Glenn Beck – One Thousand And One Parsecs

2019-10-03 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the October 3rd edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

When Mrs. Vasicek and I got married, we decided that there would be no smart devices or screens in our house beyond the master bedroom. Our reasoning had mostly to do with personal health and avoiding bad habits, though there was also some concern about data collection and privacy.

One of the things I really like about this rule is that it keeps me from becoming too attached to my smart phone. Most of us are never be more than an arm’s reach away from our phones, and over time we come to feel almost like they’re a physical part of us. But every night, Mrs. Vasicek and I leave our phones to get ready for bed, and we don’t pick them up again until after we’re fully awake.

I have to admit that I had withdrawals at first, but now I feel much better. My phone is just another tool now; it no longer feels like an extension of myself.

Another thing I really like about this rule is how it sets apart a large section of the house that is free from digital distractions. The bedroom is now a really great place to read. Our one exception to the no screens rule is my Kindle Paperwhite, which uses e-ink anyway so it’s not as bad as an LED screen. It’s also seven-and-a-half years old, so web browsing isn’t really practical.

The other thing I really like is how it sets my mind at ease to know that there’s at least one part of the house where there aren’t any digital recording devices surveilling and collecting data on us. (Please don’t tell me that the Paperwhite is recording me too!)

In the last few years, it seems that Big Tech has been increasingly intrusive in our lives. Over the summer, it seemed like every week there’d be a new story about a Silicon Valley whistleblower, or an undercover investigation, or even a senior Google executive coming out on the record about censorship, bias, and control.

A couple of weeks ago, Glenn Beck did a fascinating interview with Robert Epstein, a researcher who found compelling evidence that Google has both the capability and the motivation to sway major national elections. (Epstein voted for Clinton in 2016, so the interview wasn’t partisan.) It reminded me of a presentation that Chamath Palihapitiya (senior executive at Facebook from 2007 to 2011) gave at Stanford in 2017, where he talked about social media addiction and explained why he doesn’t use social media nor allow his children to do so.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate our modern, complex world in a way that doesn’t surrender most of our agency to Big Tech and Silicon Valley. It’s also becoming increasingly ambiguous how much of that agency is an illusion, with companies like Facebook and Google influencing us in ways we aren’t consciously aware of.

As an indie author who depends on Amazon for a large part of my income, I’m very much aware of these issues. It’s part of the reason why I’m working so hard to build and maintain this newsletter, so that I don’t have to depend on Big Tech for my book marketing. It’s impossible to be a career author these days without a plan for navigating this world.

Where are we headed? Science fiction gives us a chilling answer. Right now, it appears that China and the East are going the way of 1984, while the United States and the West are going the way of Brave New World.

But those books were written almost a hundred years ago, and technologies have been developed that Orwell and Huxley couldn’t have even dreamed of. It’s time for a new generation of writers to pick up the torch that they handed off to us.

That’s a big reason why I’m writing “Sex, Life, and Love under the Algorithms.” As for where to go next, I honestly don’t know. So much happening in the world today screams out for new science fiction just to make sense of it all, so when I’m not writing fantasy I’ll probably delve more into that.

Whatever else happens, we’re all in this rabbit hole together.

Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner

I picked this one up from Glenn Beck’s recommended reading list, and found it to be pretty good. The most disappointing part is that it was never finished, so what starts as a history of the Third Reich up to 1939 actually ends in 1933. It would be really fascinating to get Haffner’s account of events like the Night of the Long Knives or Kristallnacht, but unfortunately we never will.

That said, what we do have is a truly remarkable account of the fall of the German Empire, the chaos and collapse of the post-war order, and the transformation of German society as the Nazis rose to power. Most histories try to be objective, or at least try to limit their subjectivity. Not so with this book. As Haffner puts it:

Clearly, historical events have varying degrees of intensity. Some may almost fail to impinge on true reality, that is, on the central, most personal part of a person’s life. Others can wreak such havoc that there is nothing left standing… I believe history is misunderstood if this aspect is forgotten.

This book is not quite a history, and not quite a memoir. Rather, it falls somewhere between the two, combining the best of both forms to paint an extraordinarily vivid picture of one of the most terrifying times and places in modern history.

By far, the best part of this book is the depth and precision with which Haffner describes historical events and their effects on the German people. The only other author I know who is more precise with his language is Jordan Peterson. Because of this, it is very easy to imagine yourself in Haffner’s position, and to see the struggles of our time reflected in his story.

The parallels in Haffner’s account between Germany of the 1920s and 30s, and the United States today, are truly striking. It’s not a one-for-one comparison, of course, and the people today shouting “Nazi!” the loudest are obviously dead wrong. But the trends are headed in the same direction, and some of the more disturbing nuances are starting to rhyme.

