AI and the lost art of reading

As information sources have become abundant and attention spans have shortened in the age of AI, we take on the lost art of reading. Join us to explore why reading rates are falling, how that shift affects judgment and opportunity, and how interdisciplinary books help us see patterns across history, economics, and technology. 

To help us, Alisa Rusanoff, CEO of Eltech AI, joins us to share her perspective on reading, debate volume versus depth, and offer practical ways to reclaim attention and read with intention.

• Evidence on declining reading rates among adults, teens and children
• Noise versus signal in the attention economy
• Mental models and interdisciplinary synthesis for better decisions
• AI’s limits and why human integration still matters
• Cycles in debt, trade, demography, and geopolitics
• Fiction as a cultural sensor for lived experience
• Wealth gaps, polarization and the need for critical thinking
• Practical habits to train feeds and protect reading time
• Challenge to read, reflect, and apply insights

For people worried if they are reading enough:

• Reading just 1 book a year puts you in the top 60% of readers
• Read 4 books a year to be in the top 50% of readers
• Read 10 books a year to be in the top 20% of readers
• For those looking to be in the top 5% of readers, expect to read at least 50 books

This episode is full of research and fun connections that are sure to make you think positively about your commitment to reading. At the time of this episode, it's not too late to join the top 20% in 2026!

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Transcript

Alisa's intro and shared reading lists

Speaker 3 0:02

The AI Fundamentalists, a podcast about the fundamentals of safe and resilient modeling systems behind the AI that impacts our lives and our businesses. Here are your hosts, Andrew Clark and Sid Mangalik. Welcome to this episode of the AI Fundamentalists. Today we are talking about reading. To help us, we are excited to bring on Alisa Rusanoff, the current CEO of Eltech AI. She's a seasoned founder and executive in private credit, fintech, alternative investments, trade finance, and embedded finance. She's previously been featured on Bloomberg and the World Economic Forum, other industry media, and is a contributor to academic books. Elisa, welcome to our show.

Speaker 1 0:55

Thank you for having me. Thanks, Susan.

Speaker 0:58

And we're so excited to have you on this episode because we've been talking so much about reading and the joy of reading and the importance of reading. So I thought that a really nice topic to just start off the episode is what are you reading?

Speaker 1 1:11

Good question. Yes. I think we really have to dig deep into understanding the uh the past and the history. So one of the books I'm reading now is 1929 by Andrew Sorkin, which I'm enjoying a lot, a lot of different patterns and parallels in the 20s and 30s of the last century versus nowadays, with very prominent, interesting figures from the entrepreneurial world and also politician world. And the other one I'm reading now is uh The Ancient City, which is a pretty um old book by European writer Coulonge. I might be mispronouncing his name, uh, but that book specifically is about the way the cultural upbringing and the belief in the uh ancient civilizations and the respect to the dead people kind of shaped and involved the the culture of uh the European elites and the European uh average people. So, yeah, a lot of history. So we'll see where 2026 brings us. What about you guys? What are you reading?

Mental models and decision making

Speaker 2 2:22

Those are some some great books, and I agree. Like the reading the history to really understand the present is is so critical, specifically with seeing like the cycles with AI and things like that. Um I know we'll get into some of the parallels there in a little bit, but um I'm I'm reading uh a set of books that I I saw recently called The Great Mental Models. So it's kind of a uh kind of a variation of like how Charlie Munger, you know, talked about the different like ways you could be thinking about how you can interpret events and things. So kind of like that same, same kind of you're focusing more on that like a geopolitical side. This is a little bit like the mental models from like science and um and philosophy and different uh and economics and and things like that, of like how to interpret events and understand like um uh the parallels of like thermodynamics and entropy and things like that for making decisions. So the more mental models you have about how things work can help for different situations for in enhancing decision making. So it's a pretty interesting uh set of four volumes. So I'm in the second volume so far, which is the physics, chemistry, and biological models. So that's uh it's an interesting series, so I recommend checking that out. It's it's more of like a summary, and then you want to deep dive into specific areas, but it's a pretty good overall summary. And then uh wrapping up a book that I started uh a while ago with Churchill Walking with Destiny, so it's really in-depth about Winston Churchill his whole life, essentially. Um a lot of good witticisms and things like that in there, but just very interesting of uh kind of the resilience and uh he was wrong a lot, but also learned from his mistakes a lot. So uh just good to get that historical context and you see the parallels, as you were mentioning, of kind of how you know what happened in the 20s, or the you can see how what happened from the World War I, why that led to World War II happening and things like that. So you can you can see a lot of how these these different cycles work together. So yeah, uh two kind of different ends of the spectrum, but um both very enjoyable reads, I recommend.

