Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
Absolute Swamp Thing – Alan Moore et al.
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
Going Infinite – Michael Lewis
For what he lacks in intellectual heft, Malcolm Gladwell more than makes up for it with riveting storytelling and clear prose. Subtitled “The Story of Success,” Outliers examines the lives of famous figures like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles, and other, lesser known success stories like NYC corporate lawyers and 1800s entrepreneurs.
While he admits most of these people possessed a high degree of innate ability, he downplays the role that talent and IQ had in their success. Instead, he highlights how opportunity, circumstance, practice, and cultural legacies lead to their achievements.
He definitely challenges conventional notions of success, and marshals an array of convincing evidence. The best example of his argument is the birth months of the premier Canadian junior hockey team. Something like 75% of the players were born in the first four months of the year.
The reason for this phenomena is how the hockey league is structured. The cutoff date for each age group is Jan. 1. “Gifted” teams select players when they’re 8 or 9 years old. When they’re that young, being 6+ months older than the competition is a huge advantage. They’re not necessarily more gifted, they’re just bigger than everyone else and so appear gifted. Next, they get selected for these gifted teams, with better coaches and more practices, year after year, so that they really are better than their peers by the time they’re 17, in a beneficent feedback loop/ self-fulfilling prophecy.
Other arguments are less persuasive, such as that Asians are better at math because their ancestors cultivated rice or that 10,000 hours of experience is needed to become an expert in any field. The latter is ostensibly true, but neglects to mention how much early positive feedback is needed for a person to wholeheartedly dedicate themselves to a pursuit.
Tom Wolfe was one of the keenest observers of American society in the latter 20th century/early 21st. I read “I Am Charlotte Simmons” as a freshman, and it almost exactly describes what it’s like attending a prestigious university. “Bonfire of the Vanities” takes aim at the pretensions, aspirations, and foibles of the rich and powerful in 1980s New York City. Sherman McCoy is a WASPy bond trader with a Park Avenue penthouse who finds himself on the wrong side of the law in a highly politicized case. It’s a satire that has aged into prescience in the years after George Floyd. Along the way, Wolfe, in his inimitable style, introduces some unforgettable phrases: Master of the Universe, Great White Defendant, and “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”
“Swamp Thing” is a modern day retelling of Frankenstein. There’s a reason Alan Moore’s run on this series is considered one of the most groundbreaking and influential of modern comics.
“Going Infinite” recounts the life and rocketship rise of now convicted FTX founder SBF. As an early adopter of bitcoin and crypto in general, I love reading about its history from a normie perspective. But this book is less about crypto than it is about SBF. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was part of the movement seeking to bring crypto under US regulation and subject it to the ruthless maneuvering of Wall Street and its high frequency trading firms. It makes me nostalgic for the old days when all of crypto was affordable, sneered at by respectable people, and used to buy illegal shit on the internet.
Surprisingly, considering its about a convicted fraudster, the first half reads like a hagiography. SBF is some kind of genius wunderkind whose gonna legitimize crypto and use the profits to save the world. Chapters are devoted to his personal philosophy, early life, and pre-crypto career at a quant firm (Jane Street). Along the way, we learn he was an idiosyncratic loner growing up, lacked an ability to connect emotionally, and had to practice facial expressions in the mirror to get along at school and work. Oh, he also used a rollie backpack in high school, and never had a job until college.
This only confirms a personal hypothesis: a big problem with the world today is that many of the super rich and powerful wouldn’t even have lived to adulthood had they been born a 100 years earlier–their constitutions and immune systems are too weak. Autistic nerds with a resentful streak (Gates, Zuckerberg, SBF, etc.) and zero experience sweating from physical exertion should not run the world, for the sake of everyone else. These types have not evolved to live until adulthood without modern medicine, let alone exert so much power over thousands of people.
While this was published before the trial, Lewis remains defensive of SBF throughout, and doubts that he committed fraud, or had any criminal intent. His account reiterates that FTX was run without any standard corporate structure, and what happened was likely an accident. The customer funds that were supposed to be in FTX were actually in his crypto hedge fund Alameda Research, which lost billions in bad trades. Regardless if he meant to or not, I can attest that a well-intentioned accident is sometimes a grievous crime.
Easy Trouble 