The Realignment: Startup Delusions and Facebook's Ugly Truth + Call for Audience Book Recs
Call for fiction and non-fiction recommendations, episodes of the week, and more
Thanks for checking out our Substack.
If you’re new, hit subscribe to get future issues in your inbox every Thursday.
Welcome Back to The Realignment
Last week, we fessed up to not reading enough fiction during the Realignment Q&A section. Instead of repeating our earlier Ender’s Game, Three-Body Problem, and Dune recommendations (speaking of which, what do you all think of the new Dune trailer out today?), we turned the tables and asked you all for your best fiction books.
We were blown away by how good the suggestions were and already picked up a few copies. Marshall’s back in Portland for the weekend, so a trip to Powell’s is in order.
This week, send us your best non-fiction recommendations and we’ll put together lists for everyone to check out.
The Realignment Conference
We’re going to keep pumping the conference for the next few weeks.
The number one thing everyone should check out is more information on The Realignment’s first conference in Miami on October 22nd. Thanks to everyone who’ve reached out so far, the response has been great, so we’re exploring expanding our space.
Episodes of the Week
Episode 144: Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang: The Ugly Truth About Facebook
You can purchase An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination at our Bookshop storefront.
Episode 143: Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell: How Wall Street and Venture Capital Fueled the Great Startup Delusion
You can purchase The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion at our Bookshop storefront.
Check out Marshall’s interview with New York Magazine’s Reeves Wiedeman about his WeWork book, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork, also available at our Bookshop.
Next Week’s Episode
We’re finally booked ahead guest-wise. So we can start previewing our upcoming shows. We’re still figuring out our formatting, so ignore titles and focus on the guests/topics.
Episode 145: Robert Draper on To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.
We think that the decision to invade Iraq was one of the worst decisions in America’s history and one of the most important events in the 21st century. It’s almost impossible to understate how the decision to invade and the disastrous occupation completely *cough* cough* realigned global and domestic politics.
This episode will be refreshing, especially since it’ll let us correct the record on how we both think about foreign policy. We avoid engaging with bad faith critiques, but one of the worst is the idea that either of us is a neoconservative. If you’re at all looking for clarity, this is the episode to check out.
Episode 146: Amanda Litman and Pete Davis on Statehouse Futures, their summit on progressive policy and strategy at the state and local level.
We’ve talked a lot about progressives in Congress, but we’re really interested in how these debates play out at the local level, especially in the wake of the NYC mayoral election results. One of the central ideas driving the show is the fact that the nationalization of politics has really wrecked our ability to address local issues especially as traditional left-right labeling makes it harder to sort and understand political and policy debates.
The Realignment Bookshop
As a reminder, we’ve created a Realignment Bookshop affiliate store showcasing books by guests, what we’re actively reading this year and deeper dives into the featured topic of an episode.
Most importantly, you don’t need to go with our recommendations if you want to support the show. If you go to Bookshop.org through our link and then purchase *anything* we still get your support.
If you purchase a book using our link, the show gets a 10% commission, a local, independent bookseller gets support, and you get an awesome book!
Here are two lists we’ve built out:
1) Books by Realignment Guests
2) Books we’ve read/listened to in 2021
Let us know what you think about this or any other week’s episodes. Please share The Realignment with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.
The Realignment: Startup Delusions and Facebook's Ugly Truth + Call for Audience Book Recs
Nonfiction book recommendation: "Progress & Poverty" by Henry George
I think George's arguments about land & natural resources have a lot of relevance for what you discussed in The Space episode this week -- orbital real estate, as well as the surface of Mars and the Moon fitting very well in with George's definition of "economic land" -- natural phenomena no human being can create, but which is a necessary input into production. America already treats electromagnetic spectrum in this manner -- you can't create new frequencies and it's a fundamentally rival good (if you use it, I can't), so rather than let someone just plant their flag on it and own it forever, we hold periodic spectrum auctions, similar to the "land value tax" George proposes for all forms of economic land, which is designed to eliminate the distortions caused by land speculators. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty which "establishes that space shall be free for exploration and use by all nations, but that no nation may claim sovereignty of outer space or any celestial body" expresses a fundamentally Georgist notion -- space belongs to no one but the whole of the human race.
George's basic idea is that people should be entitled to the fruits of their LABOR, and a return on their invested CAPITAL, but nobody should be able to extract value out of others just because they hold the land, which should be the equal inheritance of all humankind.
book on bookshop:
https://bookshop.org/books/progress-and-poverty-9781544631172/9781544631172
audiobook on audible:
https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/progress-and-poverty/273401
for a condensed version, I wrote a book review:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
and that book review is also available in audio form:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty/id1295289140?i=1000517489173
Wow great job on the Facebook episode guys! Love hearing the elitist PMC types tell you how literally everything I believe regarding COVID, vaccines, election and Jan 6 was fake misinformation!
I must say they really convinced me with their condescension.