Speaker 1 4:22

I love Churchill, just to your point. Um, if I mean I'm not sure if your audience knows but knows that, but he did get a Nobel Prize for Literature, which was I thought pretty interesting, right? So, apart from recommending uh actually the historical books that he wrote, I think there's a great book um which kind of brings us to the present as well. Uh George Orwell and uh Churchill. And the book is, I think, called Churchill and Orwell by Thomas Rix. It's a pretty interesting parallel between the two lives of two very interesting people. Um, I would actually recommend that as well.

Speaker 2 4:55

Awesome. Thank you. I'll I'll definitely check that out. And I now I've to your point, I want to go read a bunch of uh Churchill's books that you know contributed that Nobel Prize. Yeah, it wasn't a Nobel Peace Prize, it was a Nobel Prize in Literature that he won.

Speaker 3 5:11

Yeah. And then those are interesting. I think I got inspired to dig into a book I had read uh back in the early 20s, probably at the beginning of the pandemic, um, maybe in the pandemic, it was influence, the psychology of persuasion, and reading it now. It goes, it goes through like the psychological like this more of a scientific uh restudy of like the six psychological principles, such as like reciprocity, reciprocity, commitment, consistency, social proof, liking, and now reading it in 2026 again with the lens of LLMs and the arguments of thinking, reasoning, are these uh human-like is a different lens on this book for sure, but I highly recommend it, even if you were looking at it for like organizational or psychological behavior, it's really good.

Speaker 6:06

And I've been just about wrapping up uh Sichin Liu's three-body problem trilogy, which has been really fun to just get back into real hard science and like real hard sci-fi. Um, which is great. I mean, I mean, I grew up on a lot of like Asimov and and Orson Scott Card, and so it's it's good to like read some more sci-fi. Uh a great read, I highly recommend. More like fun than serious, but I think we're getting a little bit more abstract here at the end of the series. Um, and I recently just finished up Albert Ellis's The Myth of Self-Esteem, um, where he basically discusses a new model of therapy besides like cognitive behavioral therapy or skills-based therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy. He discusses a rational emotive behavioral therapy, which is grounded in a lot more of existential philosophy and pragmatics, and focuses on how we can fundamentally accept ourselves and accept others, and how moving towards acceptance of self can resolve a lot of our internal conflicts.

Speaker 3 7:09

That actually sounds like a really good follow-on to the psychology of persuasion. I it's I saw you put that up there, and I think I'm gonna read that right after that.

Speaker 7:19

Yeah, it's it's a it's an interesting read. I think it reads like a paper, but I think it's a very interesting read. Awesome.

Speaker 1 7:27

And to me that that calls for existentialism, which is probably one of my favorite philosophical uh movements of the last century with Jean-Paul Sart Sartre, um, his um, I guess his the love of his life, uh Simone de Dubois, very interesting woman, also philosopher, and a couple of other interesting people. Albert Camus, um, The Stranger. I was just a couple of days ago, I had a book in my uh in my bag. I was just grabbing a coffee and like finished half the book. It's it's pretty small, but it's it's it's pretty fascinating. The stranger by by Camus. And you can even probably see some of the Russian writers like um like Dostoevsky being a little bit on the existentialism side, even though he's not a philosopher, but I would call him on the border on the edge of philosophy. Um and there is actually a lot of interesting parallels between him and Nietzsche, um, which might surprise some people, but they are viewing the world, I think, very more similar than a lot of people would uh would imagine. But yeah, thanks for sharing.

Psychology, sci‑fi, and therapy

Speaker 8:34

Absolutely. And thanks everyone for sharing your books. So I think let's start off with some stats here and then let's get into some discussion. So just to open up, um, we are seeing declining readership across the US at basically every age range. When the National Endowments of the Arts surveyed adults, uh, we saw that from 2012 we were seeing readership at like 54% reading any book in a year, down to 2022, down to 48.5%. Uh, and this trend is still going down. Uh, we're seeing this for teens uh reading for fun going down from 27% down to almost 14% now, and even young children, right? This is nine-year-olds reporting reading for fun. This is from the NAEP. Uh, they're finding that readership is down from 53% to 39%, with only 16%, and this is the lowest they've ever recovered, never or hardly ever reading for fun. Uh, you know, so you know, take some caveats for for COVID-19 and its influence, but what are your what are our feelings about the implications about less reading among the populace?

