Acquired

I just rewatched the Godfather movies and yeah, I forgot the Godfather part 2 Happens right before the revolution totally and there's a book called Havana Nocturne which is really interesting and sort of graphic description of how the mob and Frank Sinatra and all those folks spent a lot of time down in Cuba

Luckily, you know, and you know the very famous, uh, you know the reporter the the water water most book, right He evaluated our service And we were so nervous, you know, he's very straightforward, right? At the good news He did write down a very nice article published in war street journal and also he personally recorded the video And overnight we got a 50 50 thousands 50 thousand Users from that article

The book is Running with Purpose and Brooks has been a fabulous journey, and I'm a person that believes in life The journey is to be you know just cherished and enjoyed.

It's a turnaround story. It's a purpose driven culture driven brand story it's a focus niche challenger brand story in an industry like so many that's dominated by platforms one really really fabulous platform.

And so we've navigated that we built we're building a really cool brand with lots of runway yet for growth and And it's a great business too And so I wanted to tell that story because if you're not a runner we haven't marketed to you

I actually just re-listened the audiobook when when it dropped earlier this week Actually that you narrated which is very fun to hear your voice while I was running on the Burke by your office

I started telling the book. I really wanted to play the long game I wanted to build a brand and you know the TAM.

Warren has written a lot in his annual letters about Pete who's just a legend of a human being was a great inspiration to me.

I think they even say either in the Sony book by John Nathan or in Akio Merida's book that his younger brothers were actively sort of training to become a Khazi pilots like that would have been his future.

Ryan sent me a copy of the book A Young Poet by Real K which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend and one of the things it talks about right towards the beginning of the book it's sort of a mentor poet speaking to writing a letter to a young poet and saying you're asking me whether I think your poetry is good and here's my answer to you forget about all that forget what anybody says go into yourself all you can really do if you want to be an artist maybe this applies beyond art but I feel quite confident it does apply to being an artist all you can do is just go as deep as you possibly can into yourself and see if you can dig down deep enough where you can honestly say I'm not paying attention to anybody else or anybody's perspective or opinion I'm just here with myself because that's where your unique voice is and if you can get there that's the thing and yeah then you can ignore the rest and that's not necessarily going to make you money or make you popular but being an artist isn't about money and popularity

I also would recommend an old book that a friend who only reads old books recommended to me which you can find free copy of online like LibGen you can get it it's called Dynamic Economics by Burton Klein and you've never heard of Burton Klein Burton Klein looked at how firms grow and how they start sometimes the Skunk Works projects he actually looked at Kelly Martin's team he looked at the trader is eight at Fairchild he looked at the China Lake Sidewinder first practical heat seeking missile development and he made some killer observations about structure sort of sociology anthropology hierarchy about how firms go from innovation to rent seeking to outright vampiric badness and he had four kinds of firms

And bear in mind, in the 80s and 90s, there was a book written called The Cola Wars

Haruki Murakami meets Ready Player One

Rabbits is this thriller about this kind of global game that takes place to save the world and You play it by following a bunch of these coincidences that seem like coincidences, but maybe they aren't and Ultimately playing in winning Rabbits is how you kind of like reset balance in the universe

It's you know, again, maybe not the best written book that I've ever read. I've heard the ending isn't great I haven't gotten there yet, but it's been a really entertaining I can't put it down kind of read and it has murakami ish vibes if it's not quite as good as murakami

Somebody suggested this book to me called The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhacker

Origin of Wealth was a slog. I think it took me six months to really get through it

And sort of serendipitously around the same time, someone suggested Complexity by Mitch Waldrop to Brad.

I'd heard a little bit about Complexity theory and the Santa Fe Institute, which I want to get into.

The idea is to say a stock price or it could really be any asset price, a price of an asset, but let's say a stock price reflects a set of expectations about future financial performance.

The second step is to say, let's introduce strategic and financial analysis to judge whether that set of expectations is too optimistic, too pessimistic or about right.

But the core idea is just basically say, what do I have to believe? Is the company going to do what the market believes it's going to do? And then let me make decisions as a consequence.

The book came out September 10th, 2001.

So we put this back together, but I went to Alan said, let's would you like to work on that? And he he agreed. He's now in his late 80s.

It is a really interesting book. One of the main theses is we humans are animals.

And it's not saying act on those, but every chapter sort of points out a different and very observable basic animalistic thing that exists in our brain.

I'm reading 'The City and the Stars' by Arthur C. Clarke right now and that's literally like the that is the city like let's do that let that's a cool enough thought like full enough thought experiment that if that exists and it's a truly super connected world what's possible in that world like that to me is like an interesting question in many more ways more interesting to me than what is store value what is gold what is money right

Camilla Russo and her book The Infinite Machine which came out recently and Served as basically the main narrative source for history and facts here Camilla is an Excellent journalist was part of the technology team at Bloomberg

Camilla writes in The Infinite Machine here I'm gonna quote that Vitalik was quote-unquote sure his work was gonna get torn apart with an idea this big There has to be a very good reason why nobody has tried to do it

The question was would they be Google a for-profit Company with you know revenues and cashflow and profit. Yeah, or would they be like the Mozilla Foundation?

Camilla titles this chapter the red wedding in the machine

The question all comes down to like either the currency What is it? Is it a security or is it a commodity?

First book I read was rendezvous with Rama

And then I'm in the middle of The City and the stars right now Which I'm also really enjoying set billions of years in the future where all of mankind has been reduced to one single city On earth.