The Monday Media Diet with Matthew Weaver

On Joseph Henrich, Tajikistan, and The Odyssey

Matthew Weaver (MW) formerly worked for the US digital service and currently works at Layer Aleph. He has a background in problem solving in complex environments. We find him very interesting and it’s great to have him on the page. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I'm a son, brother, loving husband, Bouvier dad, and founding partner at Layer Aleph. I spend my professional time troubleshooting complex systems – basically applied SYSTEMANTICS – or helping guide leaders and leaders-to-be by sharing my experience, strength, and hope in a consulting or mentoring role. I care about healthcare, infrastructure, and national security (in the practical sense: that water, food, energy, and supply chains are stable).

I've a background in distributed systems operations, which I've had the privilege of practicing at every level across multiple economic sectors. I even had a spell serving inside the US federal government, spending time in more than ten agencies.

I grew up in the American midwest, and am now based in a rural part of the same. I've lived in both city and country up and down both coasts, and sometimes miss my time living in the Rockies. I aspire to wisdom, patience, steadfastness.

Describe your media diet.

I've trimmed my intake over the past 5 years down to a small, intentional set of streams.

Unless I'm traveling and pick up a Sunday FT or this week's Economist to read while waiting, my main source of news is the BBC World Service's Global News Podcast. Why bother tuning in to the shortwave broadcast when the podcast can be delivered right to my phone?

I subscribe to newsletters, which I always read – if I stop reading one, I drop the subscription. There's about a one-per-quarter churn, with the Lindy Effect strongly expressed (the older subscriptions are more likely to stick around). Right now, I'm following WITI (of course), The Prepared, Matt Levine's Money Stuff (via email!), The Hundred, Craig Mod's Roden and Ridgeline, Ganzeer's Restricted Frequency, Deb Chachra's Metafoundary, and I just started giving Matt Tait's (pwnallthethings)  move to newsletters a shot. Robert Spangle doesn't publish them frequently, but I never miss any of his Observations.

I've two graphic novel/comic inputs right now. Lordess Fourde's serial THE PHANTOM PLEASURE, and Dorothy Gambrell's "internet workaround" quarterly zine of Cat and Girl comics (plus extras), which she screenprints and sends in the mail. I've been following Dorothy's work for two decades, she's the best.

The space left by my secession from social media is filled by various group chats with my closest friends, colleagues, and various mindshares, mostly using iMessage or Signal. Some Discord, now, in the past year.

What’s the last great book you read?

Emily Wilson's fantastic 2017 translation of The Odyssey. Raised by academics, she'd studied literature in general, ancient Greek and the classics in particular, since childhood. She translated Homer's work in brisk, plain english, all iambic pentameter. It's urgent, fresh, oral. Fantastic.

What are you reading now?

Josiah Ober's The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, mostly to be sure of my footing before I read the next book in that Princeton Press series, Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome. Both focus on how infrastructure, economics, and culture contributed to those civilizations' historically unusual levels of wealth and excess production. They also cover how those things came apart.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

For either of my favorite publications – The Economist (180 years in publication), or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (80 years in publication) – I make a quick skim of the table of contents in case I can be excited by a topic or author I enjoy. Then, I read straight through, cover to cover, in chunks dictated by circumstances (before bed, before boarding, sleepy weekend afternoons, etc). I skip the poetry (my apologies to the poets: it's not you, it's me).

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

My hope is that more folks read Joseph Henrich. An anthropologist, he's studied the evolution of cooperation, including running behavior experiments around game theory fundamentals across a vast array of different human societies. Mostly, he found that game theory predictions rooted in self-interest not only failed, they failed differently in different cultures. He writes scientific literature examining the way that biological and cultural evolution are intertwined modifying systems, and shows how behavioral contagion actually happens in humans.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

Echoes. It's a front end to the sprawling array of content that spills out of John Diliberto's decades-old radio show. A constant source of surprising or unusual music and musicians, it's a real treat among the illusion that our ubiquitous access to massive music libraries makes it easier to find the remarkable.

Plane or train?

Nothing beats a good train. Seeing what is on the earth between here and there, the proximity to infrastructure, the tunnels and back sides of our roads, waterways, power and communication lines. An idealized liminal space, perfect for thought and deep work.

What is one place everyone should visit?

The Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, adjacent to the Chinese and Afghani borders, a short distance from Pakistan. The Pamiri people, including the Wakhi, speak a family of pre-persian Iranian languages. It's an isolated bubble of culture and life that has repelled, by sheer ruggedness, a few thousand years of meddling pressure. That might be ending now, by way of Russia and China, but anyone with a chance to stand on the banks of the Panj (Ochus) River should seize it.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I found out that Martin Luther wrote treatises from hiding after the Diet of Worms (which put a price on his head), answering questions – a sort of "Dear Luther" column. They are fascinating, including one answering the question of whether a "good Christian" should flee the plague. It was a bad year with the Black Death. One passage from Luther's answer (translated from German) is pretty striking: "I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence." (MJW)

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