My biggest takeaway from the book was this: when we reach a point where our neighbors are getting disappeared, it’s time to either take up arms or bug the hell out. In Germany, that happened well before the Nazis rose to power, which surprised me. But that wasn’t the only takeaway, by far. The book is full of them.

For anyone with an interest in the rise of Fascism and 20th century history, or anyone with an interest in politics and current events, I highly recommend this book.

Addicted to Outrage by Glenn Beck

I wasn’t always a fan of Glenn Beck. When I was in college back in the 00s, I thought he was a pompous blowhard—and I was probably right. We’ve both changed a lot since then. I started listening to his radio show podcast in 2017 at the urging of a friend, and to my utter shock I found him to be both reasonable and insightful. I’ve been listening ever since.

If you’re a regular listener to Glenn’s show, most of what you’ll find in this book is stuff you’ve already heard. That said, on the show you pick it up in bits and pieces, whereas here it’s all laid out in one place, without any filler or extraneous back and forth. Having done both, I would rather read this book and listen to his show only occasionally than listen to his show religiously and skip this book.

The thing I like most about Glenn is that he’s one of the few political pundits who have checked their pride in recent years. In Addicted to Outrage, he gives his story: how he went from being one of the most prominent and virulent right-wing commentators to acknowledging that he’s been wrong about some things and completely changing his approach. He lost a few of his old-time fans who preferred the screaming, ranting Beck, but gained an ability to understand and speak the language of those on the other side of the political divide.

The main thesis of this book is that outrage, especially social media outrage, has become an addiction very much like alcoholism, and that the steps for recovering for alcoholism apply equally as well for healing our modern outrage culture. Glenn brings up a lot of interesting points about how the outrage in our culture is increasing, how social media is designed specifically to foster a chemical addiction through repeated dopamine hits, and how it feeds into all of our worst impulses and does serious damage to our health, our relationships, and our ability to live together.

The most interesting part for me was where he talked about how our outrage culture and the news cycle is distracting us from the truly important stuff that’s going on right now, such as the development of AI, the rise of big tech monopolies, technological disruption and the looming unemployment crisis, and geopolitical challenges that threaten to drive our world into war. Again, this is all stuff that Glenn covers regularly in his radio show, but it’s useful to have it all in one place.

My biggest criticism of Glenn is that his obsession with all of the ways that things can go catastrophically wrong turns him into something of a doom pornographer at times. He generally keeps it classy, but classy doom porn is still doom porn. I don’t think we’re anywhere near a hostile artificial general intelligence sweeping the world with nanobots and turning us all into grey goo, for example. That said, his prediction track record is surprisingly good, so even with the doom and gloom it’s still worth listening to him. At least he doesn’t (usually) cross the line into fear mongering.

Glenn’s love of the Constitution definitely shines through this book. He spends a great deal of it going through the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, which I found to be insightful. In one of the more interesting chapters he talks about how we should neither whitewash our history nor condemn it, but acknowledge both the bad and the good and strive to live up to the aspirational deals set forth in our founding documents.

All in all, it was a good and insightful read. If you’ve never listened to Glenn, this book is actually a really good place to start.

Plans for My Personal Home Library

If everyone has a weird or quirky super power, mine is the ability to acquire books. Even when I was living out of a suitcase in a remote Caucasian village, or traipsing across the Middle East, I was constantly acquiring books.

With my marriage to Future Mrs. Vasicek coming up, I’ve decided to put this super power to use. Instead of acquiring books randomly, I’m approaching the task of building a personal library with goals and a plan. Part of that plan is to inventory all of the books that I own, with lists of books / ebooks / audiobooks that I want to acquire. Part of it is to find a place in my home where I can shelve them all, instead of keeping them in boxes or the closet. And another part is categorizing all of the books, with goals for each category.

Requirements

After putting some thought into it, here are my basic requirements:

The entire library must fit in a single room / device / server.
The only books that I’ll keep are ones that:
- I want to read again,
- I want to talk about with others, or
- I want to share with my family.
Ebooks and audiobooks must be DRM-free and device agnostic.

A while ago, I did a blog post on the pros and cons between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. That seems to be a pretty good set of criteria for determining which formats to collect my books in, or whether to collect a particular book in multiple formats.

Ideally, I want to set up my personal library in a shared space in my home, where I can host guests. Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are going to get a set of scriptures, kind of like the tradition of a family bible, and I want this to be the centerpiece of my personal library. Eventually, I also want to get a dedicated ereader (or set of ereaders) that lives in the library, as well as a portable hard drive for all of the audiobooks. I don’t want any of it to depend on the cloud.

Categories

So far, I’ve got eight categories, though I’m sure this will expand. They are:

Science fiction & fantasy
Other fiction
LDS non-fiction
Self-improvement
Writing & publishing
Arabic language
History & current events
Other non-fiction

I have a lot more fiction books than non-fiction (go figure). For now, I’m using Goodreads as a library inventory system, though I may want to find something better in the future. If you check out my Goodreads profile, you can probably see all of them.