Existentialism and literary parallels

Speaker 1 9:42

I'm curious if that cor that correlation is it's pretty high uh in terms of number of hours spent on social media platforms, right? That that could be an interesting parallel to understand. I mean, it's it's pretty sad, but I also feel like it goes in cycles. Um, and it's interesting. So I'm I'm based in New York, and um quite a few of my friends or some people that I meet at different um social events, uh even finance and fintech events, they run their one their own book clubs. Unfortunately, nowadays, with so many destructions like social media, television, um, and very short way of consuming information. Because if someone is saying that, hey, I'm reading Twitter on a daily basis, I'm spending hours reading articles, um, but even those articles sometimes is just consumption of information, and I wouldn't call it rating. And I think that's probably the problem of nowadays. There's too much noise, there's not enough signals, or it's probably not even not enough signals. I think it's really difficult to understand uh what is a signal versus noise, right? In the amount of information we're consuming on a daily basis. Um, I do think that um historically, the people, the humans generally, uh should be able and were able to um consume and analyze and process the amount of information um they would be surrounded by, right? If you just look at the you know average person 200, 300, 400 years ago, the amount of information they would receive, maybe some articles once in a while, newspapers, I mean, uh once in a while, but certainly no TV, certainly no, you know, social media or anything like that. So the amount of information they would consume, they would be able to process. And I think from a psychological standpoint, um the genetical side of a human being should be able to process that amount of information. Otherwise, you do feel overly stressed and anxious because you're just not you're just not capable to process information. And unfortunately, or fortunately, um the human species are not able to uh develop and evolve um with the speed the technology is evolving, right? So we're still, you know, the the instincts and the core instinct of fear that is probably the core basis of all human incidents, it's still the same, whether it's 2026 or it's you know, um 1456, right? But to me, it's actually reading a book because there's no distractions. I try to put my phone on on silence uh when I'm reading a book, and I would never understand people that compare the book and a movie, right? There's a really good old saying: the more um languages you know, the more human you are. I think we can probably transfer it to the more books you read, the more human you are.

The reading decline by the numbers

Speaker 2 12:48

Fully agree. I'd like to to pull out a couple things you you mentioned there of um the world moves fast but really slow, right? So, like which is what you're saying, like the how humans, what makes a human human, how humans operate, how like you said the the cycles of history and history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes, those sorts of things. This is where books allow you to, and even like biographies and things as well, let you learn from other people's mistakes so you don't make them uh the same way. And I think what you you mentioned earlier in there is that like a lot of your your friends in the in the more intellectual circles you're you're a part of are doing book clubs and things. I would say that's the you want to live like a billionaire, read books. Like it's the accessible luxury, and weirdly enough, it's it's so inexpensive. Like books are now getting closer to Starbucks coffee, like the paperback book to start, like the it's reading has never been more accessible or cheaper than it is today. Um, but it's less and less used when it used to be more highly valued. But like that is the trends. If you look at like what are the most successful people doing throughout history, how does innovation or ideas come? It's from reading and books and synthesizing ideas, like that's and that's not going away with AI or anything. And now that we I call the you know iPhones anxiety squares, like like like this is where everybody's you know on this on social media, do the Twitter and things, it's like that constant, like gets you on that rat race and burnout and things, it keeps you busy but not productive. And that's where it's like the the the most productive people are often the ones that don't seem as busy either. It's because they're finding that way to modulate as well as having that the accessible luxury of understanding like the ideas and how parts connect. And that's really what seems to differentiate from from success and things. And I think that's a lot of the areas you were just touching on. Love your your perspective on that.

Speaker 1 14:39

Actually, some of my favorite moments. Um, just sitting in the plane, no Wi-Fi, no connection. I don't necessarily watch TV a lot, and I do take a lot of long flights, and it's just a book and me.

Speaker 2 14:50

I love flights. It feels the best, like you actually like get more things down, or it's like it's black, it's I know it's it's strange.

unknown 14:56

Yeah.

Speaker 1 14:57

People they've people hate it, they're scared of it, and like I love, I love it.

Speaker 15:01

And I think that a very natural follow-up, which I mean, we're talking about like reading and are we reading enough? Uh, if you if you just want some quick stats here, if you read just one book a year, start to finish as an adult, that puts you in the top 60% of readers. So if you've been putting enough, please try and plan to read at least one book this year. If you can read four books a year, then you're actually in the top 50%, right? You'll see very quickly that people who read like to read a lot. Uh, and if you want to be in the top 20% of readers, expect to read at least 10 books. And if you say, like, I'm actually really great at reading and I love reading, and reading is my hobby, you should plan to read at least 50 books in a year to be in the top 5% of readers.

