gettingagriponthings

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Getting A Grip

[gettingagriponthings]

The A.I. Panopticon: The Power of Mind Over Mind

In 1787 a British thinker by the name of Jeremy Bentham published a series of 21 letters in response to an advertisement he’d seen in the paper. The ad was regarding a House of Correction. Parliament was preparing to deport thousands of prisoners to Australia (they had been sending convicts to the colonies across the Atlantic, but that system ended with the American revolution) and was looking for some new prison designs. Bentham went to great length detailing a structure he thought might fit the bill and allow a large number of subjects to be overseen by a minimum number of monitors. He called this design the panopticon or Inspection House. PAN-OPTI-CON, From the Greek: pan (all) opti (seeing). Bentham described it as such:

The building is circular.

The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them, if you please, the cells.

These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest dimension of the cell.

The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspector's lodge.

It will be convenient in most, if not in all cases, to have a vacant space or area all round, between such centre and such circumference. You may call it if you please the intermediate or annular area.

Bentham’s design called for a round building with a single tower in the middle. The tower was surrounded by some large number of cells arranged in a circle, all exposed to the central tower. Subjects would be kept in separate cells, and monitored by a solitary guard in the middle. I used the term “subjects” because Bentham emphasized in his letters how versatile the panopticon could be:

No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.

Bentham’s panopticon was designed for the masses, especially for the subjugation of the vulnerable and already oppressed.

With only “a simple idea in Architecture!” Bentham effectively designed a way for the powerful to reform the morals, preserve health, and invigorate industry, among the powerless. And only one monitor would be needed for “obtaining power of mind over mind.” 

Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated instruction diffused - public burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in Architecture!

[...]

A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example

The panopticon is a diabolically genius idea. Though its simplicity and bluntness hit you over the head like a brick and leave you with a bad hangover. One person can effectively control hundreds, not by monitoring all subjects at every moment, but by convincing them that they could be monitored at any given moment. You never know when the monitor is watching so you behave as though he is always watching. 

Visible and Unverifiable

Nearly two centuries later, in his 1975 book Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, French philosopher Michel Foucault revisited Bentham’s panopticon. 

Foucault teased out some of the finer points and clarified the ramifications of the architectural structure that could go beyond the physical manifestation of a prison.

"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. [...]

To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.

A Clearer View of Everything

2020 has brought about a new age of the panopticon. This one is without walls and is even more “all-seeing” than Bentham’s version.

The New York Times recently released a piece entitled The Secret Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It, detailing a new artificial intelligence company called Clearview AI that’s developed a powerful facial recognition product. Clearview’s facial recognition application is unparalleled in its reach and capacity to recognize the faces of countless people on the street that might be unfortunate enough to cross the path of a device employing it. But Clearview isn’t a best-in-class product because of what the founder Hoan Ton-That says is a “state-of-the-art neural net,” or because of more sophisticated thermal imaging, or because of the implementation of any other particular technological innovation. In fact, Albert Wenger of the venture capital firm a16z wrote on his blog:

“First, it should be clear by now that it has become almost trivial to build a system like this. A lot of open source frameworks and neural networks have been made available that can be trained for face recognition. Clearview AI did not have to come up with some technological breakthrough, they just had to point existing technology at image sources[...].”

Clearview AI is in a class all its own because of their massive database of images to pull from when evaluating a person spotted in the real world. They tout a database of over 3 billion images, each scraped from sites on the open web like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Venmo, and YouTube. 

Automated web scraping technology has existed nearly as long as the internet itself. The first internet crawling bot, the World Wide Web Crawler, debuted in the summer of 1993, with the first crawler powered search engine coming that winter. 

The usage of web scraping technology is not difficult (Try it for yourself here, here, or here), but the usage of it for the collection of massive amounts of personal information for surveillance is ethically ambiguous at best, and is in direct contradiction to the terms and policies of many popular websites. Twitter’s Developer Agreement and Policy document for example says:

User Protection. Twitter Content, and information derived from Twitter Content, may not be used by, or knowingly displayed, distributed, or otherwise made available to:

1. any public sector entity (or any entities providing services to such entities) for surveillance purposes, including but not limited to:

investigating or tracking Twitter's users or their Twitter Content; and, 

tracking, alerting, or other monitoring of sensitive events (including but not limited to protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings);

2. any public sector entity (or any entities providing services to such entities) whose primary function or mission includes conducting surveillance or gathering intelligence;

Twitter has already sent a cease and desist letter to the company regarding its violation of its terms. I hope other platforms aren’t too far behind.

More important than Clearview’s violation of the wishes of giant tech platforms is their violation of the trust and privacy of millions of Americans. In over three billion instances Clearview has surreptitiously taken the images of unwitting social media and content site users (if you’re reading this, they almost certainly have photos of you) and given them to others to surveil them.

There are now over 600 different law enforcement entities in the United States that have licensed Clearview’s facial recognition product. Everyone from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to hundreds of state and local agencies is using Clearview’s tech. It’s had such rapid adoption because it’s simply more powerful than everything else they have. A more common facial recognition tool used by law enforcement might have similar identification technology but certainly has a dramatically smaller database to match from. It might have a database of a few million images: a combination of police collected images from criminal investigations, mugshots, and maybe a state DMV database. It would be limited in size (still massive but not 3 billion images massive) and limited in identification range and flexibility. These government collected photos are often taken straight-on from the front, or directly from the side, and usually feature an individual with a relatively blank expression. Clearview’s ripped photos show people from every imaginable angle and would feature a wide range of expressions; from happy to sad, and everything in between. 

Invisible and Verifiable

Clearview’s facial recognition weapon is the panopticon made real and inverted.

Foucault described Bentham’s panopticon as laying down the idea that power, like the monitor within the central tower, should be ‘visible but unverifiable.’ 

In conjunction with the unregulated ability of companies and governments to track our movements, purchases, thoughts, and desires, Clearview’s product (and the ubiquity of facial recognition policing) represents a new paradigm. 

Power will be increasingly invisible but verifiable.

There is no central tower to see and to fear. It’s been digitized, decentralized, and democratized. 

And there isn’t a question of whether or not the inspector is paying attention. You are being watched. You are being monitored. You are not anonymous. 

Only understanding the issue and having the courage to stand up and speak, even while under the gaze of the panopticon’s eye, will hold power accountable. 

*(h/t to @benedictevans whose subheading “Building the panopticon” in last week’s newsletter lead to my research into the ideas of Bentham/Foucault. Read his essays HERE and subscribe to his awesome newsletter)

[gettingagriponthings]

Encryption Deja Vu All Over Again

Bill Barr, the Trump appointed Attorney General of the United States, issued a statement last week, demanding that Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer, Inc., formerly Apple Computer Company) assist the Department of Justice in decrypting two iPhones (an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 7). These particular phones are of great interest to the United States government because of who owned them. The phones were owned by a Saudi Arabian flight student who was participating in a long established training program between his county and the United States before his death. Last month, he killed three people on a US Naval Air installation in Pensacola, Florida. 

Apple says that they’re happy to help. They’ve already “provided information to the Department of Justice including iCloud backups, account information and transactional data for multiple accounts.” 

But to the Attorney General, to President Donald Trump, and to many others in the law enforcement community, the type of help that Apple is giving just isn’t good enough. 

We are helping Apple all of the time on TRADE and so many other issues, and yet they refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements. They will have to step up to the plate and help our great Country, NOW! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2020

Barr said that Apple has yet to provide any “substantive assistance,” at all. What he really wants is for Apple to break into the phones on behalf of the federal government, specifically by means of creating a “backdoor.” 

“We have asked Apple for their help in unlocking the shooter’s iPhones.  So far Apple has not given us any substantive assistance.  This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that investigators be able to get access to digital evidence once they have obtained a court order based on probable cause.  We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of Americans and prevent future attacks.” - AG Bill Barr

Barr knows that Apple is not going to willingly give the type of “substantive assistance” that he really wants. What he appears to be doing is setting the stage for a long and important legal battle over the nature of data security, national security, privacy, and encryption. 

Tragedy in San Bernardino

This is not a new fight. Four years ago, the news was filled with details about an eerily similar battle between Apple and the FBI. The government was trying to gain access to an iPhone 5C used by a terrorist pair who killed 14 people, and seriously wounded 22 others, in San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation gained possession of the terrorist’s phone and was granted a warrant from a federal judge that allowed its agents to access its contents. After uncovering a small amount of information, they realized that the iPhone was an encrypted device and they didn’t have the ability to unlock it without the owner’s passcode (the owner had been killed in a shootout with law enforcement hours after the December attack). The government would need Apple’s help to extract the encrypted data.

Representatives of the federal government met with Apple CEO Tim Cook in an effort to persuade the company - at the time, the most valuable in the world - to help them unlock the terrorist’s iPhone. Apple supplied the government with what it could, including data - contacts, photos, video, email, etc - that had been backed up to the associated iCloud account. Their ability to help then quickly ran out as they reached the end of their capability without having access to the secure data stored on the phone itself. 

Apple’s Encryption: Technology & Policy

Apple couldn’t simply open the phone up for the feds to peek inside. They use a complex suite of secure processes to keep the massive number of iPhones in the world (possibly more than 700,000,000) as safe as possible. 

Beginning in 2014, with the new iOS 8, Apple stepped up their encryption game, making it exceedingly hard for law enforcement officials - and most importantly, bad guys the world over - to gain access to an iPhone without the user’s permission. Since the iPhone 3GS Apple has used some level of standard encryption on their devices. iOS 8 took on-device security significantly further and encrypted just about all of the important information on the phone including:

The Mail app (including attachments), managed books, app launch images, and location data are also stored encrypted with keys protected by the user’s passcode on their device. Calendar (excluding attachments), Contacts, reminders, Notes, Messages, Photos, and Health ancillary data implement Protected Until First User Authentication.

