Choosing to Have Kids During the End Times


My best friend believes that humanity has a 60% probability of becoming extinct in the next 15 years. He’s one of the smartest people I know and is an extremely well-adjusted and high-functioning person. He scoffs at conspiracy theories, doesn’t wear tin foil hats, and has an abiding love of statistics. His belief is terrifying because it derives not from fevered information bubble YouTube binges, but from years of methodical research and predictions.

But I don’t need his bleak predictions to feel like the world is ending. I’m apocalyptic enough on my own for that. And now that I have 3 young children, I’m more worried for them than I am for myself. What kind of world did I bring them into?

Is it wrong to have kids when you are aware of all the risks? Am I to blame if my children suffer through a world-ending event?

It’s Not Just In Your Head

Last summer at a family gathering, I asked my parents about my feelings of dread.

“Mom and Dad, is it just me or is the world ending? Are my concerns just what it’s like to be the father of 3 young kids?”

My parents are some of the most rational and loving humans I’ve ever met. I’ve always been their paranoid, obsessive son. The kind of son you have to constantly tell to relax and not to worry. Take a deep breath, things aren’t that bad, George.

“The world is a lot scarier now than it was when you were little.” I almost couldn’t believe they said it. Maybe they had misunderstood my question?

Later that weekend, I asked my 93-year-old grandmother. She looked at me with pain in her eyes and said, “I’m worried about what your generation will have to face.”

These Are the Ways the World Ends

And those are just the risks that have a decent shot at ending our species. If you’re more conservative and only care about you and your family living, you’ve got lots of other risks to worry about: political instability, war, and the normal plagues.

Most people probably fall into this camp, and the sad fact is that it’s historically mundane for entire families, cities, and nations to be extinguished unceremoniously.

Let’s stop here for a moment and return to the main point of this post: the kids.

As a parent of young children, the thought of even these mundane calamities befalling my children is heart-breaking. No. Those words don’t quite do the emotion justice.

If I think of my children dying, a lump forms in my throat. I lose the ability to function. My brain freezes and I teeter on the brink of tears. The idea of this happening to every person’s kids is unfathomable. It’s pointless to multiply infinite suffering by anything.

So perhaps it is rational to just not have children?

Are We Just Species-Level Hypochondriacs?

People have been predicting the end of the world since there were words to record the sentiment. I’m fond of this Wikipedia article: list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. And lest you think that all of these predictions are just about a religious end of the world, don’t overlook the predictions about floods, comets, and earthquakes.

It’s tempting to conclude that humans are just species-level hypochondriacs. Even before nuclear weapons, prophets were envisioning the end of the world in a hundred different ways. 

We now know that apart from the mundane firestorms, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves, there are more exotic and deadly natural phenomenon: 

While all of the major asteroid impact events and mass extinction events predate our species by hundreds of millions of years, far smaller events happen regularly. For a sobering read, check out the Tunguska event.

So yeah, nature is out to kill us, and that’s stressful. But that’s sort of our species’ baseline. Me, my parents, and my grandmother all seem to be cluing into something more modern and ominous. 

Many Existential Risks Really Are New

Our species has probably existed on earth for ~190,000 years. Four out of five potential ways to end ourselves were created in the last 100 years. That means that the bulk of our species’ known existential risk has been created in the last .05% of our collective existence. Two of those risks (AI and pandemics) have really only become existentially threatening in the last 20 years. That’s .01% of our species’ existence.

Against the backdrop of massively increased risk, we’ve also created instantaneous worldwide communication and algorithmic information bubbles. That seems like the perfect storm for anxious people. 

Whenever I start down this path, I reflexively think “well, we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet, so maybe I’m just worrying too much.” But we’ve come alarmingly close more than you’d think: 

  • There have been at least 20 nuclear close calls since the creation of nuclear weapons. Some incidents got so close it makes me nauseous to read the accounts.

  • Covid-19 killed ~27M people and was probably created through non-nefarious gain-of-function research plus an innocuous containment leak. Oopsie.

  • Climate change is thought to have already killed ~2M people.

So, we’ve already nearly ended our civilization with nukes about two dozen times and millions of people have already been killed by two of the other major risk vectors. And unlike previous generations, we are cursed with the knowledge of the risks, the near-misses, and the accelerating rate of change. 

Given all of the above, I have to conclude that it’s fairly rational to be more worried about our civilization and our children than previous generations.

So, Why Have Kids?

If you’ve read this far, it may seem stupid to invest time and energy bringing children into such a risky world. Selfishly, kids take a lot of work and cost a lot. If you think our civilization will end in 5 years, why not remain child-free, retire early, and sip cocktails in the Caribbean? Even if cocktail-sipping in the tropics isn’t your thing, isn’t it philosophically cruel to bring kids into a world knowing that there is an increased risk of suffering and dying young?

I think that if you believe the world is going to end in less than 5 years and you don’t already have kids, then yeah, maybe don’t do that. But if you think we have more than 5 years and / or you already have kids, I think investing in them is essential and valuable. 

The Utilitarian Argument for Kids

I’ve read a bunch about the psychology of happiness. Daniel Kahneman proposes two ways of understanding the experience of happiness: the experiencing self and the reflecting self. The experiencing self is what everyone is most familiar with. It’s just how you feel while you live your life. It’s how you feel while you read these words. 

The reflecting self is different. How did you feel when you last went on vacation? What was something particularly fun that happened in the last month or so? Spend a couple seconds thinking about those experiences. Remember all the little details: the events, the people, colors, smells, and sensations. This is your reflecting self.

Kahneman and others have shown that we think very differently about our lives in these two modes. And most importantly, he has shown that we spend the vast, vast majority of our lives experiencing rather than reflecting.

This makes intuitive sense: most people spend orders of magnitude more time just living life than thinking about living life.

I think this simple fact makes for a pretty strong argument to have kids. I’m not a strict philosophical utilitarian, but follow me down the utilitarian path for just a minute here. 

Let’s say that you have a kid and every hour of that child’s life they get to experience a range of emotions that net out slightly positive. Sure, there are tantrums, pain, and displeasure, but there’s also lots of joy, excitement, and love. Over 5 years, that child gets to experience 25,550 hours of waking, positive life.

If the world gets nuked out of existence, they might have a couple of weeks of terror and pain followed by death. Even if that terror and pain last for 3 months and every single waking second is miserable, that’s still only 5% of their life. More likely, they can find joy even in the most grim circumstances. If this point seems hard to believe, read Man’s Search for Meaning.

Also, as a father of young children, I can attest that young kids seem from the outside to be very joyful most of the time. They aren’t plagued by the morose moods of adults. The movie Inside Out did a good job of visualizing this early-life psychological simplicity.

So, unless the end of the world is extremely drawn out and painful and your kid is already prone to suffer an unusual amount of physical or mental pain, I think having kids creates net-positive human experience … if you think the child can live beyond early childhood. 

Why the caveat about age? Because among most parents I know, raising kids from 0-5 is a very net-negative experience. Some people love babies and toddlers, but I haven’t met anyone yet that loves them for 90+ hours a week. 

The Phenomenological Argument for Kids

If you’ve done your philosophical homework, you may have read Heidegger or Sartre. They represent a branch of philosophical thought called phenomenology. One of the tenets of that system of thought is that human experience is inherently valuable, regardless of the quality of that experience. 

I’m not fully convinced of this in the extreme cases. For instance, I think it’s wrong for someone dying of excruciatingly painful and terminal cancer to be denied euthanasia on the basis that their suffering is meaningful. But for more mundane examples, I agree that human experience is superior to none at all. I think most people fundamentally agree. It’s pretty obvious why: we’re all human and the vast majority of us inherently value other members of our species. 

This school of thought would argue that a child’s existence and consciousness are valuable, regardless of whether that child is happy or sad. I think it’s tough to quantify this value, but I agree in principle that our species is enriched by having another child exist vs not exist.

The Hedonic Treadmill Argument for Kids

Maybe you aren’t convinced by esoteric philosophical arguments. That’s fine, I think there’s still a very strong argument for having kids if you want to. It’s called the Hedonic Treadmill. Empirical studies find time and time again that most people revert to a happiness set point, regardless of what life throws at them. 

This was popularized in the highly influential and oft-quoted study about recent lottery winners and paraplegics. Researchers enlisted people who had recently won the state lottery and people who had recently become paraplegics or quadriplegics due to an accident. They asked those participants to rate their happiness while experiencing everyday events like watching TV and talking to friends. What they found was that in the long run, there wasn’t much difference between the two groups despite their substantially different life circumstances. 

Put more simply, we can adapt to basically anything life hurls at us, and for most of us, we’ll probably be about as happy before and after. This effect has been labeled the Hedonic Treadmill. Like walking on a treadmill, our brains quickly adapt to new life circumstances and we tend to return to a happiness “set point.” 

Why is this applicable to having children? Because it strongly suggests that over the long term, you’ll be about as happy with kids as without them.

I can hear some folks reading this now and saying “whoa, hold on a minute, one of your arguments for having kids is that they probably won’t make you more miserable?!”. But I actually think that is a very strong argument. Bear with me for a moment.

I think Jean Twenge made a pretty compelling argument in her book Generations that despite their rhetoric, most young adults that choose not to have children today do so for selfish reasons. But what the Hedonic Treadmill strongly suggests is that avoiding kids so that you can enjoy your life more won’t work for most people. 

You might think “without kids, I can have tons more fun, I can go hiking and go to parties and live in an expensive city and play video games all day!”. And those things are fun, but only for a while. After you finish playing your 30th video game of the year, you’ll probably want to do something else. After living in San Francisco for 5 years, you might want to try living somewhere else.

Personally, I think parents in the US really are less happy on average for the first 3-5 years. Childcare is criminally expensive. Most parents don’t get any leave from their work. Young children induce sleeplessness, sickness, and marital tension. And in reaction to all these changes, many parents do stressful things like move out of big cities, change jobs, and remodel homes. All of that pushes a lot of parents to be less happy moment-to-moment.

In the long term, though, parents are about as happy as non-parents.

If you think that the world is going to end next year, there’s a pretty strong argument not to have kids because you’ll struggle less in those 12 months. But if you think the world will last at least 5-10 years, there’s a pretty good chance that having kids won’t make much difference to your long-term happiness.

Also no, having a kid isn’t an environmentally immoral action.

The Life Regret Argument for Kids

People regret things they didn’t do more than the things they do. That’s true even if the things they do end badly. 

Even with advancements in reproductive technology and medical care, if you want to have kids, it’s still a very good idea to have them when you’re relatively young. So, unlike some other big decisions in life, it’s not feasible to wait and see indefinitely. 

I’m a firm believer that people who don’t strongly want children shouldn’t have them. The US cultural norm that you grow up, marry, and have kids has become less prevalent, but is still too strong. If you don’t want kids, you shouldn’t have them. It’s that simple. And anyone that pressures or shames you for that decision is wrong.

If you do feel strongly that you want kids, but are worried about the state of the world, however, things are more tricky. If you’re in your mid-30s and feel strongly that you want kids, but decide not to do so because of political strife, climate change, nuclear war, etc, you may come to regret the decision. And there are very few options to go back and change your mind.

Why I’m Raising Kids in the End Times

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life. I’m not proud of it, but there is a certain comfort in the thought of surrendering to nihilism. What’s the point in struggling to raise children when there’s a non-trivial chance Putin will end the world in 2026 with the flip of a button? When you’re in that mind-space, you’re numb to all the fears and concerns.

But for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, I still think having children is worthwhile. Is it always pleasant? No. Does being a parent heighten my concerns about existential threats? Yes. But to simply surrender to nihilism and depression would make the world a worse place. If for no other reason than to show my children how I want them to act, I’m not willing to do that.

Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023 and What They Taught Me

Here are the top 10 nonfiction books I read in 2023 and 3 things that each of them taught me.

★★★★★ An Immense World by Ed Yong

  1. An organism’s umwelt (pronounced “um-velt”) is a description of what they can perceive. Many organisms have such different umwelt that they are essentially existing in different universes without any perception of one another.

