Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.
I was introduced to Trae Stephen’s idea of choosing Good Quests through the Meditations with Zohar podcast. His essay (cowritten with Markie Wagner) explains the idea further:
At the dawn of the 20th Century, the Wright Brothers embarked on a quest to build the first controlled airplane. A half century later, NASA embarked on a quest to put a man on the moon. Combustion, penicillin, nuclear fission; the discovery of America, the drafting of the Constitution, Normandy — history is defined by protagonists pursuing good quests.
And a simple definition of a good quest:
In the most simple terms possible: a good quest makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn’t improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.
So a question to ask ourselves as the New Year ushers in: What’s your quest?
Maybe write the idea on a notecard and pin it above your desk: Choose good quests.
Read Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner’s essay in full here.
And listen to his interview with Zohar Atkins here.
But the thing that we maybe haven’t said or touched on as much that just in your invocation of the rocking chair and sepia tones and so on looking back. Something about beauty and craft. If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, I think the world is uglier than it needs to be.
It’s a free lunch where one can just do things well or poorly and beauty is not a rivalrous-ly good. We can just architecture, but my intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you?
Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and then everything else in a very slapdash way. And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.
On the lessons of chess. Sport could apply here too. Any competitive activity really…
Rick Rubin: As you were progressing, as things were going good, as you were rising in whatever ranks there were, do you remember a big loss?
Tyler Cowen:Well, what I remember most, is I learned pretty early on. This was very important for me. Like first I learned I could win. Beat like grown adults. But more importantly I learned that I could lose. That there were people out there who were just better than I was. And even if sometimes I’d hold even because I had good work habits or I didn’t take drugs or drink, like they were just better. And a lot of smart young people don’t learn that until much later, and that they’re not sort of built to adjust for it. And I feel I was built to adjust for that very early on. So I always knew there would be smarter people than me out there, and to do well I would have to kind of have rituals and routines, where I would have a lot of compound learning, and just keep on doing those for many decades. And that I figured out when I was like twelve, thirteen because of chess. And that was just invaluable for me.
Excellent throughout. One of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to. The tone of voice. The steady pace. Rick Rubin channeling his inner Tyler Cowen with ping-ping-ping questions. The range of topics, getting into Tyler’s childhood, his fascination with music, chess, global population, Rick asked questions of Tyler that haven’t been asked before. Wonderful.
One of my favorite things about being a professor is learning. I love to teach because I love to learn. And I love to do that with students who do as well.
I think the syllabus is an underrated learning tool. If there’s a subject you’d like to learn creating your own syllabus would be an excellent starting point. Maybe a micro-syllabus?
There’s 6 assignments for the podcast class. The first I call “Memento Morit and the 20-year plan”. Memento Mori is latin for “remember you’re going to die. And so from that, I ask students to think about what goal they have for what they are doing in 2043, and why. Try to understand precisely what it is about that goal that matters, what feeling does it produce, and how would they feel if that feeling wasn’t produced, and then work backwards to 6 months from now. Then select an interviewee and write a short biography about them.
Katalin shares insightful ways to deal with life’s setbacks. Listen to the entire conversation here:
WALKER: Selye. Thank you. And in high school you read a book about stress by Hans Selye. Can you tell me how that influenced your thinking? Why was it so impactful?
KARIKÓ: Indeed, we actually wrote a letter to him. And he responded and we got so excited. Because he was born in Hungary, his book about stress was translated to Hungarian, and so in the ’60s, you could read his book.
We discussed it in biology class. So we did understand that stress can kill you — but only how you perceive it. So you have to learn to handle the stress.
And what he said also in his book was that without stress life is meaningless. You wouldn’t get up this morning if you don’t have this anticipation, excitement, that we will talk today.
So you need that kind of happiness… This is also stress, but it is a good stress… And how you would, when you are kicked out of your job, see the goodness of it.
But you have to learn, and it is a practice. So we practise and we talk in the school about how we can focus on things that we can do. That’s the problem with people: they focus things that they cannot change. It was important that the conversation has to be about what I can do, not blaming others. And so it was very helpful.
WALKER: Without reading that book, would you have been as good at handling stress? I feel like your personality is very optimistic, naturally.
