Ticket No.3 is a short, weekly newsletter format from The Alpine Review, where we share three things that drew our attention. If you only want to hear when the next Alpine Review is ready, you can opt-out of Ticket No3 here.
👋 Once a gain, here’s a brief audio introduction to this week’s letter.
The Deep Dive — Nate Hagens
The Great Simplification
I really enjoy Nate Hagen’s podcast The Great Simplification. It’s a gem and I’ve listened to every episode. The basic premise of the show is that we are, collectively, “energy blind” and that we are reaching diminishing returns on cheap fossil hydrocarbons, which means we’ll need to simplify—hence the title— but Hagens takes a bird’s eye view on many other related topics. I’ve learned a ton.
Top signs you’ve found an exceptional podcast:
Fringe/heterodox thinkers
Interviewer who asks follow up questions and disagrees when needed
Superior, detailed show notes pointing to the detailed scientific literature
Edited transcripts for every show
This show has all four. Be sure to listen the “bend not break” series (episodes one, two, three, four with Daniel Schmachtenberger. It’s a good starting point.
If you dig this subject, you may even read the wide-ranging paper by Nate titled Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism.
Writing Dept. — Nassim Taleb
To be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past
How do I write? The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.
No, no; it’s the exact opposite. I stood the idea on its head. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the contemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.
Productivity — Janan Ganesh
Knowing what you want: the ultimate life skill
We are inundated by productivity porn (“The morning rituals of turbo-strivers are entertainment, not inspiration”), which focuses on the “how” of things (i.e. Tim Ferriss, Ali Abdaal, Tiago Forte and a slew of imitators). But beyond our collective obsession with the how lies a more important question: for what?
Janan Ganesh in the FT:
Ambiguity has its place in art. A sense of direction is worth more than talent or hard work, and almost as much as luck As a life strategy, it is ruinous. Among the defects and oversights of the self-help industry is that it dwells on the How. It has less to say about the What. All the life hacks in northern California assume you have an end to which to put them. “Follow your purpose”, comes the cry, as though the audience has resolved what that is. […]
I have a useful brain but nothing special. I have had some good luck, but not before I had some bad luck. As for hard work, I am of the Reagan view that while it never killed anyone, why take the chance? I have but one superpower: knowing my own mind.
Detours and other interesting finds:
Shein (“She-In”) is set to be the world’s largest fast-fashion specialist retailer, valued at just over $100bn at its last fundraising round in April, making it the world’s third-most valuable private company at the time, behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX and ByteDance —— Not good news for carbon emissions.
Ideas of India — I don’t understand India very well (have never managed to resolve a question that’s been floating in my mind for a long time: why is India not a manufacturing powerhouse like China or Vietnam?) So I was happy to discover this excellent podcast with Shruti Rajagopalan which helped me sharpen my understanding.
Found On the global state of friendship, loneliness, and ‘bowling alone’, from Substack friend Anton Cebalo:
I’ve also very much enjoyed Walter Kirn’s thoughts on the Twitter saga, which came out today over at Common Sense
“I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.”
See you next week!
I call them tickets because they opened a door in my mind and briefly turned me into an investigator, wanting to know more. Perhaps they will have the same effect on you.