2024 in Books

Defense Deep Dives, Intellectual Faith, and More

This is a weekly newsletter about the art and science of building and investing in tech companies. To receive Investing 101 in your inbox each week, subscribe here:

---

I originally posted this on my personal website where you can see the full list of the books I read this year and my broader library.

---

I’m Back, Baby

Every year since 2016 I’ve made a list of the books I read in a given year. That list has taken various formats. Since I started writing this blog consistently, I did it for 2022 and 2023. Unfortunately, both of those years were sort of disappointments when it comes to the volume of reading I got done. Well, after a massive post-COVID slump in my reading habits, I finally broke the curse. This year I matched my all-time-high of reading 41 books from back in 2018. Felt pretty good.

When I wrote about my reading habits last year, I said I would “lick my wounds and reflect on how to make more room for reading.” Well, I certainly managed to make more room. As I look back on what made that possible there are two things that I think helped.

Always Be Reading

Source: YouTube

Last year in chastising myself for only having read 11 books, the fewest in one year since before college I think, I talked about a specific quote from Ryan Holiday about finding more spaces in my life that could be filled with reading:

“You should always have a book with you. Always. People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow. But what I also do is read all the time. I am always carrying a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. There’s no trick, no secret, no shortcut. I like B.H. Liddell Hart’s old line that sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. If you put the time in, you get the results.”

That is, effectively, what I did this year. I deleted Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, and TikTok from my phone and blocked them. The first few weeks I could feel myself jonesing for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. But I persisted. Instead, my Kindle app became my #1 app. It’s what I turn to every time I open my phone. For example, in one particular day my Kindle app was 70%+ of my iPhone usage that day:

But it wasn’t just the time spent on my phone reading. I also created reading opportunities in other spaces in my life.

For example, my wife and I have a routine that I love where we make sure we spend at least a little bit of time together every night. Granted, it got interrupted by our new baby, but we’ll get back into the swing eventually. The routine was every night we put the kids down around 8 PM and then from 8-9 or so we would watch TV. We’ve watched Mr. Robot, Fargo, Succession, The Bear, Veep, Nobody Wants This, and on and on. That’s our time together. Tangentially, my wife and I often listen to audiobooks together on road trips and we had started listening to Lonesome Dove on one drive. So I proposed to my wife that, instead of an hour of TV together every night, what if we did 30 minutes of listening to our audiobook together and then watched TV. That’s where we read Lonesome Dove, Demon Copperhead, and Streets of Laredo.

At night, our bedtime routine with the kids is baths from 7-7:30 or so, which leaves us 30 minutes to read scriptures and say prayers. But we don’t always use that whole time, so my wife has started reading with the kids. That’s where we read The BFG and A Wrinkle in Time. We just switched so that now our 8-year old is reading Harry Potter to us at night.

Finally, my gym routine switched so I’m spending an extra hour early in the mornings on the treadmill so that I can read my Kindle while walking and then an hour in a workout class while listening to audiobooks. That’s where I read The Idea Factory, Brave New World, The Man From The Future, Patriot Games, and Without Remorse.

In Pursuit of Something

One other thing I did wasn’t something I deliberately intended to increase my reading habit, but boy did it. For Contrary Research, we spent a year researching and writing a book about Anduril as a company. More on that to come! As part of going deep on the defense industry, I wanted to read some of the quintessential books.

I started by reading Skunk Works and The Kill Chain. Then I wanted to revisit some fiction I’d read about possible future outcomes in a global conflict between China, Russia, and the US, so I re-read 2034 and then I read the sequel, 2054. From there, I wanted to go deeper into the rich history of technology and defense during and after World War II, so I read The Idea Factory and The Man From The Future. Finally, I wanted to round out my exposure to some of the key conflict areas, like nuclear weapons and semiconductors, so I read Nuclear War: a Scenario and Chip War.

Again, this wasn’t deliberate. I needed to go deep on defense and I wanted to do the work to read the books. It just so happened that that exercise led me to reading 8 books on the subject. Later, I read an essay by Packy McCormick that touched me deeply, called Read More Books. In it, he perfectly captured the experience I had going deep on defense. He explains the approach this way:

“Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel has this idea about building a “white hot core” when starting a marketplace. The idea is that you shouldn’t try to serve everyone at once, at the beginning, but should begin by nailing the product for a very specific, constrained problem or niche. Prioritize retention over growth. Then, and only then, once your small niche of users really loves your product, you can expand outward into adjacent niches and problems.

I’ve always been a little jealous of the way that it seems people like Byrne [Hobart] and Ben Thompson’s brains work. From the outside, it seems like they have a scaffolding in their brain, and then, whenever any new information comes in, they can simply hang it on that scaffolding. That’s why they can write five excellent essays a week when I struggle to write one.

I haven’t asked them about this, but what I think is actually happening – other than just raw horsepower – is something similar to Sarah’s white hot core idea.

Read a lot of high-quality stuff on a certain topic or time period. Recognize connections, reinforce them, prioritize retention over growth. Then, and only then, once your core is established, expand outward.”