Speaker 2 15:39

And then the Warren Buffett of read 500 pages a day. It's like what's great about he and or Charles Munger, like, there is no secrets. Like they they told how to be successful, how to be a great investor, and as he's challenged, nope, here's what it is. Nobody, none of you are gonna do it. It's like it's it's pretty simple, but it's extremely hard to execute. But it all comes back to this of the more information you know, the better you're mental models that don't chase the hype is where the signal is.

Speaker 1 16:04

And that stats is that global or that's US based?

Speaker 16:07

This is US adult-based.

Speaker 1 16:09

Interesting. I'm actually curious if there is any uh difference between other parts of the world in that regard.

Speaker 16:16

Yeah, I think that's absolutely fair. I I think I feel like in America we're gonna be able to do that.

Speaker 1 16:20

I'm not trying to say anything here, but you know.

Speaker 16:23

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 16:24

We could always do better.

Speaker 16:26

Awesome. So I think now we can dig in a little bit into something we were talking about earlier, which is this idea of influence between life outcomes and reading. Is there a connection? What's this connection look like? And, you know, what anecdotes are out there. So there's absolutely the fine that exists, which is that reduced readership is correlated with lower literacy rates, um, and then lowered literacy rates then directly affect socioeconomic status later in life. Um, we also should note that if you are not able to read a lot as a kid, uh, this can create a vicious cycle of inequity. And you end up in these situations where not reading at a young age but gets not reading at a later rate age, uh, lowering literacy, lowering education levels. And uh we see this, we see this in both directions, right? That lower socioeconomics means less reading, and less reading means lower socioeconomics. Uh, but then we contrast this with the idea that there are people who are, you know, at the top successful that tell us uh read, read, read, read, read. Uh how much stock do we want to put into let's say volume of reading versus quality of reading? Should we just be reading to be reading and to fill up space? Or what how do we feel about that?

Attention, noise, and human limits

Speaker 1 17:40

No, to fill up space. Um, I think you guys some of you just mentioned recently um reading for fun. I actually don't know what that means. I don't think I ever read for fun. I feel more for uh to fill an intellectual gap, if that's if that's a saying, right? Um I'm reading because I'm curious, and I think curiosity is one of those very interesting uh human traits that kind of drives you to learn more, to better yourself all the time. And it's ongoing, um, unstoppable way of living your life, right? Because you can't, yeah, you have to be constantly learning, right? And by constantly learning, I mean expanding vertically and horizontally, right? And I think this is one of the most important things um in reading, and I think Andrew, you uh rightfully mentioned that it's pretty much free right now. I do think that um reading creates different patterns in your brain, especially in the age of AI and LLMs, and you know, LLMs are language-based, right? Which basically means all the repetitive tasks, all the textual based and some reason and some logic-based exercises would be pretty much automated and streamlined in the near future in the majority of the sectors. So not touching the job, uh, obviously concerns that is a real concern these days. I think the future um will hold for the people that are trying to find the patterns in between disciplines and sectors. And I think even historically, um uh the majority of the genius always comes into intradiscipline, right? Because you're seeing the patterns, you're seeing how the world is so much interconnected. Uh, one of my favorite books is actually um uh about the golden ratio. And I'm really fascinated by this specific topic because it kind of the book is by uh Mary Olivia. Um it came out you know a couple of years ago now, but it's it's a great understanding of how music, architecture, art, math, um uh, geometry, and all the other things in the world are pretty much connected the way we sometimes don't think about, right? I just also read a book, um, An Immense World, um, by a very interesting science writer about how the the different animals, whether it's mammals or insects, are seeing the world and viewing the world and feel in the world. And it's so fascinating how we are pretty much um uh living in one you know couple of dimensions and there's so many different people, like whales, for example, they're mapping out the the entirety of the ocean with the waves um that allow them to understand and shape the reality therewith, right? So there's so much that we don't know about the world yet, and I don't think I don't think LLMs would be able to tell us all about it, right? And reading, especially reading about different cultures, about different ways to shape the history, different ways the history is shaped by different factors. And I think some of those factors could be, you know, history and religion, and maybe we'll get to that later, and um and culture and legal systems. And that's so interesting how that impacts um how we see in the world. Actually, one of my um many, many years ago when I was in college, one of my um college professors was um was really good at this class, which was a very interesting class in linguistics, um, how the fairy tales shape the cultures. You can actually um maybe not judge, but understand the culture a little bit more or civilization a little bit more by reading their fairy tales, because you can see how their mentality, the way of living, the way of seeing the world is shaped, whether they're more you know, optimists versus pessimists, how their um kind of ancient um civilizations are around it. So you can you can go all the way from fairy tales and you can read up up to Um, let's say Arnold Toynbee on the Civilization theory. And it's fascinating how we can just zoom out. I like zooming out generally when I'm reading about how we see the world. And there is, you know, the rule of like seven whys, why this, why that. And we just go to this understanding of the entirety of the world. And the curiosity pattern is um unbeatable, I think.