User-installed apps that do not opt-in to a specific Data Protection class receive Protected Until First User Authentication by default.

(from Apple iOS Security Guide, September 2014)

And in 2013, before the additional software encryption iOS 8, Apple started rolling out devices with a new A7 processor. The new chip added significant hardware protections, including a separate processor, solely used for the iPhone’s cryptographic operations, called the Secure Enclave.

Normal password protection works by taking a simple passcode, entered by the user, then applying a key derivation function (KDF - a special math problem used to in cryptography to create a secret code) to it, along with a little salt (some random data) sprinkled on top. This mixture yields a new, hopefully unique, and hard to break (depending on the strength of the password selected), encryption key. 

To increase protection, Apple chose not to include a normal KDF, but instead included, on each device, a unique 256-bit secret UID (Unique ID) that is stored physically on the phone in the Secure Enclave. Apple doesn’t keep a copy of the UID on file digitally or at Apple headquarters, it can only be found on your phone, and can’t be identified from a distance using software. 

So, with the state-of-the-art consumer level encryption system in-tact (plus several other security features I won’t go too far into here, like a time gap between password attempts), and without having a user’s unique password readily at hand, even Apple couldn’t simply open up a phone for thorough inspection. In fact, it would likely take several years to break into an iPhone by brute force (simply trying all possible combinations). Apple’s 2014 privacy policy laid the idea out simply:

“Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data [...] So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.”

And Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took an extra step in an open letter to users regarding the new features. He brought up the concept of a backdoor and made the company’s commitment to user privacy above all else, incontrovertible:

Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.

A Throwback to ‘89 (1789)

Talks after the San Bernardino massacre between Apple and the DOJ quickly broke down when Apple asserted their well established security principles. So the FBI asked Apple to figure out a way for them to get in anyway. They wanted Apple to create a ‘backdoor’ in the software that would let them access everything they wanted. Apple said no.

On February 16, of 2016 the Department of Justice (note: the FBI is a part of the DoJ) applied for, and was granted, a search warrant for a key to access the terrorist’s phone by Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California. Some legal experts viewed this search warrant itself to be ground breaking and illegal. A search warrant is typically granted for a location where a crime was committed (no crime in this case took place at Apple HQ), or for specific evidence or materials related to a crime that may be stored in a given location. The “backdoor” key to the iPhone used in the December 2 attacks wasn’t located at Apple HQ, either. It wasn’t located anywhere. It did not exist. The search warrant granted to the DOJ would compel Apple to spend significant time and resources to create a brand new piece of software. 

The government based its argument on a piece of legislation originally signed into law by President George Washington in 1789 (though it has been slightly amended in the centuries since) called the All Writs Act. It states:

(a)The Supreme Court and all courts established by Act of Congress may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.

(b)An alternative writ or rule nisi may be issued by a justice or judge of a court which has jurisdiction.

The All Writs Act (AWA) essentially enables a court to compel individuals to act on the basis of a judicial command. AWA has a long history of use, but as time has moved forward, it’s been used more sparingly, and usually in times of significant import. It’s been successfully deployed in times of war, in conjunction with instances of torture and terrorism, for some investigations of particularly egregious crimes, and in one particularly relevant instance regarding a telecommunications company. In a 1977 court case (US v. New York Telephone Co.) the All Writs Act was used to compel a telephone company to help the FBI by giving “all information, facilities and technical assistance” necessary to get the job done. 

The 1977 application of AWA would seem at first blush to fit the Apple situation, but the difference between the two situations is significant. New York Telephone Co. only had to supply the FBI with some simple information and access a few phones in order to comply with their court order. Apple would have to devote significant time and resources to create a completely new operating system. The creation of which would directly violate their own, well established, corporate values. 

At virtually the same time in early 2016 that the battle over the phone in the San Bernardino case was getting rolling in California, a New York federal judge ruled against the government’s use of the All Writs Act in an attempt to unlock iPhones used in a drug case. This was not clear cut.

Apple Takes a Stand

On February 25, 2016 Apple filed its formal decision not to comply with the federal government. And again, Tim Cook took the opportunity to defend the company’s position with a boldly worded letter directly to their customers and to the world:

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.

We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country. We believe it would be in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the implications.

While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.

Both sides were firmly dug in and ready to go wherever the case took them. There were two conflicting judicial rulings (affirmative from Judge Pym of the Central District of California and negative from Judge Orenstein of the Eastern District of New York). Jim Comey, then head of the FBI, testified before Congress, expressing the need for a way around the “vicious guard dog” of encryption that Apple had set up. Apple engineers, who would be the ones tasked with actually creating the backdoor, threatened to protest or even quit if so ordered. This situation called for further deliberation. Maybe a ruling by the Supreme Court. Maybe even a brand new piece of legislation would be needed to settle the issue. The future of privacy and encryption was on the line.

A Breakthrough

Then the FBI hacked into the phone on their own and on March 28 dropped the case against Apple. 

To this day, the public is still not officially sure who helped the FBI open the iPhone 5C in question. There are rumors floating around about a few companies that could have done it, and Senator Diane Feinstein revealed that it cost $900,000 to get it done during a 2017 Judiciary Committee hearing. A steep price to get into a phone that ended up not yielding any valuable information. 

Conclusion

In 2016, when this battle was dominating the news and racing through the courts, I generally sided with the federal government. Like most people my age, I have a really strong memory of September 11 and am wary of anything that could enable tragedy like that to strike again. My father was a career military officer, and I’m not generally distrustful of law enforcement. Plus, it can be pretty hard to disagree with Obama, who (unsurprisingly) had one of the clearest, and most nuanced, articulations of the government’s side on the matter:

All of us value our privacy, and this is a society that is built on a Constitution and a Bill of Rights and a healthy skepticism about overreaching government power.  Before smartphones were invented, and to this day, if there is probable cause to think that you have abducted a child, or that you are engaging in a terrorist plot, or you are guilty of some serious crime, law enforcement can appear before your -- at your doorstep and say, we have a warrant to search your home, and they can go into your bedroom and into your bedroom doors and rifle through your underwear to see if there’s any evidence of wrongdoing.

And we agree on that, because we recognize that just like all of our other rights -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, et cetera -- that there are going to be some constraints that we impose in order to make sure that we are safe, secure and living in a civilized society. [...]

And the question we now have to ask is, if technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there’s no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?  How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?  What mechanisms do we have available to even do simple things like tax enforcement? [...]

And I've got a bunch of smart people sitting there, talking about it, thinking about it.  We have engaged the tech community aggressively to help solve this problem.  My conclusion so far is that you cannot take an absolutist view on this.  So if your argument is strong encryption, no matter what, and we can and should, in fact, create black boxes, then that I think does not strike the kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years.  And it's fetishizing our phones above every other value. And that can't be the right answer.

(from SXSW 2016)

With his words, President Obama gave a really sophisticated shoulder shrug and suggested that we keep working together to figure this out. I think this is basically right. But where I differ, personally, from him is in the realm of action. With the actions of his Department of Justice, Obama firmly indicated his preference for a backdoor to be created.

The answer on the question of strong encryption and the need for a law enforcement back door isn’t clear. Security vs. privacy is a constant game of trade-offs. And to me the potential ( arguably inevitable) loss of digital privacy (messaging, health, banking, etc.) that would result if the weapon of a backdoor got into the wrong hands - be they the hands of criminals, or the hands of an adversarial state actor - isn’t worth it. 

(This piece took a long time to research and write. I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out the the incredible resources I studied online from The New York Times, Harvard, Slate, and especially the technical legal and encryption writing from comex on Hacker News, Matthew Green, How-To Geek, Darth Null, LawFare, and Reason.)

[gettingagriponthings]

A.I. to Greenlight Movies: Is This How Cats Got Made?

Artificial intelligence decision making systems are now in place to make or suggest choices for us in nearly all parts of our lives. Questions big and small are answered or informed by computers. Questions like:

Who gets extra attention and resources from doctors and hospitals?

How long should this person’s sentence be for a parole violation?

What social media post should I look at first?

Which television show should I watch this evening?

And now the decision about which movies get made or distributed might be heavily influenced by AI algorithms, too.

Scrolling through Twitter earlier this week I came across this post from the film news aggregation site, Discussing Film:

@DiscussingFilm: Warner Bros has signed a deal for a AI-driven film management system which will help decision-making for greenlighting certain films. The AI system can assess an actor’s value in any territory and how much a film is expected to earn in theaters. (Source: Hollywood Reporter, Twitter, 1/8/20)

While this sounds like an intriguing and impressive piece of technology, it immediately jumped out to me as a bad idea. Unless developed with an extremely high level of care, and by an uncommonly diverse and thoughtful team, decision making algorithms often end up including the human bias of the people creating them, or reinforcing bias from the past. 

Instinctively, I think that this 'AI-driven film management system’ would lean toward recommend the greenlighting and purchase of movies that aren’t particularly unique, that lack inclusion of female or minority leads, and would reinforce the less than perfect existing patterns in filmmaking.

From the Hollywood Reporter post about the algorithm: 

Resistance is futile. Warner Bros. has become the latest studio to publicly embrace artificial intelligence. The movie division has signed a deal with Cinelytic to use the latter’s AI-driven project management system that was launched last year. Under the new deal, Warner will leverage the system’s comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams. [...] While the platform won’t necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warners’ hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates. The platform is particularly helpful in the festival setting, where studios get caught in bidding wars and plunk down massive sums after only hours of assessment (as happened with New Line’s $15 million acquisition of Blinded by the Light out of last year's Sundance Film Festival). The Cinelytic AI’s insight might also have altered decision-making on some of Warners’ misfires from 2019, such as The Kitchen, Shaft and Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Diversity and representation in art don’t happen by accident or by looking at the past to predict the future. And the past would be present in every decision made by this artificial intelligence system. Sophisticated (in the technological sense) machine learning algorithms, like the one created by Cinelytic, are developed with the input of hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of data points that teach it what to look for when making a decision.

