My inaugural newsletter on the 1st January might have been a little flowery for some but this time there should be a little more to get your teeth into.
A Quick Note on Prophecy and Futures
In my last note I touched upon ancient prophecies and the inevitability that we would face an unraveling of our civilization and possibly an evolutionary moment in the history of our species.
Before I scare off too many professional futurists - or people familiar with futures - with talk of predictions and prophecies I wanted to make a statement.
Whilst I believe that humanity will eventually wake up, this does not mean that I think we are 100% destined to make it.
Many futurists today leverage off or add to a body of knowledge called futures research. Things have come a long way since HG Wells envisioned a systemic approach to exploring the future. Many early futurists in the military wanted to predict the future or at least reduce it to scenarios. Nowadays most futurists talk about futures, highlighting the possibility of a number of possible futures. Jennifer M Gidley does a great job in this book discussing the evolution of the field of futures.
The Future: A Very Short Introduction by Jennifer M Gildey.
She writes:
“In the late 1960s some of the big changes that were happening in other disciplines also impacted the study of the future. The most important change in the naming of the study arose with the insistence by leading thinkers in the field such as James Dator and Eleonora Masini that both the terms futures and studies needed to be plural, bringing about the birth of ‘futures studies’. This move to pluralize the terms may seem minor but it reflected a deeper philosophical and political manoeuvre to democratize and pluralize the future. Futures studies…is a transdisciplinary academic field combining education, philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and economic theory with real-life observation to propose, for the benefit of society, not just one kind of future but multiple futures.”
I also have respect for this growing body of research and practice and will often refer to futures. However I will also occasionally make forecasts in all likelihood. First, I cannot help it given my former career in investment. Second, with advances in our understanding of the universe in frontier sciences and empirical evidence showing precognition as something that’s real, I believe it’s something we should not brush under the carpet. Certainly the worlds top intelligence agencies and militaries take it seriously. But much more to come on this topic I am sure.
Beauty of Impermanence
“Yes, the cherry trees put this truth very plainly: none of the glory of blossoms and autumn leaves lasts long in this fleeting world.”
Tale of Genji
The Japanese Tale of Genji might well be the world’s oldest novel. That it would emphasize the effervescent nature of life is a given. This is something at the heart of the Japanese spirit and philosophy especially during the 11th Century Heian period during which Kyoto was the capital city . When I lived in Japan, not far from Kyoto at first, it was such a powerful experience every year to witness an entire nation celebrate the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossom, a mass spiritual event, that was never called a religious event. For the Japanese it would rival Easter or the Hajj in Mecca.
Yesterday was the anniversary of my dear younger sister Rebeccas passing. She was another fleeting flower, a loving soul that came and went. After she passed away 7 years ago, and 3 weeks after giving birth to a beautiful baby girl, she taught me as much in her death as in her life.
This is a photo of her 7 year old daughter, Isabella, and her two step daughters, Lydia and Daisy, paying their respects as they do every year. For me - knowing what has happened - its one of the most touching photos I have seen.
Yesterday, I accompanied my parents to Romsey Abbey and lit candles in remembrance.
New Year Rituals
I used to love the turning of the New Year as there would always be a plethora of interesting articles in the press about the future. It was the one time of the year when journalists and others were expected to look a little longer term and perhaps even get their crystal balls out. In the financial industry, many strategists and investors would copy my former colleague Byron Wien (at Morgan Stanley) and write their 10 surprises for the following year.
He seems to have continued the tradition here at Blackstone. He and other experienced macro thinkers at Morgan Stanley taught me a lot but now the surprises don’t seem out of the box enough given the acceleration in the rate of change. If you look at the list linked above, nothing seems that shocking - in fact I’d be shocked if that’s all that happened! I would expect a lot more turbulence.
However, despite my tradition of going through the media, this New Year’s weekend I was thoroughly uninspired to go through the newspapers, magazines and online media. Perhaps some of it was bias: my trust in the media has fallen and fallen over the years so my passion to trawl through everything has diminished. For me the partisan bias or even outright lies, have reduced the utility of making the effort. But it’s also because I couldn’t see much in the traditional media through skim reading the headlines.