How much to read and why

Speaker 22:25

And this notion that true understanding or deep understanding comes from an interdisciplinary understanding of the world, I think is is so vital and so crucial. And I mean, this is a lot of what my PhD advisors are so big on, right? We were like language, we were psych and we were comps and we were math. And I think that like that's where you really find that breakthrough and when you find that space. I always think about books like uh Girdle, Escher, and Bach, GEB by Douglas Hofstadter, uh, another big book, which is like you one page you're reading a math proof, the next page you're reading a music score, and the next page reading a play. Uh books that really push us and challenge us to think about the world in an integrative way, in an interconnected way, uh, where we see how the disciplines can meld together and you know uh tell us some grander story. Uh and I think this is really valuable, especially in an age of AI where people are thinking very linearly, I think thinking very broadly and in a broadly in the way that we're aggregating knowledge uh is what's going to give us that room to still grow. Um so I think the next question I have for you guys, based directly on that, is from the reading that we're doing, what are some of the cycles that we're learning that we can use to integrate to understand things like history? Right? We we read all the we read about tech, we read about economics. What are some of the cycles that we're learning about that maybe we're seeing repeating today?

Speaker 1 23:48

It is a great question, and it depends how doomed you want to sound on a Friday morning.

Speaker 2 23:53

Go for it.

Volume versus quality of reading

Speaker 1 23:57

Um yeah, it's it's a great question. So I, as I mentioned earlier, I'm reading 1929, and this is, I think, one of those history books that gives you parallels and patterns. Um, but honestly, I'm one of those people. I just want to go straight to ancient Rome and you know, read about those times and how like we're evolving as a nation, as a civilization. But I think among modern writers um or thinkers, I think Ray Daly is pretty fascinating about the debt cycles. Um, I think a couple of books recently, um most recent why how countr Why Countries Would Go Broke, I believe. And the other one is the uh the change in world order a couple of years ago. He does have really good statistics. Um I think you can make um even for the statistics purposes, I think it's really interesting to read, you might come to different conclusions. And I think I would say probably the same about Peter Zion, uh geopolitical thinker and writer. Um very fascinating mind uh mind as well. Uh he does provide a lot of statistics. Um, he's really uh drilling down into depopulation crisis, for example. I think one of his top books is Disunated Nations a couple of years ago, but he's done you know a couple of other interesting books. Um, really understanding how the cycles shape the economy. How do we see the patterns? And I think a lot of this goes down to, and I think this is about Ray Dalios' um cycle theory as well. A lot of it goes down to the economy uh and the debt cycles. Um, talking about the debt, I think there is another great book. Um I have to uh double check the um uh the author, but it's called uh debt five thousandths of history, I believe. Uh it's one of those, you know, very large books um that does provide history of um the debt and relationships and monetary uh policies before the monetary system was even created, right? And I was actually also working on um on a chapter to an academic book um sometime last year about international trade. And we can go back to even to ancient Mesopotamia uh to understand how the international trade was financed, right? It was financed uh predominantly by um very rich, um, you know, you could call them salespeople right now, but some of them own the ships. So there was a lot of, you know, before the monetary system truly existed, um, a lot of it was border-based, but there are still the relationships, the systems, the monetary um framework and architecture that shaped a lot of economies, that shaped a lot of trade cities. Um, I've traveled to Jordan in the past, and it's also very fascinating culture in terms of how they were um developing their cultural um circumstances. And trade specifically one was one of those driving powers in the entirety of the human culture, right? And there's a reason the majority of the largest cities and the most popular and top cities in the world are based on some maritime routes, whether it's uh a river in most of the European countries, for example, or it's the ocean or it's the sea, trade is what powers and connects the economies. Um, there's actually another great book that um we've read I as part of uh of our book club we've read in the past in the past, Guns, Germs, and Steel um by Jared Diamond. Uh it's it's a pretty fascinating book how the cultures develop in the past. And going back to the present, obviously the patterns that we can see, we can actually read the historical books, understanding the different types of patterns, right? But also we can read some fiction books, and once in a while I do read some fiction. Um so I would probably go, like nowadays, I would probably go to um Eric Maria Remarque, one of the most prominent German writers of the 20th century. He's he's absolutely fascinating. Um, my favorite book is probably the The Ark of Triumph. Um, but you can also go to Milan, uh Milan Kundera, the unbearable lightness of being. It's uh it's a work of true fiction. Um, but you can still feel the um the cultural differences, the trends and the patterns, the way um people feel what's happening historically in the times they were living in. And I think it's it's very fascinating to actually have that fill-in of like how the human um psychic is changing to adapt to the current environment. And again, going back to the core basis of human instincts is is fear, right? So every single thing is about adaptability. So I think in the times that we're living in, um, when the world order is changing, I don't think we have a um a set in stone world order yet. We're the beginning of um, as as was said, rupture recently, but I think it's really uh about understanding the multipolarity that's gonna come in the next couple of years, right? So I think both fiction and nonfiction is probably very, very helpful to process the change. And I think this is my coping mechanism as well, um, because there's a lot of anxiety, obviously, um, in the US and and globally generally. So for me to feel better about myself and the world and the relationships, I always go back to history and and and and reread certain things because nothing is is new in the world, right?