Here are some numbers from the Cinelytics website indicating the data used to formulate its product, and what it promises to deliver:

95,000 + Films with Performance and Metadata

550,000 + Above-the-line* Talent Analysis profiles

85% + Box Office Forecasting Accuracy

20X Faster and More Efficient

*”Above-the-line” talent includes actors, producers, directors, etc.

The algorithm is not intended to be the final say on which movies get made, but rather to be an analytics tool used to give informed recommendations to the human decision makers. But unfortunately, algorithmic recommendations are often interpreted much more like firm, perfectly constructed, and infallible decisions by the people who use them.

Cinelytic’s (now WB’s) product would include the top movies from the last decade, and tens of thousands more, when recommending which movies to greenlight. And while I’m confident the algorithm includes weighting to pay some respect to the slow-growing trend of diversity on screen, I am skeptical that it would be done with all the care necessary. Cinelytics “Key Team” includes one woman, and not many ethnically diverse faces. 

The movie industry has slowly been inching its way toward better diversity and inclusion among the characters portrayed on screen, but still has a long way to go. According to a report released last year by Dr. Stacy L Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative about the 1,200 top movies between 2007 and 2018, only 27 movies had leading or co-leading roles that featured racially/ethnically underrepresented actors. In 2017 33 of the top 100 films had a female lead or co-lead. Ten years before that, in 2007, only 20 films had a female lead or co-lead. These numbers are bad. But there has been some progress.

I worry that informing “your casting, greenlighting, financing, budgeting and release decisions in real-time with [Cinelytic’s] industry leading AI-powered predictive forecasting tool,” will effectively eliminate many surprise box-office hits from consideration. There were several successful movies released over the last few years with diverse casts like Get Out ($255 million at the box office, $4.5 million budget, The Farewell ($19.6mil, $3mil), and Hustlers ($156mil, $20.7mil). None of these movies were at the very top of the box office, but they each punched well above their weight and made serious, unexpected cash for their producers and studios.

Specifically, I’m clearly concerned that automating some of the systems used to choose which films get made and promoted could have a negative impact on diversity (of actors, directors, producers, etc). Generally, I fear that this step will erode overall risk-taking and creativity in film. In an era of film (especially within the big studios) that is already dialing back the level of artistic risk taking, the implementation of a tool designed to mitigate risk could completely eliminate it.

I’ll leave you with some words from one of today’s greatest filmmakers who even had a hard time getting his movie made the way he wanted to in 2019:

���In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.”  

- Martin Scorsese

[gettingagriponthings]

Learning Through Reading: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

For years I’ve been come across references to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his profound books on Twitter and across the blogosphere. Quotes and allusions posted by tech and business practitioners to signal their worldliness, intelligence, and appreciation for clear thinking abound. The references were intriguing and powerfully worded, but often went over my head. So when I came across a good copy of Taleb’s most prominent book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, in a used bookstore at the end of 2019 I didn’t hesitate to pick it up. That was a quick decision that I do not regret.

Antifragile is a book with one clear 450-pound silverback gorilla of an idea: that some things in this world “benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”

Taleb proposes that we describe these things as “antifragile.” They are the exact opposite of “fragile” (Many would initially think the opposite of “fragile” would be “robust,” or “durable,” but that’s not correct. Something that’s antifragile would gain advantage or profit from disorder. Something that would be described as robust would simply be immune to disorder), and should be encouraged in most cases.

Some examples of things that are antifragile:

Hydra - when one head is cut off, two more grow in its place

Silicon Valley - when businesses fail, or markets shift, the learning from that event can be built upon to promote innovation in new projects

Evolution - surprising mutations trigger the process of natural selection and promote the passing of better genes

A forest - natural forest fires periodically clear the forest of easily flammable material, preventing enormous, permanently damaging blazes, and leaving behind more fertile soil

A riot - when chaos or violence occurs in the midst of a riot, the resolve and anger of its participants only grows stronger

After vividly illustrating the concept of antifragility, Taleb proceeds to support it using several smaller and more specific concepts that can be used to look for and promote antifragility or it’s opposite, fragility, and promote or repel it, respectively.

The barbell - a bi-modal strategy to engage uncertainty by avoiding the seemingly “safe” middle and leaning into a combination of extremes that are kept separate

Iatrogenics - a new definition of the concept of ‘harm done by the healer.’ A pervasive condition particularly found in medicine and governance

Touristification - the idea that modern systems too often treat people like simple machines, with guides and plans to achieve fantastical results.

The convex curve (fundamental asymmetry) - when something has more upside than downside, it is antifragile

Lindy Effect - the idea that technology, knowledge, etc increases in life expectancy with each additional day (a hundred year old book will likely be relevant farther into the future than a two year old book)

The book is also a reflection of Taleb’s general personal thinking and behavior, as he tries to live as antifragile, and as ethical, a life as possible. He only drinks things that have passed the test of time and remained in existence for thousands of years: water, coffee, wine. He understands the value of variation in physical exercise, etc. And Taleb explains the concept of antifragility at the expense of others (eg: bringing about or intentionally facilitating chaos that would cripple those weaker than you, but that you know you can gain from), and tries to avoid it, and call it out in others.

Antifragility is a concept firmly in the ideological continuum of Taleb’s other books. The ideas build upon one another logically and are all deeply connected. Each of the main concepts are described and alluded to throughout the book. Fooled by Randomness - The world is more random than you think. Black Swan - History is defined by large scale, irregular, and unpredictable events. Antifragile - It’s better to condition yourself to gain from disorder than to be Fooled by Randomness and think you can predict the next Black Swan. Skin in the Game - Antifragility-at-the-expense-of-others, a negative impact on society is often hidden

Though I now have a slight shadow of understanding of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s portfolio of profound ideas, I can’t wait to dig into his other books to deepen my understanding. I recommend you do the same.

[gettingagriponthings]

Reading 52 Books in 2020

2020 will be my most focused year yet. One of my points of focus is my personal reading. I already read a lot, but I want to try and take things up a notch and read 52 books this year. One book per week.

In order to achieve my goal of reading 52 books this year I’m going to have to be pretty organized and determined. I’ve come up with a general reading plan with books broken up into four groups that will help me keep a good mix of fun and necessary learning through the year.

Group 1: Work Related

Roughly 25% of the books I’ll tackle this year will be related to technology, telecommunications, and business. I cover tech and telecom issues in my role as a policy staffer in the US Senate and the general knowledge base needed to do this job well is massive and constantly expanding. I can’t afford to sit still! And, being relatively new to this role, I have a lot of catching up to do. Within technology, I’m planning on spending a significant amount of time diving deeply into the field of Artificial Intelligence. This will be beneficial to my office, but is also of particular interest to me beyond my job (I wrote about this desire extensively in my last post).

Some Work Related books I’ll try to get to this year:

Goliath, by Matt Stoller

How to Create A Mind, by Ray Kurzweil

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom

Group 2: Amazing People

Biographies and memoirs by and about amazing people are a never-ending source of inspiration and learning for me. In addition to learning the habits, adventures, and personalities of some of my favorite figures, biography allows me to learn vicariously about the many mistakes that others have made. I make plenty of poor decisions and want to take every opportunity that I can to minimize those! Within this category of ‘Amazing People’ I’m going to make an effort to read some good group biographies and stories of successful teams.

Some books about Amazing People I’d like to read this year:

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

The Twelve Caesars, by Seutonius

This is Not a T-Shirt, by Bobby Hundreds

Group 3: Fiction

While fictional books may not be factual accounts of real events, they are often much truer than the outrageous things we see in the news. Great novels, Science-Fiction, and literature get at the fundamental truths of humanity and help us to understand others, and ourselves, much better.

Some works of Fiction I want to read this year:

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

City of Thieves, by David Benioff

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

Group 4: Miscellaneous

I’m leaving space for a fourth grouping of books to accomodate my whims over the course of the year. My interests often evolve quickly and I like to follow my curiosity with a good, relevant book whenever possible. This will also leave me some space for self-help books, books about nature or the human body, or something when I need to laugh!

Some Miscellaneous books I hope to get to this year:

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

I’m aiming to read one book from each section every month to keep it moving and make sure that I don’t get tired of any particular genre.

Do you have any book recommendations that would fit within one of my four groups? 52 books is kind of a big number so I’ll definitely be looking for good tips! Drop me a line on Twitter (@Rashan), or email me at: rashanacolbert@gmail.com!

[gettingagriponthings]

Getting A Grip On: Artificial Intelligence

I’m going to be taking on a lot in 2020. I plan on working on my health and fitness, reading more books than ever before, taking on some big personal goals and challenges, attaining new professional achievements, and doing work to orient myself for long term career success. And with all of these things going on, I still want to pursue learning in a meaningful way. 

This year I want to make a serious go of getting a grip on Artificial Intelligence. 

“Getting a Grip” on Artificial Intelligence is such a large and ill defined objective that it is essentially laughable. (You’re excused if you’ve already guffawed. I’m chuckling right along with you). 

Artificial Intelligence is already a part of so many things we use and do every day. Recommendation features on the most popular social networks in the world are using AI to learn user preferences and show you relevant content. Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa help millions of people schedule appointments, buy household consumer products, or check the weather. Financial institutions use AI to help protect you from fraudulent transactions with real-time monitoring and mobile alerts. 

Even more robust everyday Artificial Intelligence is right around the corner. It will be found in the computer vision that powers autonomous vehicles, in empathetic virtual assistants that will help care for the growing elderly population, and in the more pervasive usage of biometrics and facial recognition tech that will help keep our data secure. 