KARIKÓ: Yeah. I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be talking with you.
WALKER: Really?
KARIKÓ: I would not reach that, because it was so critical. What I can see, even today, is that people are comparing themselves to the others immediately. Don’t do that! Don’t worry about that other person who works less and gets promoted and gets hired. You cannot change that. But the people paying attention to this, they get distracted and they are not focusing what they can change — doing the research. And they are blaming. They blame their children, their husband, wife, neighbours, somebody. And then you cannot change those people. They wish that they would do this and that. No. You have to always end every conversation in your mind with “What can I do?” So that’s very helpful.
And if people would learn this, they would live a much better life. For example, the grudge that people have against somebody. So many people ask how I feel now that I can tell those people who were not nice to me. I mean, I thank people who were not nice to me, because without them, I wouldn’t be here. Because hardship and those things are forming your personality. Much better than if somebody prepared yours, and you just have to walk an easy way.
So if you struggle you learn many things. Also, people who were not nice to me made me work harder with what I have. And then that’s how you have to process. So even in… Actually in school — in high school we are talking about reading this book —, my high school teacher told me — he didn’t like me — and he told me after I graduated to the highest mark, he said that he knows somebody at the university and he will make sure that I will not be accepted.
At first you could see that, “Oh, this is mean and bad news.” But if you say, “Okay. How do I perceive it?” That’s important. “I perceive that I have to work harder, so I have to be the number one. So no question about that. I will be accepted.” If he says: “I will arrange that you will be accepted”, I sit back and work less hard. So you have to see it as: “Okay, he made me work harder.” And then you also learn, every time, you learn that not everybody’s rooting for me. And that was your lesson of the life there — so not everybody wants you to succeed. And you have to think about that. You have to practise, to think: “Okay, what did I learn from it?” Because even the meanest person to tell you anything, you learn: “I won’t do that, I won’t say that to anybody else because it’s hurtful.” So I learn, and then you move on. That’s the simple philosophy. I don’t know, maybe there is such philosophy that exists. But if you live your life then you are so much happier.
Ideas of India became one of my favorite podcasts in 2022.
In the 2022 in Review episode producer Dallas Floer’s posed the question to Shruti Rajagopalan.
Why should we talk about India more?
Three summaries from their conversation:
Avoid cultural boo-boos. India is much more diverse than our immediate social circles. If you at the moment have young children, there’s a high likelihood they will marry someone Indian.
India’s population is young, and getting younger. The global talent pool will continue disperse from there.
As India’s infrastructure continues to develop, Indians will soon dominate the internet, YouTube, twitter, streaming apps, etc.
FLOER: I have a general question—and I think this rounds out this first part of the discussion nicely—but why should we talk about India more? Why should more people be listening to, not just your expertise, but anyone who spends their time doing research and talking about India?
RAJAGOPALAN: The world demographics are changing, and I think we are not good at looking at the 30-, 40-year horizon, because of Twitter and all the other things we talked about. We’re so in the moment of what’s happening now. If you look at global demographics—and I recently started a Substack, it’s called “Get Down and Shruti,” and the first post was on this topic—the developed world is depopulating, or at least, the fertility rates are dropping quite rapidly. In fact, China will start depopulating next year, and it’s so far the largest country in terms of population.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: India will not depopulate until 2065. India’s population, which is right now 1.4 billion, will continue to grow and then start to go down only in 2065 when it peaks. Over the next 40 years, China will lose a quarter of a billion people and India will gain a quarter of a billion people. That’s like the size of Brazil and three-quarters the size of the United States, so that’s big numbers. What this means is India is very young; it’s only going to get younger as the world gets older.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: One in five young people in the world actually live in India, and half the Indian population is below 25. Even for very self-serving reasons, if people have nothing to do with India, the global talent pool, the workforce is going to come from India. And as India starts peaking, then it’s going to come from Africa. That’s where we need to pay more attention. The world just doesn’t pay enough attention to India or Africa, so that’s the big picture.
