Circle Three 70 / This Must Be the Place
I hope everyone had safe travels and plenty of turkey over Thanksgiving. At home in PA, nine family members sat over our turkey-less meal Thursday night and answered a question: “Who did you meet this year that unexpectedly added a ton of value to your life?”
Thanks to you as readers — many of whom I have a relationship with — and to everyone who came into my life in any form. I appreciate you.
Contents:
Book Review: Origin by Dan Brown
brain bites: Business & Investing
How to Read Financial News: Tips from Portfolio Managers
The Uncertainty in China Is Kryptonite to Global Markets
Chief of Staff
brain bites: Psychology & Health
Why Do Hangovers Happen And What Can You Do About Them?
Lyric: This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads
Book Review: Origin by Dan Brown
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?
They are two of the most basic questions mankind has asked for millennia. Man has created stories and gods to define these mysteries.
Author Dan Brown explores these questions in a battle between science and religion. Book here. He blends facts with a mind-bending mission in Spain to share truths with the world that answer the two questions above.
“Well, science and religion are not competitors, they’re two different languages trying to tell the same story. There’s room in this world for both.”
In my inner nerd’s search for an intellectually stimulating fiction novel, Origin delivered.
November 2022 seems like an appropriate time to read it because of just how quickly science seems to be advancing. New AI applications pop up seemingly every week. It can be an exhausting battle for someone who attends church yet loves the sciences. What might this look like in 50 years?
Our methods of inquiry have been evolving exponentially for millennia! It took early humans over a million years to progress from discovering fire to inventing the wheel. Then it took only a few thousand years to invent the printing press. Then it took only a couple hundred years to build a telescope. In the centuries that followed, in ever-shortening spans, we bounded from the steam engine, to gas-powered auto-mobiles, to the Space Shuttle! And then, it took only two decades for us to start modifying our own DNA! We now measure scientific progress in months, advancing at a mind-boggling pace. (134)
Origin is extrapolated from facts, meaning the theories from art and science are real; you can go explore the buildings of Spain that are part of the story — Gaudí’s Casa Mila, the Sagrada Familia, El Escorial, and the Guggenheim; and Brown uses valid thought experiments (the Infinite Hallway) and literary secrets (the ampersand &) to support the story’s premise.
The logical conclusions and facts really make me think about the world and what I believe in.
This is the brilliance of the book. It is not the style of prose and the mysterious characters. Dan Brown is presenting one solution to questions that have proven impossible to answer: Where do we come from? And where are we going? (I wrote them again. Get used to it. You’ll read them 100 times in the book.)
It’s a particularly important time to consider them.
We are now perched on a strange cusp of history, a time when the world feels like it’s been turned upside down, and nothing is quite as we imagined. But uncertainty is always a precursor to sweeping change; transformation is always preceded by upheaval and fear. I urge you to place your faith in the human capacity for creativity and love because these two forces, when combined, possess the power to illuminate any darkness. (570)
I won’t spoil the grand reveal, but the answers to the questions help me to learn the historical context and force me to pause to consider my own life and decisions. Let’s read more books that have that effect.
Origin is highly entertaining, edge-of-your-seat good, and intellectually rigorous. A highly-potent combo for any curious mind.
Prayer for the Future: may our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.
(Online here.)
brain bites: business & investing
How to Read Financial News: Tips from Portfolio Managers. Here. I’ve found myself acting in information overload, needing to step back during the holiday and recalibrate my compass. “…many of us plow ahead, reading news and research until our eyes turn red. After all, reading is easier than critical thinking.” Relate?
TL;DR: use a few key questions and practices to separate the signal from noise. My favorite reminder: Develop Your Own Framework. Before you read the news, you must have your own framework in place for decision-making. Otherwise, you’ll be unduly influenced by what you read.
The Uncertainty in China Is Kryptonite to Global Markets. Here from Charles Hugh Smith’s blog. I don’t pretend to know half of what’s going on in China, but the events in China over the past months seem to be creating some potentially catastrophic second-order effects.
Few seem alive to the potentially consequential financial risks arising from uncertainties evolving in China.
Chief of Staff. One struggle this year has been having a reliable framework for communicating my role at FirstWatch. I’ve gravitated more towards Chief of Staff than Operations as a framework after doing some deep dives. This was inspiring with the responsibilities in the following buckets:
brain bites: psychology & health
Why Do Hangovers Happen And What Can You Do About Them? This from Examine felt appropriate after Thanksgiving. A scientific approach to causes, effects, and remedies. I’ve been trying to significantly cut alcohol.
We’re not exactly sure how alcohol gives us hangovers, but it’s likely a combination of toxicity, dehydration, poor sleep, and our body’s striving to get back to where it was before all the alcohol.
Lyric: This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads
People are migrating to or from home today — 55 million people via plane, car, or train. Home is where we want to be.
Talking Heads wrote this tune as a love song made up of phrases with emotional resonance, but no narrative qualities. Zero. There is no story here, simply a bunch of catchy lines. To frontman David Byrne, love songs are “kinda big” and this keeps it light.
As we travel home from Thanksgiving my hope is that home, wherever that may be, feels like it.
Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me around
…
Home is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
Stay Curious,
Dan