  2. It makes no sense to make statements like “a dog’s nose is 10,000x as sensitive as a humans.” Dogs almost certainly perceive the world in radically different ways unrelated to the number of nerve endings in their olfactory bulbs.

  3. Humans only perceive a very narrow range of possible sensory signals. To take a single example, elephants can communicate with one another using subsonic frequencies that are imperceptible to us. In a very real sense, the world is fundamentally different depending on your species.

★★★★★ Chip War by Chris Miller

  1. Only 3 companies in the world are capable of physically manufacturing the most advanced computer chips that power everything from laptop computers to cell phones: TSMC (Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation), Samsung, and Intel.

  2. Only 1 company in the world is capable of creating the specialized ultra-UV lithography machines that these three chip fabs require: ASML. It’s lithography machines cost $300-400M each. It takes 13 containers and 250 crates to ship a single machine.

  3. Because chip fabrication facilities are so mind-bogglingly expensive to build and run, many companies known for their electronics design (Apple, Nvidia, et al) don’t physically manufacture their own chips. They design chips which are then fabricated by TSMC, Samsung, or Intel.

★★★★★ The School of Life: An Emotional Education

This book defies the pattern of science-y nonfiction. It’s not, in my opinion, especially useful to summarize in bullet form. You’ll have to just check it out and see if you agree with the points.

★★★★★ Generations by Jean M. Twenge

  1. I used to think that generations were a bit like astrology: make-believe concepts that people used to justify pre-existing biases. After reading this book, I realize that view is probably too extreme. There are real differences between differently-aged people. Whether you’re comfortable lumping them together using birth years or not doesn’t have anything to do with large and observable differences in the way those people think and act. So by all means go ahead and disagree with whether “millennials” start in 1979 or 1982, but people born around that time have significantly different life trajectories to people born in the late 1950s.

  2. Younger people’s (Gen Z) mental health started to decline dramatically starting in 2012. A broad consensus is forming that the cause of that decline is due to cell phone use and social networking in particular. The impact has most heavily impacted young women.

  3. The falling birth rate in developed nations is probably being driven by increasingly capable technology, wealth, and social acceptance of individualistic behaviors. The alarmist rhetoric about people not having babies because of climate change or overpopulation don’t hold up under research scrutiny. Most people that don’t have children do it for the obvious reason: children are insanely expensive and inconvenient. In the past, more communal societies distributed the cost of raising kids at the same time that it put pressure on individuals to have families to adhere to social norms. As societies have become more individualistic, the cost of raising kids has skyrocketed for parents at the same time as society has punished adults less and less for choosing not to have kids in the first place. Hence, fewer babies.

★★★★★ Seek and Hide by Amy Gajda

  1. The right to privacy has been a part of English common law in some form or other for hundreds of years. Americans imported it into the original 13 colonies, but enforcement has always been inconsistent.

  2. At the end of the day, the main battles in privacy law enforcement have centered around relatively powerful people attempting to obscure their deeds from the public. US society has gone through periods where it was deemed more and less acceptable to muckrake and expose those secrets. During the late 1790s, for instance, journalists and muckrakers had a largely free hand to malign politicians and businesspeople. During the early and mid-20th century, by contrast, the right of privacy was more strictly enforced and courts ruled more in favor of protecting individual’s private details.

  3. We are currently in what Gadja thinks is the end of a period of particularly lopsided privacy enforcement that protects journalists and internet platforms.

★★★★★ Immune by Philipp Dettmer

  1. The immune system is so dangerous to the body’s tissue that there are an almost mind-boggling number of steps, checks, and safeguards on it’s activation. So, if you ever see a medication that promises to “increase immune response” be skeptical: you don’t want an over-active immune system.

  2. The body keeps a chemical memory of every pathogen it has ever encountered. That “memory” can be activated days, months, or years after first encounter. It also means that if you think of our immune system as a library of sorts, it is one of the most impressive information storage systems.

  3. When your tissue is infected, it becomes warm to the touch. This is a localized version of having a high temperature during a bout with the flu. Scientists currently hypothesize that the added heat does help a bit to kill off pathogenic invaders, but mostly, it’s to facilitate easier and faster protein synthesis for the immune system. Basically, we get warmer when we’re fighting off a bacterium or virus because the immune system can more efficiently create warrior cells at slightly higher temperatures.

★★★★★ The Fall of Robespierre by Colin Jones

  1. Robespierre’s contemporary oratory and rhetoric sounds unnervingly similar to modern populist leaders.

  2. As with most tyrants, Robespierre held onto power through the use of violence and scare tactics. But this was also his undoing. The primary reason he was removed from power wasn’t due to a widespread popular backlash against his methods, it was because other powerful members of the revolutionary government were concerned that he might kill them.

  3. There were many unlikely events that led to Robespierre’s removal and execution. If any one of them had ended differently, there’s a pretty good chance he would have survived and continued running the revolutionary government. In one particularly comedic situation, overwhelming military strength was arrayed against Robespierre’s enemies and it looked like the entire rebellion was over. But the leader of the that military detachment misunderstood how many guards there were in a government building. Fearing a clash with a non-existent enemy and fearing for his own title and office, he chose instead to retreat.

★★★★★ Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

  1. International trade benefits developing nations far more than it benefits the US. The authors estimate that if all international US trade were halted tomorrow, it would only cost American consumers about 2.5% more per year to source all goods and services domestically. This isn’t a good argument to cease international trade, though. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have better lives due to trade with the US. It is, however, an important fact to keep in mind when creating policy.

  2. One of the primary hypotheses the authors put forward to explain rising income and wealth inequality in the US is a lack of a social safety net. While it seems like an obviously good idea on the surface for recently-laid-off workers in Cleveland to move to San Francisco to take advantage of more plentiful and highly-paid work, most can’t afford to do that. That’s not to say that they are modern day Okies fleeing the dustbowl with no money for gasoline. But expensive housing, a lack of subsidized childcare, and inaccessible health benefits make most disenfranchised workers rationally conclude that it’s better to remain in a place where they have social ties, even if there is no gainful employment. This perpetuates economic inequality. The laid off workers get poorer in small rural towns while coastal knowledge workers get richer in big cities.

  3. In response to growing automation and AI-fueled job destruction, we could significantly increase social stability by offering displaced workers government-subsidized jobs doing work that robots can’t do such as in-person teaching, caring for children, or producing certain kinds of art. The way to identify these heavily-impacted people, however, will be difficult and contentious.

★★★★☆ Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

  1. Most fungi are not visible to us humans. Mushrooms are only the fruiting part of most fungi plants, and not every fungi species distributes it’s reproductive material via the air. The overwhelming mass of fungi on earth are contained in rocks and topsoil.

  2. The whole premise of the video game and TV show The Last of Us is way less far-fetched at a scientific level than I had expected. Seriously, it’s a bit terrifying how advanced and pervasive fungi are and how little we can do to control them.

  3. The root systems of most plants offload the production of necessary chemical symbiotic fungi species. That means that most trees and plant species would be incapable of existing on the planet without fungi.

★★★★☆ When Crack was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

  1. Crack babies don’t exist. Or rather, the impact of crack on pregnancy outcomes was massively over-stated during the late 1980s and early 1990s to fit with a racist narrative of inner city black women and their lifestyle choices.

  2. There is actually fairly solid evidence that the US federal government colluded with large, known cocaine traffickers during the 1980s as part of the Iran-Contra affair. While there isn’t a direct link between entities like the CIA and cocaine distribution in inner-city neighborhoods, the conspiracy theory about the US government using cocaine to control black communities isn’t as misplaced as I had assumed.

  3. The end of the crack epidemic appears to have largely been driven by young people witnessing the ravages of the drug on their communities and abstaining. Ramsey even suggests that influential hip hop artists like Dr. Dre may have intentionally glorified the use of less destructive drugs like marijuana to discourage kids from using cocaine, crack, and heroine.

Other Books I Read in Q4

★★★★☆ Platonic, by Marisa G. Franco

★★★★☆ Stalin by Oleg V. Khlevniuk

★★★★☆ When Crack was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

★★★☆☆ Growing Up Human by Brenna Hassett

★★★☆☆ A Storm of Witchcraft by Emerson W. Baker

★★★☆☆ How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy

★★★☆☆ Gangsters vs. Nazis by Michael Benson

★★★☆☆ What the Ermine Saw by Eden Collinsworth

★★★☆☆ Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin

★★★☆☆ Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait

★★★☆☆ Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse by William Neuman

★★★☆☆ The Dive by Stephen McGinty

★★☆☆☆ The Declassification Engine by Matthew Connelly

★☆☆☆☆ Fortune’s Bazaar by Vaudine England

★☆☆☆☆ I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter










2023 Reading Update

So far in 2023, I’ve read 24 books and gave up on 7. I would have written about all these awesome books earlier, but writing on my new personal finance blog has taken up more of my time than previously.

If you’ve read any good nonfiction books, please pass the recommendations my way. I’m always looking for new material!

★★★★★ Chip War

If you read one book this year, I would recommend this one. The creation of microprocessor chips isn’t just important to techies and nerds anymore. The country that can produce more and better chips will prevail over all other countries. Miller not only describes the incredibly fascinating way in which chips are made, but makes a compelling argument about the hot topic of chip dominance between China and the US. I couldn’t put this one down and now really want to take a tour of a chip fab if I ever get the chance.

★★★★★ The School of Life

The School of Life doesn’t get everything correct, but there’s enough really good wisdom in here to make it a must read. This was initially hard for me to get into because it’s so thoroughly unscientific. At no point does this devolve into the popular science trope of citing social science research. You’re never asked to believe in the outcomes of a study conducted at such and such university that proves that love is real. But I think that’s the key part of the charm: it’s direct and even when it misses, it’s still thought-provoking.

★★★★★ Immune

I remember taking biology 120 in college: it was a big, long, and somewhat boring lecture series. This book is the opposite of that. Philipp Dettmer does an incredible job of making the specific mechanics of our immune systems accessible and fascinating. There’s so much detail in here that I almost immediately forgot most of it, but I came away with a deep, abiding understanding of the absolutely absurd level of complexity built into how our bodies keep us healthy.

★★★★★ The Fall of Robespierre

In my opinion, this is history writing at it’s finest. Rather than describing the events of the French revolution at a high level (booooorrriinnng), he zooms in and tells the deeply human, messy, and interconnected history of how a seminal historical event actually unfolded. What is often described in history textbooks in a couple of sentences and comes across as dry and predetermined here comes alive with ambiguity, reversals of fortune, random strokes of good luck, and human tension. I wish that I was taught this sort of history during my time in school.

★★★★☆ The Making of the Atomic Bomb

This would have gotten 5/5 stars, but good lord does Rhodes take a long time focusing on the history of physics. Easily the first half of the book is just focused on the extremely detailed history of the physicists and experiments that led up to what the title promises: the creation of the atomic bomb. And I get it, the title is about the making of the bomb, but I would have appreciated a longer epitaph about what some of the key figures did after the Manhattan Project. I was especially curious to learn what many thought about their contributions decades later.

★★★★☆ Chaos Monkeys

This one won’t change the way you see the world in a fundamental way, but good lord is it entertaining and accurate. Martinez was a couple of years ahead of me going through YCombinator and working at Facebook. But our experiences overlapped so closely that I feel like I am in a unique position to judge the accuracy of this book. And it is 100% accurate. If you ever wanted to know what it’s actually like to be funded by YC, work at Meta, or just be a techie in Silicon Valley, look no further.

★★★★☆ Barbarians at the Gate

This one deserves it’s reputation as a classic among business books. It’s well-researched, readable, and interesting at a human level. Personally, I think the people most likely to benefit from reading this book are younger people who don’t have a lot of working experience yet. It does a really good job of explaining how business at big corporations is really conducted. Obviously, the cast of characters here were chosen because they are almost caricatures of themselves, but if you’ve worked in corporate America long enough, you’ve met every single person described in these pages.