The other part of it is, India is also a subcontinent. It’s 1.4 billion people. It’s stitched together as a collection of people with different—it’s actually, religiously, the most diverse place in the world. It’s linguistically the most diverse place in the world. There’s, of course, caste heterogeneity. For these reasons, it’s difficult to understand India. Thinking that India is your buddy from accounting or IT in your office, that’s like one type of India and one type of Indian that you may meet in your social circle or in the neighborhood or in the office place.
India is actually very diverse and requires a lot of context to actually understand. If the future is India, and you’re going to have more people coming to universities, and there’s a good chance that some of the older listeners in this episode, their children end up marrying an Indian they met in college.
FLOER: Sure.
RAJAGOPALAN: Even if the base reason is you don’t want to make a cultural boo-boo in front of your future in-laws, you’ve got to know some cultural context. You’ve got to know a little bit more about India. I think, for various reasons, of course, if you’re a university or if you’re hiring, if you work in the AI or tech space, all the talent there is coming from India. So for different groups, India might be more or less relevant. If you work in the climate space, you should really focus on India. It’s going to be one of the largest-growing spaces, which means we need to worry about technology and how to control carbon emissions. It’s different for different people, but I think everyone should pay more attention to India.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: More generally, the baseline has to increase. And then, depending on what you do, you may want to zero in on certain kinds of books and podcasts and experts. Most Indians now have access to electricity. About 800 million-plus Indians have access to a smartphone, so now they’re on the internet. We are slowly getting to a point where the internet will also get dominated by Indians. In terms of natural language processing, more people sound like me than sound like you, Dallas. More people will spell like me than spell like you and so on.
I think, with an overwhelming number of Indians on the internet, people will also see that landscape change faster than immigration or them visiting India. Their Netflix front page will change quite dramatically and so on.
That from The Rest is History podcast, with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. The backstory here is young Churchill is traveling on a ship with a journalist from the Manchester Guardian. After spending a few days observing young Winnie this was his brilliant description.
Ambition combined with the ability to laugh at one’s self. Potent mix, that.
Listen to more exquisite Rest of History pods below:
Why was Jack the Ripper’s final murder the most appalling of all? Who was the mysterious Mary-Jane Kelly, his unfortunate victim? And, what enduring impact would his crimes have upon the cultural climate of England, and the treatment of women?
Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the nightmarish crescendo of Victorian London’s darkest days, as Jack the Ripper’s killing spree culminates with his most horrifying murder so far.
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Pete Doctor is Pixar’s chief creative officer. Recently he sat down for an interview with economist Steven Levitt. On his People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, Steve asked Pete one of my favorite, but ridiculous interview questions. What live advice would you give the 20 year old Pete Doctor, knowing what you know now?
Pete’s response:
I’d probably tell myself draw more. Just get outside and draw, cause your draftsmanship skills are always handy. But more importantly I think, drawing for me, really connects me to stuff. It forces me to see things. I can walk past a house everyday, but then if I stop and draw it I suddenly notice details and things about it that I’d never payed attention to before. So I feel like drawing is a way to slow me down and really connect me to the world that I’m inhabiting that I’m not always fully paying attention to.
An excellent interview for all you drawers out there. Listen in full here.
Alan admits, it’s OK not to read the great works everyday:
But you don’t read Shakespeare every single day and you certainly don’t read the tragedies every single day. Those are incredibly demanding for the same reason you don’t every night sit down and watch an Ingmar Bergman movie or 12 Years of Slave or something like that. You have to be able to give yourself a break from the demands of really great works of art.
Great works of art ask a lot of us and we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can rise to that occasion every single day. So, sometimes you ought to be reading Harry Potter instead of reading Shakespeare because you need a break. And I think both Bloom and Adler were reluctant to acknowledge that.
On seeing where your W-H-I-M takes you:
Yeah. So, I got this from the poet Randall Jarrell, who ended an essay that way, read at Whim. And Whim with capital W, W-H-I-M is a kind of a principle or a policy. Let me tell you how I came onto this. What would happen is that year after year after year, so I’ve been a college university teacher for 35 years now and I would have students who would come to my office and they would say, “I’m about to graduate, but there’s so many great things I haven’t read yet. Give me a list of things to read. Give me a list of books that every educated person should have read.” And they’re coming in with their notebooks and they’ve got their pins poised over the notebook. Like, “Give me these things.”