Interdisciplinary thinking and AI

Speaker 2 29:42

Fully agree. And the two areas you you put on there, I know you and I have a shared uh passion for economics and macroeconomics and international finance, but when you combine that with history, like you're mentioning, that's where like you know, what's happening macro in the world right now, that's you see these parallels in the different rise and fall of you know the Roman Empire and things like that. You can see these sorts of parallels and the the economics of like most economies develop in a certain way, and you're and we're starting to that's with some of the debt cycles and things you're seeing, like how they the rise and fall as well as certain trends of even like the protectionism early on is not necessarily a good longer-term strategy, but it's what you do on a small economy before it opens up, and then when you do currency paggings to free floating and all these types of things, yeah, I can definitely reading really just provides that perspective to, and I think just colloquially macroeconomics specifically. I know like so it's one of the I heard I have to verify the stat, but I remember hearing that it was one of the most failed undergraduate classes in economics. Like in general, there's like this kind of a fear of economics in the general populace, but it's something that I would say, I mean, history definitely, but like the understanding the intersection of history and macroeconomics is really powerful and freeing for understanding that perspective of how how the world fits together. And of course, there's a lot of people that are more like you and I are more down the rabbit hole of some of the finance stuff, but just in general, a basic understanding of how economies work really helps put the pieces in place for how the world is changing today.

Speaker 1 31:08

As they say, it's the economy stupid, right? It goes down to that because uh based on the I think the wealth gap is a very underspoken conversation these days because this is really getting this is getting really, really bad. And if you're looking at the statistics of the last year, the majority of the consumption is really coming from the top 10 percentile of the US population, right? So we have to look at the you know uh Wool Street versus Main Street, and this is a conversation not a lot of people want to to hold. But at the end of the day, the way the voting occurs, whether it's on the right side and the left side, it's being just polarized. But the issue is the same, whether there are people voting for Trump with people who voted for Mam Dani, um, and again, I'm I represent New York sitting here in Manhattan. I think the core issues are the same. And the way they're just portraying uh the problems is a populist approach. It's just on different sides of the equation, right? But the we we're losing the um uh the magic power of a dialogue at the end of the day. And unfortunately, these things historically never um end up well. There has to be a redistribution of wealth to a certain extent, whether it's forced or it's not forced. And I think the patterns have shown us that with the technology revolution, which is probably what LLMs are bringing to our life, um, the uncertainty and the the fear and the um the discontent among people is is certainly on the rise that has to be dealt with proactively other than reactively.

Speaker 32:49

And I don't want to say that you know reading is an automatic panacea for this, but I think that it does kind of tap into this idea that we can respond differently to the world. I think that we have a very emotive and reactively respond to the world, and we have these slow and cautious and thoughtful and deliberate ways, which are informed by you know moving away from media that triggers our stress responses, pulls at our attention mechanisms, um, and can you know very easily overstimulate us and put us in positions where we're we're very susceptible to uh flashy positions. Um and I, you know, taking that time to read and reflect, even just 30 minutes a day, even if it has to be in the shower, whatever it takes to just like digest some of the stuff that we're consuming is a valuable way to try and move the world a little bit more intentionally.

