double Dragon games, Double Dragon Gaiden accommodates two players simultaneously if not always cooperatively, as there's an option to enable "friendly fire."

Double Dragon Gaiden comes with three game modes: story, versus, and survival. Story mode has players confronting four gangs, with each later gang becoming stronger and their stages becoming longer until the city is finally rid of crime. Versus simply allows players to have a go at each other. Finally, survival has players trying their luck against wave upon wave of enemies to see how long they can go before being defeated.

Obviously, there's a lot of game packed into Double Dragon Gaiden. Yet an important reason players will keep coming back will be the unlockables. There's a ton of things to unlock via the game's "token shop"--characters, stages, art, and music--and so players will be doing their best to earn as much cash as they can to convert into tokens for the purpose. And how does one earn cash? Of course, by defeating enemies via "Special KO." Hence, players have an incentive to learn how refine their playing style to learn how to do exactly that.

Or maybe what I should say is: I did exactly that.

From a gameplay perspective, Double Dragon Gaiden just feels right. It's pretty straightforward--pickup the controller and unleash chaos!--but has enough complexity that you can, in fact, learn how to play it well by stringing together combos and setting up massive amounts of simultaneous Special KOs by way of "crowd control." The fact that you can also toggle difficulty settings in Story Mode, which not only makes the game easier/more difficult but also raises/lowers the exchange rate for tokens, helps keep things interesting.

If you happened to enjoy playing any of Technos Japan's Double Dragon games from back in the day, Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons will feel like a love letter to those games. On the other hand, if this is your first foray into the franchise, then you would have have found everything that the franchise was about on offer in a neat and tidy package.

Incorruptible

2026-05-25T00:00:00.005-04:00

Few authors have probably helped shape the methodology by which startups function and thrive more than Eric Ries. Yet over the years he's become more and more cognizant of the limits to what has heretofore been his body of work. "My book The Lean Startup gave a generation of founders the tools to build quickly, to scale, and to create massive value," he writes, "But I'd failed to anticipate what came next. I taught people how to build something worth protecting–but not how to protect it."

Thus, he seeks to address that shortcoming in his latest book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great.

The annals of business are peppered with stories of organizations that went astray, which ultimately proved to be their undoing. "Not all forms of making money are equal," Ries observes. "Some create wealth; others merely redistribute or destroy it.". But what accounts for a company changing trajectories from one to the other? Ries posits from both observation and experience that the answer is straightforward: corruption.

Corruption in this sense does not pertain to executive malfeasance or outright fraud, which by definition can be catastrophic (think Enron or, for that matter, Bernie Madoff). Rather, the corruption as Ries conceives it is when an organization begins to favor short term gains over long term goals, when the culture that brought it success begins to fray, and when ultimately it loses sight of what made it unique in the first place. The message in Incorruptible is that such "rot" is far from inevitable–we have simply taken for granted that the structure and practice of business need not be cookie-cutter; there are, in fact, different and arguably better ways to set up and run a business to insulate organizations from such pitfalls.

Hence, Incorruptible serves as a guidebook on how to keep a company's spirit alive. The presents a substantive critique of the oft-held mantra in business circles that the ultimate goal is necessarily the maximization of shareholder value. Ries offers suggestions about how a business may be structured to protect itself from the pressures that lead to "corruption," emphasizing governance as the means to achieving alignment.

From a much broader perspective, people get into business for varying reasons which over time lead can lead to tensions among its different stakeholders. Yet what ultimately drives a business is how incompatibilities between such tensions are resolved: founders want to build and may be in it for the long haul or even for altruistic reasons, while investors might be out for nothing more than a return on their capital. What Ries has to offer in Incorruptible is a framework to place the interests of a thriving business as a whole prior to that of any individual stakeholder, for the sake of maximizing the value that the business can create over the long term.