On the latest episode of the a16z podcast (Why We Should Be Optimistic About the Future), venture capitalist (and all-around-super-smart-guy-when-it-comes-to-future-things) Marc Andreessen said this about how his firm is thinking about AI: 

“We are more believers [...] that AI is a platform and is an architecture. In the same sense that the mainframe was an architecture, the mini computer was an architecture. The PC, the internet, the cloud...have been architectures. We think there’s very good odds that AI is the next one of those. And if that’s the case, then it means that basically - when there’s an architecture shift in our business it means basically that everything above the architecture gets rebuilt from scratch. Because the fundamental assumptions about what you’re building change. So you’re no longer building a website, you’re no longer building a mobile app, you’re no longer building any of those things. You’re building instead an AI engine that’s just like, in the ideal case, is just giving you the answer to whatever the question is.”

Along with the increased usage and capability of Artificial Intelligence will come more and more complicated questions regarding how we want to regulate the technology and what lines we need to draw to protect ourselves. Questions like:

Do we want to continue the automation of decision making in complex areas like criminal justice and  health care? 

Are some people advantaged over others by artificial intelligence? 

Is the emergence of superintelligent AI inevitable? 

If not, should we be rapidly pursuing it, or should we be looking to slow things down? 

If superintelligent AI is inevitable, how should we be preparing ourselves now?

These are giant questions and many more are arising every day. The world is going to need all types to people to have thought about these issues deeply if we’re going to have a chance at addressing them effectively. 

I won’t be an AI expert by the end of 2020, but I do think that twelve months will enable me to build a solid intellectual base from which I’ll be able to think critically and creatively about where things are going. 

I’ll do my best to keep the blog updated regularly with my progress as I muddle my way through! Contact me on Twitter (@Rashan) or send me an email (rashanacolbert@gmail.com) if you have thoughts about AI!

[gettingagriponthings]

Reading Through 2019 (Part 2)

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood (1985, 395 pages) I found a really cool used copy of this book on a trip to my favorite used bookstore, McKay’s, and picked this up along with a haul of 6 or 7 other books and tore into this one first. Atwood’s prose is excellent, and though simply and cleanly written, was vibrantly visual to me. Not surprised at the success the Hulu series adapted from this book has had. I was excited to learn about the impending release of the book’s sequel, The Testaments (over three decades in the making), shortly after I finished reading this. Though it is now older, The Handmaid’s Tale felt shockingly contemporary to me.

The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong (1979, 576 pages) This book contained a few enlightening details about the inner workings of The Court, but it was hard to take some of the details as credible. If you’re a SCOTUS nut, or if you have a particular interest in one of the cases detailed in this I’m sure this is a must read, but if you are a relatively casual observer, The Nine is a better usage of your time.

The Stand, by Stephen King (1978, 817 pages) My mother read this book back in the 70s when it came out and I enjoyed talking about the different parts of the story with her as I read through it. King is a favorite of mine, and he went all out in this horrific and sweeping epic. The story begins with an insanely powerful and effective “superbug” that wipes out 99%+ of the US population and ends with a battle between the very essences of light and dark. It’s a huge book, but a good one for Fall when settling in with horror is just the right ticket.

“Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

The Blind Side: Evolution of the Game, by Michael Lewis (2007, 352 pages) My third Michael Lewis book of the year. You’ve seen the movie, but the book is worth your time. The incredible story of Michael Oher is compelling, but it’s the story of the evolution of the game of football from the perspective of the left tackle that is really special.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE, by Phil Knight (2016, 400 pages) Another candidate for read of the year for me. This book had it all: international travel and adventure, sports and the pursuit of athletic greatness, a bit of pop culture and music, and one of the very best accounts of an entrepreneurial journey that I’ve read. A truly inspiring book.

Past Tense: A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child (2018, 487 pages) Lee Child is an underrated master of his genre. If you’ve read a Jack Reacher book before you know what I’m talking about. There are no particularly witty turns of phrase, no surprisingly intricate sentence structure that actually mirrors the overall structure of the book, and no introspective character development that causes you to understand yourself a bit better after reading the book. Just nonstop action and fun, like every other Jack Reacher novel.

Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing, by Robert Caro (2019, 231 pages) Robert Caro might be the Lee Child of Biography (there’s one sentence that you won’t get ANYwhere else!) No, he doesn’t put out a new book each year (Caro’s only published five major works and takes between 8 and 12 years to finish each one). He’s not underrated (he’s won two pulitzer prizes). And his books are not just nonstop action and fun (Caro’s books are fantastically wide-ranging and include detailed digressive histories on particular topics that rival some single issue books for depth). What I mean is that Caro is a master of his genre, and Working is so fascinating because here he steps out of his typical role and gives the reader a peak into his process and several pieces of his personal history. Another read of the year candidate for me.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite, by Duff McDonald (2017, 672 pages) The Golden Passport is essentially a sequel to McDonald’s 2013 book The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business. Together the books form a pretty powerful indictment against the business, political, and academic governing elite. The Golden Passport describes the way in which the world has been HBS MBA’ified and and how that has fooled us all into playing along with a game that leaves the world with fewer morals but more PowerPoint presentations. Amazing details and a powerful message, but maybe a bit long?

Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King (2013, 544 pages) I rushed through this one a bit to complete it before going to see the Doctor Sleep (sequel to The Shining) movie in theaters in November. Classic King, Doctor Sleep blends the supernatural and the ordinary in a compelling fashion. A couple of truly horrific scenes in this one.

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, by Ruha Benjamin (2019, 172 pages) A book I read for work that touches on many of the issues that I’ve had the honor of dealing with directly. Data, maybe the most commercially valuable resource in today’s economic system, is captured at an alarming (and underestimated) rate and is increasingly weaponized against those who it is often supposedly helping. Particularly vulnerable are those who are already more vulnerable to predation and oppression, and the automated systems of the present and the future are only reinforcing the biased systems of the past. This book does an elegant and persuasive job of breaking down just what those systems are and showing us what we can do to fight back. Read of the year shortlist selection.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone (2013, 384) Amazon started with the kernel of an idea for an “everything store” at the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw where Bezos worked before venturing to Seattle to try and make it happen in the early 1990s. This book is completely unrivaled in its depiction of the business and especially of the mind of Jeff Bezos. Fascinating and thought provoking, The Everything Store inspired me to write a post (still a work in progress) imagining what it might mean if Amazon actually achieved their mission to “build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (2013, 336 pages) I had the pleasure of meeting Bryan Stephenson in my office in 2016 and got to speak to him briefly before listening to an extended conversation he had with my boss. He’s someone who I appreciate as a modern day civil rights and justice icon. I bought Just Mercy for my dad for Christmas two years ago, but hadn’t read it myself. I thought I understood this book. I did, to a degree. But the experience of actually sitting down to read it, feeling the crippling weight of injustice experienced by the people detailed inside, and being forced to see, in full relief, what modern, systemic oppression looks like is worth more than the few hours it took to consume Just Mercy. Another read of the year selection for me. Really excited about the movie coming out in January!

“Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

The TLDR Version:

Number of Books Completed: 25

Shortest Book: Race After Technology (172 pages) 

Longest Book: The Stand (817 pages)

Total Pages Read: 10,437

Oldest Book: One L (January 1, 1977)

Newest Book: Race After Technology (July 9, 2019)

Favorite Reads of the Year: Race After Technology, Working, Shoe Dog, The Right Stuff, Just Mercy, The Stand

[gettingagriponthings]

Reading Through 2019 (Part 1)

As always, I had a lot of fun with reading this year. I found a couple of new used bookstores that I love, I made good use of libraries, I discovered new authors and doubled down on some favorites, I created a #Bookstagram account, and maybe most importantly...I got really good at reading on airplanes!

Heading into 2019 I knew that with a new work commitment (I took a job that had me travelling about 75% of each month) I had to be realistic with my reading goals. I cut my goal down to 25 after reading 40 books last year. This turned out to be a wise move and I comfortably hit my mark. I got in a good mix of Fiction, History, Biography, and Memoir.

Here’s what I read this year (in chronological order):

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick (2011, 704 pages) This is the best book on Barack Obama (not including his memoir, Dreams from My Father) that I’ve come across. Remnick is a talented writer and successfully combines compelling prose and detailed research with a tremendous number of interviews of folks close to the 44th president from the different parts of his life. I took my time reading this one, usually in 20-30 page chunks in bed before sleeping.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018, 473 pages) I read this entire book on a long day of travel between Des Moines, Iowa and Newark, New Jersey. An important endorser gave this book to my boss and I got to read it. I saw DKG speak about Leadership at the 2018 National Book Festival and was completely taken by her. This is a good book with a relatively unique format, to be coming from a historian, that works well to instill some solid lessons from the individuals profiled in the book: Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ.

One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School, by Scott Turow (1977, 288 pages) A fun book to read, though maybe not the most original. I don’t think I got much substance from this that I didn’t get from the book The Paper Chase, which was published six years earlier.

Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis (1989, 310 pages) I’m a big Michael Lewis fan so I was excited to tear into his first book about his time at the legendary investment bank, Solomon Brothers. Lewis’ characteristic mixture of accurate, educational factoids and history, hilarius details, and masterful storytelling were all mostly in place in this book. This is a great book for anyone interested in finance, but will definitely keep you entertained even if that’s not exactly your forte.

The House of God, by Samuel Shem (1978, 416 pages) Hilarious. Disgusting. True. These are the overwhelming reactions I got from this book. Shem (real name, Dr. Joseph Bergman) got a lot of flack from the professional medical community when he released this satire depicting the hell that is the intern year at a top hospital just after graduating from a top medical school. This book is not for the faint of heart, but seems to give some genuine insight into the old, elite, and maybe a bit self-important profession of medicine.