Speaker 2 33:38

For sure. And we both kind of touched on it when this is not a social media episode, but I don't think that's necessarily helping the division or the middle ground there. But um I love Sid what you were just saying there is so I've also recently uh read uh Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. Man, that's like a good book of kind of like a almost a solve for the soul, if you will, of like where we're reading kind of really showing that, and this is also a common thing you you see with like that self-determination and ability to um self-reliance. It's the kind of theme you see among uh some of these philosophers and and writers as well. But like the whole experiment of like what happens if you step back from the world a little bit, really read deeply and understand how things work and get that perspective. And I think the one thing that just keeps coming back to me when I think about reading and what it provides is that perspective of like the little things, even also in your life that might cause anxiety that the anxiety square helps to perpetuate. You step back and see, wow, this is actually super minor in the grand scheme of things, but it kind of see what matters and like really it's not about what how much you read. What today is like you should be reading, but then it's also not about how much you read, but how deeply you read, and like that's kind of that second-order effect longer term with it. And that Walden Pond, I think, is a kind of a good starter. There's some god of dry trapters in there in the middle, but overall, as a good kind of uh a starter along that path.

Patterns, cycles, and geopolitics

Speaker 1 34:56

I think certainly we need to read and not consume information. I think that's the difference, right?

Speaker 3 35:04

Yeah, of course it is. And I I agree with you, Elise. You had mentioned earlier in the episode um that social media was a lot of the catalyst for the polarization of thought because algorithms were built for influence and keeping you engaged on one train of thought. So now when you're reading, you don't have that, you don't have some other influence trying to keep you trapped in a thought. How do we help with the balance of reading versus influence?

Speaker 1 35:40

I think cap yourself. I think there's so many different tools. Um, and some of my friends just don't even have social media. I think my biggest social media is LinkedIn. Um, but you don't really get a lot of polarized information on LinkedIn. Um it depends. That's funny. Um, I think you have to be smart about training your own algorithm. So literally my Instagram is trained, and it's really easy to do, actually, like a couple of searches, a couple of you know, extra second spends on specific content. And literally my Instagram is promoting some um philosophical books and uh, you know, really good quotes from like Seneca and Stoicism, and then some good restaurants in New York, right? You you can train your own social media, just don't try to read on politics on Instagram, don't try to uh watch some videos on Twitter that come in from some sources that you can't even explain and don't understand, right? You can change the algorithm on your own social media so fast, like literally a couple of minutes, a couple of you know, days. Um, so it's all up to you, right? The information is free, and it's up to you to understand and source the right information. Like I have this rule with my family, with my um older parents. Uh my mom cannot send me anything, whether it's Twitter or any other social media, if she cannot explain where it's coming from. If she doesn't know the source, it's not allowed. I'm sorry. And it's it's it's a great tool because it actually makes her question the information she's receiving, which should be the case with everyone else.

Speaker 3 37:20

Yeah, I agree. I think all of us fully agree with you. We have similar rules either for our teens, kids, and our and our parents on that exact same thing you're talking about. Um it's funny that you bring that up.

Speaker 1 37:33

Actually, I think it makes it more difficult for the parents because they're not used to the internet, right? Like they are much more lost in this age of social media information and noise. And I think kids are probably much more adapt to, you know, okay, this is this is good information, this is not, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 37:51

Which I think hits on one of your things of humans adapt slowly, but I think the filtering is something that's kind of like a modern survival skill that all of us are getting a little bit better at just by necessity. But I think one of the things is we're we're starting to wrap up here. Uh I think kind of the summarizing of a couple points I'd love to get your thoughts on is if you look in at history and the greatest thinkers, business leaders, politicians, what have scientists of any discipline really, there's like one common thread that we often see, of course, as outlawers, it's reading and understanding perspectives and and the thinking deeply in things. Like, of course, completely separate disciplines. But that's one of those things that um the most successful have in common is you know, readers are leaders, or leaders are readers, or I'm saying go backwards, but uh in any case, like I want to get your thoughts on that. I think that's really what that the accessible luxury. Don't make this the thing that all the billionaires do, but everybody else doesn't. This is a everybody can take control of their destiny, and uh, even if it's read listening to an audio book on the way to work or something, it's a way to get started. And I I've not met anybody, I definitely challenge you both or all three of you for this as well. Anyone that's regretted reading. It's hard to start like any habit or whatever, but I'm not hearing about like, oh, reading is so terrible, I'm gonna stop. No, it's like, oh, I need more time. How do I do more? It's like you start realizing the more you know, the more you don't know type thing, and this just gets that like a virtuous feedback loop of oh my goodness, I don't know a lot, and I gotta keep reading. Uh, I've yet to hear somebody have like a oh, I'm I'm an AA for reading, you know.