★★★★☆ Preparing for War

Onishi might be wrong about his primary thesis, but it is at least consistent and may answer a question that’s been on my mind for the last 8 years: why is conservative political ideology so nonsensical? His theory is that most conservative rhetoric is an intentional misdirection from the real truth that the only consistent Republican system of belief is white supremacy. That’s almost certainly an oversimplification for any one conservative person’s system of beliefs, but the shoe does seem to fit the party’s direction at the national level. At the very least, I’d encourage you to read it and make your own assessment of his hypothesis.

★★★★☆ Entangled Life

I had actually been avoiding this one despite the insanely positive reviews. I mean, c’mon, how much is there to know about mushrooms? But I was wrong and the reviews were right: this one really is insanely interesting. If, like me, you thought that fungi were only just mushrooms then you should do yourself a favor and read this book. It was so good that I found myself spontaneously gushing about it to coworkers.

★★★★☆ The Secret Life of Groceries

This book could have easily devolved into another Supersize Me, editorialized expose about grocery stores, but it rises above that. I learned a lot about why Trader Joes is so likable, why it’s nearly impossible for good food to be sold at large box stores, and why the food we eat is neither so terrible as journalists would have you believe or as good as food marketers claim it is.

★★★★☆ John Adams

I love the musical Hamilton. The show briefly covers the Adams administration, but I realized recently that I didn’t really know much about him nor his work. And of course, David McCullough is a nonfiction legend. I’ve read most of his books, and they’re all great.

This might have scored higher with me if I hadn’t accidentally downloaded the abridged version of the audio book. So, don’t do that if you actually want to learn about Adams. Otherwise, I really enjoyed refreshing my knowledge on the founders. I came away thinking that Hamilton was probably the lesser of the two men, but the musical is still great.

★★★☆☆ Dead in the Water

I have a fascination with large boats. I have no idea why. But if you’re like me and maritime shipping and boats are at all interesting to you, this one will definitely keep your turning the pages. It’s about what is probably the largest known maritime insurance fraud that occurred about 15 years ago. It’s got everything you want in a story: a bad guy, a good guy, murder, fraud, extortion, and … big boats.

★★★☆☆ The World in a Grain

I was worried that this book would fall into the category of pop-sci books that became a fad in the mid 2010s. They all follow the same pattern and pitch: Simple Noun: How Simple Noun is Important to Every Person That Has Ever Lived and May Have Killed Your Parents. I’ve read a couple books in this genre and they can be pretty cloying in their fascination with their subject. But this one is significantly better than the rest of it’s ilk. For one, I think Beiser’s point about the importance of sand to the modern world is actually accurate. From concrete to glass to silicon chips, we really do depend on sand quite a bit. And I knew next to nothing about it prior to reading this fun book.

★★★☆☆ Trust the Plan

Given how unhinged the political right has become in the US and the visibility of this particular conspiracy theory to adherents of that ideology, I felt I needed to better understand what QAnon really is about. It turns out it’s even more insane and vapid than I had assumed. I had thought that perhaps, due to the relatively high profile this particular conspiracy theory had attained, there would be more to it than random posts on 4Chan, but …. nope. Having read it, I feel equal parts dismayed and educated.

★★★☆☆ Uneasy Street

I love reading about how people think about and understand money. And this book does a good job of accurately representing how wealthy people understand and cope with their own wealth. This one didn’t cause me to fundamentally reevaluate my life or anything, but it was a fun read and I think Sherman did a good job avoiding the popular “eat the rich” narrative.

★★★☆☆ The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe

I want my kids to read this when they get a bit older. Novella’s commitment to skeptical thought is a breath of fresh air. It’s deeply entertaining to read. It’s like a written version of MythBusters but with a lot less filer. My only gripe is one inconsistency in his approach. He really dives into and tears apart most folk beliefs, but seems to make an exception for theories that surround the AI singularity. I think that AI doomerism casts a spell on many hyper-intelligent rationalists and I wish he’d taken off the proverbial gloves and asked harder questions on this topic.

★★★☆☆ The Perfectionists

This was a fun read and I loved that Winchester organizes the book by measures of precision. I didn’t learn anything earth-shattering here, but it was entertaining and I learned lots of factoids along the way. I also came away with a better understanding of just how imprecise most human-made objects are.

★★★☆☆ Rise of the Robots

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that AI is going to steal your job and probably cause the collapse of our society. So, you know, not much to see here.

★★★☆☆ Rise and Kill First

Okay, the premise here is really fascinating. I knew nothing about Israel’s explicit policy of assassination as a tool of the state. From there, I assumed that Mossad and other associated defense agencies must be hyper-competent killing machines. And certainly they have killed a bunch of people, but I came away from the book reaffirmed in my belief that almost all spycraft and covert military stuff hews closer to the depiction of the CIA in Burn After Reading than any Tom Clancy novel.

★★★☆☆ The Wager

Who doesn’t love a good adventure/survival porn book from the age of discovery? That’s right, nobody. If Scorsese and DiCaprio ever actually release a movie based on this material, I’ll definitely watch it.

★★★☆☆ Endless Forms

I hate wasps. And I actually mean to use the word “hate” here. It probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve been stung repeatedly by them over my life and even sent to the hospital due to an allergic reaction. If they at least had the good manners to die when they sting, this penchant for stinging all the time could sort of be forgiven, but no, they aren’t even polite enough for that.

So I was interested to see if Sumner could convince me to abandon my well-deserved dislike of these murder flies. The short answer is no, they’re still beastly and awful. But they are at least more interesting than I had previously understood. Also, most of the wasps you actually see aren’t the aggressive, social species that would actually sting you. So there’s that I guess.

★★★☆☆ Who Gets In and Why

College admissions is pretty borked. This book is probably not worth reading unless you have a kid that’s college-bound, but it' is interesting to get a glimpse at just how subjective the process really is. Also, I’ll be curious to see how long we keep pretending that essays are a valid way to communicate anything of value in a post-ChatGPT world.

★★★☆☆ The Great Displacement

I had hoped that Jake Bittle would go beyond what I had already learned about how climate change would affect people’s lives here in the US. He did add a little color around the edges, but he didn’t try to do any advanced modeling or make any specific recommendations, which was a bit of a letdown. Basically the south and west are pretty much doomed due to desertification, drought, and increasing temperatures. So, nothing new here.

★★★☆☆ The Escape Artist

This was a good read on a topic that I already knew a lot about. I do hope that this book is incorporated into school curricula, though, because it tells a far more nuanced historical account of the Holocaust than is typically discussed.

Didn’t Finish

★★☆☆☆ The World

I wasn’t even able to make it through the introduction. Too long-winded! Get to the point.

★★☆☆☆ All That Moves Us

I thought this one would something akin to Complications, but this wasn’t as well-written and tended towards saccharine, feel-good stories.

★★☆☆☆ Cobalt Red

I’m a jaded, cynical bastard, but I find it completely unsurprising that big western hardware companies exploit other people in the world and that their suffering is exquisite and completely unnecessary. If you haven’t read about this sort of thing before, this is worth reading about, but I just found it sad to reflect on yet more senseless misery.

★★☆☆☆ The Last Days of the Dinosaurs

I was hoping for lots of science and disaster porn, but instead, got lots of poetic descriptions of late-Jurassic landscapes.

★★☆☆☆ Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

You know that corny 1920s radio announcer voice? Yeah, kinda what it’s like reading this book. I don’t mean that the narration of the audio book sounds like that, but the personalities here are so larger-than-life and so much of their time, it was too much.

★★☆☆☆ The Lessons of History

First, the audio book version of this was ruined by a poorly-recorded interview with Will Durant that’s borderline un-listenable. Second, if you read history or nonfiction books, you’ve probably already figured out most of the lessons they cover.

★★☆☆☆ There Are No Accidents

Felt like an overly-long Atlantic article. The world is unfair and people get hurt as a result of it.

★★☆☆☆ Infinite Powers

If you like math, you’ll probably really like this one. I hated Calculus and I still made it through about halfway, which is a huge vote of confidence. But, at the end of the day, this is a book about math and it’s never been my passion.

The Top 10 Nonfiction Books I Read in 2022

This year I read 21 books. Here are the best 10. For more on the 11 books I didn’t include, you can check out my Q3 Book Review and my recent Q4 Book Review posts:

★★★★★ The Betrayal of Anne Frank

I first read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school and I didn’t really understand it. I don’t mean that I didn’t comprehend the facts. I read it and learned about Anne and her family and what they went through in the Second World War.

But it wasn’t until I had kids that I felt like I was able to actually understand the tragedy and heartbreak of their experiences. And until I saw this book on Audible, I had simply assumed that nobody knew who had tipped off the Gestapo to their presence in the annex. I think I had actually gone one step further and made the assumption that it would be impossible to figure out the mystery after so many intervening years.

I was wrong. This book isn’t fascinating because it purports to answer an international mystery known to millions of people. The book is fascinating because of the way in which it does so. I learned a bunch of incredible details about life in Amsterdam in the waning months of WW2 that I had never thought to consider. And that’s ultimately what good history is all about: connecting modern readers to what it was like to be alive at a particular moment in the past with all the mundane, beautiful, and horrific details.

★★★★☆ The Psychology of Money

My rationalist friends hate me for this one, but I think this book is a great set of easy rules of thumb for using money to get what you want out of life. The fundamental premise that Housel takes is that humans are not inherently rational and most of us don’t actually like to think about money all that much. Despite this, almost every living adult has to deal with money. And not just in a transactional should-I-buy-this-book-right-now sort of way, we have to make long-term decisions about how to invest our money, how to care for our aging parents, and how to save for our children’s education.

If you are the sort of person who doesn’t particularly enjoy doing rationalist thought exercises to uncover your terminal beliefs, calibrating the accuracy of your future predictions with statistical models, and better understanding how Monte Carlo simulation work, this book is a great way to develop a healthy relationship with money. Personally, I kinda enjoy all that nerdy stuff, but even I have days when I feel tired and the lessons in this book are good first-approximations of monetary wisdom.

★★★★☆ Allow Me to Retort

Equal parts informative, depressing, and hilarious, Mystal’s analysis of the US Constitution is a great read, especially for folks like me that aren’t steeped in legal history. His central premise is that the US Constitution was an amazing piece of law that worked very well to create one of the most prosperous and enduring democracies the world has ever seen. But it was also written by racist slaveholders that were explicitly not interested in creating a country of equal rights for its citizens. And insofar as we want that kind of a world to exist today, it’s a pretty garbage place to start.

I was raised to revere the US Constitution, and as a snapshot of historic intent that was successful beyond any of it’s writer’s wildest dreams, it’s pretty amazing. But as the founding fathers themselves believed, no single legal document should be expected to endure for centuries without major overhauls and re-writes. Mystal’s suggestions for making those revisions seem appropriate given our current political moment.

The only reason I didn’t give this one 5/5 stars is that Mystal’s writing style is pretty monotonous. I binged this one pretty hard, and I think I just got burnt out on that particular style of delivery.

★★★★☆ How to Be Perfect

As I get older, I find myself thinking more about philosophy and it’s implications for my life. But reading most philosophy books is an exercise is protracted self-punishment. You could be doing something fun, like having your toenails pulled out, but instead you’re stuck trying to figure out what the actual heck Heidegger is trying to communicate.

This is where Michael Shur comes to the rescue. As the author of the wildly funny TV show The Good Place, he takes a hilarious and light approach to the most weighty questions of what it means to be alive. Not only did I laugh most of the way through the book, I actually came away with a functional understanding of the major western philosophical disciplines and how my own personal beliefs adhere to or diverge from those approaches.

This book is like an intro to philosophy lecture and a standup comedy routine rolled up into one. The reason this didn’t get 5 stars is that it didn’t fundamentally change my perspective on life, the universe, and everything. Which is a pretty tall order for any single book.

★★★★☆ The Alchemy of Air

This one details how modern humanity is able to feed all ~8 billion of us. It’s a fascinating story that involves an ardently nationalism German Jew, a savvy industrialist and inventor, and Hitler’s Third Reich. Along the way, I learned about fascinating side topics like how humanity used to rely on bird shit to feed ourselves and how an enormous factory in eastern Germany was briefly the allies’ most important bombing target in the waning months of WW2.

