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.