History, trade, and city building

Speaker 1 39:22

That's that's very true. I think the rule of my life, and um, this is kind of kind of how I was raised, um do not do not believe in anything you see. It doesn't matter where the information is coming from. It could be from a political leader, the president of the country, your teacher, your professor, it doesn't really matter. You have to critically think and approach everything with questioning. So I think that's the bottom line of anything you do in your life, you have to question pretty much anything you hear. And it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter where it's coming from. Um, let's say we're you know discussing the the recent developments in Venezuela, right? You can read a lot of you know newspapers and articles and media coverage of of the uh Maduro um developments, but also you can just go and read the the book. Uh, and it's I would recommend that book very much. Um it's Lindsay O'Rourke, I believe she's actually a former student of John Mayersheimer, whom I absolutely adore, uh, covered regime operations. And she's basically she's done a really good job at digging, I believe, 60 plus different covered operations uh by the US in the last you know couple of decades. Um not most recent, but you know, 20, 30 years ago, uh basically most in the last century. And you can do your own critical analysis in terms of what has been done or what had been done, how it had been done, et cetera, et cetera. Is it new? Is it not new? Because a lot of information that we're receiving nowadays uh could be shocking to a lot of people, but the reality is, again, it's not new. We just don't know much, right? We don't read a lot of history. So this is my kind of coping approach. Um, I read something that's happened recently. I'm seeing the shock waves across the media, across the social media, et cetera, and then just go back to history. I'm like, okay, well, that has that we've done before, that we've done before. How's that different? How's that different? And this is where you, you know, you analyze on your own. And at the end of the day, you can always go back to um Michelang or I'm sorry, um uh Machiavelli's prince, or you can go to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the social contract, you can go to you know, the realpolitik without knowing that was realpolitik of the of the past and really understand how that works. Again, history works in cycles, economy works in cycles, the human um the religion works in cycles for sure. So the human existence works in cycles. So it's about the the understanding of the patterns um that could be predictive, right? But there's always like fat tails, obviously. You can never predict the future, but you can predict where the trend could be going. And here, just because you guys are all quants and you really understand and appreciate the finance and the mathematical side of it, I think I've always been thinking, I'm still thinking a lot about the um the place of a leader in history, right? Whether it's up to the leader, it's more about the um the masses and the movements and the cultural um trends. Um, but I think it's probably following the what's called volatility skew, right? Which is kind of like uneven distribution. Um, because I believe, based on you know, a couple of historical examples, that um to skew the the masses and the population civilization to the wrong side of history is much easier because we're still driven by um by the fear and by um kind of like not the most positive sides of survival. And this is just the nature, right? We need to survive, we we need our you know, um children to survive, and this is just how we are operating. But I think to be one of those um figures like in the Russian history, it's probably Gorbachev, right? Um in in India was Bahatma Gandhi. There were there were different um uh it was also in the in the older Russian history was Alexander II. Um very interesting people, but it does take a lot more efforts, and it does take a lot more uh charisma, if you like, or you know, will of power from the leaders to skew the population, civilization, and the minds to towards a more positive side, right? But again, it's all history, and unfortunately, a lot of these people um, and this is another, I don't know if it's a trend, but it's a very tragic trend. But the majority of these times. Types of people, whether it's um Gandhi or Alexander II or MLK in the US or uh or Kennedy, um they were at the end of the day killed by the people, right? This is this is a very interesting thing, how the people that are trying to make a difference um based on some positive attributes, some strive for the better life, they are sometimes ahead of their time, right? And um, yeah, there is a lot to think about when you go back in history and uh trying to bring parallels into into the today's world.

Speaker 44:36

Yeah, I think there's no question that, you know, being knowledgeable and understanding and being informed most importantly is a big piece of how we're gonna have to move through the world. Uh, I think it's very difficult to move the world without this kind of context and this kind of understanding of how things have moved cyclically, of how things will maybe move in the future, and sometimes even just having language to understand the moments that we're in right now. Um I want to thank Elisa for joining us on this episode. This has been a lot of fun, a lot of a lot of great stuff to discuss. Uh, I almost feel bad for Susan having to write all the books you've talked about today in the show notes. It's gonna be a long, long list.

Speaker 1 45:15

Don't worry, I got it. Thank you so much for having me. It's been it's been a lot of fun. I've got a couple of books as well from you guys.

Fiction as cultural sensor

Speaker 45:23

Awesome. Well, you know, 2026 is still young. Please, audience, read something. Read something short, listen to an audiobook, pull something out of your backlog. And after you read it, take some time to reflect on it and think about what you read and you know, maybe integrate some of that knowledge somewhere else in your life.

Speaker 3 45:41

Perfect. Well, for our listeners, thank you for joining us. If you have any questions about this episode or any of the episodes in our catalog, please write to us at ai fundamentalists at monetar.ai. Until next time.