Understanding what “white hot cores” I’m trying to develop is a key way to read more. What do I want to learn more about? And what books would contribute to that knowledge base? And then go nuts.

While defense is certainly the most extensive knowledge core I focused on this year, this is a good segue into something I do every year anyway. And thinking about it through the lens of a “knowledge core” has been instructive. Here are some of the themes inherent in a lot of the reading I did over the course of 2024.

Themes

Defense

Obviously already unpacked this one above. But I’ve got to say, having never really read much about the defense industry, it actually feels like a fairly effective scaffolding to expand into just about any other knowledge area. Human history is built on conflict. Those conflicts have become more complex over time. Increasingly, things like technology, diplomacy, economics, human psychology, and culture have played an ever deeper role in how these conflicts play out.

Books like Skunk Works and The Idea Factory represent a crash course in the psychology of how to build an exceptional engineering organization. While Skunk Works is part of Lockheed, this excerpt from our Anduril book is instructive, though it uses Boeing as the example:

William Boeing, who founded Boeing in 1916, held a very high standard for his company, enforcing a culture that prized quality. “After noticing some shoddy workmanship on his production line [he said] that he would close up shop rather than send out work of this kind.”

But this long standing culture of excellence was watered down in August 1997 when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas was known for building military planes, but had a questionable reputation, at best, for commercial planes. Douglas launched a commercial airliner called the DC-10 in the 70s, for example, which over the course of its life resulted in 1.2K fatalities! Quartz later described the merger like this:

“In a clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing’s engineers and McDonnell Douglas’s bean-counters went head-to-head, the smaller company [meaning McDonnell Douglas] won out. The result was a move away from expensive, ground-breaking engineering and toward what some called a more cut-throat culture, devoted to keeping costs down and favoring upgrading older models at the expense of wholesale innovation.”

Innovation doesn’t just happen. When people talk about how programs like defense and space exploration have pushed the edge of technological innovation forward its the kind of engineering-first organizations that defied the odds. It’s not a bygone conclusion, you can see that from the rise and fall of Boeing. The stories of Bell Labs in The Idea Factory and DARPA in The Man Who Knew The Future outline similar cultures.

But increasingly we face incredibly complex issues like the threat of nuclear war, geopolitical chokeholds like Taiwan, increasing volatility in nations around the world. So much of what you could possibly be interested in learning are often tied up in the question of how do the nations of the world regard each other.

Trauma

This year was my first experience with therapy, both marital and personal therapy. And in part because of that, but also in part because it was some of the fiction I was drawn to, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about trauma. Books like Demon Copperhead, Boy Raised as a Dog, and Braving The Wilderness were filled with stories, both real and fictional, that illustrated some of the experiences people have had and what impact that had on their ability to function as an individual. More than anything, reading about other people’s trauma put into perspective any hardship of my own. It’s just not anywhere near as bad as it could be.

Intellectual Faith

Each year, I try and find books that touch on aspects of my faith in addition to the things I read for work or entertainment. Books like Leap of Faith, Restoration: God’s Call to the 21st Century, Witness and a Warning, Faith of a Scientist, and Stretching The Heavens largely revolve around this question of “why do I believe?” I’ve never identified with the radicalized religionists of modern Christianity who use a fuzzy picture of Jesus to bludgeon other people with their beliefs in the name of “freedom of religion.”

Increasingly, I’ve tried to embrace the nuance of my religion. I think The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints offers one of the most interesting and compelling cosmologies of any system of belief with which I’m familiar. And I don’t think I have to be dumb or believe in magic I can’t see. My experiences in life open up my heart to the possibility of a soul, but the presence of a soul touches on things that compel me towards certain answers. And these types of books are aspects of that feeling. That feeling that faith and reason don’t have to be at odds with each other.

Knowing America

Finally, I found myself engaging with a number of books that took me on a tour of America’s character. From the establishment of America through the settlement of the west, with Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo, to the modern trappings of what’s going on in America, whether its an under appreciation of our physical assets, like in A Walk in the Woods, to the raging opioid epidemic that touches the lives of the characters in Demon Copperhead.

Reading as a Parent

Beyond a tradition of revisiting themes, I have another tradition when it comes to reflecting on my reading. Each year, I always come back to wanting to clearly state how important reading is to me not just as an individual, but as a parent.

I’ve frequently seen people point to claims like ones in this 2010 study, saying “Books in home as important as parents' education in determining children's education level.” Others saying that even a modest number of books in the home, like 20, can have a material impact on a child’s educational outcomes. I haven’t dug into the data or methodology here so who knows.

But my gut tells me that if you take a couple with children who never read and you drop 20 books in their house it won’t be nearly as impactful as having parents who have actually read 20 books (at least.) My perspective is that its not just the presence of books but of bookishness. The more reading you do as a parent, the more you open up your child’s neurological pathways. The more capable they become of creating new connections, new ideas, and expanding their brains.

So, as I reflect back on my reading from the past year, I do it with that in the back of my mind as well. I’m not just reading for me but so that my kids have a reader as a Dad.

To read my full list of books I read in 2024, check out this post on my personal site.

---

Thanks for reading! Subscribe here to receive Investing 101 in your inbox each week: