After 63 Years I Figured Out How To Do It All

Yes, I’m going to tell you how

Sep 07, 2024

Welcome to Macro Mashup, the weekly newsletter that distills the content from key voices on macroeconomics, geopolitics, and energy in less than 10 minutes. Thank you for subscribing!

Many of you have been following this newsletter for a while, and you know what I write about. Knowing this, what do you think I mean by “How To Do It All?”

I will tell you, but first, we must take a tour of how this newsletter has evolved.

I am going to link to a few previous pieces. You can click through and get the ‘through line’.

The Hero’s Journey

The hero's journey, also known as the monomyth, is a narrative template involving a hero who goes on an adventure, faces challenges, achieves victory in a crisis, and returns home transformed.

Writing is an adventure, and it has challenges. Posting 1,500 words or more each week represents a victory, and it is transformative to do that.

This adventure started when one of my sons sent me a note - an article or a brief post by

kyla scanlon

wondering if the Fed would break something.

I wrote about that here

That started the journey and began one of the three pillars of this newsletter - macroeconomics.

22 of 32 posts, not including this one, are on macroeconomics or investing.

Five are on energy.

One is on meditation (hmm), and two are on geopolitics.

What’s The Mission

In under ten minutes, the mission is to explain some aspect of macroeconomics, energy, or geopolitics that piques my interest and will, I hope, pique yours, too.

They are all tied together, and - I wrote an article on this - energy underlies it all.

We dragged ourselves out of the primordial slime with energy:

We used wood to make fire
We harnessed our energy and that of the animals we domesticated
We used wind (to sail)
We used water
We discovered coal
And then oil
And then natural gas
And nuclear
And hydropower
And wind again (windmills)
Solar
Biofuels
Geothermal

We learned to use energy sources to make electricity and piped that everywhere to power more or less everything.

Without energy, there is no macroeconomics, and geopolitics becomes much worse.

The word era, used sequentially in the above chart, suggests that one era supersedes and replaces the era that went before.

Of course, that is not the case

All that is important and worth explaining in digestible chunks.

Why Should I Bother To Do This?

Living on this planet is itself an adventure. Explaining it in some small way is a privilege.

It is a gateway to understanding.

Anyone familiar with taking the subway in a big city knows that it is possible to understand pieces of the city around the stops we take regularly and still not know how it all fits together.

This happened to me when I moved to London. I knew the place where I lived—Islington—and I knew the place where I worked in the city.

I knew where I went for fun - the West End and the Southbank - but it wasn’t until I started biking and running around the place that I began to piece it together.

The genius who put together the London Underground made it easy to read in 90-degree and 45-degree lines but made it even more detached from geographic reality.

Writing is like getting out a map. Like running and biking, it takes effort.

Researching an article is like planning a route and setting out for the destination.

It Helps With Investing

A bonus of all this research and writing is the understanding it brings about the entire investment landscape.

You must figure out who you are with your investments: an investor or a speculator.

Like many, with a full-time career, long hours, and a growing family, I left my investments to a revolving cast of financial advisors, many of them less than stellar.

It wasn’t their fault. I just didn’t understand their incentives and wasn’t paying attention. Does this sound familiar?

If this doesn’t sound familiar, congratulations. You have probably been managing your money well.

If you don’t understand or have a framework for understanding the big picture, it’s a tough road: you don’t even know the questions to ask. I wrote about that here.

This chart is good and could merit a whole podcast or series. It deals with all the key issues, including one often talked about but less frequently understood - risk and return.

Inspired by reading a book that everyone interested in investing should read, The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks, I wrote about risk and return here.

The entry price is crucial in this risk-return equation: a good investment bought at fair market value will only deliver a fair market return. It is not a bargain.

If you want a bargain, you will have to do more work. If you don’t have the time to do that work, you may have to settle for fair market value.

Researching this newsletter helps me at least think I have a clue. That makes me sleep easier. At 63, sleeping easy is not easy.

Driving Across America (Are We There Yet?)

If you want to figure out America (and something about yourself) try driving across it.

I have done this a lot. We used to do this as a family, with two labradors.

The kids would watch Monty Python. My parents never let me watch that.

I like to have the Jeep wherever I am, so in the winter, we drove 2000 miles on I-80 from New York to Colorado.

And we drove this summer - but not together: my wife drove her Tesla (once as a passenger in the Jeep for 2,000 miles was enough)

It slows you down. There is no point in worrying about speed. Just set the cruise control a few over the limit and relax.

Watch the farms, the factories, the gas stations, the rest stops, the 18-wheelers.

Choose a hotel chain (my current favorite is Tru by Hilton). You want something good, predictable, and, in our case, one that takes pets.

With all that space around you, it is impossible to feel too important. You reset: ctrl-alt-del.

Drive, listen, drive, stop for gas, drive, listen, think.

While driving out, I listened to Meredith Angwin's Shorting the Grid, and while driving back, I listened to Gretchen Bakke's The Grid.

The electricity grid is something we can’t do without, so I want to understand it.

I am going to talk about what I learned, so stay tuned…unless you are

Meredith Angwin

(thank you for being a subscriber!), in which case, you know more than I ever will!

Figuring It All Out

I promised I would get to this, so here we go.

It’s not about investing, but it’s partly about investing.
It’s not about energy, macroeconomics, or geopolitics, but it’s partly about those things.
It’s not about having business success, but it’s partly about that.
It’s not all about loving your family and spending enough time with them so they know you love them - but it is more about that than 1-3 above.
It’s not even about writing about all this.
It's about understanding—and maybe this is why I wrote about that article about meditation—that we can only control a few things. Trying to control more will impair our ability to control the things we can control.
It’s about learning to focus on those things you can control and allocating your energy to them.
And…it’s about learning to live with the fact that you will never figure it all out - otherwise, there is nothing to aim for.
So, stay with me - I am just getting started.
We are going to do this weekly. There are going to be Notes, Chats - and, later this fall, a Podcast!