And I would think you’re just finishing up four years of school, give yourself a break. You don’t have to do this now. You don’t have to read according to an assignment or according to a list of approved texts. Enjoy your freedom. Go out there and follow your whim. And by that, I mean follow that which really draws your spirit and your soul and see where that takes you. If it turns out that you spend a year reading Stephen King novels or something like that, that’s totally fine. That’s not a problem. Read your Stephen King novels, but there are also really good novels.
But whatever it happens to be, if you’re reading young adult fiction for a year, read young adult fiction for a year. After a while, you probably got to have enough of that. But don’t go around making your reading life a kind of means of authenticating yourself as a serious person. It’s just no way to live. So, I would always tell them, “Give yourself a break. Don’t make a list. See where Whim takes you.”
How to read “upstream”:
Well, what happens is that there is a kind of an emergent structure in a way, things emerge. So, here’s one of the things that I will tell people. I’ll say, “Let’s say you really love Tolkien and you’ve read Lord of the Rings like 10 times and you’re not sure you want to read the Lord of the Rings again.” First of all, I will say, “Rereading is always a good idea. It’s always a good idea. But there may be times when you think, yeah, maybe I don’t need an 11th reading of the Lord of the Rings.”
And so, I’ll say, “Well then, let’s move upstream a little bit. Why don’t you ask yourself what did Tolkien read? What did he love? If you love Tolkien’s writing, what writing did Tolkien love and kind of go upstream of him and find out what he read.” And in that way, you’re doing something that is really substantial. I mean, learning about some new things, some important things, things that are really valuable, but you’re also kind of following whatever it is in your spirit that responded to Lord of the Rings. You’re taking it to that next level.
Yeah. So, I’ve done this before, this going upstream, but in a different way. So, my favorite novel of all time, I said this before on the podcast lots of times is Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.
Alan Jacobs:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
And then I started reading his like … I’ve read that thing like five times, but then I was like, I’ve got to read the prequels. I started reading like a Dead Man’s Walk and a Comanche Moon. And then I started learning about that. I was like, “These Comanche Indians, I didn’t know about this.” And so, I was like, I went on Amazon and just searched books about Comanche Indians and that’s how I discovered Empire of the Summer Moon, fantastic book. It was some of the best books I’ve read.
Alan Jacobs:
Right. But you wouldn’t have discovered it if you hadn’t been actually reading at Whim. You were not thinking, “Oh, let me see, I’ve read this Larry McMurtry book, now I need to read all the other books that were well-reviewed that year.” Instead you were following up something that was really drawing you on. In a way, you’re just obeying your own curiosity and that’s a much better guide to reading than having a list that somebody else has given you.
And rereading a book can shake your core:
Brett McKay:
Well, what do you think the value of rereading is?
Alan Jacobs:
Well, there’s a lot. I mean, first of all, if it’s a really worthwhile book and books can be worthwhile in a thousand different ways, you’re never going to get everything important out of it on a first reading. But then in addition to that, you go through different stages of life. And in those different stages of life, books speak to you in dramatically different ways.
I remember once I used to teach Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina almost every year. And one year I was reading it and I came across a passage, which totally knocked me out and I couldn’t even remember having read it before. I’d taught the book six or seven times and I had completely passed over this particular passage. And it’s a passage where one of the two protagonists, a man named Konstantin Lëvin, his wife kitty has just given birth to their first child. And he picks up his newborn son and the first thing he thinks is, now the world has so many ways to hurt me. And it’s just an incredibly powerful scene.
Why didn’t I notice it before? Because I hadn’t had children before. It was as soon as my son was born, I saw that passage in a way that it would have been irrelevant to me before because it was so disconnected from my experience. At that point I thought to myself, what’s wrong with you that you didn’t notice this? Did you have to have a child in order to understand how emotionally overwhelming it is to have a child? I guess so. So, I learned something about myself there. I learned about the things that I was paying attention to and not paying attention to.
Read on a W-H-I-M.
Forge your own reading path. You don’t always need someone’s list to guide you.
Floodlights and Goalposts 