Most of the front pages were about Covid and the Queen’s Honour List appointing various positions including new Knights and Ladies of the Garter. Some were much deserved and then there is the questionable appointment of Tony Blair, who many in this country regard as a war criminal for misleading the public into war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What I found was more of the same from throughout the year: pages and pages dedicated to reality TV, celebrities, sex, gossip, affairs and football.
I didn’t see the front page of the Financial Times but I saw that the main headline on New Year’s Eve was “M&A surges to record $5.8 trillion high” and how banks made $157 billion in fees due to this low interest environment. This is quite symbolic of our financial system today: lots of money sloshing around but not really representative of the underlying health of economies or the plights of most citizens.
Whilst our species and planet face not only ecological crisis, but economic dysfunction and deep social problems, the media just seems decadent and of course it’s also a mirror of us! This is exactly what always happens at the end of all empires or civilizations.
Well what did I do instead?
In order to make sense of the world now one need to cast the net especially wide. These are some of the ways I consumed media over the New Year weekend. It’s not a complete blueprint of how one should gather insights today but it might be good food for thought.
Netflix
I watched “Don’t Look Up” on Netflix. Sometimes movies are good at capturing a zeitgeist - what is in the general consciousness - and sometimes they are very creative and strive to wake us up.
Don’t look up was a great metaphor for our modern civilization in so many ways: a comet was hurtling towards earth and our entire society was focused on everything except what was important. From the Guardian newspaper:
“A comet is on a collision course with Earth…..According to stoner PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a self-consciously Leonardo DiCaprio), the asteroid is the size of Mount Everest and due to hit in six months. The pair try to warn Meryl Streep’s President Orlean about the impending “extinction-level event”, only to find her preoccupied by the midterm elections. They attempt to raise awareness on breakfast TV, but anchors Jack and Brie (Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) can’t help but give their bad news a positive spin. The only person with enough money to intervene is tech entrepreneur Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who wants to mine the comet for its “$140tn worth of assets”.
As usual, the youth leaders hit the nail on the head with Xiye Bastida saying that this is not hypothetical movie at all. It shows exactly HOW we are facing an actual existential crisis :
Many snotty reviewers did not like it. Was it because it put journalists in an even worse light than the politicians? George Monbiot seems to think so:
“It is the structural stupidity to which the media are committed. It’s the anti-intellectualism, the hostility to new ideas and aversion to complexity. It’s the absence of moral seriousness. It’s the vacuous gossip about celebrities and consumables that takes precedence over the survival of life on Earth. It’s the obsession with generating noise, regardless of signal. It’s the reflexive alignment with the status quo, whatever it may be. It’s the endless promotion of the views of the most selfish and antisocial people, and the exclusion of those who are trying to defend us from catastrophe, on the grounds that they are “worthy”, “extreme” or “mad”.
I think that this absurd satire (absurd by design) will play its role. It might wake up those that already believe we are facing a climate crisis but aren’t yet doing enough about it - which pretty much includes all of us. Let’s face it there are virtue signal let’s everywhere. Action doesn’t mean just talking about it or merely buying a Tesla. It means a lot more than that. After witnessing - and to a certain extent partaking - in a consumer driven Christmas with the exchange of no end of presents which will end up in landfills, I’m looking at my own behavior more. For starters , I plan to go back to being vegan (no fish after seeing Seaspiracy!), using more refillable products like a coffee mug, doing more shopping at second hand stores and just consuming even less more generally. Already I’m consuming the least I ever have and go to most places by foot or public transport. But it really is time to review everything.
However, the film will certainly do very little to change the minds of those that dont believe we are facing a climate crisis. No new science or data is introduced. And besides, condascension is never a good way to change someone’s mind: we have seen this one play out so many times in the past few years. I have always thought that NGOs, the UN and poicymakers should have called this an ecological crisis and focused on the ecological destruction more widely instead of merely narrowing down to CO2 in the air and the resulting rise in global temperatures. If one studies complex dynamic systems it’s beyond stupid anyway. And the forecasts in the models have consistently been quite poor. I prefer to focus on the much wider destruction to our planet and the empirical evidence around it from the Sixth Extinction collapse in biodiversity to acidification of our oceans to the destruction of our forests, and then conclude that we cannot really forecast a precise outcome but here are some scenarios and they all look pretty bleak. I think this is more convincing than only talking about temperatures.