“LAWS OF THE HOUSE OF GOD I Gomers don’t die. II Gomers go to ground. III At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse. IV The patient is the one with the disease. V Placement comes first. VI There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a #14 needle and a good strong arm. VII Age + BUN = Lasix dose. VIII They can always hurt you more. IX The only good admission is a dead admission. X If you don’t take a temperature, you can’t find a fever. XI Show me a BMS who only triples my work and I will kiss his feet. XII If the radiology resident and the BMS both see a lesion on the chest X ray, there can be no lesion there. XIII The delivery of medical care is to do as much nothing as possible.”

Beneath a Scarlet Sky, by Mark T. Sullivan (2017, 513 pages) Another book that I read entirely on a series of airplanes. This time I was travelling between DC, Indianapolis, El Paso, and Las Vegas, before heading to Wisconsin to return it to my girlfriend’s mother who lent it to me. We both agreed that this historical fiction piece was a little light on beautiful writing, but more than made up for it with compelling prose and historical detail. Recommended for history buffs who might want a unique look at a subject (the Italian experience in WWII) that doesn’t get as much artistic coverage as some others.

Spy Master, by Brad Thor (2019, 402 pages) I picked this one up to pass the time in a Wisconsin airport during a long weather delay back to DC. I’m a casual fan of paperback espionage/military/government thrillers and hadn’t read a Thor book before. Not my favorite practitioner of the genre, but I wasn’t disappointed.

When Life Gives You Lululemons, by Lauren Weisberger (2019, 352 pages) Another airport bookstore special - I loved reading this book. I had a short break from work when I got this and was looking for something to totally get me out of my headspace. Emily Charlton (the protagonist from Devil Wears Prada), and her world of celebrity sex scandals, coverups, and adult irresponsibility did the trick.

Losing Earth: A Recent History, by Nathaniel Rich (2018, 224 pages) A compelling and heartbreaking quick read history of when the US government almost preemptively tackled climate change. Picked this one up from the new releases section of my local library.

Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead (2009, 273 pages) An interestingly constructed recounting of childhood from a super talented writer. Recommended for Black people, for a summer read, or for those looking to escape to the summer in their mind in the middle of an urban winter.

The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis (2018, 219 pages) The second of three Michael Lewis books for me this year. Fascinating dive into parts of the federal government that most people don’t understand at all. I saw Lewis speak about this one at the 2017 National Book Festival when he was still in the writing process.

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System, by Henry M. Paulson, Jr. (2010, 528 pages) The 2008 financial crisis is one of my very favorite historical (weird to say as we all lived through it) events to read and study about, and Hank Paulson, then the Secretary of the Treasury is my favorite character within the all encompassing drama. This book is FULL of technical details that you’ll savor if you love federal government of finance. The lack of personal anecdotes was a bit disappointing (though totally in character for Paulson) and might make this a tough read for those who aren’t active nerds for the topic.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (1983, 369 pages) A candidate for favorite book of the year. I’ve read other Tom Wolfe material before and loved it, and this one did not disappoint. Wolfe was a standard bearer for a style of writing called “New Journalism” that aimed to communicate real stories that read like a novel. He nailed it with this book detailing the creation of NASA’s successful Mercury effort to reach the moon ahead of the Sovient Union. High octane and drama, comedy, historical accuracy - this book’s got it all.

“After all, the right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life (by riding on top of a Redstone or Atlas rocket). Any fool could do that (and many fools would no doubt volunteer, given the opportunity), just as any fool could throw his life away in the process. No, the idea (as all pilots understood) was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment—but how in the name of God could you either hang it out or haul it back if you were a lab animal sealed in a pod?”

[gettingagriponthings]

Getting a Grip on Climate Change and Energy (Part 2)

I ended my last post with a question: “So if Climate Change is such a bad thing…and we know that fossil fuels are a leading cause of the problem…why haven’t we done anything about it?”

Well...we are doing things about it. But so far, we’re just not moving fast enough. 

The United Nations warns that unless serious action is taken within the next eleven or twelve years to reverse the dramatic warming that earth has undergone for the last sixty years, we will reach a point of “no return” and the planet will undergo irreversible damage. The magic number is 1.5 °C of global warming above the pre-industrial level. We’re currently at around 1 °C and don’t want to risk going much higher. But, unfortunately the chances of us not reaching 1.5 are so slim that scientists are already starting to gauge what could happen at two degrees and beyond. I’ll go into more of what could happen at those levels in a later post, but trust me, it would be bad.

The United States electricity grid has been undergoing varying levels of change over the last several decades, but we’ve really got to step on the gas (pun intended) if we’re going to make meaningful change quickly enough. Today, nearly 80% of total energy consumed around the world comes from fossil fuels.  

We have a very long way to go, but the trends are generally moving in the right direction for electricity generation. Approximately 64% of the current electricity mix in the United States comes from fossil fuels, around 19% is nuclear, and something like 17% is generated from various renewable sources. Just this spring, total renewable capacity grew beyond the potential electricity that could be generated from the burning of coal in the United States (note: energy “capacity” is not the same as actual energy “generated”), both are around one-fifth of US capacity. Overall investment in renewable energy is also moving in the right direction. For the last several years there has been more global renewable capacity installed than that of both fossil fuel and nuclear energy capacity combined. Now more than one-third of world wide electricity capacity is renewable. 

Unfortunately, electricity generation is the area where we’re seeing the most progress and it’s not even the majority of total energy consumption. Heating and cooling, dominated by natural gas and oil makes up 51% of the globe’s energy consumption, and fuel for transportation, 32% of global energy use, is dominated by gasoline and diesel. As with electricity, there are some positive steps being made in both of these sectors, but progress is too slow. 

As I see it there are two big reasons why the world, and the United States in particular, hasn’t responded to the looming climate crisis by putting an incredible amount of energy and investment into greening our energy sources: the market and politics.

The United States relies upon the dominant philosophies of capitalism and democracy to solve the basic questions of ‘who gets what?’ and ‘who makes the decisions?’. These two systems can work in concert to properly incentivize amazing things to happen, but in practice the system can be rigged and inefficiencies and perversions can occur. I believe that’s exactly what we’ve seen take place with the fossil fuel industry. The industry came to prominence through the growth of a natural market. As I described in Part 1, people wanted cheap power and businesses developed to supply it, and a global industry emerged over time. But the industry has become so big and so powerful that it has distorted the fundamentals of a free-market economy to work in its favor, and subsequently, to work against the best interests of the planet and its inhabitants. Market manipulation, legislative lobbying, mass disinformation campaigns, and illegal or immoral political contributions are all tactics from the big oil playbook (this is another set of ideas I’ll wade more deeply into in a future post) that have been used to slow the necessary transition away from fossil fuels.

If the people of the world really want to stave off irreparable climate disaster, we’re going to have to work together like never before. Solving this problem will take a militancy of action, global coordination, and reimagining of political possibilities like World War II, the Global War of Terror, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the American Revolution combined. Nothing less will get the job done.

[These two posts have only served as a foundation in my pursuit to “get a grip” on these closely related issues of Climate Change and Energy. I’ll be adding future posts on the History of the Oil Industry, How the Fossil Fuel Industry Impacts Politics, What Happens to the Environment if We Do Nothing, What a Global Climate Agreement Might Look Like, and potentially several others in my pursuit to get a better understanding on all the things at play here. I hope you’ll learn with me!]

References: Vox: The global transition to clean energy, explained in 12 charts; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Special Report Global Warming of 1.5 ℃ ; University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems: US Renewable Energy Factsheet; Yale Climate Connections: Planetary health and '12 years' to act; Sun Day Campaign: U.S. Renewable Energy Generating Capacity Has Now Surpassed Coal; Duke Energy: A Brief History of Nuclear Power in the U.S.; US Energy Information Administration: What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?, and US Energy Facts Explained

[gettingagriponthings]

Getting a Grip on Climate Change and Energy (Part 1)

I love big ideas and big problems. The type of multi-faceted theories, systems, beliefs, events, or industries that you can get totally lost in. They keep me intellectually engaged with the task of breaking them apart and attempting to get a grip on just how they operate. Through my work in politics and government over the last three years, and the last several months in particular, I’ve had the chance to learn, through both study and exposure, about a lot of big ideas and how they connect to real people. Gradually, through my personal experiences and through the stories of others, I’ve become more and more intrigued by the interconnected issues of Climate Change and Energy.

By some measures “climate change” is the number one issue in the minds of Democratic primary voters as we head toward the 2020 presidential election. It’s taken a long time for many folks to come around to the urgency of the issue, but it’s getting pretty hard to ignore. Bigger and more unpredictable storms pounding the coastal regions, incessant rains causing severe flooding in the heartland, seemingly never-ending wildfires in the west, and the dramatic loss of land in low-lying areas (plus so many more things) are having serious impacts on everyone’s life. 

Planet earth is surrounded by a thin protective barrier in its stratosphere called the ozone layer. It protects us from most of the harsh ultraviolet rays of the sun. Some of the sun’s energy is reflected back into space, and of course, some of the sun’s energy does reach the earth’s surface. It is absorbed then trapped in our atmosphere by greenhouse gases, keeping our planet nice and warm and habitable by all of the amazing life here. So the greenhouse effect is critical to sustaining life, but like so many things, it is a delicate balance. 

Science has shown us that human activities including our choices in land-use, massive deforestation, and the combustion of fossil fuels (especially in the last 60 or so years) has drastically ramped up the natural greenhouse effect on our planet. An over concentration of carbon-dioxide, a main byproduct from these activities, is keeping a dangerous amount of gas in the atmosphere. And as we’ve understood for a long time now, the burning of fossil-fuels is the most dominant and intractable component of these man made issue. The problem is that we are completely in love with the power of these dark, dirty, naturally occurring materials from deep below the earth.

