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Mimetic desires made sense as a phenomenon and I felt the draw of the book’s message. It’s however never the case for me that advice that will “change your life” actually ends up changing much - perhaps because the message is never that startling or profound enough.

When Fukuyama and Dugin seem to agree on what’s gone wrong with liberalism and why there must be something they’re worth paying attention to.

Liberalism finds itself without serious challengers and turns on itself - how individual identity and entitlements erode duty and awareness of the privileges of freedom. It is somewhat scary how Fukuyama’s critique of liberalism is so on par with the likes of E.g. Alexander Dukin’s (even if their proposed ways forward differ) - when opposites agree there must be something there of paying attention to.

A classic for a reason - the hero’s journey help us understand the lessons that transcend any story and blurs the importance of a story being real or fictional, the importance lies in if it is real i.e. if you can learn from another’s story and see yourself in your own story

Initially an intriguing read but strays more and more into a form of consequentialism that becomes hard to grapple with - so hard in fact that some form of mechanised automated decision-making become the most ethical alternative. Still, a good addition to anyone’s world view and a sober warning regarding how fast a flourishing population can be reduced from millions to thousands by simply maintaining the low birth rates we currently have in some Asian and western countries.

A sober look at what the statistics are actually saying about what we know about climate change and the problems in modelling available data.

Excellent account on how start-ups, looking to avoid state control mechanisms, scale to a point where they start acting like governments themselves. The problem as of yet unsolved, is that of trust and the book does an excellent job of showing how this problem has been tackled from Ancient Greece to Bitcoin

A very clear-eyes take on the important role of nuclear energy for achieving various climate targets - my main takeaways are that new nuclear is being replaced by renewables which means fossil fuels and coal are not. Also, the future for small modular nuclear plants seems bright and hinges on two things (apart from public and political support), choosing a limited number of designs and mass-producing them.

Space as real estate. It makes the matter of bandwidth for satellites and the importance of a lack of global rules of engagement in space understandable and is a necessary compliment to his earlier works on the role of geography.