Abundance is the bold title for a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been receiving a lot of attention. Given my own profound interest in how to get past scarcity thinking I felt compelled to read it rather than rely on the profusion of reviews. In short, while I commend Klein and Thompson on wanting to shift the dialog towards a positive vision, the book falls comically short of its title. A more apt name would have been something like “Awakening” as it does a good job of rep...

My book, The World After Capital, has been available online and as hardcover for a couple of years now. I have had frequent requests for other editions and I am happy to report that they are now all available! One of the biggest requests was for an audio version. So this past summer I recorded one which is now available on Audible. Yes, of course I could have had AI do this, but I really wanted to read it myself. Both because I think there is more of a connection to me for listeners and also ...

A couple of weeks ago I participated in Creative Destruction Lab’s (CDL) “Super Session” event in Toronto. It was an amazing convocation of CDL alumni from around the world, as well as new companies and mentors. The event kicked off with a 2 hour summary and critique of the new book “Power and Progress” by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. There were eleven of us charged with summarizing and commenting on one chapter each, with Daron replying after 3-4 speakers. This was the idea of Ajay Agra...

Over vacation I read Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Unlike many other recent books tackling the climate crisis, it is entirely focused on the controversial issue of geoengineering through solar radiation modification (SMR). The basic idea of SMR is to let slightly less sunlight into the Earth’s lower atmosphere where it can heat things up. Even a tiny decrease in solar radiation will have a big impact on global warming. To put upfront where I stand on this: I first wrote about the need...

Recently someone tweeted at me that I should read Ishmael by David Quinn in response to a piece I posted about the need for unlimited growth in a finite world. Well I have read it and now find myself wondering if people endorsing it, including Jack Dorsey, have spend much time thinking about it. The book consists mostly of a dialogue between a teacher (an astute and telepathic gorilla) and a student (a somewhat befuddled human who slowly learns how to see the world as desired by his teacher)....

After many years of writing in public, I am super thrilled to finally announce that my book The World After Capital is now available in print. The digital version will remain online for free and the content continues to be creative commons licensed. There is no subtitle and the back cover is free of annoying blurbs (just a beautiful blue). All four of those points are meaningful to me and yet every publisher I talked to insisted that those are terrible ideas and they wouldn’t publish the book...

I am super excited to share that my book The World After Capital is nearly finished. What is on the web site is more or less complete, with maybe a bit more copy editing coming. If you read the book now and find a typo please let me know or even better, make a pull request to fix it. A huge thanks to everyone who has contributed over the years, including everyone named in the acknowledgments. A special shoutout for Mona, who has been crucial in getting to the finish line. Now for everyone who...

My book World After Capital has been an ongoing project for a couple of years now. I am excited that as of this weekend I feel it includes all the ideas I want in there. Some of them, such as strategies for overcoming the dominance of nation states, are so far in a protozoic stage, but at least they are there. Others, such as the chapter on the sufficiency of “Capital“, are in need of a substantial rewrite because they have fallen out of sync with other parts (see the rewritten chapter on “Ne...

I previously wrote a review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, which I highly recommended, despite fundamentally disagreeing with one of its central arguments. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Homo Deus. While the book asks incredibly important questions about the future of humanity, it not only comes up short on answers, but, more disappointingly, it presents caricature versions of other philosophical positions. I nonetheless finished Homo Deus because it is highly relevant to my own writi...

For 2017 I made two New Year’s resolutions. The first is to get into better shape (yes, like just about everyone else judging from the crowd at the gym today). The second is to finish my book World After Capital. For that I will need some help. I am looking for a research assistant who can help me fill in the many instances in World After Capital where it says “XX” or “YY” instead of an actual number, or where I have made a note that I need a source or additional data. There are also a bunch ...