Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I sent my final Monday Musings newsletter this week, which marks the end of an era in my writing career. I'll continue to prioritize Friday Finds though. These links are a blast to find and the base ingredients for my writing process.

Next Friday, I'll also share my Annual Review with you, which is the most personal thing I write all year.

I've also just published the final lecture in my series about René Girard. This one is about apocalypse. Girard believed that when Christianity exposed the injustice of scapegoating, it robbed society of the tools it'd historically used to limit violence. In this episode, my friend Johnathan Bi tells us why the bulwarks against apocalypse (law, war, and capitalism) are on the verge of collapse.

Today's Finds

​How Narratives Drive Prices: The public markets increasingly resemble private ones in the way that revenue multiples continue to spread. Founders who can articulate their company’s vision and persuade the public markets that they have a bright future have cheap access to capital. Elon Musk and Tesla is the perfect example. The author writes: “Thus Tesla’s PE ratio is in many ways self-fulfilling. If Tesla could get people to extend the access to capital it needs for long enough, it will be successful. If it could not, then it would have collapsed. Ironically, this means that far from Elon’s antics being distracting, his ability to maintain these high PE ratios might be the most important driver of the company’s ability to succeed.” The better a company can tell its narrative, the cheaper it can access capital and the higher its price-to-earnings ratio can become.

​Lee Kuan Yew Speech: Lee Kuan Yew served as the Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 – 1990. This is my favorite of his speeches. It conveys a seriousness the American government should learn from. This is my favorite quote: “I ignore polling as a method of government. I think that shows a certain weakness of mind, an inability to chart a course. Whichever way the wind blows. Whichever way the media encourages the people to go, you follow. You’re not a leader.”

Plato's Views on Education: Reading Book 7 of The Republic inspired me to dive deeper into his philosophy of education. At the childhood level, he believed in a free approach to learning. As he famously wrote: “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore, do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.” For a detailed summary, I recommend this excellent Quora answer.

​A History of American Families: Future historians will look back at the second half of the 20th century as a time when the American family unit fell apart. It was a time when mobility and opportunity surpassed family loyalty on the hierarchy of values. As the author writes: “We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families.” This essay tells the story of the nuclear family’s decline and what it means for American culture. Beyond a history, it explores tensions such as the stability of family vs. the dynamism of capitalism; close communities vs. the sociological constraints that make them possible.

​Deconstructing Kanye West’s Voice: Kanye recorded his first single, Through the Wire, after a car accident with his jaw wired shut. On the track, his voice is muffled and his words are hard to make sense of. On the track, he says: “Yo, Gee, they can’t stop me from rappin’, can they?” This video deconstructs how Kanye used autotune to alter his voice early in his career on albums like 808s and Heartbreak. And on Graduation, he even used synthesizers that sound like the human voice.