Underneath the historical details, Hager proves himself to be a compelling storyteller and historian. Not only is the book deeply-researched and accurate, he does that rarest of things for a nonfiction writer: he only tells you the most interesting stuff.

★★★★☆ Empires of Light

Before reading this one, I would have told you that I knew a fair amount about how electricity was discovered and commercialized. But to quote George R.R. Martin, “you know nothing, John Snow.” I didn’t realize that Tesla was such a bad businessman. Like, I knew he was no Edison, but wow. And I hadn’t realized that George Westinghouse was such an important and pivotal figure in the story of how we got electric lights. The only reason this one didn’t get the final star is that I feel like I’ve been reading too much about the late 19th century recently and so some of the ancillary topics just didn’t feel as fresh.

★★★☆☆ The Last Pirate of New York

This book won’t redefine how you perceive the world or shake the foundations of your reality, but it’s a damn good book filled with interesting historical details about the city that never sleeps. I learned about the origins of the word “Shanhai’d,” I learned a lot about how murder investigations were run decades before forensic techniques were discovered, and how worldly the past really was. At the end of the day, though, you shouldn’t read it to learn any one particular thing, you should read it because it’s just a great story.

★★★☆☆ Einstein: His Life and Universe

Maybe it’s a bit unfair for me to rate this a 3/5. I knew it couldn’t be a 5-star review because I was already so familiar with Einstein’s achievements and contributions to science. But I felt that I just didn’t know as much as I should about the details of how he came about those achievements. The story of his life is more interesting than I expected and Isaacson does a good job of retelling his major life events with a balanced hand. The one place where I think he came off as being a bit too soft on the man was in the way that he underplayed how hurtful he was to those directly around him. His infidelities were legion and Isaacson brushes them off a bit too gently in my opinion.

★★★☆☆ The Storyteller

I hadn’t realized just how much of the music I grew up on was either directly created by or heavily influenced by a single man: David Grohl. From Smells Like Teen Spirit to Everlong, this guy’s songwriting and musical prowess practically defines a generation. And as you might expect, the stories he has to tell about his life and career are pretty damn entertaining. He’s met every amazing musical artist, he’s performed to tens of thousands of people, and as the title suggests, he’s pretty good at telling interesting stories about it all.

There were two reasons I gave this one 3/5 stars: first, the end of the book is quite a bit weaker than the start. I’m guessing the editor pushed Grohl to hit a certain word count, but that meant including some less-than-riveting stories at the end that kinda devolved into Hollywood-style hero worship. Second, there’s only so much you can rhapsodize about metal/rock music and avoid jumping the shark.

★★★☆☆ The Facemaker

I didn’t know much about reconstructive surgery. I didn’t even know that the term “plastic surgery” doesn’t refer to the material we know today by that name. It was originally used to describe materials like wood and rubber that were “plastic” in that they could be shaped by doctors to replace parts of the body. If you were alive in the 1730s, for instance, getting a wooden peg leg would have been considered “plastic surgery.”

Okay, that’s a fun little trivia tidbit, but the real reason I would recommend this book is that it tells a story that has largely been lost to modernity about what injuries meant to the soldiers who served in World War I.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to reading more books in 2023. If you have any great recommendations, send them my way. And if you enjoyed this, you should follow me on:

  • Substack - where I summarize the stuff I learn from books like these into 3 minute reads.

  • Twitter - thoughts about economics and technology.

  • LinkedIn - what I’ve learned from being a YC founder and being a PM at Facebook and Google.

Q4 2022 Book Review

Here’s what I read in Q4 2022.

★★★★☆ The Alchemy of Air

This was a really, really good book. The only reason it didn’t get 5 stars is that it didn’t fundamentally change the way I view the world. But it is everything else you’d want from a great nonfiction book: fascinating characters, counter-factual revelations about important events in history, and chemistry. What’s not to like? My wife has gotten tired of me talking about this one, it’s that good.

★★★★☆ Empires of Light

Before reading this one, I would have told you that I knew a fair amount about how electricity was discovered and commercialized. But to quote George R.R. Martin, “you know nothing, John Snow.” I didn’t realize that Tesla was such a bad businessman. Like, I knew he was no Edison, but wow. And I hadn’t realized that George Westinghouse was such an important and pivotal figure in the story of how we got electric lights. The only reason this one didn’t get the final star is that I feel like I’ve been reading too much about the late 19th century recently and so some of the ancillary topics just didn’t feel as fresh.

★★★☆☆ The World For Sale

A decent summary of the world of asset trading. I didn’t know much about the industry prior to reading the book. Going in, I thought that perhaps asset trading was somehow different than other sorts of financial trading, but was disappointed to realize that it’s 99% identical. If you’ve seen The Wolf of Wall Street, you’ve basically read this book already, except that rather than scamming people in the US, asset traders were doing dubious business in developing nations instead. There are some interesting portraits of savants and hucksters in here, which kept it readable.

★★★☆☆ The Storm of Steel

War is hell, but for Ernst Junger, it’s clear that war is also deeply meaningful and important. I found myself more fascinated by Junger than his retelling of his experiences in the trenches of the first World War. He was a decorated German soldier and hard right nationalist, but he didn’t support the Nazis. He was explicitly spared deportation and other depredations by the Nazi leadership because of his stature as a writer and social icon. He wrote scores of books in his lifetime and was a polarizing figure until the day he died. I liked My War Gone By, I Miss it So more as a recounting of someone who finds a home in the experience of war.

★★★☆☆ The Order of Time

I feel pretty confident that I just wasn’t smart enough to really understand whole swaths of this book. Something something the scale of organisms determines how they perceive time’s movement? I think? After reading Einstein’s biography and re-familiarizing myself with his theories of relativity, I think I understood more of the ideas in this book, but it was touch and go for at least 30% of the content. I’d love to discuss this book with someone that’s far better at physics than me to see if I even understood the big points correctly.

★★★☆☆ The Last Pirate of New York

This book won’t redefine how you perceive the world or shake the foundations of your reality, but it’s a damn good book filled with interesting historical details about the city that never sleeps. I learned about the origins of the word “Shanhai’d,” I learned a lot about how murder investigations were run decades before forensic techniques were discovered, and how worldly the past really was. But again, it’s just a great story.

★★★☆☆ Einstein: His Life and Universe

Maybe it’s a bit unfair for me to rate this a 3/5. I knew it couldn’t be a 5-star review because I was already so familiar with Einstein’s achievements and contributions to science. But I felt that I just didn’t know as much as I should about the details of how he came about those achievements. The story of his life is more interesting than I expected and Isaacson does a good job of retelling his major life events with a balanced hand. I think he underplayed how hurtful he was to those directly around him, but I’m just intrinsically judgmental about infidelity.

Getting to Base Camp is Skill, Getting to the Summit is Luck

“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” -Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb

Most types of achievement I have observed follow a power law. 

You see this pattern in lots of highly-visible areas of life: wealth, power, followers, attention, income, and corporate titles to name just a few. As technology becomes increasingly pervasive and people have more access to world markets, talent pools, and social circles, this trend will continue to accelerate. Taylor Swift briefly holding every spot in the billboard top 10 is not an anomaly: most types of success are being concentrated in ever-greater quantities in the hands of a dwindling number of humans. 

But I’m not interested in rehashing my very long series on income inequality, I’m interested in some observations that I’ve made about how people traverse this curve and achieve greater things. If you are all the way out on the far right-hand side of the curve, how do you move to the left? Frame this in whatever way is personally relevant for you: maybe you are a deeply-passionate musician, novelist, teacher, or farmer. It’s natural to want to sell more records, write more books, teach more students, or increase per-acre yields.

Climbing Mountains

I like climbing mountains. When you are planning a hike up a big mountain, there are two categories of logistics you plan for: 

  1. Getting to a place on the mountain where you can make a summit attempt.

  2. Making a summit attempt.

Preparing for the former is often 90% within your control. You carefully inventory your gear, check your permits, and drive to the trailhead early in the morning.

But getting up that last little bit of the mountain to stand on the summit is mostly about playing the odds. If you want to climb Denali, for instance, the best thing you can do to increase your odds of actually doing it is to block off a couple weeks (preferably a whole month) so that you’ll be there when the weather is just right. You can always try to force it, of course, but that carries the very real threat of injury or death. And in case you think that never actually happens, 96 people have died on Denali since 1903. [source]

The Determinism Tree Line

What I’ve been describing is a system where the inputs and outputs have a discrete discontinuity. If that language sounds fancy, there’s a good hiking metaphor here too. On a big mountain, there is a point in the ascent where the trees suddenly disappear. The vegetation is discretely discontinuous at a certain elevation. Below that elevation and you’re hiking through a thick forest, above it, there’s nothing but sky, rocks, and some small shrubs. 

For many important deterministic systems, inputs and outputs are deliberately transparent and predictable. The most ubiquitous of these systems that I’ve come across is education. In the US public school system, things are predictable: you memorize the things the adults tell you to, you write the memorized stuff down, and you are rewarded for it. This is predictable because we have a lot of control over the inputs: ourselves! You see the same thing in other systems built for young people: internships, apprenticeships, and entry-level jobs are built to make it clear that taking a desirable action results in desirable results and vice-versa. 

And this is where a lot of smart people get lost and confused. After spending twenty-some odd years in artificial, deterministic systems where inputs and outputs are prescribed, measured, quantified, and transparent, they make the mistake of assuming that other important dimensions of life are similarly predictable. They try to apply the tool set that made them successful in deterministic systems to systems that are increasingly random. They try to ascend Mt. Everest wearing the light pants they wore while hiking to the base of the Khumbu Glacier.

But the way that you get an entry-level job is very different from the way that you become the CEO of that organization. The way that you learn to run a small diner is very different from the way that you become a multinational franchise owner. 

Tactics for Managing Randomness and Reaching the Summit

Just because systems become less deterministic as you level up in your chosen pursuit doesn’t mean that you lose all ability to influence them. But that wording is important: for most stuff in life, the older you get, the more you work within systems where your desired outcome can only be influenced, not directly controlled.

The rational thing to do is to start treating the things you want to achieve in terms of probabilities. Rather than taking direction from peers and superiors and assuming causal relationships between the directions and outcomes, you must formulate guesses about what relationships exist between your actions and the things you want. You then test those relationships and then invest your time in the activities with the highest correlation. 

In my career so far, I’ve identified a number of things that seem to be strongly correlated with outsized returns: network size, generalist skill sets, intellectual leverage, and sustainability.

  1. Maximize for professional network size. One of the best ways I know of to increase the odds of experiencing unprecedented good luck in your career is to build a very large and very high-quality network of peers. This is what MBA programs are actually good for: introducing you to a lot of really hard-working, connected, ambitious people. But for folks that don’t want to spend 2 years of your life schmoozing your peers or for folks like me who are too old to get the benefits from such a program, when a career decision comes up, you should always choose the option that allows you meet and work with large groups of other bright and ambitious people. This means switching companies, teams, or projects regularly. It also probably requires you to work at one or two really big companies where you can meet a lot of people rapidly.

  2. Don’t over-specialize. If you’re already at base camp, you probably have enough specialist skill that you’ll hit strong diminishing returns if you keep investing. Early in your career, it makes lots of sense to go deep and become an expert at a couple of skills, but by the time you’re mid/senior in your discipline, you’ll find that people are rewarded not for deep specialization, but for modest specialization and the ability to spot patterns and create solutions across disciplines. Avoiding over-specialization also helps the first goal by forcing you to meet all sorts of different people working on different problems.

  3. Learn to clone yourself. Invest in skills that increase your leverage instead of increasing your deliverables. Writing is a good way to clone yourself. As you read this post, you’re engaging with words and ideas that I wrote at some point in the past, but you are still engaging with me, George Saines from across space and time (hello by the way!). Responding to questions on Quora or Stack Overflow has the same effect: you get to multiply your presence. The more “surface area” you have, the more likely that you’ll be considered for the lead role in that new broadway play about one of the American founding fathers (who is Alexander Hamilton anyways?). You’ll be more likely to be invited to be employee #5 at the next Facebook. You’ll be front of mind when a seasoned angel investor is syndicating a financing round for the next Uber. 