Anyway, I’m really glad I watched it.
Substack - Ed Snowden on bias
I also read some interesting articles on Substack: a number of journalists, writers and deep thinkers have moved here recently, which inspired me to start writing on this platform. Edward Snowden has put out some thoughtful pieces and he made some astute comments on the nature of the internet:
“The bump on your toe is probably cancer; levels of Arctic sea ice are both decreasing and increasing; the world is either 6,000 or 4.5 billion years old...
Because you’re online, you already know this: Google (or Mad-Libs your search-engine-of-choice) is able to vomit up “scientific” data to support, even “confirm,” nearly any private theory you want. And the truth—yes, the truth-truth—is that a lot of that data will be accurate, but a lot of it will not be.
You probably don’t have toe cancer.
Much screen-ink has been spilled over the fake news and pseudoscience that are returned to us by our searches — the information (let’s call it) that answers our sincere queries in a manner algorithmically aligned with our preferences, and our community’s preferences. Though for the word “preferences,” you might as well substitute “biases”…
Data as filtered by what calls itself the media, as opposed to data as filtered by an individual, should be better, but isn’t. After all, the statistics on CNN, on FOX, and in The New York Times—someone Googled them too. That’s what the media has become: someone Googling for you. And yet whenever the media presents statistics, it somehow never manages to remind us that statistics are inherently uncertain. The field of statistics is literally the study of uncertainty, of possible or probable likelihoods (or unlikelihoods), which are ten-out-of-ten times presented as the personally-applicable percentage chances, the Vegas odds that X or Y will (or will not) happen to YOU.
For many of us, to read the daily news is to assess our personal risk-levels and yet we rarely recall—and the media never mentions—that the true challenge is not to enumerate the risk, but to live with it; to stake out the resilient middle ground between denying danger altogether (and, say, refusing to wear a mask in a crowded train or bus) and finding nothing but danger everywhere (and, say, wearing a mask and gloves when alone in the middle of the woods).”
So he quite accurately describes why I am fed up with media personalities screaming their personal opinions at me declaring that this is a fact or that is a scientific certainty. There is no nuance , let alone polite dialogue, left!
Blogs - China and Technology
Blogs can be quite useful ways to make sense of the world. They tend to have less of the editorial censorship one might see in a mainstream publication. Of course that does leave you with the author’s personal biases, but at least one can get to know the author and where they are coming from. I dipped into one blog by a tech analyst Dan Wang about his experiences in China as well as his reflections on the country’s development. It was another fascinating read this year. But as I’m on the subject of perceiving reality today I’d like to quote one passage which is quite insightful:
“China is like the thinking ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris: a vast entity that produces observations personalized for every observer. These visions may be a self-defense mechanism, allowing leftists to see socialism and investors to see capitalism; or, as Lem’s ocean might be doing, China is vastly indifferent to foreign observers and generates visions to play with them. Whatever the case, we need a better understanding of this country. Too many commentators have been interested in the story of China’s collapse. When the collapse doesn’t come, they lose interest and move on. It’s a more important and more subtle skill to figure out how this country can succeed, because that is the exercise the Chinese leadership is engaged in.”
Most likely I will reflect more on China in an upcoming letter.
Podcasts
Podcasts are becoming a very useful alternative to the print media. Some of the long form podcasts contrast quite dramatically with cable/TV. TV hosts can be quite smug, opinionated, polarizing and only after the soundbite. In constrast, someone like Joe Rogan gives guests time to speak over several hours, there is room for nuance and the discourse is civil.
I decided to listen to one controversial interview on the Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify. After one of the inventors of the technology behind the mRNA vaccine, Dr Malone, got banned from Twitter for defying big pharma and questioning the vaccine, it seemed inevitable it would get a massive audience. Millions have tuned in. Dr. Malone has a stellar track record and has taken the vaccines himself so his views should be taken seriously. He is President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization “of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about Covid pandemic research and treatment.” This interview along with the interview with Dr John Abramson - a Harvard lecturer and author of “Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How we Can Repair it” - might well give you a different perspective on the intentions of big pharma and the Covid pandemic.
Society is suffering from delusion or mass psychosis in so many areas and I find it incredible that many do not apply critical thinking and common sense to any profit-making industry. In just in recent years industry after industry has proven to be corrupt and detrimental to the public good. If we are truly in a living and breathing democracy, the general public should monitor and challenge everything.
