🤯

Market value of being unpredictable and inexplicable is going up.

Now do nuclear.

If you feel like you're bad at your job and it's making you depressed, just consider that, as the investigation of the recent heist revealed, the password to access the Louvre's videosurveillance system was "Louvre".

One of the more memorable emails I've opened recently.

One of my children is the embodiment of my id, is this typical?

It's important to say because people don't hear it enough. Have kids young. Wish I had started sooner.

“Love life more than its meaning.” Outstanding.

Never thought about it this way before, but Bob is basically a Holy Fool.

Balzac - Lost Illusions. (That’s just the start. You can read the entire Human Comedy on Gutenberg.) Bellow - Herzog or Sammler’s Planet.

Pruning my books as I pack them for the final leg of moving house. What doesn’t make the cut? Pynchon. Shteyngart. Whatever moments their books captured and spoke to has passed, and I’m certain I won’t need them around. Balzac, Dostoevsky, Bellow, Eliot—yes yes yes yes.

The millennial generation might be the last one that grew up with any knowledge of classical music. Even then, it was weird and rare, but it’s only become truly dire in the last 20 years or so. Piano sales have been in decline in the US for decades, something like 17,000 sold last year. it’s always blamed on the economy, but great used pianos have never been cheaper or more available. Classical music has never been more accessible. I think the deeper problem is we no longer know how to appreciate beauty.

New rule of thumb for this era: always bet on the weirder outcome.

I've been a small-scale real-estate investor, done deals myself and with others. I've landlorded buildings. 100% the most merciless education in human nature you can get. The true art is reaching settlement with somebody who has diametrically opposed interests, and may even hate you. The whole game makes some people cynical, others skeptical, others fearful & cautious. But to come out of it with a greater love for humanity, and an appetite for more? That's strange. And rare.

The problem with this place is there’s too much macro narrative going on all the time. Suffocating. I have some things to say about radicalization again, but otherwise, I’ll be down here microposting.

Jane Goodall... A woman I met via Zoom in 2021 for the Templeton Prize. It was surreal to see her face for the first time, even in a blurry box on a screen. It felt like no other call I've been on. She had an aura that is hard to describe. Here's my try: When you're with Jane, you feel your heart rising to her. It's an instinctive thing. Like you're responding in a basic physical way to the presence of... well, goodness. It seems to me now that Jane's achievement was not simply being "the first." If you had sent me to Gombe in the 1970s with Jane's mission, I would not have come back with her insights. She was not a passive witness of the animals. I'm convinced that wherever she was, she had this same effect on creatures around her. Wherever she was, she made others want to be better. To care. To love. If animals are anything like us—and this was basic to Jane's worldview, yes, they are—they must have understood Jane much as I did: here is a good person. And in a strange way, without really knowing her, like millions of others, I loved her. In the last day, I've described Jane Goodall to people as part Einstein, part Mother Teresa. And while that may sound grandiose, if you reflect on who she was, both living saint and wise soul, and how nobody else on Earth is quite like her... it's not. Anyway.... what I came here to write was this: Because I've refrained from travel as much as possible (small kids), I missed my two chances to meet her in person. Until… one week ago, when she decided to attend the 2025 Templeton Prize ceremony. There, I had the honor of finally meeting her in the flesh — cool, bony hands, gleaming ponytail, bent back, Africa medallion necklace. She had the air of a small, light-footed, focused creature. Not frail, even at 91, but delicately built, like a gazelle. I had to run—literally run—to keep up with her when she raced to meet Al Gore in the green room. I gently asked her if she might ever consider resting. I remembered how her friends and staff in 2021 told me how grateful they were that she was (due to the pandemic) forbidden to travel. At last, after decades of 300-days-a-year on the road, Jane was home. They hoped she'd stay. But Jane didn't stay. At 90, she went out again. Like a missionary, she seemed to feel a calling that gave her astonishing energy. But, she told me as she walked with a grimace, “It is hard, and getting harder.” Oh, and her response to my question about rest: a firm and grim "No." That was the last thing she said to me that night. One week later, she died in California, far away from home, doing what she loved and needed to do If Jane hadn't left home, I, and thousands of others, never would have had the privilege of seeing her. If she hadn't left home, perhaps (though there’s no way of knowing this) she might have lived a little longer. Thanks to Jane and all those who have supported and loved her these many years. May she long be remembered.

How many evenings like this, in early fall with long afternoons, with small children and doting grandparents, do you get? Savor them.

The cure to a mind sickness is always greeted with revulsion and pain, at first.

Reminded as I often am of the book Demons by Dostoevsky. In his depiction, the most violent conspiracies are executed by the pathetic, encouraged by the beautiful and nihilistic, and concocted by a narcissist who loves nothing but power. Let’s see how these dominoes fell.

I’m afraid a long nightmare is just beginning. Pray for the family, and the country.

Free movie idea: bring to life this period, the Permian, right before this entire universe vanished for all time.