The Impossible Factory

2026-05-18T00:00:00.059-04:00

Something I've noticed both from observation and personal experience: anyone bitten by the aviation bug will always have an inclination to geek out over anything aviation-related. It's not something one ever really loses interest in once it catches your fancy. It's as if aviation nerds have such a unique appreciation for the fact that man was not meant to fly that the mere fact we can build things that allow us to do just that always remains awe-inspiring.

In that connection, "awe-inspiring" is perhaps the best way to describe The Impossible Factory: The Remarkable True Story of Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunkworks, America's Innovation Machine from author Josh Dean.

As the title suggests, The Impossible Factory recounts the purple patch of twentieth century aircraft design and development at the Lockheed Corporation, one of America's pioneering aircraft manufacturers responsible for some of the world's most iconic military planes. More specifically, it delves into the company's Skunk Works, the unit within Lockheed that created a reputation for developing these aircraft for the US Intelligence Infrastructure and Armed Forces in both record time and at comparatively low cost.

Yet, most importantly, it focuses on the contributions of Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the visionary engineer who led Lockheed's Skunk Works and in the process rose to become one of the industries luminaries.

What's interesting in the way Dean has written The Impossible Factory is that the book isn't a comprehensive corporate history of Lockheed or its Skunk Works nor the equivalent biography of Kelly Johnson per se. Rather, it presents a narrative about all three, because all are necessarily intertwined. It is, in short, a long interwoven story about how Lockheed, Kelly Johnson, and his Skunk Works would come of came of age (as it were) at a unique time in world and American history, resulting in the design and production of aircraft like the P-38 Fighter Plane, the U-2 Surveillance Plane, and the SR-71 Blackbird.

Such a sustained level of productivity, representing almost fifty years of continuous innovation, has arguably never been seen since. It stands out because some of the problems that Johnson was trying to solve had never been considered before, such as the supersonic speed of the Blackbird (at 3.2 times the speed of sound!) or its near-invisibility to radar (because of its minimal radar cross-section). Johnson and his colleagues at Lockheed were able to solve problems like these in record time, creating aircraft with characteristics that had never been seen, much less flown, before. More, they were also able to bring these new aircraft into service sometimes in a matter of mere months.

No doubt, it was a different world then. Geopolitical tensions—beginning with World War II and the Cold War that followed—created the conditions for a military-industrial complex in aviation and aerospace development. The Impossible Factory details how Lockheed was a direct beneficiary of this need to scale up America's airborne intelligence and military capability. Thanks to the likes of Johnson, the company was more than up to the challenge.

It's remarkable to think that one company, let alone one person within that company, contributed so much to pushing the frontiers of aviation. Josh Dean does well to bring this to light in The Impossible Factory with the right amount of technical detail and drama thrown into the mix. It's the kind of book that will thrill aviation geeks—and may very well get otherwise uninitiated readers bitten by the aviation bug as well.

Moral Economics

2026-05-11T00:00:00.002-04:00

Alvin Roth isn't the first person who's ever applied an economist's perspective to matters perceived to be outside the ambit of the dismal science. But he may very well be the first Nobel Prize winner to explicitly do so, especially given the topics he's chosen to address.

In Moral Economics, Roth applies the principles of market design to what he dubs "repugnant transactions" to see whether better or more equitable outcomes can arise notwithstanding the revulsion some societies or cultures may have to the transactions in question:

"Let’s call a transaction repugnant if all parties to the transaction want to engage in it, and others think they shouldn’t be allowed to for moral or religious reasons, even though those others can’t detect that the transaction has taken place unless someone tells them."

Thus, the book delves into such matters such as prostitution, contraception and in vitro fertilization, drugs and organ sales in order to, in a sense, shine a light on the costs of sociocultual repugnance, without necessarily advocating for a course of action one way or another. Indeed, Roth is very careful in this regard, attacking the subject with the methodical mien one would expect from someone who has received the highest recognition of his profession.