  4. Avoid burnout at all costs. It’s fine to work intensely. It might even be fine to work intensely for a substantial period of time, but avoid burnout at all costs. If you burn out, you risk being incapable of making a summit push if the opportunity presents itself. As Nassim Taleb discusses in Black Swan, if you burn out (he uses the phrase “blow up”), the game is over and you lose all the leverage you’ve carefully built up. The way this has worked for me is that if I find myself in a role where I’m having to work nights and weekends, I give myself a deadline. It’s an up or out system: if I hit my deadline and I haven’t achieved my goal, I leave the role, quit the company, work for a different manager, etc. It takes discipline to see the pattern and commit ahead of time, but avoiding burnout is worth the effort.

You might look at this list and think “George, that stuff is super boring. Don’t you have any better advice that can get me to VP in the next 6 months?” And the answer is “not really.” If you think this stuff is boring, you’ll be disappointed to learn that climbing huge mountains is much the same. You take seriously all the boring, mundane, everyday logistics of getting to basecamp. Then you give yourself as many opportunities as possible to seize the first 3 clear days to touch the heavens.

If you enjoyed this, you should follow me on:

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The Best and Worst Books I've Read So Far in 2022

Book Bounty

Before I get into it, have you read or do you know about any books focused on the following topics? If so, send them my way. What do you get out of it? My respect and admiration of course!

Predicting second and third order effects of climate change. Climate change is a widely discussed topic in modern nonfiction books. Among the 12 books below, 4 dedicated extensive sections to climate change. But I have yet to see an author seriously attempt to predict what will actually happen to human civilization. I’m not talking about temperatures, humidity, rainfall, and sea ocean levels, I’m talking about how humans will reacts to changes in those environmental factors. I would be endlessly appreciative if you could point me to a book that seriously attempts to make predictions based on guidance from bodies like the IPCC.

The near term future of processing hardware. Moore’s law for single core CPUs collapsed a while ago and while parallelism, emulation, virtualization, and a host of other technologies continue to enable vast improvements in cloud-based computation power, single-core applications of that power have lagged far behind. Just witness the Mac Studio: the M1 Ultra’s multi-core compute bandwidth is incredible, but for a lot of single-core applications, it’s nowhere near as revolutionary. I’m not a hardware expert, but would love to learn more about chip design, the limits of current chip fabrication and design, and what people in the field think will happen to computing hardware in the next 3-5 years. Bonus points if the book in question is written for muggles.

Best Books I’ve Read in 2022 So Far

★★★★★ The Anthropocene Reviewed

From the author of Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars comes this collection of essays about what it is to be alive as a human during a uniquely human era. The premise is simple: John Greene reviews various experiences like gardening, Hailey’s Comet, and Kentucky Blue Grass and gives them a star rating from 1 to 5. At times laugh out loud funny and at others, painfully sincere, I loved this one. If you can, listen to the audio book. There are some extras in there that make it worthwhile, and the author is a surprisingly good narrator.

This book changed how I see the world in a couple of key ways. Most importantly, he gave me words for something I’d long known about marriage, which is that good marriages often require two people to see and appreciate some third thing together. I think my own marriage has been strictly better since my wife and I had kids because they are our third thing: a hopeful project for the future that imbues our lives with meaning outside of our ourselves. You don’t have to have kids of course, but the happiest couples I know have something that they share and appreciate together on a regular basis.

★★★★★ The Expectation Effect

If you can get over the stench of the pop-sci genre, this book is amazing. Robson’s thesis is nuanced: your expectations change not just how you perceive the world (they do) but also what we in the US have long viewed as strictly physical processes. For instance, you will heal from surgery faster if you think you will. You will live a longer and more healthy life if you believe you are healthier than average. You will eat fewer calories if you believe that you have eaten enough. There is even evidence that just thinking about physical work will make you better at doing that work. Robson is not saying that you can think your way out of physical challenges. You can’t think the cancer away, you can’t get into Harvard by visualizing your success if you flunked out of most of your high school classes, and you won’t become a world-class body builder by thinking about lifting 1,000 pounds. But at the margin, you can recover more quickly, get better test scores, and improve your dead lift next week if you adopt certain beliefs about the world. The cumulative effect of these at-the-margin hacks can add up to a huge advantage. This is as near to a real life super power as I’ve come across.

★★★★☆ Extra Life

Short and to the point, Steven Johnson takes the reader on a tour of the things that humanity has done to improve our life spans in the last couple thousand years. He ranks their impact from savings billions of lives to improvements that have probably only saved a couple hundred thousand. This book is great for 2 reasons:

1) The author clearly understands and explains what “life span” actually means and avoids the popular misconception that adults in the past died at younger ages than do adults today. Most of the ways that we have increased our healthy life spans have not been through elongating the lives of otherwise healthy adults (although we have done some of that), but by preventing children from dying of preventable causes. He provides not just an explanation of this phenomenon but also a brief history of how the science of age and mortality statistics was created and modernized.

2) Most of the book talks about innovations you know about already. You may even know about how some of those inventions came to be: the moldy cantaloupe that gave us penicillin and the bomb manufacturing that gave us industrial fertilizers are two well known stories. But Johnson goes beyond these simplified and flattened narratives and gives the reader lots of details and texture that humanize and contextualize how things like pasteurization became common place. In so doing, he makes it clear why it has never been enough to change the world for a lone genius to have a eureka moment in a shed.

★★★★☆ Eight Days in May

If you have ever taken an American history course in high school, you probably knew about as much as I did about the end of World War 2 in Europe. The story I knew was about this concise: “Germany surrendered in May of 1945 and Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker. The Allies immediately set about rebuilding Germany.”

Well, there’s a lot more to the story than those two pithy sentences. By examining a very narrow range of time (the 8 days mentioned in the title), Ullrich is able to explain a very complex process in concrete terms by following individual people and explaining specific events in detail. As with all good history books, the reader comes away thinking “wow, that was a lot more complex, dramatic, and human than I thought it was.”

★★★★☆Remember

I would have preferred a more technical and in-depth treatment of the topic of memory and how it functions, but this was still a great read. I came away with a couple of useful tips for improving my memory retention and a much better understanding of how and why some memories are stored forever (the lyrics of Nelly’s Ride Wit Me) and some are forever lost to the sands of time (what I ate last Tuesday for lunch). Genova does a great job of summarizing and keeping it short too. If she had stretched the same content out for another 100ish pages, I probably would have given up. But it’s pithy, direct, and useful.

★★★☆☆ Otherlands

I have a fascination with deep time. The fact that the world is billions of years old is so mind-bogglingly incomprehensible that I find it useful to read books like this to regularly put my own life experience and the experience of our species in context. Otherlands does a great job of painting those worlds in rich, vivid color for us modern homo sapiens. I loved the geographic details, but thought there was too much emphasis on the organisms of past worlds. Contemplating giant centipedes and microscopic parasites from the pre-dawn of our planet is interesting, but I didn’t need to know the minutia of evolutionary differences between certain genera and families of plants and insects. Apart from that, it was delightful geography porn and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in better understanding how the past may have looked millions of years before hominids burst onto the scene.

★★★☆☆ Jackpot

This is a fun and accessible read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in wealth inequality today. One of the things that the author gets right and is a pet peeve of mine is the misconception around wealth labels as used in the mainstream US media. When journalists write articles about “the 1%,” they tend to use stock photography of mega-yachts, the French Riviera, penthouse apartments, and exotic sports cars, but the reality is that the 1% of Americans live far less glamorous lifestyles. The lifestyle that people associate with the top 1% is really another decimal point or two away: enjoyed only by the top .1% or even .01%. Mechanic nails this distinction and has some great anecdotes to ground the reader in the difference.

Another thing I really enjoyed about this book is how the author doesn’t shy away from the challenges and problems that great wealth imposes upon people. Money problems are so ubiquitous, that most people assume that more money would strictly be a good thing. And to a certain point it is, but this book focuses specifically on people that come into vast sums of wealth suddenly. We’re not talking about people who get a $25,000 check from granny’s estate, these are people who wake up one day to find $25,000,000 in their checking account when their grandfather’s trust suddenly starts distributing funds or their company gets sold unexpectedly. Paranoia, estranged family relationships, divorces, isolation, and loneliness are still real challenges even when you have 7 or 8 digits in your investment portfolio.

This book changed my perception of what constitutes a dangerous amount of money for myself and my children. It’s a bit silly in parts, lapsing into what I’d characterize as pandering to the ultra-wealthy and their lifestyle perks, but it’s enjoyable and informative too.

★★★☆☆ There’s Nothing For You Here

This could have been a 4 or even 5/5 stars, but Fiona devotes 40% of the book to describing in paranoid detail the goings-on inside the Trump White House. I don’t need a long description to be convinced that Trump is a weirdo and that his administration was chaotic and incompetent. Hill could have convinced me of those facts in a couple of paragraphs and moved on, but instead that section of the book just. kept. going.

If you just skip the Trump White House bits, though, this is an excellent book. Fiona Hill does an great job of tying together themes of economic stagnation between the rust belt in the US, the de-industrialized Northeast of England, and the rural areas of Russia. Her thesis about the commonalities between these areas, their residents, and their ultimate fate is both a fresh take on current events and a deeply troubling conclusion.

So, I’d strongly recommend picking this up for the first 60% and then setting it back down again when she gets to her stint in the Trump administration.

★★★☆☆ Bitcoin Billionaires

A fun, breezy account of how the Winklevoss twins … got even more wealthy because they deserve it? I won’t try to defend the morals of accumulating billions of dollars, but it was an entertaining read. I thought Mezrich went too far in trying to humanize the twins and get people to empathize with them - sort of an inverse treatment to the one adopted by the screen writers of The Social Network - but I guess you gotta root for the protagonist? Anyways, it’s a short fun read.

★★★☆☆ An Anatomy of Pain

I learned a lot about the human experience of pain from this one. The topic is very interesting, the facts and research uncovered by Lalkhen are engaging, but I found his writing style and the editing of the book to be a bit inconsistent. Some chapters and topics were well structured, interesting, and expertly explained, others dragged on and were more confusing than it seemed they had to be. It’s a relatively short read, though, so I’d recommend it even with the flaws.

★★★☆☆ The Falcon Thief

Did you know that falcon eggs are sold on the black market for large sums of money to ultra-wealthy people in the middle-east? Neither did I. But that apparently happened and may still be happening.

This is a fun read. Hammer does a great job of bringing the characters to life and humanizing an otherwise weird underworld. I docked it 2 stars because at the end of the day, it just doesn’t seem all that important that falcons are getting smuggled to Saudi Arabia for sale to avid collectors. I mean, that’s not great, but I kept thinking “don’t we have bigger problems in today’s world than whether certain falcon species retain viable reproductive population sizes in the UK?”

★★★☆☆ When France Fell

Could have been a lot shorter. The thesis statement is interesting and counter-factual to most modern readers: the rapid collapse of the French armed forces at the beginning of WW2 had devastating and unpredictable effects on the US’ entry into the conflict. In fact, there’s overwhelming evidence that the US government preferred collaborating with the Vichy government rather than face the threat of consolidated axis powers in control of Europe. All that is interesting and tells a story that not many people know.

But Neiberg could have told that story in half the time. Sometimes less is more! Also, I listened to this as an audio book, and the word “Vichy” isn’t phonetically pleasing to listen to repeatedly. Imagine a narrator trying to use the word “moist” at least 2 times in every sentence for 6 hours and you have an idea of the effect.

Books I Gave Up On in 2022

★★☆☆☆ Metropolis by Ben Wilson

Too much poetry, not enough history and facts. I only got a little ways into it, so maybe it gets more interesting later in the book, but after the third or fourth tangent to elaborate on all the ways that people living together is a myriad tapestry of human experience folded onto one another like a great collage made of memories and synaptic connections — I just gave up.