Pfizer is due to make $45 bn from the vaccines over the course of 2020/21 and its no surprise to me - given my experience of following the money - how alternative treatments have been suppressed. No wonder Rogan attracts a larger audience than prime time CNN!
I have been book marking a number of other podcasts to go through.
Books
In recent years, the more I have gone off the media, the more books I have consumed. This suits me well as I am a total bibliophile. I love libraries so much - they are magical places for the imagination - that the book I am writing starts off in a library. In fact I am writing this newsletter from our home library - Merlin’s Esplumoir.
Aside from the sheer pleasure of reading, one of the benefits of reading is to actually improve your concentration and focus whilst the rest of the world is stuck in attention-deficiency. Emphasis on short 800 word articles, 2 min videos or 140 character Tweets tend to worsen your concentration as you flit from topic to topic without going deep. This article in the Guardian is interesting on how your attention didnt collapse it was stolen.
For relaxation I am currently enjoying reading Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson , a science fiction book centered on the climate crisis. I picked it up earlier in the year and got sidetracked with other books. I would have met him at COP26 as he spoke the day before me at an event at which I was due to speak but I had a problem getting into the bluezone. Hopefully I will get to cross paths with him one day. This was a memorable phrase from the book:
“Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: the old saying had grown teeth and was taking on a literal, vicious accuracy.”
I am also going through Sacred Economics again by Charles Eistenstein. This book really does probe deeply into the origins and use of money and will be useful for the chapter on economics in my own book.
Cracks in the delusion
Whilst the mainstream media has become blighted by partisanship and even the censorship of free speech, it seems that there is more media than ever to consume if one wants to go deeper and challenge so-called accepted truths. We truly do live in a time of paradox!
I would like to end this column with a quote by Charles Eisenstein from another book he wrote who reminds us that there is an alternative to the allure of this decadent civilization which is in its death throes:
“The more beautiful world my heart knows is possible is a world with a lot more pleasure: a lot more touch, a lot more lovemaking, a lot more hugging, a lot more deep gazing into each other’s eyes, a lot more fresh-ground tortillas and just-harvested tomatoes still warm from the sun, a lot more singing, a lot more dancing, a lot more timelessness, a lot more beauty in the built environment, a lot more pristine views, a lot more water fresh from the spring. Have you ever tasted real water, springing from the earth after a twenty-year journey through the mountain? None of these pleasures is very far away. None requires any new inventions, nor the subservience of the many to the few. Yet our society is destitute of them all. Our wealth, so-called, is a veil for our poverty, a substitute for what is missing. Because it cannot meet most of our true needs, it is an addictive substitute. No amount can ever be enough. Many of us already see through the superficial substitute pleasures we are offered. They are boring to us, or even revolting. We needn’t sacrifice pleasure to reject them. We need only sacrifice the habit, deeply ingrained, of choosing a lesser pleasure over a greater. Where does this habit come from? It is an essential strand of the world of separation, because most of the tasks that we must do to keep the world-devouring machine operating do not feel very good at all. To keep doing them, we must be trained to deny pleasure.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
it's funny that you write "my trust in the media has fallen and fallen over the years so my passion to trawl through everything has diminished", while you trust more meme's that are shared on social media to create rage and engagement to serve the business models of these platforms. If you delete people that have a different opinion on social media, you might find discover that over time, you are moving into the same trap as all others that became extremists.
"Society is suffering from delusion or mass psychosis in so many areas and I find it incredible that many do not apply critical thinking and common sense to any profit-making industry" - it seems like all new age persons, you do not trust pharma but rather trust ancient non-scientific health recommendations. I do not fully support the closed data model pharma is pushing, hence my own work with my foundation to open source pharma and AI in health, but it's quite a leap to write that society is suffering from delusion or mass psychosis and do not apply critical thinking, while spreading non-fact-checked meme's yourself.
If you share such strong opinions, call people out for being subject mass psychosis, or telling people that their answer is a typical "Western" answer, you should allow people to react. Deleting them, unfriending them is just pushing you even more in your totalitarian view of this world.
Prescient and poignant i loved the comparison of media doing our googling for us :)