In that sense, Moral Economics arguably demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of the discipline that is economics. Readers of the book will note that economic analysis as applied to the different repugnant transactions therein featured demonstrate how changes to a market's design can yield societal benefit; yet the question of whether such things should be pursued (e.g., "Should organ sales be legalized?") is left unanswered. Indeed, one can argue that economics is precisely the wrong lens with which to view the latter question. Roth notes, for instance, that "markets can have both good and bad outcomes, and they are better at producing efficiency than at producing equality."

From this, we may infer: If asking the question, "What's the most efficient thing to do?", you would do well to ask an economist. Meanwhile, only a poor economist would invoke the discipline when faced with the question, "What's the right thing to do?" Roth, to his credit, asks the former question yet demurs on the latter, which is in no way a sign of intellectual or moral cowardice but rather of prudent professional restraint.

Against Money

2026-05-04T00:00:00.036-04:00

Your typical economics textbook would describe money in three ways: as a unit of account, a store of value, and a medium of exchange.

Personally, I've always been satisfied with this functional take on what money is supposed to be. To my mind, it checks the necessary boxes. Each is simple enough to comprehend—which in itself appeals to me—and allows one to move on to other more complex concepts within economics and finance. Thus, it never would have occurred to me that such a foundational description of an economic variable could be found wanting. Yet economists J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev argue exactly that in their book, Against Money.

To be clear, one should not infer from the book's title that Mason and Jayadev are opposed to the concept of money especially in the sense of fiat currency. Rather, the authors stress that economic activity takes place against the backdrop of money and yet our understanding of it is flawed at best. They write,

The argument of this book is that money does matter, in three senses. First, it has effects on the economy and the broader society. How easy it is to acquire money shapes real activity of production and social existence in general. Second, It evolves independently—Mone quantities do not reflect developments in an underlying real world. And third. Many economic quantities (and many with significant implications) are only meaningful in terms of money. Statistics like GDP and phenomena like the interest rate are not monetary representations or appearances of some underlying "real" object but exist only in terms of money.

In that context, what Mason and Jayadev take issue with is the often presumed neutrality of money. Economic and financial activity are necessarily denominated in monetary terms, with the unspoken assumption that stating such things in this manner has no underlying effect on what is being measured. Whether this is true or not may be open to discussion; but what is clear regardless is that money in itself takes on a life of its own—and we ignore this at our own peril.

Hence, Against Money often reads like an ontological examination of money. What is money really? How does it facilitate the accounting of the parties' obligations to one another? If it is neutral, then how do interest rates and inflation rates come to be, and why do we seek to manipulate these through policy? How can it be that profits arise from purely financial transactions? Indeed, if money is simply the unit of account/store of value/medium of exchange that our textbooks say, it would thus appear that what we have been painting ourselves an incomplete picture of how the economy really works. More, if that picture is incomplete at best, then the models by which we seek to manage the economy may very well be deeply flawed.

Such appears to be the inescapable conclusion of the book: we need a more complete appreciation of what money is and how it affects the economy, and only thereby can we develop more accurate model how the economy actually functions.

Certainly, anyone who reads Against Money will certainly never look at money the same way again.

That said, I have to wonder how practical it is to go down this rabbit hole. After all, everyone knows that all economic models are merely abstractions of reality and necessarily need to simplify what is otherwise complex. As such, the question is not whether or not they are accurate in themselves but whether they are accurate enough for our purposes. While Mason and Jayadev appear unsatisfied with the accuracy of existing economic models owing to the way these treat money within the analytical framework, others may not be similarly dissatisfied (as I am) for the simple reason that they get enough of the job done.

Economists can always argue over the accuracy of their models and perfect these to their hearts' content. Yet Occam's Razor still applies. At the end of the day we rely on models because they are useful, and thus the profession will have to strike that delicate balance between the elegance of simplicity on the one hand and uncompromising verisimilitude on the other in the pursuit of explanatory power.