★★☆☆☆ AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee

Too sensationalized. I felt like I was reading a Tech Crunch funding announcement drawn out into book-length. AI is scary! China is scary! But China is also incredible! $50 trillion dollars! 54 petaflops! Scary! The US is falling behind because of AI! There, now you’ve read it.

★★☆☆☆Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

This is a timely and important subject, but it it was about 3x too long. I really wanted to know what happened to the characters, but I wanted a 10,000 foot summary rather than an on-the-ground daily retelling of events.

I Watched 68 New Movies - Here are the 10 Best and Worst

Back in January, my wife and I had our third child. Young infants have no circadian rhythm which means they wake up - and want to stay up - at all hours of the day for the first couple of months. When we had our first kid, the sleep deprivation was terrible because I hadn’t figured out any coping techniques to deal with the new demands on my time and energy. But I quickly found my outlet: movies. I have a film degree and it has been very satisfying to get to binge all sorts of arthouse movies without having to compromise with anyone else. With baby #3 now sleeping through the night on a semi-regular basis, I’ve put together a summary of what I’ve watched, what I liked and what I didn’t.

First Cow - 10/10

This movie is equal parts tender and brutal. It portrays that rarest of things: a friendship between men that feels sincere and empathetic without having the characters ostentatiously assert their heterosexuality every couple of minutes. It’s also much truer to life than most period films and it gets the little details right in a consistent way that quickly sucks the viewer into the world of the story. I would have rated this an 8/10 except the ending was just incredible. This isn’t an over-the-top film. Truthfully, it’s a bit slow, but it’s worth being patient to savor it (pun intended).

The Green Knight - 10/10

Buckle up and make sure to view this on a big screen because David Lowery’s adaptation of the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the green knight is equal parts fever dream and visual poetry. Also, do yourself a favor and at least read the Wikipedia article about Sir Gawain before watching — you’ll be glad you did.

Okay, now that you’re watching on a big screen and have refreshed your memory about the court of Arthur, why does this get a 10/10? The critical consensus was ambivalent here: some loved it, others hated it. And to be fair to critics, there’s a lot to hate. The story rambles a bit, our protagonist isn’t the classical good guy, and the writers have taken substantial liberties with the source material.

At the end of the day, though, I can’t help but love this, warts and all. First, it does what I love so much in the cinematic format: it uses imagery and film construction to weave additional layers of meaning over an otherwise didactic morality play. And those layers of meaning are downright beautiful to behold. And then there’s the ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but sufficed to say, viewers are empowered to read into the events of the conclusion whatever they want. It’s the best kind of conversation starter: what did it all mean?

I can’t wait to re-watch this to catch all the details I missed the first time through.

The Father - 9/10

As we live longer and more of us are confronted with the ravages of Alzheimer’s and dementia, this film feels extremely timely. While there aren’t many films that tackle this difficult topic with any seriousness, The Father stands out among the few by telling the story through the mind of the patient. That simple narrative device makes all the difference. Viewers are left with an abiding emotional understanding of what it is to have your own mind betray you. The narrative discontinuities force viewers to piece together what is and isn’t real and what appropriate reactions are given a deeply unreliable narrator. There are no good solutions and whether you judge Olivia Colman’s character or Anthony Hopkins, you end up realizing that traditional narrative evaluations of morality probably aren’t appropriate anyways. Aging, dying, and love are messy, and I came away loving, hating, and hurting for all the people portrayed.

Cold War - 9/10

I’m a sucker for black and white films. I’m also a sucker for foreign films that eschew traditional Hollywood narrative tropes. And you know, if you’re gonna make a black and white foreign film, why not double down and have it set in eastern Europe for maximum depressive effect?

Kidding aside, I loved Cold War. I didn’t necessarily love the people portrayed, but I loved the film. From a purely technical standpoint, it’s beautifully well made. The shot composition is immaculate, the framing tells us more about the story than the dialog, and the director trusts the viewer to make sense of a nonlinear story (and what love story outside of the confines of Hollywood is ever completely linear?). It isn’t redemptive or revolutionary. It won’t change your approach to love, life, and the universe. But it’s terribly sincere, compact, and well-made.

Nomadland - 9/10

I love Francis McDormand and this is, in my opinion, one of her best films. It perfectly captures the ethos of a time and place that is largely invisible to most Americans today. While we might regularly interact with the shape of these stories every time we open an Amazon package, the people behind the logistics and supply chain wizardry remain intentionally obscure. But that world is real, their loss is devastating, and the effects of those living in marginal circumstances are increasingly making their voices heard and felt. This film perfectly encapsulates a much bigger topic about mobility, wealth disparity, and dwindling opportunities in a simple down-to-earth way. The only reason it doesn’t get a 10/10 is that it’s conclusions are too bleak even for me.

Mass - 9/10

School shootings have become commonplace in America. When I was in school, the Columbine shooting made headlines and there was a decade of public hand-wringing, witch hunts, and confusion. If you had told my younger self that society would have mostly swept the issue under the rug even as it became more pervasive, I would not have believed you.

I think this is why I love this movie so much. Mass does the opposite of sweep school violence under the rug: it puts the pain, bewilderment, and fury front and center so that you cannot avert your eyes. And it is also remarkably fresh in that it tackles the part of the story that’s too sensitive for new cameras to ever capture: the personal struggles of parents seeking to find peace and move on years after the media firestorm blows over. It’s got all the tension of a modern day 12 Angry Men, but the stakes feel more immediate.

Woman at War - 9/10

I tried watching this movie a couple of years ago, but gave up just a bit too soon. This time around, I made it through the weird narrative slowdown around the 20 minute mark and made it to the awesome payoff that starts in the middle and builds until the last couple of minutes. The ending is absolute gold. Right when you are settling into the falling action, waiting for a subdued conclusion, you get one final narrative jolt of excellent, plausible, joyous fate. The quote from Variety is spot-on: this movie is nearly perfect. It’s got laughs, drama, tension, and meaningful stakes. It also has an answer for the never-ending question of personal responsibility for climate change. Where other documentaries and nonfiction books tend to end this coverage of the issue with mealy-mouthed platitudes about international cooperation and political responsibility, this movie presents one very concrete solution that individuals could undertake — even if it’s a tad bit illegal.

Quo Vadis, Aida? - 9/10

I was a bit too young to be aware of the Srebrenica massacre when it occurred in 1995. I remember my dad listening to NPR and hearing endless coverage of the issues in Bosnia, but it was practically another planet from my day to day existence. And even if I had been older, this movie would have been difficult to appreciate before I became a parent.

So often, war movies focus on heroism on the battlefield: bullets fired, trenches stormed, enemies killed. War as a human experience encapsulates those stories, but today with Ukraine under siege by Russian forces, the events depicted in Quo Vadis, Aida? are eerily prescient.

Ultimately, this is a story of loss. It documents the effort of one person to avert the end of her world and all the immediate family within it. The chilling conclusion is an unforgettable testament to the evil and resilience of humanity.

The Sound of Metal - 9/10

If you liked CODA, but you wanted less of a Young Adult treatment of deafness, loss, and integrating in a hearing world, you should take the time to watch The Sound of Metal. It’s a beautiful and realistic depiction of how our senses are integral to our personhood and what it means to suddenly and unexpectedly become someone else when one of those senses fails.

And just like CODA, the ending is amazing in large part due to the movie’s sound design choices. Both films subvert the traditional climax and resolving action of the storyline in favor of an immersive experience of otherness. It’s hard to take your hearing for granted after watching this one.

Uncut Gems - 9/10

Uncut Gems is simultaneously amazing and unbearable. As someone who is very financially conservative, I was almost incapable of watching Adam Sandler piss away opportunities for prudent gain all for the opportunity to win big. But unlike other movies in the genre (gangster films? suspense thrillers?), Uncut Gems remains grounded in reality for the entire duration of the story. There are no hero boss fights, no improbable getaways, everything feels believably twisted. I would have given this a 10/10, but the sound design is really out there and detracts from the experience. I had the same complaint about There Will Be Blood. Just because a movie has artistic aspirations, doesn’t mean the soundtrack has to hurt viewer’s ears!

The Worst 10

See above if you want to watch good movies, but it’s also valuable to avoid watching bad movies. Below are the worst of the 68 movies I watched and short explanations:

  1. The Mountain II Don’t let the IMDB rating fool you, this movie is awful. I think it’s supposed to be nuanced or something, but the writing is bad, the direction is worse, and the characters are like cardboard cutouts. I think I turned it off after less than 10 minutes. 2/10

  2. Pandorum I came for thought-provoking sci-fi mind-fucks, but instead got a worse version of Alien. I couldn’t make it past the first 15 minutes, but I did read the Wikipedia page afterwards. It has an interesting twist ending, but wow am I glad I didn’t watch the full thing. Take a warmed-over remake of Heart of Darkness, mix it with the aesthetic of the Alien franchise, and then make the screen writing and direction much worse and you have Pandorum. 3/10

  3. Who am I? Maybe I’m not the target audience, but the depiction of technology in this film was so bad I couldn’t make it through the first 10 minutes. I love Guy Fawkes masks as much as the next film buff and I’m very interested in the social ramifications of VR, online privacy erosion, etc, but this was closer to the cringey scene in NCIS (you know the one) than Ready Player One. 3/10

  4. The Great Beauty I’m not in film school anymore and I don’t have to sit through really boring arthouse movies if I don’t wanna. I’m sure there’s lots of film beauty to be had in this one, but it’s ponderous and takes itself too seriously. Snoozers. 3/10

  5. The Irishman Scorsese, please stop making the same gangster movie over and over. But if you really must, at least cast it with actors who are less than 80 years old. It’s painful to watch great actors like DeNiro be badly CGI’d into younger versions of themselves just so we can have another Goodfellas installment. The Irishman is actually so bad, it’s funny to watch because the casting and plot are so at odds with one another. If you like watching really old people pretend to hardened criminals, you might enjoy it, otherwise pass. 3/10

  6. The Worst Person in the World I agree with the title of this movie. The protagonist really is an unpleasant human and it’s unpleasant to watch her wreck her life and those around her. I get it that the main character is supposed to be a metaphor for all the modern ennui of being young and learning things the hard way, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for anyone in this movie. 3/10

  7. The Jungle Book This one actually isn’t objectively bad, I guess that I just don’t intrinsically care what happens to the little kid in the jungle. I thought maybe the new art and a modern adaptation could bridge that gap, but I was wrong. 3/10

  8. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy You have to really know what you are doing to get the “bunch of vignettes strung together” movie thing right. This movie didn’t get it right. Also, it didn’t help that it leads with a short film that is essentially just one unbroken dialog sequence in the back of a taxi. Maybe it gets better later on, but after 20 minutes I was struggling to read the subtitles out of boredom. 3/10

  9. Drive My Car Too. Damn. Slow. There, I said it. This one is a critical darling right now and has received countless accolades, but it’s just not that interesting to watch. And at just under 3 hours of runtime, that’s a lot of uninteresting footage. The premise and conflict sound promising on paper and I generally love Japanese film aesthetics, but it’s hard to feel invested in the outcomes of a main character that has the charisma of a wet paper towel. 4/10

  10. Aniara Like Pandorum, I was hoping for some awesome hard sci-fi suspense, but it’s a deeply uninteresting watch. I think the problem is that everyone in the story doesn’t react in a realistic way to stimuli. If I was told I’d probably die of old age floating on a big spaceship instead of seeing the rest of my family tomorrow, I’m not sure I’d take that news terribly well, yet one of Aniara’s key conceits is that tens of thousands of humans are basically okay with that outcome. Maybe it’s better if you can understand the dialog without subtitles, but it fell flat for me. 4/10