Since Americans figured out how to turn “rock oil” found in the mountainous regions of western Pennsylvania into reliable and cheap fuel for household lamps we’ve been hooked on petroleum. And our love affair with coal as a cheap and flexible fuel source began ages before that. The scientific discoveries that allowed us to do so much with these materials was perfectly aligned with our ongoing technological innovation. As we began the process of industrialization we were hungry for more and more fuel to power our progress. As demand for coal and oil - and eventually, natural gas - rose, so did the incentive for enterprising entrepreneurs to get involved. Intrepid and eager businesspeople invested their time and energy, made and lost fortunes, and risked death or injury to fuel the world. They did it to amass staggering personal fortunes, sure. But they did it for us, for all of us. We wanted cheap power and we sure got it. A lot of it.

Today’s fossil fuel industry is absolutely massive. It is deeply embedded into every part of our economy and has been essential to the formation of the modern conception of the American way of life. According to the 2017 US Energy and Employment Report the Traditional Energy and Energy Efficiency sectors employ about 6.4 million Americans. Over a million of them work with fossil fuels. And that’s just the people who get their paychecks from energy related employers. Mass transportation (planes, most trains buses), construction, manufacturing, agriculture, shipping, and that car sitting in your driveway (only something like 0.3% of US cars, and 1.7% of cars sold in 2017, are electric vehicles) all rely on fossil fuels to operate. 

Cheap fossil fuels gave us access to the train, the bus, and the automobile. The latter of which changed, I think, more about the domestic American way of life than anything else. The democratization of the car changed where we live and how we socialize. It changed the way we work, and made living in one place and working in another, possible. The car gave us the suburbs. It gave us automobile accidents. It gave us drive-throughs, and drive-bys, and drive-ins. The car made the supermarket and the shopping mall possible. It completely revolutionized family life and entertainment. 

And maybe most importantly, access to cheap fossil fuels changed the nature of conflict and geopolitics forever. Not only did coal and petroleum power the planes and ships and tanks and jeeps with which we conduct war, but the potential acquisition of these resources became reason enough to engage in war.

 As Daniel Yergen, the author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power wrote:

“Today, we are so dependent on oil, and oil is so embedded in our daily doings, that we hardly stop to comprehend its pervasive significance. It is oil that makes possible where we live, how we live, how we commute to work, how we travel—even where we conduct our courtships.”

So if Climate Change is such a bad thing...and we know that fossil fuels are a leading cause of the problem...why haven’t we done anything about it?

(stay tuned for my next post!)

[gettingagriponthings]

Getting A Grip Through Reading: The Financial Crisis

Like many in my peer group, I’ve developed a particular fascination with the global financial crisis of 2008 and have been in a constant search for understanding of its causes, the warning signs, what happened “during” the crisis, the lasting effects, and what it means for the future. 

I entered college in the Fall of 2007, and one of my first classes was Economics 102, Macroeconomics, with Professor John Abell. One of the major focuses (that I remember) of our class that semester was on the developing danger of sub-prime mortgages. I remember being aware of the absurdly pricey real-estate market in Northern Virginia at the time and was excited to be learning why some things were the way they were. We talked a lot about Robert Shiller, his housing index, and how things had gotten seriously out of whack.

Jump forward four years to 2011. The financial crisis of 2008 reared its ugly head and wreaked havoc upon the world economy, leaving many families, homes, personal fortunes, and businesses in tatters, and sending many recent college graduates back to their parent’s homes to fruitlessly search for jobs in one of the worst labor markets ever (And yes, I really mean EVER). 

This amazing period of time from late 2007 through...now(?) is one that has been talked about and agonized over, and reframed and rehashed in innumerable books, movies, and television shows. Everyone knows the jargon; sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps, moral hazard, too big too fail, etc, etc, but I think that most people still don’t have a really tight grip on just what happened. At least I know I’d certainly like to understand it all a bit better. 

Over the last few years, I’ve been steadily, and almost subconsciously, amassing a small collection of books that touch on the crisis directly (the who/what/where/when/why/how of ‘07 and 08′) and indirectly (past crises, future crises, etc) and haven’t been able to bring myself to dig into them, b/c I wanted to attack them in a properly structured way. Well...this is the time. 

I’m my personal unread stacks I have:

Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

This Time is Different, by Reinhart & Rogoff

The Great Crash of 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Alchemists, by Neil Irwin

On the Brink, by Henry M. Paulson

A Short History of Financial Euphoria, by John Kenneth Galbraith

On the Origin of Financial Crisis, by George Cooper

(I understand that this is not an exhaustive list. HERE is one of the best of those I’ve found. And I’m not committing myself to necessarily reading all of these, or limiting myself to only these titles)

The economic turmoil we’ve recently witnessed at the end of 2018 and the start of 2019 is possibly indicating that this long bull market may be coming to an end, and the pessimistic side of me is bracing for something catastrophic. I’m wise enough (though not very wise) to know that things will not go the way they did just over a decade ago. Things may not be nearly as bad, or things could be much worse. We (consumers, the government, financial institutions, homeowners, big businesses) have learned from our past mistakes, but are not insulated from making new ones. 

“The next time” will look and feel different than a decade ago. As Mark Twain is said to have said (he almost certainly did NOT say this:) “History doesn’t repeat itself - but it sure does rhyme.”

A 2016 quote from Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury during some of the headiest days of The Crisis puts things into stark relief:

“I can't help but think what would have happened if a divisive character such as Trump were president during the 2008 financial crisis, at a time when leadership, compromise, and careful analysis were critical.”

- Hank Paulson

[gettingagriponthings]

Reading Through the Second Half of 2018

Every year brings its own set of unique challenges and unpredictable changes. 2018 was no different. But one reliable constant was my reading. I read more last year than ever before, completing my personal reading challenge of finishing 40 books. Some were big, some were small. Some were extremely memorable. Some I will likely re-read in the future and have already recommended to friends. And others were slightly less remarkable. But I can confidently say that I didn’t waste my time on a single bad book. I’ve gotten pretty good at casting an unreadable book (could be my mood or the timing, not necessarily a criticism on quality) to the side and moving on to something I really want to read.

Maybe one day I’ll get to a place where I don’t need to worry about meticulously tracking my reading and can be more like Naval Ravikant, not worrying so much about a number of books to complete, but rather keeping the habit and consuming just as much content, but in a more organic way. Below is a quote from Naval’s interview on the Farnam Street podcast (an absolute must listen, or read for anyone who likes to think):

“all of these societal and personal rules that we’ve put up, like you must finish a book and you must read books that are good for you, and you can’t read junk food books. This is a hot book right now and so on. The reality is I don’t actually read that much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001%. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I’ve had in my life and any intelligence that I might have. Real people don’t read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.”

-Naval Ravikant

But until I’ve ascended to a higher plane of reading enlightenment, I’ll continue to blissfully quantify my habit. Here’s what I read in the second half of last year:

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, by Brian Kilmeade - Pop-history at its page turning best. I saw Kilmeade at the 2018 National Book Festival, and was less than impressed with him in person, but would recommend this book to anyone, especially those who are interested in learning the more interesting, human stories of American history, but find it hard to slog through a dry, more traditional academic book.

Life on the Run, by BIll Bradley - I grabbed this book by Bill Bradley about his days as a nomadic professional basketball player shortly after I read a book about his days as a great college player. Bradley is an incredibly intelligent person, and a good, but not great, writer. But his impressive level of introspection and nuanced view of the world shines through in this.

Worthy Fights, by Leon Panetta

The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama

Time Present, Time Past, by Bill Bradley

Chief of Staff: Twenty-Five Years of Managing the Presidency, by Samuel Kernell

Profiles in Courage, by John F. Kennedy - I first read this book describing some of history’s greatest moments of political courage in the United States Senate maybe a decade ago. It held up wonderfully. I brought my own experience as a staffer in the Senate with me to this reading and it helped me to understand the sacrifices made by these individuals that much better. The book also helped me to properly weight the significance of the moments, large and small, that I’ve witnessed during this most recent 115th Congress.

The Making of the President, 1972, by Theodore H. White - As we quickly head toward the 2020 presidential campaign season I began looking to some historical contests to give me some perspective and start imagining what kinds of things could happen. ‘72 stuck out as particularly interesting to me because it was the first presidential election after the momentous primary reforms that were instituted in the wake of the raucous 1968 election. I see some parallels between 1968 and 2016.

A Reason to Believe, by Deval Patrick

Jack Reacher: Night School, by Lee Child - The Jack Reacher series is incredibly entertaining. They are not literary masterpieces, but each book (Child begins writing a new book on the same day each year!) is undeniably readable and provides the perfect change of pace from whatever else you’ve been reading. I may never end up reading all of the Reacher books, but I will certainly end up reading a whole lot more before it’s all said and done.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, by Sudhir Venkatesh - In the conversation for my best read of the year, this sociological epic detailing the lives of the hustlers, criminals, and ordinary denizens of one of Chicago’s most infamous housing projects informs and entertains in equal measure. I knew the basic ideas of Venkatesh’s studies from their appearance in Freakanomics, but this book was worth the time.

The Making of the President, 1968, by Theodore H. White

Deliverance, by James Dickey

All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, by Matt Bai - This extremely comprehensive journalistic telling of the story behind Gary Hart and the scandal that ended his career and changed American politics forever was on my list for a long time, and I finally got to it before I saw the 2018 movie based on it, The Front Runner. I worked on the presidential campaign for Martin O’Malley, who worked on both of Gary Hart’s campaigns (1984, 1988) and this book, as much as anything else, actually helped me to understand who O’Malley is - as a politician - from the inspiration he got from Hart, but also from the unspoken disappointment and confusion he undoubtedly experienced during that race.

