Weekend Reading #161
This is the hundred-and-sixty-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 26th March 2022.
To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.
*****
What we're thinking.
As ever we are thinking about markets, both stocks and crypto and trying to make sense of the macro scenario we find ourselves in. Yet again there seems to be an almost epic battle (in the media and the markets) between the buy the dippers and the sell the rally’ers. As with most things these days it plays out in the public domain and tends to be quite vitriolic. Our blogpost this week tries to make some sense of reconciling what is getting both camps excited.
What we're doing.
How popular is “Wordle” right now? It's proven to be a very popular game, with 300,000 players reported at the beginning of January. It's now believed that over 2 million users are playing Wordle globally. Our family do it. Everyone in our office does it. The rivalry and competitive sides of all of us shine through when we have those 5 minutes of the day to solve the word of the day. Great concept however frustrating at times... for some. DK
What we're reading.
Two excellent books I’ve been working my way through over the last couple of weeks are on subjects relating, in a variety of ways, to the events taking place in Eastern Europe. This Is Not Propaganda is a fantastic read, by Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev about the disinformation age. It takes us deep into the murky world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump, and everything in between. Published in 2020, it remains a current read and feels even fresher given the most recent chapter of history Putin is writing, and the stories Pomerantsev tells and what you learn from this book feels vitally important today, coming in an age in which we drown in information, some real, most less so. To accompany this book, I am also about to finish Samantha Power’s, A Problem from Hell. The “Hell” Power describes in this fascinating, yet thoroughly depressing and distressing book is genocide, and she explores, amongst other strands, America’s response to genocidal actions throughout the last century. Harrowing in its detail, Power’s central message is, surprisingly, one of hope as she tells stories of outrageous courage from individuals who risked their careers and lives to save others, whilst policymakers and outsiders ignored warnings and rationalised inaction. Does this sound familiar in Ukraine today? Perhaps, but Power has always been prescient with her writing. Power is an Irish-American journalist and diplomat who is currently serving as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. She previously served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. She is something of a hero of mine. Her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, is a hugely inspiring read, telling her life story from coming to America as an Irish immigrant via war correspondent and activist to becoming the youngest-ever US Ambassador to the UN. Another great book of hers is Chasing The Flame, her profile of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which feels like a very important current read, too. Pomerantsev and Power, two fabulous writers, two brilliant books for trying to make sense of these complicated times. EJP
This essay from Niall Ferguson is one of the few good takes we have read on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Much of Putin’s thinking is readily attributed to how he views himself relative to other leaders in Russian history, especially in Tzarist times, and especially Peter the Great. This dives into some of the thinking and actually asks whether it is appropriate at all. It also places the roles of western leaders in a similar context. This is well worth a read.
A crypto project we’ve written about before is Helium, one of the very few projects that at this stage appears to have a genuine line-of-sight shot at creating real-world value. When we wrote about the project around a year ago, they had something like 20 000 hotspots. They now have 600 000 of them and a backorder waiting list of 3 500 500. Yes, that is not a typo. This is what exponential growth looks like. I came across this interview with CEO, Amir Haleem which is a great overview of what's happened, where we are and where we might be heading with this project.
On a completely different note, this twitter thread really caught my eye. The thread is titled, “What does Love mean to 4-8 year old kids?” and is a series of answers from kids which just really sums up what we all wish we could articulate. If you think your kids aren’t acutely aware of how things work, you should have a read!
And finally with all the action happening in Europe, it appears Kim Jong Un has been feeling a bit left out. This week North Korea tested a missile or two just to remind everyone he was there. I also came across this website, shared by comedian, David Baddiel, entitled Kim Jong Un Looking at Things. The website is well... exactly that. Not quite Putin bare-chested on a horse, but you get the drift. DC
What we're watching.
I’ve been reading a lot of depressing books of late (see above) and so I have tried to make the episode of television my wife and I watch each night (relatively) light-hearted. The Gilded Age has been excellent entertainment and great fun but what really provided a bit of respite over the last week has been Amazon Prime’s, Reacher. This is not complicated television. It will not change your life. You can scroll Twitter with one eye whilst you watch. But it will more than likely pass the hour between the end of dinner and the start of bed... well, as sad as that sounds, it does in our house, anyway! You might have seen Tom Cruise in the film versions of Reacher, but this is, I think, the first serialised TV version. It is based on the international bestseller, Killing Floor, by Lee Child, which is an excellent “airport departure lounge” read. The story in this series is a simple one, with Jack Reacher getting arrested for a murder he did not commit and finding himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy full of bent coppers, shady businessmen and scheming politicians. With nothing but his significant wit and his even more significant muscles, our hero must figure out what is happening in Margrave and get out alive. Spoiler alert: he does and it’s brilliant fun! EJP
Bit of family fun this week where my boys introduced me to “Is it Cake”? A Netflix addition where skilled cake artists create mouth-watering replicas of handbags, sewing machines and more in a mind-bending baking contest inspired by a popular meme. Then judges need to choose which item is the cake. One for the family.
The final chase! After a lengthy break, Killing Eve is finally back for its fourth and final season. The show's third season wrapped up in May 2020, meaning we've all had to wait nearly two years for new episodes. Looking forward to bingeing on this one soon. DK
What we're listening to.
The new Lumineers album was released this week. This one is called “BRIGHTSIDE” (in all caps) and has a couple of really good tracks including “Where we are” and “Never Really Mine”. What you get with the Lumineers is consistency. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are – pure folk rock. Pretty cool to listen to while kicking back with a beverage and staring at the sea, or in my case, with your noise-cancelling headphones on the train home in London rush-hour each day.
I don’t often listen to Joe Rogan, mainly because the conversations are just so long but a conversation popped up between him and Antonio Garcia Martinez. Last week Martinez appeared on my Twitter feed as he decided to go and take a trip to Ukraine in the middle of the war. I remembered Martinez because he wrote a bestselling book (which I haven't read) called Chaos Monkeys in which he wrote about the secrets of ad tracking and targeting in social media companies. He worked for Facebook early on and then more famously for Apple, where he became one of the earliest victims of cancel culture when what he calls a “slack mob” called him out for some parts of his book. Unlike some more recent examples (Coinbase, Netflix) Apple caved and fired him. This is a really cool all round conversation about everything from Ukraine to social media to even Elon Musk’s offer to fight Putin. Very long but at 2x speed it is worth the listen. DC
This Macro Voices podcast showed up as a timely recommendation, featuring Joseph Wang aka Fed Guy discussing the aftermath of the FOMC meeting last week. Background wise, Joseph was a former senior trader for the New York Fed’s open markets desk, which puts him in a unique position of being able to opine on what really happens behind the scenes of QE (or QT), when an instruction is sent to the open markets desk after an FOMC meeting. Specifically, Joseph speaks about the nature of money, the nature of US treasuries as collateral, agency MBS and housing, whether Powell pull off a Volcker move, the ability of the US government to handle high interest costs (spoiler: he thinks they’ll be able to handle it) and many more fascinating matters. At the end of the day, this just adds to the list of complexities in a system that many take for granted, but which without proper understanding could behave in very unexpected ways at inopportune moments. EL