The Full List

Title - My Rating

  • First Cow - 10/10

  • The Green Knight - 10/10

  • The Father - 910

  • Cold War - 9/10

  • Nomadland - 9/10

  • Mass - 9/10

  • Woman at War - 9/10

  • Quo Vadis, Aida? - 9/10

  • The Sound of Metal - 9/10

  • Uncut Gems - 9/10

  • The Mitchells vs the Machines - 9/10

  • 1917 - 8/10

  • Dune - 8/10

  • Memories of Murder - 8/10

  • Minari - 8/10

  • Promising Young Woman - 8/10

  • Never Rarely Sometimes Always - 8/10

  • The Last Duel - 8/10

  • Driveways - 8/10

  • Coherence - 8/10

  • Clara - 8/10

  • Europa Report - 8/10

  • Prospect - 8/10

  • Belfast - 8/10

  • Capernaum - 7/10

  • Your Name - 7/10

  • CODA - 7/10

  • The Gentlemen - 7/10

  • Nightcrawler - 7/10

  • A Man Called Ove - 7/10

  • C'mon C'mon - 7/10

  • The Power of the Dog - 7/10

  • The Lighthouse - 7/10

  • Nobody - 7/10

  • Don't Look Up - 7/10

  • Booksmart - 7/10

  • Bad Education - 7/10

  • The White Tiger - 7/10

  • Pig - 7/10

  • Contagion - 7/10

  • Oxygen- 7/10

  • A Hero - 7/10

  • Nightmare Alley - 7/10

  • Bacurau - 6/10

  • The Painted Bird - 6/10

  • Tenet - 6/10

  • The Lobster - 6/10

  • Shiva Baby - 6/10

  • Sunshine - 6/10

  • First Reformed - 6/10

  • Never Let Me Go - 6/10

  • Licorice Pizza - 6/10

  • The Peanut Butter Falcon - 6/10

  • King Richard - 6/10

  • The Best Offer - 5/10

  • Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - 5/10

  • Judas and the Black Messiah - 5/10

  • Super 8 - 4/10

  • Another Earth - 4/10

  • Aniara - 4/10

  • Drive My Car - 4/10

  • Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy - 4/10

  • The Jungle Book - 4/10

  • The Worst Person in the World - 3/10

  • The Irishman - 3/10

  • The Great Beauty - 3/10

  • Who am I? - 3/10

  • Pandorum -3/10

  • The Mountain II - 2/10

Homework Pass Syndrome

When I was a kid, my teachers would sometime issue slips of paper to students as a reward for good behavior. These little decorated slips entitled the owner to escape any given homework assignment. Forgot to do that worksheet? Just turn in your homework pass and you'd get a 100% for that assignment. They were the real life equivalent of a "get out of jail free" card and I coveted them. I would paper clip each homework pass into the relevant class' folder in the front as a comforting reminder that I had a safety net; a rainy day backup plan in case I played video games the night before and forgot to complete my algebra exercises.

I had a privileged childhood and was lovingly prevented from having a job or dealing with real world problems until I was in high school. Before the age of 15, school was my first and only responsibility. So homework passes were even more valuable to me than hard currency would become in late high school. Almost anyone willing to flip burgers at the local McDonalds [1] could earn $20 to spend on Friday night, but only the best students ever built up a homework pass stash. They were socially exclusive in a way that money has never managed to be.

And that's why I developed a problem.

I craved the social affirmation and feeling of freedom that homework passes granted. I was so addicted that I was almost never able to use them. Spending one meant a loss of control. The next time I forgot an assignment or needed a small grade boost, I wouldn't have that little piece of paper to protect me. I finished most classes that had homework pass systems with a neat stack of slips which immediately became useless when I switched teachers.

In college, where homework passes had been phased out, I intentionally built up relationships with my professors to ensure I'd have wiggle room if I bombed the next exam. They'd at least know I tried and cared and in a sea of uncaring undergrads, I learned that building up the reputation of being an earnest, hard working student was more valuable than any homework pass had ever been.

Around this time, I started dating the woman that eventually became my wife. On one of our early dates, I brought up my homework pass addiction. 

"You did that too?! I thought I was the only one who hoarded those things!" she exclaimed as though admitting a dark secret. I had found a kindred spirit; another soul whose desire for recognition and safety had reached a pathological level well before adulthood.

But far from being proud of our resourcefulness and hard work, Rebecca and I were ashamed of our sordid past of homework pass curation. The whole purpose of a homework pass was to reward students for good work and allow them a bit of freedom in the future. But paradoxically, the kids most likely to earn them were the least likely to use or enjoy them. During childhood, Rebecca and I had earned the right to take a night off and enjoy ourselves, yet we did the opposite: we doubled down and worked extra hard to avoid having to ever use the privilege. In the end, homework passes became like Tolkien's ring: a possession we clung to at all costs that did nothing but enslave us.

Rebecca and I eventually dubbed this behavior "Homework Pass Syndrome," and made a concerted effort to fight it.

Adults aren't given homework passes, but over-achievers find ways to unhealthily stockpile goods against some imagined future catastrophe. Most adult homework passes are monetary: we max out our 401k and IRA contributions, we obsess about our saving rate, we figure out how to retire at age 30, we build up college funds for our unborn children, we wait to buy a car until we can afford to pay all cash, and we shoot for 50% down payments on our homes. But we Homework Pass Syndrome sufferers also safeguard our future in other ways: we buy gifts for our loved ones ahead of time in case we forget later. We go to professional networking events to meet potential employers when we aren't job searching. We give talks at conferences to build up our resumes. We maintain personal websites, deepen our portfolios, and write books. We do anything we can to minimize the chances that we'll have to stoop too low when we need something from anyone else in the future. 

Society awards and applauds these sorts of behaviors, but it's toxic to get carried away in the pursuit of delayed gratification. In middle school, if a class ended and Becca or I had homework passes left over, we would just feel a bit of disappointment and move on. If we forego living our lives now to accumulate wealth or influence, we may reach old age and regret having not taken advantage of our health and youth.

As we meander our way through our 30s, we are more aware than ever how quickly life can pass us by if we don't spend the occasional homework pass, play hooky from our homework and have fun. So to those who save their marshmallows, remember that homework passes, money, and influence only contribute to your life if you're willing to spend them once in a while. To hell with your algebra homework, let's travel the world.

[1] I flipped burgers at McDonalds the summer after my senior year and learned firsthand how little was expected of fast food workers. When I left for college, I handed in 2 weeks notice and my boss laughed and said it was the first time she'd ever been told when an employee planned to leave.

Q4 Books and The 2016 Nonfiction Divide

I set quarterly goals for myself to not only write but also to read. In Q4 2021, I read 10 books (more on those below), but also crystalized a trend that I’ve been noticing for a couple of years: there is a stark difference between nonfiction published pre-2016 and afterwards. I’ve started referring to it as the Nonfiction Divide.

Before 2016 and the Trump presidency, the capitol riot, and the elections or coupes that brought populist leaders to positions of power around the world, there was a general sense in nonfiction books that the fundamentals of modern technocratic democracies were intact.

Before 2016, science didn’t need to be defended, most social problems were being solved (even if too slowly), the ‘isms were in retreat, and the future was a up-and-to-the-right line graph of progress. There was a very real sense that society in the US and abroad was leading inexorably to fantastic human achievements like discovering life on alien planets, eliminating poverty, and curing communicable diseases. You see this most in the ending sections of pre-2016 nonfiction books that deal with hard topics. It’s formulaic: authors write about a very thorny problem (racism, the history of colonialism, or contraception say) and then end their book by proposing solutions which invariably take the form of exhortations and appeals for more of what we’ve been doing: more science, more research, more education, more open-minded pursuit of truth.

Today, those appeals feel disingenuous and naïve. How can rational, intelligent authors in 2022 honestly believe that ideals like “being open” or “accepting complexity” will win the day in the face of growing polarization? I have a family member who I love and respect, but I can’t talk to about vaccines because they believe they are lethal. One of my best friends has been talking to me seriously about leaving the US out of concern for his family’s long-term safety. A couple of weeks ago, I switched to using an end to end encrypted chat service for conversations with my closest friends and family. I regularly see Tweets from people in my generation casually referring to the coming civil war in the US and a recent Harvard Youth Poll suggests that I’m not living in a bubble [source]. I’m concerned that the unvarnished things I say in those threads could be used against me by a malevolent state, company, or political group in the future. I don’t think I have subversive beliefs, but words can be dangerous.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m now a parent, but I think that the world today is objectively more threatening than it did even as little as 5 years ago and I’ve been seeking out reading materials that take that into account. (If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend How Democracies Die and Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy.) Mostly this has meant not reading books about social issues that were researched and written prior to 2016 - they no longer feel real.

With that alarming caveat out of the way, here are the best books that I read this quarter. Only a couple were written before the nonfiction divide, and I intend to be increasingly selective on that front in Q1. As always, if you have any suggestions for nonfiction books that you enjoyed, please send them my way.

★★★★★ The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

If you read only one book from this list, read this one. This is an incredible, even-handed, and nuanced treatment of a topic very near to my heart: genetic diversity and life outcomes. In contrast to the provocateurs like Charles Murray, Harden takes a deeply humanitarian, but scientifically rigorous look at the effect of genetics on how we all turn out. It is equally humbling and enlightening.

★★★★☆ Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

If you enjoyed Debt: The First 5,000 years, you’ll like this. Suzman doesn’t fall prey the lazy historical thinking about work as a specific creation of industrialization. He instead digs deeper into human history to try and pinpoint when exactly the concept of work (as distinct, say, from “surviving” or “existing”) emerged, what it meant for people then, and what it means to us today. The book is more philosophical than I expected, but it’s better for it.

★★★★☆ The Forgotten Man

I deeply enjoy reading books that update my worldview in some material way. It’s well and good to collect trivia and it’s great to read for no other reason than you like a story, but I get the biggest thrills out of reading a convincing and well-researched argument that my existing worldview is incorrect in some way, and then accepting or rejecting the argument on the merits of the facts. This is one such book. If you think you know about the depression in America, Shlaes has a different take and he does an excellent job of both telling compelling stories about real humans and diving deep into the details that support his broader arguments.

★★★★☆ In Your Defense

This one didn’t upend any of my pre-existing understandings of the world, but it was a page-turner and the stories that Langford tells are equally empathetic and factual. You feel for all of her protagonists (even the bad guys). Books like this make us all better humans by telling the stories of our fellow man in a factual, but tender way.

★★★★☆ Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

This one falls prey to the nonfiction divide. It’s engaging stuff and I actually updated a bunch of world views, which was fascinating, but the end just rings hollow. Even the title seems out of step with our times. In a world killing itself with worry about fake news, it’s darkly humorous to think about any one person knowing the “important facts” of the world. As we’ve all seen recently, too many people have followed Rosling’s advice, done their own research, and ended up with far more distorted views of the world than he might have ever thought possible.

★★★☆☆ Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children

This must have been really revolutionary to read when it was published, but time hasn’t been kind to all of Merryman and Bronson’s findings. Things like growth mindset have failed to reproduce in subsequent studies, for instance. But on the whole, it’s a good read and like many pop-sci books, it’s an easy read. I am personally really looking forward to reading Emily Oster’s new book (The Family Firm) for my next dose of data-driven parenting advice.

★★★☆☆ The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World

Although I think some of Wyman’s arguments about the impact of this particular time period are a bit exaggerated, this is still an engaging read. I took away a profound sense of just how complicated, modern, and advanced the world of the late 15th and early 16th centuries were. In the midst of reading this book, it’s easy to forget that you’re reading about an event that occurred in 500 years ago because the characters and events are retold with such clarity and humanity.

★★★☆☆ The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World

I was really hoping that Sarah Johnson would rock my world in the same way as Kevin Hand did in Alien Oceans. Alas, this was interesting, but not revolutionary. If you don’t know much about the history of Mars exploration, you’ll learn a bunch, but for anyone that’s interesting in space exploration and has read a couple of recent books on the topic, there isn’t a lot that’s new here.

★★★☆☆ Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiating Strategies for Reasonable People

Pretty good, although it falls into the “business book” trap of telling lots of “just so” stories that feel a bit like humble-brags by the author. I also couldn’t escape the feeling that the main points could have been more concisely encapsulated in a shorter blog post. But such is the nonfiction genre, I suppose.