Bright, Precious Days, by Jay McInerney

The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics, by Bradley Tusk

Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver - A 1968 stunner that will absolutely knock you on your ass. Cleaver, who wrote the letters contained in this book from within the walls of Folsom State Prison in 1965, found himself in jail for a series of violent crimes, and largely educated himself in the mode of Malcolm X. The ideas contained within are controversial, provocative, logically presented, and beautifully written.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder - I started this book in June, read two-thirds of it, abandoned it, and picked it back up in December. It’s a long and detailed history of Buffett, showing the personal moments, detailing many of his business deals, and analyzing what makes him tick.

A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers

[gettingagriponthings]

Getting a Grip

This blog is titled: “Getting a Grip” because that’s exactly what I hope to accomplish through it. I want to use this space to work through complicated problems and big ideas, and to share my findings with anyone else who might be interested in following with me along as I learn. 

This general theme of learning is the undercurrent of all of my posts. I like to try and understand complicated issues and communicate them in a broad and somewhat comprehensive way, with an intriguing narrative or chronological format. 

I’m going to start doing this in a very overt way with some of my posts in a long, semi-regular series titled: “Getting a Grip On: x” For example, “Getting a Grip on Brexit.” I’ve learned that there is significant and real power that comes with the ability to explain something in a way that’s easy to follow, in a structure that is possible to remember. I’m building an ever expanding series of Mental Models for myself.

Mental Models

Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger is one of the most interesting people I’ve spent time reading about and is the master of creating frameworks for complex ideas. He calls them mental models and describes them as such:

“You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.” - Charlie Munger

Munger and his slightly more famous business partner, Warren Buffett, spend an incredible amount of their time reading books and learning about the world. Their focus on learning and understanding, before acting, is one of the things that separate them from the rest of the investing pack. And we’re fortunate to have such detailed information about just how Munger structures all of those facts floating around in his head. I strongly encourage you to spend a little time reading this, A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business, and watching this: 

While I don’t expect my Getting A Grip posts to be nearly as compelling as the inimitable Mr. Munger I think they’ll help me understand the world around me a little bit better, and I hope that anyone who takes the time to read them will be able to learn a thing or two and enjoy themselves along the way.

[gettingagriponthings]

The Chief

The White House Chief of Staff is a politically appointed employee who serves at the pleasure of the President of the United States. He is not subject to the rigorous evaluation and confirmation by members of the United States Senate that is thrust upon prospective members of the president’s cabinet. His powers are not enumerated in the Constitution. There is no legal characterization of the position, such as time spent serving in a lower rank, or even a requisite age before eligibility. The position of White House Chief of Staff does not have to exist, but has been consistently filled by individuals, with more or less power, at the discretion of the President, for the last 30 or so years.

I’ve spent the last couple of years learning as much as possible about this extremely influential, but little understood, position. I’ve read books that cover the position of WH Chief directly, Whipple’s The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency and Kernell’s Chief of Staff: Twenty-Five Years of Managing the Presidency are the most topically focused volumes I’ve found. I’ve read books by prominent past chiefs, including The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, Work Hard, Study...and Keep Out of Politics, by Jim Baker (oft heralded as the gold-standard of Chiefs) and Worthy Fights, by Leon Panetta. I’ve paid close attention to the role of the Chief in books describing the ins and outs of several presidential administrations, and in innumerable contemporaneous news reports. And I’ve meticulously followed the development and evolution of the position in the Trump administration, keeping a close eye on the successes and failures of John Kelly in particular.

I can’t pretend to be a true expert on the White House Chief of Staff. I don’t know any White House Chiefs, current of former. I haven’t interviewed one. I haven’t had one for a boss. With all of that said, I do believe my research has given me a few insights and has given me a perspective on what I think the position is and isn’t, and what it seems to take to do a good job.

The job of White House Chief of staff is as big, or as small, as the power that the president imbues it with. And that concept is critical to remember. The CoS has no enumerated powers, and his authority directly waxes and wanes with the favor of the President. There’s no way to succinctly break down the duties of the job, but here are the four areas of core competency that I believe one needs to do the job well:

#1: Technical Knowledge of Government 

As the top adviser to the top government official, this should come as no surprise, but the Chief must have a deep understanding of how the government works; the separation of powers; the limits of executive power, and how those limits have been tested in the past; the basic functions and capabilities of our uniformed services and armed forces; the powers and responsibilities of constitutional officers, the president’s cabinet, the legislature, and judiciary; how the president interacts with the states, and many, many more things. Of course, no individual is likely to truly master all of these concepts, but a Chief must be able to navigate the workings of government in order to understand which buttons can be pressed and which levers can be pulled, and when, to most effectively execute the will of the president. This knowledge has often been gained through service in the government or military, and is greatly augmented by having a good sense of history.

#2: Ability to Craft A Message 

Of course the the staffer tasked most with crafting the president’s message is the White House Communications Director, but it is critical that a Chief also have a good understanding of how to communicate his boss’s goals to the American people. There are several channels through which a modern administration can communicate; directly to the American people (presidents have been doing this, in one form or another, for a long time i.e. FDR on the radio, latter 20th century presidents with the television, Obama and Trump with Twitter); publicly, through the news media (the White House briefing room both allows the American people to keep an eye on the administration and allows the administration to release information in a controlled environment); privately, through the news media (building relationships with journalists and knowing how and when to give them information is critical. John Kelly, for example, is not a master of the press conference, but is said to have spent his career cultivating relationships with the press and uses these channels to get his message across). The president wears many hats, and one of them is Chief Communicator. The White House’s ability to speak to the American people is one of its most powerful tools and the Chief needs to understand just how to wield it.

#3: Political Instinct 

This is the most complicated and elusive of the qualities necessary for a great Chief of Staff. The ability to discern between a good idea, a bad idea, a bad idea that must be executed anyway, a good idea with the wrong timing, and a million other potential combinations is hard to come by, and is very difficult to screen for. This type of judgement is mostly earned by operating in the political arena over an extended period of time, especially in the campaign world or in an office held by an elected politician (federal or state). A good sense of history, I believe, also goes a long way here, but must be combined with personal experience and a good bit of imagination. To make sound political decisions one must be able to completely take an issue apart, examine it from the angle of every stakeholder, know what’s happened in similar past situations, understand what’s different about this instance (both within the particular problem, and in the environment surrounding it), and accept what one’s own strengths and weaknesses are. And then make a decision based upon the likelihood of any particular eventuality actually playing out and hope for the best. A lot of people think they are good at this and actually aren’t. A good bit of luck also doesn’t hurt.

#4: Managerial Acumen 

Staff is the most important word in the title of Chief of Staff. Firstly the Chief is staff, and secondly, his responsibility is to manage the staff. All of the duties required of this position are impossible to complete alone. From my personal experience in politics, it is the actual management of people - the proper setting of expectations; the balance between micromanagement and a long leash, the diplomatic handling of human relationships, and the ability to move an organization forward as a single entity - that is most lacking. Despite what folks may have you believe (mostly politicians from one part or the other) the world of professional politics is not lacking for brain power. There are operatives who know the ins-and-outs of a million races, present and past. There are genius lawyers who can outmuscle just about anyone in a contest of pure mental horsepower. And there are policy wonks who are true experts in their fields and come to the world of electoral politics because they want to make a larger difference. These qualities are great. But I believe that management, in and of itself, is a skill that must be intentionally cultivated. I’m not saying there are no great political managers - they do exist. But politics doesn’t hold this ability up as a pre-eminent skill. This is partially because of the nature of many political organizations. My first campaign boss described a campaign as a ‘startup with a deadline.’ This comparison basically holds true. And because of this deadline, there is no focus on building an organization to last for decades or centuries. Even the greatest presidential administration will last only eight years. It’s possible to argue that a focus on growing individuals is too time consuming and takes away from actually operating. But I believe this attitude contributes to chronic disillusionment, frustration, rampant organizational inefficiency, and a culture that is most adept at putting out fires, rather than moving toward ambitious goals. And in addition to managing down, the a White House Chief of Staff must also management up and out. He must control the flow of people and information to the president, and must coordinate the actions of the members of the president’s cabinet, which will be filled with people with resumes, statures, and egos at least equivalent to the Chief himself.

A great Chief must focus on the management of his staff in order to get the best work out of them and successfully execute the president’s agenda, must set the president up to be successful, and must coordinate major figures across the broad expanse of the federal government.

[gettingagriponthings]

Reading Through the First Half of 2018

The reading of books (beyond news and long-form journalism), has become a critical part of my adult life and is integral to the way I order my mind. Reading helps me formulate my opinions, create a sense of solitude, learn specific technical knowledge, and entertain myself. I enjoyed reading as a child and spent more than my fair share of time ripping through Hardy Boys mysteries, getting creeped out by the slimy details of the latest Goosebumps novel, reading YA biographies of so many great Black soldiers, engineers, and thinkers, and soaking in every detail of any book on soccer or drawing I could get my hands on. But my appreciation for reading as a dedicated and intentional practice grew significantly after I graduated from college. I learned that it’s actually not something many adults spend a great deal of time on (Pew Research), and is something that can serve to significantly distinguish and shape an individual. Reading books gives one a chance to form their own mind by directing their thinking, rather than having their brain completely subject to the whims of the loudest noises of the outside world.

In 2014 I worked on the first Congressional campaign for Don Beyer, who is now my representative in the US House (VA-08). In the general election campaign I ended up in the position of Deputy Finance Director, and found myself shut in a room with the candidate for several hours a day making phone calls to ask people for money. I learned many things from this experience, perhaps chief among them was the fact that Don was an incredible reader. He seemed to know at least something about everything, and had read an incredible number of books over the years. He could easily isolate the most important ideas from each book and use them effectively in conversation, while accurately citing the references. And in addition to this great historic recall, he was always reading something new, just about a book a week, and this was while he was running for congress (which, if you didn’t know, is an extraordinarily time-consuming pursuit). This showed me just how much importance he placed on the practice of reading and on the pursuit of new information.