I’m working to come up with goals and plans for each category. Here’s what I have so far:

Science Fiction & Fantasy

My main goal here is to collect the complete works of David Gemmell. He is my favorite fantasy writer of all time, and I’ve read all of the Drenai series and most of the Stones of Power and the Rigante series as well. I’m holding off on the Troy books, mostly because I want to savor them. He’s also got a few standalones and duologies, most of which I’ve read.

Other series that I want to collect in print are:

Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series
All of Heinlein’s juveniles
The Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Princess of Mars, etc)
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle
All of the books by my writer friends

There are also a bazillion trilogies that I either own or want to collect, but it’s not worth listing them all here. I’m sure this is going to be a very dynamic part of my personal library.

Other Fiction

My main goal for this section right now is to collect all of the Sackett books by Louis L’Amour. There are only two left, both of which I’ve requested on Paperback Swap. Now I get to read them all, without any interruption!

I also plan to focus on collecting Jeff Shaara, especially the Civil War books. I currently have The Killer Angels by his father, as well as Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. But before that, I need to read Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause, which I also own (those ones cover the Revolutionary War). Depending on how much I enjoy those, I’ll decide whether to collect Shaara’s complete works.

LDS Non-fiction

There are a tone of authors that I want to collect in this section: Nibley, Givens, Gileadi, Groberg, and more. There are also a few key books that I need to acquire and read, mostly biographies and church histories.

One series that I’m really looking forward to is the four book SAINTS series published by the church. The first book was fantastic; I listened to the whole thing on the train, and it was really cool to pick out the people from my own family history and learn how they contributed to the rise of the church. The next book is going to cover the westward migration, and I have a bunch of ancestors who participated in that, including a few in the Willie handcart company. Really looking forward to it!

Here in Utah, it isn’t difficult to collect LDS non-fiction books. You can find most of the older titles in thrift stores, and there are lots of LDS bookstores to choose from. That said, I don’t have any concrete goals for this section yet. The biggest challenge will probably be in refining this section so that I only keep the best books (ha), since it would be very easy to let this section get cluttered with good but mediocre books. That seems to be the general trend.

Self-Improvement

The biggest thing I need to do in this section is reread How to Win Friends and Influence People, preferably once a year. Fantastic book.

I should also probably focus on marriage and relationship books, since y’know, I’m getting married. Personal finance is also huge: I’ve got Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and should probably collect all of Kiyosaki’s books. Stephen Covey is another huge one.

Beyond that, my cowriter Scott Bascom is really into self-improvement, so my plan for now is to build out this section based on his recommendations.

Writing & Publishing

There are a few classics that I need to re-acquire, such as Character and Viewpoint and On Writing. One classic that I will probably skip is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (can’t stand that pretentious book). Other than that, the biggest thing is to stay current and focus on indie publishing. For that reason, I suspect that I’ll collect mostly ebooks in this section.

Arabic Language

My main goal here is to read The Book of Mormon (كتاب مورمون) in Arabic. I also have plans to study the Qur’an, though that’s not a priority at the moment.

Most of these books are ones that I acquired while studying Arabic in Jordan. I don’t think I’ll acquire many more anytime soon, though if an opportunity arises, I probably won’t turn it down. The big question in my mind is whether to expand this section to Arabic language & culture, since I do have a bunch of English books on the Middle East.

History & Current Events

My biggest goal for this section is to build a collection of monetary & financial books that together make a complete history of the United States. This subject is my current pet interest, much to Future Mrs. Vasicek’s chagrin. I also have plans for a coin collection / history that I’m currently writing, though that’s on the back burner for now.

Other than that, I plan to focus on book recommendations by Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck.

Other non-fiction

No real goals yet for this section. At some point, I will probably spin off family histories as a separate category, since there are a lot of them in my family.

General Goals

The biggest thing I need to do is read every book that I own. I may be really good at acquiring books, but I’m not as good at actually reading them. Currently, I’ve read only about 20% of them.

When will I have them all read by? Ideally, the end of the year, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Then again, if I can keep my goal to read for an hour or two each night, a year might just be enough.

Since the library is constantly growing, though, I suspect this will be more of an aspirational goal, or a moving target. Even when I manage to hit it, it probably won’t take long before I acquire more books and have more reading to do again.

The next big goal is to find a place for all these books, which probably won’t happen until after Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are married. At which point, all of these plans may change, since she has a bunch of books too—but probably not too much. We’ve talked about it, and it shouldn’t be too hard to merge our books into one family library, if that is what we decide to do.

Aside from that, I’d like to get as many books signed and personalized as I can. Shouldn’t be too hard: just look up the guest list of any convention I’m attending, and bring the books along.

That’s basically the plan as it stands right now. With my quirky super power for acquiring books, it shouldn’t take long to build an epic personal/family library.