* This is Astral Codex Ten on the first Elon biography. It’s germane to the new biography by Walter Isaacson—I’ve read about half of the Isaacson one, and all of the Vance one—in that specifics about Elon may have changed in the last seven or eight years, but the essentials have not. He’s still brilliant and insanely hard working, and he still takes enormous risks and likes emotional chaos. His description of his father as “evil” seems apt. The material from the end of that biography to the present is different in the sense that Elon is building the Model 3 and more advanced rockets, but the same in the sense of underlying drives, character, etc.

* Doing business in Japan. One of these essays that’s about far more than its title. Also, from a different writer: “Notes on not liking Japan as much as everyone said we would.”

* MDMA history.

* “A review of Number Go Up, on crypto shenanigans.”

* Trying to get people to go vegetarian. Look at the illustrative picture: that’s part of the challenge. Social desirability bias is real, for both vegetarianism and polyamorism. Yet most of us are hypocrites when it comes to kindness towards animals, like dogs, that are in front of us, and incredible cruelty towards animals that aren’t in front of us.

* “I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is.” What does one do with a discipline that bears too much resemblance to astrology? What is the psychology of psychology? The psychology of psychologists?

* “My death is close at hand. But I do not think of myself as dying.” ($, WaPo). And, also, “As my end nears, I crave the soul-to-soul connection of seeing friends in person.” H/t Ryan Holiday. What is a good life? So much of it is most truly about connecting to other people, one way or another. The Internet, used well, facilitates those connections. You and I are connecting right now.

* “The case against (most) books.” Not wholly convincing but interesting, and applicable to the many books that should in fact be articles (Astral Codex Ten is great at sheering books to an appropriate size). Hanania cites Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:

it’s all basic stuff like “don’t worry about what others think of you,” and “control your emotions.” Maybe it was mind-blowing the first time someone said these things, and it’s definitely sort of cool that a Roman Emperor can communicate with you across two millennia. But I’m 100% certain that if you gathered some passages from Marcus Aurelius and hired a halfway intelligent blogger to produce content made to sound like Marcus Aurelius, nobody would be able to tell the difference.

Is Meditations “all basic stuff?” Then why do so many of us have trouble implementing it, if it’s basic? “But anything intelligent or insightful they said you’ve probably absorbed already through run-of-the-mill blogs and self-help books, shorn of all the stupid things that inevitably made their way into their writings.” I’d be curious to see examples from the “run-of-the-mill blogs” or self-help books. This is me on Stoic philosophy.

* Impulse Space CEO Tom Mueller talks early days at SpaceX, moon bases and a booming space industry.