For the last few years I’ve set reading goals for myself at the start of the year, and have recorded my progress on Goodreads with their annual “Reading Challenge” feature. I highly recommend using Goodreads if you enjoy books! For 2018 I set a goal of completing a total of 40 books (35 last year, 25 the year before that, 52 next year!). I’ve kept good pace and have reached the halfway point just before the middle of the year. I wrote a post about my 2017 reading at the end of last year, and was considering doing the same for 2018, but breaking it in half seemed like a much more manageable task. There are many books that I start but never finish, and some really big books that I may break into two or three spurts throughout the year - but here are the 20 books I’ve completed so far in 2018:

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius - A Christmas gift from my girlfriend, I sought this book out because of the amazing amount of recommendations I’d seen, particularly from people in the technology and finance worlds. An emperor of Rome, Aurelius was an extremely powerful and thoughtful person. This book is essentially a compilation of his journals as emperor and includes his thoughts as a Stoic philosopher, as a leader, and as a man. Highly recommend to anyone looking for some words of wisdom or who has found herself in the midst of a seemingly uncontrollable situation.

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind.”

Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective, by Andrew Lo

The Underwriting, by Michelle Miller - Not my normal reading fare, but one of my most memorable selections of the year. A totally trashy, salacious novel about the IPO process of a fictional Silicon Valley dating app unicorn written by a Wall Street and Bay area veteran. If you don’t want to take the time to pick up the book then you should check out her infamous blog Why San Francisco Really Is That Bad, which caused a huge stir when she released in anonymously in 2012.

Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher & William Ury

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson - A reread. I first read this book when the paperback edition was initially published in 2013.

Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio

Tribe of Mentors, by Tim Ferriss

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor, by Tren Griffin - Charlie Munger is an irreverent and original thinker, a brilliant investor and businessman, and a voracious reader. While little knows beyond the world of of finance, he is a giant within it. He’s the Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. This book distills his investing ethos and describes his famous “mental models” mainly through Mungers own quotations, which are well worth the price of admission.

“You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli - After I reread the Isaacson, book I was hungry for a bit more information on Jobs, particularly his time in the wilderness with NEXT. I sent a Tweet out communicating as much and immediately received a response from my Jobs crazy colleague who recommended this book and other, and subsequently brought the book into the office for me to borrow. This did not disappoint. It may eclipse, but definitely rivals the Isaacson book as the definitive Jobs biography in my opinion.

Surely You’re Joking Mister Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman - A pretty amusing book by and about the life of an extremely interesting character. Ranges from his experience designing the bomb at Los Alamos to his experience as an amateur bongo player. Highly recommended by a lot of smart people.

Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work, by Randall E. Stross - Not the biggest crowd pleaser on the list, but if you are particularly interested in venture capital, this is a must read. A 2000 business biography of the founding and early days of Benchmark, this book goes in depth on the personalities around the table, the details around their decisions, and even their responses to investments gone bad. An absolute must for any VC junkie.

aol.com, by Kara Swisher - Love Swisher, so when I came across this at a used bookstore, I snapped it up.

Measure What Matters, by John Doerr 

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age, by Paul Graham - Paul Graham’s essays, more than the work of any other individual, are responsible for my love of startup culture and tech investing.

Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, by Chris Kyle - If you’ve seen the Clint Eastwood movie then you should maybe take the time to read the book. It’s relatively short, simply and clearly written, and has next to nothing to do with story of the movie. A lot of really interesting technical information about military practices and weaponry.

Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, by Chris Matthews - Bobby Kennedy is a personal hero of mine, and I also loved Matthews’ book Hardball, which I was assigned to read in high school, so I knew I had to read this when it was published late last year. An excellent option if you have never read a book on RFK and want to try and get a good overall picture of the man. 50 years on from his death, I imagine there are many people for whom this new book was perfect. I’ve read a number of books on RFK and the Kennedy family and didn’t get much new information from this, but I did still enjoy reading the more personal perspectives and reflections offered by Matthews.

A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, by John McPhee - I listened to an episode of the great podcast The Axe Files that featured Senator Bill Bradley. In the discussion they mention this book. It profiles Bradley when he was still just a college student and basketball player. I knew a little bit about Bradley as he has been a great mentor to my boss, and I was extremely intrigued by the idea of a book written about someone so early in his life. The book is all about basketball and through the sport gives a good bit of insight into the standout student athlete and who he would come to be.

“He went on to say that it is a much simpler shot than it appears to be, and, to illustrate, he tossed a ball over his shoulder and into the basket while he was talking and looking me in the eye. I retrieved the ball and handed it back to him. ‘When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this,’ he said, throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop. ‘You develop a sense of where you are.’”

[gettingagriponthings]

‘A Startup With A Deadline’

In 2014 I interned in a US House of Representatives office on Capitol Hill for a member from California. After being there for a while I decided that this was actually something I enjoyed and that I wanted to become a full time staffer. The office I was working in didn’t have any openings, but I asked the staff there what I should do to get a job. I repeatedly got a particular answer; ‘Go work on a campaign.’ They told me that there were many different ways to get a job on the Hill, but that working on a winning campaign, especially for a new member, offered a particularly good chance.

So, I started to monitor the political landscape, and as fate would have it, my home district representative (VA-08, Jim Moran) announced his retirement. This meant that a competitive primary race was in the making. I scouted out the potential candidates, found one I liked, then scrambled to get myself in front of some decision makers at the campaign to beg for a job.

I sent Facebook messages and emails to everyone I could find with some connection to the campaign. I went to the campaign kickoff event, and met the whole staff (three people at the time) and the candidate, and ended up landing an interview a few weeks later with the Field Director. We sat down, talked for a bit, and shortly thereafter I was offered the job of Field Organizer. I had no idea what that was, but I was excited to get going. All I knew was that I would be one member of a six person team, would get paid close to nothing, had zero days off (yes, 7 day work weeks), and that it was supposedly a lot of fun.

One of the very first things the Field Director told the team was that this campaign would be like ‘A startup with a deadline.’ 

We would start with absolutely nothing but some people and an idea. Our operation would be constantly changing and growing as we moved forward. Everyone would likely wear multiple hats before it was all said and done. Money would always be tight, imploring us to constantly find ways to make a dollar stretch and do without luxuries (and sometimes without necessities). We would be learning and getting better at our jobs every single day. And by the time we actually start to master the broad range of necessary skills and ideas (properly utilizing voter metrics, recruiting volunteers, cutting good turf, understanding the full set of political issues, building and leading our own teams, etc. etc.) the campaign would be over.

That description, ‘A startup with a deadline’ was intriguing, to say the least. And after working on that campaign and others over the next couple of years, I discovered that it is absolutely accurate. Running or being a part of a competitive political campaign really does share a great deal with the execution of the early stages of a startup. But campaigns actually might move even faster than the infamously speedy tech iteration cycle. The trade-off is where the deadline comes in. No matter how good your campaign is, it will end. You know the end date from day one, so longevity can and must be sacrificed for speed.

The biggest limiting variable, as with so many other things in life and business, was money. Competitive elections are determined by no less than a million variables, but chief among them are a campaign’s ability to address two questions:

How quickly can you bring the money in?

A great deal of a candidate’s (and thus a campaign’s) time and resources are oriented around the effort to raise money to finance the political operation. And there’s very little reason for individuals to give beyond their personal ideals and desire to help. There are no tax benefits, donors don’t receive any sort of tangible profit from their chosen candidate’s success, and being known as a giver just guarantees that you will be asked for more money in the future. Direct donations to federal campaigns are capped at a bi-annually increasing dollar amount. Imagine being forced to crowdfund a startup with small donations (circa 2018: $2,700 max) and having to tell your donors that they will receive zero return on their money. That’s campaign finance. [You may be saying ‘But what about all of that backroom dealing, and buying votes, and big pharma/Wall Street/Oil/Tobacco money? What about corruption? And the need for campaign finance reform?’ All of these things are real, dangerous, and poisonous to our democracy. The reality though, is that influence peddling is not a thing most of the time, i.e. buying votes with campaign donations. And the political landscape is most certainly influenced by money. By billionaires who can give to dozens of campaigns and PACs and Super PACs, and by dark money that is untraceable and immeasurably impactful. But that is beyond the economics of a simple House race, and far beyond the purview of this blog post!]

And

How far can you make the money stretch?

Running a campaign is expensive, so getting the most bang out of every buck you have is paramount to achieving success. A campaign has to pay for office space, staff remuneration, transportation, consultants, advertising (print, television, online, direct mail) computers, lawyers, and a million other things that vary in size and importance. Because of this panoply of expenses, the more money you can save on anything the better. [I always chuckle a little at the way people marvel at Jeff Bezos’ usage of a door as a desk since the early days of Amazon. Yes, this was a great move. No, he is not unique in finding novel ways to save money.] Offices are never fancy, and are often oddly or inconveniently located, furniture is donated, technology is old.

On campaigns, like startups, people come together from far and wide to work really hard and try their best to build something amazing that is larger than themselves. The incentives are fundamentally different, but a lot of the inspiration and pain are similar. Everyone is overworked, social lives are put on pause, school is deferred, and the impossible is believed, all in the pursuit of building something great. But in a campaign, just when things reach full speed and start to click, everything sets in motion (hopefully successfully) for one insane day, before the operation shuts down, and everyone goes their own way. Some will head back to school, some will look for ‘normal’ jobs, many will go on to other campaigns. A very fortunate few will have the chance to move on to the equally lucrative (#not) field of government service along with their victorious candidate. But the one thing that is inevitable is the deadline.