The Iliad announces its subject with its first word: rage.

I finally came to read the poem by way of the EconTalk Book Club, after avoiding it for the first forty years of my life. When Russ Roberts announced that he would devote several episodes to it, I decided the wait had gone on long enough. I knew the story well enough to expect war, honor, and the caprice of the gods. I did not expect to find, beneath the bloodshed, one of political economy’s most neglected distinctions.

The most successful form of control is one that confines argument to questions of management. A society that has reached this condition has solved the hardest problem of political rule: it has persuaded its members that the dispute permitted to them is the dispute that matters. They may argue fiercely over who should administer the apparatus, which faction should command it, and which reforms might make it more humane, efficient, or responsive. What they are no longer invited to ask is whether the apparatus itself should exist…

The dolphins came up behind us.

My wife and I were standing shoulder-deep in the gulf off Captiva in the early afternoon of my fortieth birthday. We were talking while the water lifted us a few inches and set us down again. It was almost still, more Caribbean than gulf, as though the blue were being lit from below. The sun was high and my shoulders had begun to tighten from the heat. When I brought my hand to my face, my skin tasted of salt.

When Tocqueville traveled the American interior, he found a people who could not be still. They cleared forests they would never farm, raised towns they would soon abandon, and boarded steamboats in the conviction that somewhere upriver lay a better country and, with it, a better version of themselves.

My daughter is six. We are unofficially in kindergarten, which is to say that the question of school is no longer theoretical for us. The decision has been made, the early practice is underway, and I am now in the position of trying to articulate what I think we are actually doing. 

Adam Smith, who understood more about the moral architecture of a free society than many of his later admirers, made a distinction modern politics has never learned to keep in view for very long. Justice, he argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, may rightly be enforced. Beneficence may not.

I was young enough to be impressed by confidence and old enough to feel the pressure of the atmosphere. The men on television seemed so composed, so certain, so wholly untroubled by doubt that it was difficult not to be carried along by them. They did not speak as if they might be wrong. They spoke as if only a fool, or perhaps a coward, still had questions.

I am a computer chip.

I am a thin square of silicon, sealed in plastic, small enough to disappear into your phone, your car, your thermostat, or your pacemaker. You notice me only when I fail. Yet each day you ask more of me than entire rooms of machinery once delivered in a year.

There comes a point when a person must look squarely at the shape of his life and acknowledge how much of it was never deliberately chosen. Not through weakness or neglect, but because the world supplies answers so readily that one stops noticing they were never examined.

Your phone is not American. It’s not Chinese, Taiwanese, Dutch, or Japanese. You’re holding in your hand the result of a planetary-wide experiment in collective intelligence. The copper inside was mined in Chile. The rare earths came from China. The ultra-pure quartz was pulled from deep in North Carolina. The neon that etches its circuits originated in Ukraine. It was designed in California, fabricated in Taiwan on machines from the Netherlands that depend on mirrors from Germany.

Men have died for freedom.

They’ve lifted the cup of hemlock with steady hands, fallen to assassins’ blades, and rotted in prisons for refusing to yield. They’ve gone to the stake with flames at their feet, bowed their heads to the axe, and passed beneath the guillotine’s edge. They’ve rushed headlong at the barrel of a Gatling gun, thrown their bodies atop live grenades, and faced down tanks.

Recent market developments have accelerated the inevitable convergence of regulatory authority and private enterprise. Strategic equity positions in critical infrastructure providers, revenue-sharing arrangements with key technology manufacturers, and enhanced border adjustment mechanisms have demonstrated the substantial efficiencies achievable through direct government-business integration.

It’s been several years since I first shared V’s Final Playlist. At the time, it was a small side quest inspired by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s parting gesture. I called it a playlist, but in truth, it was a meditation on death, no doubt inspired by my reading of the Stoics.

Over time, the playlist grew. I kept refining it. Listening back. Moving pieces around. Noticing what held up and what didn’t. And somewhere along the way, it began to feel less like a mixtape, more like a score.

I now call it In Memoriam, In Vita: in memory, in life.

In 1970, Alvin Toffler offered a thought experiment in Future Shock. As corporate executives were shuffled across the country like chess pieces, one psychologist proposed—facetiously, we're told—that companies assign each transferee a replacement family at the destination. Not just new housing, but new kin: a wife and children carefully matched to the personalities of those left behind. The original family would then receive a new executive to "plug into" the vacant husband role.

Time doesn’t just pass. It gathers. It accrues like sediment, layered in memories, marked by mistakes, and colored by moments that never felt historic when they were happening. I’ve reached version 39 of this experiment called “me,” and if there’s a single thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the best things I’ve built weren’t planned.

Born into slavery in the Roman Empire, Epictetus spent his youth in chains. By the time he died, emperors and senators sought his wisdom. He could have surrendered to bitterness, resentment, or despair. Instead, he transformed his chains into a philosophy of unshakeable inner freedom. His rigorous self-discipline, controlling his reactions, accepting what he could not change, focusing relentlessly on what remained within his power, didn’t diminish his humanity but revealed its highest possibilities.

If you watch an ant colony long enough, it becomes increasingly difficult to see individual ants. Instead, you notice patterns, flows, and rhythms, an intelligence that lives between the ants rather than within them. No ant directs the others, yet pathways form, resources flow, threats are countered, and structures emerge. But blueprints don’t exist. Ant colonies have no architects; no commands, only chemical whispers and responsive actions.

I’ve been a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show for nearly a decade, and like many longtime fans, I can trace certain inflection points in my thinking, habits, and worldview back to specific episodes. What started as a podcast about performance optimization has quietly evolved into a rich archive of long-form conversation.

Few instincts run deeper or prove more dangerous than our craving for moral simplicity. We shape complex realities into reassuring narratives, populated by heroes and villains who embody absolutes that never entirely exist in human form. Our minds are built for story, for myth, not ambiguity. And in Donald Trump, we have found the perfect myth-maker.

We like to imagine geopolitical drama as a simple contest of ideals: democracy versus autocracy, open markets versus state control. But this neat division conceals something older and more human. The fiercest rivalries don’t arise from opposition. They arise from resemblance.