Welcome to all our new subscribers! But What For? is about anything — because anything can be interesting. History. People. Ideas. Investing.

If you enjoy the newsletter, please forward this along to one or more friends/colleagues or click here to share on Twitter to help us grow! 

Happy New Year! I hope everyone’s year is off to a good start!

ButWhatFor? Four for Friday

1. One Quote: Drinking Your Vegetables

2. One Long: We Had Not Been In Favor… Not Been Against

3. One Short: Charlie Munger’s Bookshelf (Part 2!)

4. One Poll: Cambodia

• Supporting: Charlie Munger: 2020 CalTech Interview & Transcript

One Quote

From this post on Twitter

I tend to struggle with audiobooks and podcasts. In the moment — while listening — I feel like I am getting something. I feel engaged. I feel like I am learning. I have a sense that I am even participating in the discussion.

However, after the fact, I rarely remember much beyond the general vibes I felt while listening.

I get the same feeling sometimes when reading as well. My mind drifts off a bit, and all the sudden a few pages have passed and I don’t remember anything about them. I couldn’t even swear to you that I read them — but I turned the pages nonetheless.

The difference, I guess, is that podcasts are almost always this way, whereas reading is almost always the opposite. But why?

I imagine it must be based in biology, somehow? I could convince myself humans tend to focus on what they see, and reading requires active involvement by moving your eyes across pages and refocusing on word after word after word. Your brain is then turning the words on the pages into imagined sounds in your head so that you can feel the meaning of the sentences. That’s a lot of effort going on to turn ink into meaning.

Hearing, on the other hand, when it comes to how it focuses a human’s attention, is really more about noticing things not currently in your line of sight so that you can adjust your line of sight, if needed. It’s kind of a background sense, whereas sight is at the forefront. Thus, you are probably focusing on other things while listening as well, dividing focus and attention even if you are unaware of it…

Regardless, it all adds up to my focus on audio rarely matching my focus on printed words…

Sometimes I wonder how much of life I am living as if it is a podcast I am listening to as opposed to a book I am focused on. That’s something to keep in mind going into a new year.

One Long

We Had Not Been In Favor… Not Been Against

There is a local Korean grocery store about 15 minutes from my house. It has a small take-out restaurant in the back.

It’s a great little spot started by a family that immigrated to the USA — and thus you can get real Korean food in the middle of a small Midwestern town. I spent about eighteen months living in Korea over a decade ago, so it’s a nice once-in-a-while stop that combines memories with great food.

However, it is also a dangerous place to stop. So much so that my wife rarely approves of me doing so anymore.

You see, a few doors down from the grocery story is an establishment of questionable propriety. The kind of place that takes advantage of the more base human cravings to draw you in and further erode your well-pruned sense of right and wrong — that's right, a used bookstore.

It’s near impossible to get in, get the food, and get out of the small shopping center without being lured in by the siren song of unorganized, inexpensive, and greying books untidily scattered across a maze of bookshelves so near collapse from unrelenting addition without subtraction that one can’t help but attempt to relieve the shelves of a part of their overflowing burden.

And thus, like an Odysseus lacking bonds fastened tight to a mast, I will carelessly dive into the dark abyss and walk away having purchased many more books that I could ever hope to read.

Fortunately, I found time to read at least one of these books, Survival in the Killing Fields, which is a memoir / story of how Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor, barely survived the Khmer Rouge’s brutalization of his country.

I was taught about Cambodia’s time under Pol Pot when I was in middle-school, if I remember correctly. I knew about the Khmer Rouge and the awful atrocities they committed against their own country. I knew it had been a terrible period for the country and its people, and that things had happened about the time the US was pulling out of Vietnam — and that many had been killed — but that was about it.

When I bought the book, I was on a reading binge of authoritarian regime-related books that was sparked by an accidental acquisition of the first book in this list — The Volunteer, Ordinary Men, The Gulag Archipelago Book 1, Cannibal Island, King Leopold’s Ghost, Blood Red Sunset, The Cowshed, and Confessions (wow, it was so much easier to read books before having my first child…). So the idea of digging into the Cambodian-equivalent felt like something worth doing.

And, man, was it a brutal book. There is something hauntingly sickening about the more primitive depravity Cambodia experienced relative to the cold-hearted, modern murder machines you encounter in European atrocities. I’m not saying one situation was better or worse for those involved — every story was terrible and I find the desire to compare atrocities as a needless game that just leaves us all feeling worse — I am just saying it pulled on a different, more uneducated and fearful part of my heart.

I think the below quote summarizes well the hard-to-imagine destruction of Cambodia — which included the deaths of around 25% of the entire population from starvation, disease, genocide, and executions:

While identity politics-based revenge played a part in what the Khmer Rouge — a group that was generally poorer and from the countryside, having grown up being told that those in the cities were the source of their misfortunes — was pursuing, at least when viewed collectively, they seemed to be spurred on by an actual belief that they were doing was best for the country and its people.