★★★☆☆ The Undocumented Americans

I really enjoyed this, but I didn’t learn anything profoundly different or life-altering. It’s important and healthy to spend time in other people’s shoes, though, and Villavicencio does a great job of telling the stories of real people.

Thinking About Buying a Home in the Bay Area? It’s Probably a Good Time to Buy

TLDR

If you are seriously considering buying a home in the Bay Area, now might be a good time to do it. Social distancing has made dense urban centers temporarily less desirable, rents are falling rapidly, banks have become more cautious about lending to potential buyers, and many people remain uncertain about the future. All of these effects are outweighing historically low mortgage interest rates, low inventory, and (up until recently) white-hot demand. Although the observed price drop is still fairly muted, it is likely to be significant for most home buyers and could become even more significant if any number of developments occur in the next 6-12 months. It’s impossible to precisely time any market, but there are deals to be had right now.

Why You Should Trust Me 

Housing has been a long time interest of mine. When shelter in place started in the bay, I started doubling down on my research and have now spent more than 40 hours reading articles on the subject, talking with my local realtor, and collecting anecdotal data from my peer group for my own Biege Book.

Social Distancing Destroys Most of the Value of Living in a City

San Francisco is the second most expensive city in the US. [1] With the median rent for a 1 bedroom apartment hovering around $3,400 [2], many people have found it difficult to justify living in the city. And if you look around the bay area, you’ll find that SF isn’t even the most expensive town to live in [3]: places on the Peninsula like Cupertino and Menlo park are even more expensive. So, why live here? For most people it’s primarily about the jobs [4] [5] [6], but it’s also about the culture, the nightlife, and the proximity to natural wonders. With recent layoffs [7] [8] and shelter in place orders closing everything from restaurants, to clubs, to national parks, a lot of those benefits have simply evaporated. It’s hard to justify spending $3,400 to live, and work 24/7 in a tiny apartment. 

Coronavirus seems unlikely to fundamentally reorganize the world 5 or 10 years from now, but many people I’ve spoken to don’t see things fully returning to normal in the near future. Bill Gates says the only way for the world to “return to normal” is for there us to create and distribute a covid-19 vaccine [9], but according to the Guardian, even if a vaccine does become available for covid-19, only 50% of Americans say that would consider getting it [10]. For many people, there isn’t a light at the end of this tunnel, and for those with family and friends that live elsewhere, or families with children, or just people who really liked going to concerts, it’s a lot harder to justify paying to live in the Bay Area while we wait.

Rents Are Falling Rapidly

Falling rents put pressure on home prices. As of June, 2020, rents in SF have fallen ~9% year on year [11]:

rent_decline_zumper.png

Home prices and rents are related because they address similar human needs: shelter. Most renters are probably not looking to purchase and vice versa, so you wouldn’t expect big changes in rental prices to have a big impact on home prices, but it’s easy to understand why less costly rent might cause a current tenant to forego a home search in favor of a “wait and see” approach. In 2019, only 52% of Bay Area residents owned their home, many of whom make more than $150,000 per year [12]. There are a lot of renters in the Bay and market forces could lower their housing costs.

Note too that renting is already more affordable month-to-month than home ownership in the bay [13]. Each individual town is a bit different, but here in my town on the peninsula, it costs about 2x as much per month to own the same property as it does to rent it. If rents continue to drop, the gap between the cost of home ownership and the cost of renting will widen, drive potential buyers out of the market, and eventually lower home prices. The US housing supply has become increasingly inelastic since 2008 and the Bay Area is an exemplar of that trend [14]. When supply is inelastic, small drops in demand cause large drops in prices and home prices have not adjusted sufficiently to avoid falling rents to suppress demand further.

It’s Harder to Get a Home Mortgage

Jumbo loans are mortgage loans that exceed the “conforming limit” set by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here in the bay area, that limit is $765,600. With a standard 20% down payment, that limit means that any home that costs more than $957,000 requires a jumbo loan. Right now, every city in my home county of San Mateo has median property values that exceed that limit [15]:

That means that unless you have substantially more than 20% of the home value for the down payment, you will need a jumbo loan. And that’s a bit of a problem at the moment. According to Bankrate, mortgage loan availability in April dropped to the lowest level since 2014 [16]. With the unemployment rate at its highest level since the second world war, banks aren’t taking risks on people with less-than-perfect credit. 

If you have great credit and the necessary down payment (I’m hearing 720+ credit score and at least 25% down are necessary to close), the coronavirus has reduced the number of competing bidders for any given property. This reduction in potential buyers leads to opportunity for buyers who do meet the above criteria.

People Are Uncertain about the Future

Most long term impacts of coronavirus are still unknown. With big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter permitting at least part of their employees to work from home indefinitely [17], and some smaller companies starting to follow suit, people are wondering: is the Bay Area still worth it [18]? People have been predicting the end of Silicon Valley for decades [19], but past false positives are not conclusive proof that this isn’t the start of something new. Home values really could start slipping in the coming years as people gradually decide that trading some career growth to live closer to family, live in a bigger home, or just deal with less traffic on a daily basis is a worthwhile trade.

Similarly, the economic impacts of Coronavirus are at best poorly understood. The national debt reached the highest levels ever recorded as a result of the coronavirus stimulus measures [20]. Delaying payments on everything from credit cards to mortgages is historically unprecedented for consumers, and nobody knows when employment will return to 2019 levels. Early indicators of consumer behavior from China suggest that things are unlikely to return completely to normal for quite a while [21] and it’s unclear what that means for jobs and spending. 

All of this has led to understandable concern about what the world will look like in 6, 12, and 18 months. When there is uncertainty, however, there is also opportunity.

The Impact of These Trends on Prices

Prices for real estate in San Mateo county are down. Compass Realty is showing a 7.1% drop in prices, while the SF Chronicle suggests the effect is closer to 6.6% [22]:

Bidding activity is also weakening:

sale_price_vs_list_price_trend_line.jpg

There are a lot of explanations for why this trend might be happening, but I think it’s because demand is drying up faster than the supply of homes being put on the market due to the trends mentioned above. 

At a more concrete level, here is my neighborhood, I’m seeing homes be discounted around 4-6% on average. Here are a few examples of properties all within a mile of my home:

It seems safe to say there are deals out there. I’ve been seeing price drops around 5%, but remember that’s just the asking price. The bidding data above suggest that homes are closing for under asking for the first time in several years. With careful bargaining [23], I think it’s possible to do much better than a 5% discount. 

If There are So Many Deals, Why Not Wait?

Residential real estate prices adjust more slowly than other assets and if the long-term trend is downward, you could imagine getting an even better deal in 6-12 months. I think this logic is probably flawed for two reasons:

  1. You can’t time the market. As anyone who tried to time the stock market in March will tell you, every decline is different and it’s incredibly hard to be right both when you sell and buy. Plus, if you are buying a home purely as an investment, you’re overlooking far better vehicles to generate cash. A home is a form of shelter. Here in the Bay Area, it might also earn you some money, but it’s probably not a great idea to treat it like your stock portfolio. If you were already thinking about buying, you could easily save six figures by doing so now. Will you save every last cent you could have if you were capable of perfectly timing the market? No. But, if you wait too long, the price advantage may disappear completely.

  2. The adjustment back to “normal” is likely to be faster than expected. Historically, pandemics do not inflict lasting damage on home prices. In fact, a recent historical analysis by Zillow [24] concluded that pandemics have a statistically insignificant impact on prices. Even much larger pandemics like the Spanish Flu in 1918 do not appear to have meaningfully impacted home prices. That suggests that what we’re seeing is likely to be short-lived as the economy gets back on its feet and things adjust towards a new normal that looks more like 2019.

Conclusion

Here’s a bit of historical context to put the current dip into perspective:

30_year_cycle.jpg

At -7%, Coronavirus has already been 63% as bad for housing prices as the 1989 Lomo Prieta earthquake, 70% as bad as the 2001 dot-com crash, and 26% as bad as the subprime crisis. It’s always possible that we’ll see an extended slide in prices as everyone starts working from home and Silicon Valley implodes. But millions of people chose to live as they did in 2019 for a reason. That consensus seems far more likely to prevail after the virus has passed. And when that normality returns, whatever specific form it takes, it seems likely there will still be too many jobs and too few houses in Silicon Valley.

Thanks to Ben, Nick, and Robert for reading over drafts of this and helping me to refine my thinking.

Sources

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How Coronavirus is Impacting the Housing Market (Curbed, 4.23.20)

How a recession could impact the housing market (Curbed, 1.10.19)

Information From Past Pandemics, And What We Can Learn: A Literature Review (Zillow, 3.13.20)

Here’s where coronavirus will impact the housing market the most (Curbed 4.7.20)

Survival of the Fittest: The Real Estate Pandemic Survival Guide (Mike Delprete, 3.21.20)

Coronavirus is brewing a mortgage crisis (Curbed 4.8.20)

These markets could see the sharpest drop in home prices during coronavirus pandemic (CNBC 4.20.20)

On the dynamics of the primary housing market and the forecasting of house prices (2015)

Real Estate Buying Strategies During The COVID-19 Pandemic (Financial Samurai, 4.18.20)

California housing market feels full brunt of coronavirus outbreak in April, C.A.R. reports (PR Newswire 5.18.20)

How Does Price Elasticity Affect the Housing Industry? (The Nest, 2.12.19)

The declining elasticity of US housing supply (Vox, 2.25.20)

Tech companies’ work from home policies have some workers ready to flee Silicon Valley (The Verge, 5.15.20)

The Technology 202: The tech industry's shift to remote work will forever change Silicon Valley (Washington Post, 5.22.20)

Tech Workers Consider Escaping Silicon Valley’s Sky-High Rents (Bloomberg, 5.14.20)

Op-ed: The next Silicon Valley exodus — Over 25% of tech sector wants permanent work from home (CNBC, 5.19.20)

Walmart says its thousands of tech employees will continue remote work — even when pandemic subsides (5.28.20)

Tech jobs soar to all-time record in Bay Area (Mercury News, 7.5.19)

Size Ensures Success for 15 of the Largest Tech Companies in Silicon Valley (BuiltinSF, 2.5.2020)

Bay Area Housing Post-Pandemic: What’s in Store? (KQED, 5.14.20)

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2019 San Mateo Single Family Sales

Largest-technology-employers-in-Silicon-Valley

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Remote Work Could Spark Housing Boom in Suburbs, Smaller Cities (WSJ, 5.30.20)

Buying A New Home: Wait Or Do It Now? (Forbes, 5/2020)

Millions Of Americans Skip Payments As Tidal Wave Of Defaults And Evictions Looms (NPR, 6.3.20)

SF, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn: 'Never seen anything like it' (SF Chronicle, 6.1.20)

The Supply of Housing Has Become LESS Elastic (Marginal Revolution, 8.15.19)

Housing Costs Reduce the Return to Education (Marginal Revolution, 7.23.18)

Was there a Housing Price Bubble? Revisited (Marginal Revolution, 8.3.17)

S.F. sees ‘unprecedented’ drop in rent prices (Curbed, 6.2.20)

Zumper National Rent Report: June 2020 (Zumper, 6.1.20)

Is 2020 A Good Time To Buy San Francisco Bay Area Real Estate? (Financial Samurai, 5.2.20)

Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 3.2020) 

It could take two years for the economy to recover from the coronavirus pandemic (The Conversation, 5.30.20)

CBO’s Current Projections of Output, Employment, and Interest Rates and a Preliminary Look at Federal Deficits for 2020 and 2021 (CBO, 5.24.20)

The 15 Most Expensive Cities In The US And What They Really Cost (QuickenLoans, 9.20.19)

SF does not have the highest rents in the Bay Area (Curbed, 7.17.19)

The Top Reasons To Live And Work In San Francisco (Financial Samurai, 5.2020)

6 Top Cities for High-Paying Jobs (Monster.com, ???)

The 10 Best Cities for Jobs (US News and World Report, 5.19.2019)

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