The Monday Media Diet with Rett Wallace

On the Dewey Decimal System, The HP 12C, and Albion’s Seed

Rett Wallace (RW) is an entrepreneur and one of my favorite people in the world. Have a great week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Rett Wallace and I’m founder of Triton, a software company that developed new financial information systems so company data – mostly private company operating data – can be automated, rather than compiled manually by legions of analysts. I moved to New York for a standard investment banking analyst gig and my last proper job was as a mid-level soldier at a media-focused merchant bank during the dot-com whiplash. After that I set up my own place to run that same merchant banking playbook for myself, and in the course of trying to be a better investor with more and better data started iterating with a bunch of interns on an internal science project that evolved into Triton.

Describe your media diet.

I didn’t think much about the national “Information Function” before watching it fall apart – and try to reconstitute itself – over the last 25 years.

In that time my “media diet” went from comprehensive – reading absolutely everything – to 100% osmotic – subscribing to nothing.

In olden days there was a stack of five physical newspapers waiting at my office door every morning, and maybe a dozen magazines would arrive each week or month.

From memory: The New York Post (THE Post), The WSJ, The NYT, The FT, The Washington Post, the Red Herring, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, the Industry Standard, MIT Technology Review, BusinessWeek, Wired, Barron’s, Forbes, Crain’s New York Business, Fortune, Spy Magazine, Newsweek, The Week, Portfolio, Foreign Affairs, and of course The New Yorker. Surely there were others.

Much was work but some was New York in-crowd required reading, captured crisply here:

It seems in retrospect that the “information function” was healthy and robust. Sure the Times and the Journal had clear editorial slants, for example, but disagreements happened on top of a common base of well-researched, well-reported, well-edited, fact-checked facts.

As everything moved online, my conversion happened gradually and then all at once – the catalyst being the day it struck me that even The New Yorker and the Journal seemed to be optimized for outrage clicks. They were trying to drive me crazy! Not keep me informed or interested.

The business model ate the product – Buzzfeed ate the information function. So I opted out completely from button-pushing and axe-grinding.

Jump to today it’s:

• Podcasts – a work colleague some years ago invested serious arm-twisting into forcing me to listen to Eric Weinstein talking about physics on Joe Rogan and it was like “oh, ok, this is where the real conversation lives.” I wouldn’t have guessed it or found it on my own.

• Newsletters – like DealBook and WITI. Sometimes structured data supplants even a tent-pole source, like Exec Sum obviating Primack.

• Twitter – a lot of what I was reading in print was just coverage of Twitter, which doesn’t lend itself well to recapping in news-speak prose, so I filter Twitter myself now.

• The NY Post – just like in olden days, The Post covers news like gossip, which I find more honest and interesting.

This approach brings me a lot more primary source material, like a one-minute video clip is often more informative than ten column inches shoe-horning bits of the video into a canned axe-grinding prose narrative.

Also my trust now attaches to people (vs. platforms) like Joe Weisenthal, Lex Fridman, Peter Robinson, ¾ of the All-In guys, Taylor Sheridan, and the Commentary pod crew.

What’s the last great book you read?

Albion’s Seed explains the four original cultures of the United States – once you know what to look for you see them and their importance everywhere.

What are you reading now?

I stopped reading new fiction for the same reason I stopped trusting Hollywood – they aren’t trying to tell me anything true. But for authors I know and trust like Ben Schott or Amor Towles there are waivers.

For non-fiction, it seems like many ideas get bloated into a book form-factor for monetization reasons, but would be both stronger articulations and easier to consume in shorter form. This doesn’t stop me from buying books as a reminder to read them, but my completion rate keeps falling.

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

Moving from back (the caption contest) to front in The New Yorker – cartoons only. The articles are now unreadable unless written by Nick Paumgarten.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

The opportunity cost of reading a book didn’t occur to me until audiobooks showed up with run times. A short book is like nine hours of your life!! So I dare not make such expensive recommendations.

For a while it felt clever to suggest Matt Levine’s Money Stuff but that’s not necessary anymore.

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

The HP 12C is the only calculator I know how to use, and I have a bunch of them. Even though the app version doesn’t have the same great tactile sensation and clicking sound of the actual hardware, I use it frequently and will miss it whenever I figure out how to ditch my smartphone.

Plane or train?

Neither! Trying to get anywhere on time in the US is a no-win situation. Both planes and trains seem to be delayed or cancelled more than not with every attempt to use them.

BUT if we could get back to the golden age it would be planes. In high school and college I lived on the LGA/DCA/BOS shuttle, which was $25, flew every half hour, required no reservation, and you could roll into LGA’s Marine Air Terminal nine minutes before flight time and still have a leisurely free beer before boarding. In my old work life, even after 9/11, it was easy to day trip to Denver from NYC without fear of being stranded.

What is one place everyone should visit?

A place everyone should have been able to visit by now – and the top of my list – is the Moon. Seriously. And I’m more optimistic all the time.

My best recommendation on this planet is first organize a revolution in Egypt, second have a great friend in Cairo covering the revolution, and third go to the Pyramids with her driver and translator and have the place literally actually to yourself for the day.

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

My work life for the last ten years has been in a rabbit hole. I set out to build a conceptually simple information product that I wanted for myself but couldn’t find in the world. It turns out the financial information function is built on very specific pre-digital IP that was designed after the 1929 Crash, is distributed across several government departments, and is thus impervious to adaptation or improvement.

To build the product we envisioned required understanding the old information systems, figuring out why they couldn’t scale, and then designing new ones. It was like discovering the Library of Congress and then having to invent the Dewey Decimal System to find anything in it. We were deep in that hole a long time before finding the rabbits. (RW)