This seems to be true for most terrible atrocities on the scale of those discussed in the books above. Authoritarians are often viewed as being power hungry, but power in-and-of itself isn’t enough of an aphrodisiac that you can justify continuously killing innocents for it.

However, beliefs held with religious zeal about how to make the world a better place — however that is defined — seem to invite an individual to say the ends justifies whatever the means might need to be.

C.S. Lewis commented much more eloquently on the same idea, and I never really appreciated what he meant until I slowly chunked my way through atrocity after atrocity to see the same thing:

Getting through a book like this is tough, but the reason you should try to do so, I think, is twofold: 1) I believe we owe it to the people who have gone through such horrible experiences to not forget them and 2) so that we can learn things that might help avoid unfortunate outcomes, small or large, and improve the lives of those around us.

I intend, in the future, to write a review and deeper dive on the book, but for now, on the second point, one takeaway that echoes in my head as I think about this book — and really all of the books I listed above about the authoritarian regimes — is related to the quote at the top of this section. It is the idea that there are some things in life where you must pick a side, even if you would rather not be bothered.

This forced choice happens because in many situations, being indifferent or choosing to ignore a situation or do nothing is the same as voting either for or against a certain outcome.

An easy example would be a disease — let’s take cancer, for example.

If you find out that you have metastasized cancer, you no longer can choose to be indifferent about the disease. You can 1) choose treatment and try to beat back the cancer, 2) decide treatment doesn’t make sense, or 3) not think about your cancer and move on with your life.

But the third option is really just a different way to choose the second option.

Another extreme example would be a situation where you come across a burning car with a person trapped inside. I think most people would say they would never kill someone — but what would you be doing if you chose not to try to get the person out of the car, for fear of your own life or otherwise?

There are less obvious — and less extreme — examples, too.

You dislike your job, but you don’t take any action and instead just passively complain — that is more or less deciding to keep your job. You are overweight, but you don’t change diet or exercise — that is a choice to remain overweight. You know you are in a bad mood when you get home, but you let the mood stick as you walk in to see your family — that is a choice to ruin the evening.

This get’s a little trickier for me though — and this is where I can better relate to the Cambodians who ignored the revolutionary activities going on around them — when it is obvious that a single person’s action can’t make a change, and thus a single person’s action is more or less the same as being indifferent or taking no action.

Cambodia was an entire country of 8 million people. Let’s just say Haing decided he strongly opposed the Khmer Rouge’s revolution and told others about why he did. He tried to convince others to pay attention to what was happening far away and out of sight for the doctors, business people, busy mothers, and tired government workers of the cities. He spent every waking hour talking, writing, debating, pleading, and pushing back.

In all likelihood, Cambodia would still have been decimated by the Khmer Rouge. Maybe Haing wouldn’t have survived as he would be more quickly killed. It would seem doing nothing and doing something can also be more or less the same thing.

I am not exactly sure how I should bring this section to a close, so I will leave it here for now. If you have any reactions or thoughts, feel free to jump in with a comment on the website (click the title of this email to go to where you can comment on this post) or shoot me a note. I’m curious to hear what you think.

One Short

Charlie Munger’s Bookshelf, Part 2

Last week, we tried to identify as many books as we could from a recent picture of Charlie Munger’s bookshelf. We got a glimpse of other bookshelves in the Munger household thanks to a few tweets from Jason Zweig.

Something I am noticing here that makes me question my taste — whereas I almost always prefer the paperback version of a book and immediately toss out the book cover as unnecessary and annoying for a hardcover… Munger seems to prefer the opposite on both counts!

However, I also struggle with logically organizing my bookshelf — there is rough organization such as all the biographies being somewhat near each other — and it seems Munger’s bookshelf is also somewhat haphazardly put together. So maybe there is hope for me yet!

Similar to last week, if you see any titles that I have not called out, please leave a comment / shoot me an email so that I can add to the list!

First Picture (left to right, top to bottom):

Second Picture (left to right, top to bottom):

One Poll

Results from last week’s poll:

One Supporting

Charlie Munger: 2020 CalTech Interview & Transcript

Taking further inspiration from all the great content shared around Charlie Munger during the last month or so, I wanted to share a transcript from a discussion Charlie gave ~3 years ago at Caltech.

Despite being 96 years old at the time, Charlie Munger was as sharp as ever in this interview. While the interviewer could have dived into some of the questions more deeply, it was still good to hear Charlie’s latest thoughts on the economy during COVID, China, career selection and investing.

Transcript:

If you made it all the way down here, please take a moment to forward it to someone that might find it interesting — I appreciate your support greatly!

Have a great weekend,

— EJ

See here for a full archive of But What For? articles

But What For? Because anything can be interesting