You Really Should Listen to the Robert Glasper Trio (and some Wisdom from Charlie Munger)
As I sit here working at my desk at 1:35 a.m., December 20th, 2024, I’m listening to a recording session of Levels by the Robert Glasper Trio feeling exhausted, but grateful, for a phenomenal year. Decisions made over the past 18 to 24 months bore extraordinary fruit for ourselves, our families, our clients, and, to be candid, the community in which we have chosen to invest. The commercial building is finally closed following several almost comical hiccups that threw a one-time wrench into my schedule. I’ve been mapping out some I.T. network enhancements I want to make following an overhaul of my tech stack. I have some really great ideas for content management systems going forward for how we can better organize our internal paperwork and improve systems. The Christmas trees are decorated. There are gingerbread cookies in the kitchen; piles of candy canes; fruit cake and coffee. The new Civilization VII will be released in the next couple months.
I wanted to stop, though, specifically to share this art with you. If Robert Glasper and the Robert Glasper Trio haven’t been on your radar, it’s worth a place in your musical life. The entire Live at Capitol Studios sessions are great.
He did a session with Norah Jones in Los Angeles where she played along with him.
Though, I do think my favorite version of the song is probably the adaptation done by the Neo Symphonic Jazz version in Tokyo from 2023 …
There there is his Canvas album …
Do you ever stop to think about how fortunate are we all we get to press a button and hear it? Of the 100+ billion folks who have ever existed, this is still an unthinkable miracle; something that has occurred in only the last few seconds of human history, relatively speaking.
I mean, sure, there are some really challenging conditions. Right now we’re going through a “4th generation” curse where the folks who lived through horrors like fascism, polio, protectionism, etc. have largely died off so younger generations and the less educated are turning to like heroin, unable to resist its siren call and no longer under the protection arising from the constant warnings of their elders. Some lessons are painful and must be relearned, unfortunately. Take Italy, for example. What is happening there on so many fronts is wild.
Rationally, of course, the misery just doesn’t make any sense. You know this. I think most people do on some level, despite the fact a decent portion of society gets upset when you tell them that truth. Still, it remains precisely that. The truth. You are the blessed generation. You are the fortunate heirs showered with abundance and wealth. A person would have to be totally mentally deficient to prefer living as royalty in the 1500s or something over being a modern-day plumber or nurse in Des Moines if you’re talking about enjoying the higher absolute standard of living.
This is not to make light of the problems we do have, and which we do need to solve, especially for future generations, but it’s vital to keep some perspective. For heaven’s sake, folks talk about inequality in America as the greatest of all evils while conveniently ignoring that the median American household does better than something like 93.5% of the rest of the global population. If inequality really is such a horrible thing, there is functionally little difference between the world’s wealthiest person and our aforementioned plumber to a good portion of the globe. That is, to be a perfectly ordinary American by definition makes one the global elite, but it’s inconvenient. Folks don’t feel that way so they pretend it isn’t so.
The reason, of course, was stated with perfect plainness by the late Charlie Munger.
Again, here is an area where we suffer because we have lost the wisdom of our elders. Folks think that billionaires wield too much political power because of their money. That’s missing the forest for the trees. You can still encourage the kind of economic superstardom of the United States economy while neutering the wealth of the rich when it comes to influencing democracy. Bring back The Fairness Doctrine. Tighten the FCC ownership rules / restrictions and have it extend to all media, including social media platforms by geographic region. Heck, pass a law that anyone who donates more than $100,000 per year for political causes or something is subject to a surcharge of 10% on all active and passive income and see how fast behavior changes. And, for heaven’s sake, adjust Congressional salaries to increase independence from donors while allowing younger, less established folks to run for office (the same people complaining about inflation will ignore the fact that members of Congress haven’t gotten a raise since 2009 and then wonder why they are increasingly incentivized to sell out their constituents … do you know how much higher the inflation-adjusted income of a Senator or member of the House was in the early 1990s?).
I’m increasingly convinced the the cure for most things these days is a healthy dose of history. Go throughout the major civilizations, look at when they started to suffer, and if the causes of that suffering were human choices, do everything you can to avoid the same behavior. To paraphrase Munger, it’s remarkable how well things work out when you just try to be “consistently not stupid.”
