Complexity and Adaptation
May 27, 2022If you are new to Things I Didn’t Learn in School you can see what I am up to here. If you want to skip directly to my conversation with poet Heidi Seaborn, click this link. Also, last night, The Wall Street Journal published a piece I wrote about family and Putin’s propaganda, which you can read here. For US readers, happy Memorial Day!
Too Many Tech Bros, Not Enough Frackers
May 7, 2022Welcome! If this was forwarded to you, you can read what I am up to here or sign up to receive the free or paid version below. This week is both an essay and a Mother’s Day podcast with my amazing wife Marina, which you can hear here.
A Conversation with Neuroscientist David Linden
April 29, 2022We are wired a bit funny, according to Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden. Our brains send us contradictory thoughts and emotions. We also want to predict the future even when some things, like imagining a world we are no longer a part of, is impossible. You can hear the full conversation here.
Undermoney
April 16, 2022Undermoney is both the name of a new novel and a term invented by this week’s podcast guest, Jay Newman. Jay defines the term as money “which is unknown publicly but that controls individuals and events.” Given the theme of this Substack, I was of course intrigued to speak with him. You can hear the full episode here.
Crossing the Rubicon
April 3, 2022Things I Didn’t Learn in School has two parts—writing about what is going on in the world (macro) and podcasts of individual life stories (micro). To understand, it helps to both zoom in and out. The very best novels—Les Miserables or War and Peace—do exactly that.
China’s Strength and Fragility
March 19, 2022Putin might lose the war in Ukraine, which helps explain why he is threatening chemical and nuclear weapons and also reaching out to China for help. In that regards, my conversation with Yuhua Wang is timely. Yuhua has both an amazing life story and is also an expert in Chinese politics at Harvard. I very much enjoyed my chat with him and think you will, too. You can listen to the full conversation here.
Our Leaders
March 6, 2022This podcast grows by word of mouth, so forward away. Today, I share a conversation with Congressman Jim Himes. You can hear the full episode here.
My Geography Lesson
February 20, 2022We grow mostly by word of mouth and a bigger community creates more robust dialogue, so feel free to forward widely!
The Physics of Story
February 6, 2022I like a good framework. For instance, an equity (a stock) has just two moving parts, earnings and the price paid for those earnings. Earnings, in turn, are spending. A framework puts individual observations, like the price investors are willing to pay to own a company’s earnings, into logical context.