Weekend Reading #157
Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash
This is the hundred-and-fiftieth-seventh weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 26th February 2022.
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*****
What we're thinking.
The question is more like what we are not thinking this week. In a crazy week for global markets and geopolitics it is easy to be swept away once again by the cacophony of opinions. We have been around emerging markets for a while and the only thing as investors that we have been doing when it comes to Russian assets for the past few months is absolutely staying as far away as we can. This crisis is not quite like any we have seen before given the size and ambition of the military campaign initiated by Vladimir Putin. That is why from an investment perspective, intraday opinions about bottoms and tops and speculation about sanctions being strong or weak shouldn’t actually matter. These are not normal times. And what's more is it came on the back of the already non-normal Fed monetary tightening and liquidity draining plans which came after a completely non-normal bubble of bubbles. So, despite being tempted to buy the “bottom” our only advice would be to show discipline and stick to process. There will come a time to make huge amounts of money again on the long side. Maybe it's now, but anyone who tells you that is probably deluding themselves to thinking that they know. We don’t know, that’s for sure.
What we're reading.
I finished one of the many books that make up my 'ongoing' pile this week and it was a tome I'd been working my way through for several weeks. The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline is a superb depiction of the, supposed, American decline over recent decades by US journalist, George Packer. The book put me in mind of another book I read recently, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, by Evan Osnos, and picked up on many of the themes espoused in that longer work. Interestingly, The Unwinding was published in 2014 but is especially prescient today, post-Trump, post-Afghanistan, post-whatever it is Putin is up to. In the book, Packer narrates the story of America since the 1980s by telling the story of a selection of Americans, each facing their own set of challenges. The tobacco farmer. The factory worker. An evangelist. The venture capitalist/financier (Peter Thiel, no less). They all share the story that tells how America, a superpower, according to some, is coming apart at the seams, its elites and institutions no longer working, with its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for salvation. In times of global strife, we need our leaders more so than ever. One can only fear and not look past the fact that a declining America is one of the reasons why we find the world today on such a knife-edge. EJP
Bruno Macaes once again hits the nail on the head with this piece on Vladimir Putin. There is so much written by so-called experts who repeatedly got it completely wrong, but Macaes did not. Highly recommend reading his thoughts. DC
It wouldn't be a bad weekend to pick up Putin's People, from FT reporter, Catherine Belton, a book I previously recommended in this newsletter. There are few better or more detailed accounts of Vladimir Putin’s meteoric and surprising rise to power and how the group of individuals, the oligarchs, around Putin worked with him to secure wealth and fortune for Russia’s ruling class in the aftermath of the USSR. In trying to compute the events of this week, understanding how we got here is the first task, and Belton's fascinating and terrifying account of Putin's rise and rise is essential reading for anyone wanting to fathom the current state of the world. EJP
What we're playing.
Yes, I know I'm late to the party, and for that I apologise, but this week I started playing Wordle. Why didn't anyone tell me it was this brilliant? Sure, the fact the New York Times bought the damn thing and it's all I've seen on my Twitter feed for the past month, but I needed someone, perhaps in a newsletter I subscribe to, one that provides some weekly recommendations for content and the like, to tell me how great it is! So, in lieu of someone doing it for me, I can't recommend Wordle highly enough. It's addictive, but in the cleverest of ways, its correct usage being limited to one single play of the game per day. Check it out. Please. And then you can't complain that nobody ever told you how great it is! EJP
What we're watching.
An uplifting film I enjoyed this week was an old favourite, The Martian, starring Matt Damon and telling the story of astronaut Mark Watney who is stranded on Mars after his crew leaves him behind, presuming him to be dead due to a storm. With minimum supplies, Watney struggles to keep himself alive but, spoiler alert, somehow manages to keep himself going and plot a path back to humanity. It's one of the great films, I think, and stands apart from a lot of the other space films that were produced around this era, such as Gravity and Ad Astra. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it might have something to do with the fact that Damon's character is likable and funny and, whilst the film dabbles in some of the physics and biology, the majority of the film is focused squarely on one man's struggle for survival, told in a super friendly way with a large dose of humour chucked in. Like most great films, you really enjoy them if you're really rooting for the main man in the middle, and The Martian is a classic example of this, with every scene an opportunity to cheer on Watney and his friends at home on earth who are attempting to plot him a route off the Red Planet. Hugely uplifting. Hugely entertaining. One of those films where you feel like applauding when the credits roll! EJP
What we're listening to.
This podcast featuring Derek Yoo, co-founder of Moonbeam and Moonriver, on the Delphi Podcast offers much to think about in relation to the state of play of cross-chain integration and infrastructure. Moonbeam and Moonriver are EVM-based smart contract engines on Polkadot and Kusama respectively, looking to bring more functionality onto the Polkadot ecosystem. A bigger topic of cross-chain messaging (as opposed to copies of the same dapp deployed across multiple chains) came into the discussion, which raised the question: for all the brilliance and sophistication behind these technical solutions, would anyone even know (or care), beyond the User Interface and User Experience the have? Put differently, is crypto following in the same path as traditional tech, where the sophistication of the tech matters less than the user-facing front end when it comes to capturing the market’s imagination, and the resulting multiple? Think Nvidia vs TSMC, or the broad swathe of high-tech tooling that goes into other semiconductors, cloud computing and headline SaaS platforms – the tooling makes the dream come true, but ultimately the value accrues to the dream, not to the instruments. EL
I listened this week to Lex Fridman chat with one of my favourite blog authors, Tim Urban, scribe of Waitbutwhy. I’ve written about Waitbutwhy before – it's just such a great place for the curious mind and Tim’s writing style makes it such fun to read. Both Lex and Tim are great fans of Elon Musk and quite a bit of time is spent talking about Mars. What I find fascinating about their discussion is that it wasn’t a chat about how to get to Mars and are we capable of man landing on Mars but rather, what will happen once we are there, involving interplanetary transport and a multiplanetary future for man. It really got me thinking about how we really do need idealists and dreamers in the world and for all the criticism of how Elon Musk conducts himself and the possible financial gymnastics at Tesla, he has definitely inspired a generation of smart young people to dream of things we would otherwise not even believe remotely possible. The conversation covered lots of other cool stuff also including Tim’s upcoming book about procrastination (read his blog on it here) DC