“A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon”: https://t.ly/udYKu

This is an adventure book, but instead of going up, they go down, and across.

I’ve been to the Grand Canyon twice. It’s amazingly beautiful, but what I felt most was fear, of falling off the edge. You’re right there, a stumble and you’re gone. And you’re gonna die. Happens on a regular basis. Did you read about the gymnast who just fell off a mountain while shooting a selfie?

“Tragedy as star gymnast, 23, plunges 260ft down mountain to her death ‘while taking a selfie’ during a sightseeing visit to German ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle”: https://t.ly/lTREs

Yes, that’s a link to the “Daily Mail,” but don’t let that turn you off, the story was everywhere.

As are the stories of people being killed elsewhere while taking selfies. Frequently by stepping outside the guardrail.

And then there was that woman who slipped to her death climbing down Half Dome in Yosemite.

People are convinced they’re immune, and that if something does happen someone is responsible, and they will be held liable and have to pay.

This is patently untrue. Mother Nature is a cruel mistress. Even if you’ve got a lot of experience in the wilderness.

So Kevin Fedarko has a lot of experience in the Grand Canyon, but down below, on the river.

Fedarko, an Ivy League graduate, has dedicated his entire life to the outdoors, and writing about it. Living on the edge of poverty to pursue his dream.

This was more of a thing in the sixties and seventies. But even then it was not easy to make ends meet. Or, if you could, one disaster, a problem with your health, your car, would push you over the edge. But in today’s cutthroat world of income inequality, people want a safety net, a guarantee that they won’t fall to the bottom. Which is why so many breakthroughs are made by those outside the educational system, because those who pay their dues studying want a dividend for that work.

Now Fedarko has got this photographer buddy who is always proposing these trips that are not completely thought through, and he tells Fedarko they should walk the Grand Canyon.

Easier said than done. As a matter of fact, very few people have done it at all! The Grand Canyon itself has not been fully explored.

Man, we’ve gone to the moon, and we still don’t know what is happening here on earth?

Everywhere you go you’re not the first. But in the Grand Canyon?

Now it turns out there are people who’ve dedicated their lives to the canyon, whose names you’ve never heard of and probably never will. Some have great jobs, traditional jobs, are experts in their field, but they’re drawn to the canyon, they hike it every chance they’ve got, they plot it… Once again, today everybody does it for the money and the fame. Just to do it because you love it, that’s rare.

And you may not have been to the southwest, to the desert, it’s very forbidding. Scary. And it’s one thing to stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and look, but the thought of going down in it…

That’s another way people regularly die. They start hiking down and the heat and the lack of water ultimately gets to them. They set out in their sneakers, on a lark, and they come home in a body bag.

There are so many ways to die on the established routes, but hiking the entire length of the canyon, that’s asking for it.

Now Fedarko is a bit too self-deprecating for my taste. But that doesn’t undercut the basic narrative. You can feel the heat, the risk is self-evident. This is a dangerous trip and he and his partner are often not up to it.

Actually, canyon experts insist on coming along for parts of the trip, for fear that the two will buy it. As do expert canyoneers all the time.

Yes, your life is at risk. And the elements can turn on you instantly. Like those deaths in flash floods in the west just this past week.

Fedarko is not the usual adventure writer. Straightforward in simple language. His is a more literary style, which makes the book a bit more dense and harder to read. It is not the breeze of Krakauer.

Not that I want to denigrate Krakauer, I love his immediate style. But Krakauer always leavens his stories with his personal experience. He adds life to the adventure. Fedarko speaks of his ill father, but most of the time is spent down in the canyon. And that can get old, but…

It’s no walk in the park. But it is. There is no safety net, you may not be able to be rescued. And slipping and falling to your death is a constant possibility. The earth might move, having nothing to do with what you did. That’s nature.

Now “A Walk in the Park” got great reviews, and it was recently on the L.A. “Times” best-seller list. But reading it is…no walk in the park. You have to dedicate yourself to it. At times it’s relentless. Dry. But when you’re done…

It’s just like completing the hike itself. You’re satisfied, you feel you’ve done something special, and it’s nearly impossible to forget.

Once again, it’s hot and dreary and you’re out there alone and there’s no established trail.

You know if you want to read this book.

But, once again, it requires dedication. But there are rewards.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/death-of-an-artist

I had no idea “Anita de Monte Laughs Last” was based on a true story.

Turns out minimalist Carl Andre pushed his artist wife Ana Mendieta out the window and got off and lived… Happily ever after?

What you’ve got here is Helen Molesworth, a curator who lost her job at MOCA, telling the story. And it’s not deep history, it all went down in the eighties.

Molesworth sets the scene, very clearly, and then there’s the trial.

Really, it’s riveting until…

There’s a heavy dose of feminism and MeToo that ultimately overshadows the story in the later episodes, but the podcast does recenter.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with talking about feminism and MeToo, it’s just that it makes Molesworth look somewhat myopic, it takes the focus off what’s most important here, Andre’s bad behavior and how he got away with it.

As for the vagaries of the legal system, they’re involved in every trial. Molesworth has a hard time believing someone who is obviously guilty gets off. She starts debating “beyond a reasonable doubt”… This is what lay people don’t understand about the law, emotion doesn’t come into play, there are rules, which must be abided (unless, of course, you’re the Supreme Court).

Molesworth is frustrated that Andre escaped unharmed and Ana and her work were buried. But in truth, Mendieta’s star has been rising for decades. Seems like the truth always outs.

And there’s a lot of insight into how the art world works, how it’s a closed community almost exclusively run by white men.

But when Molesworth becomes conversational and introspective at the end… This is the problem with too many podcasts, they’re focused on the hosts as opposed to the subject/guests. When Molesworth talks at the end about her feelings… They do not have the gravitas or the meaning that the raw facts of the story have. Like how could Ana have fallen out of the window when the ledge was up around her chest and she was short and had a legendary fear of heights?

But not everything could be introduced at trial. There are rules of evidence.

But despite all of Andre’s buddies rallying around him, he may not have ended up in jail, but he definitely paid a price.

This is very good work. I’m just pointing out some of the flaws so you don’t come back to me and complain.

Also, like too many true crime podcasts, there’s overproduction. With the music, the dramatic sounds. Podcasts are a storytelling format, the facts should be enough, the audience doesn’t really want a return to radio dramas, never mind these elements give the feeling of “Dateline,” a lowbrow production that focuses on sensationalism and has none of the ultimate effect of “60 Minutes,” never mind print.

But if you do listen to this podcast, you will have to endure the commercials read by Malcolm Gladwell, a principal in Pushkin Industries, the producer of this podcast.

I’ve been down on Gladwell ever since he excoriated Bowdoin College and was wrong and wouldn’t admit it, he doubled-down.

And I like him better as a writer than a podcaster. But people go where the money is, irrelevant of their talents.

And then there was Gladwell saying that L.A. is known for its luxurious golf courses. I’ve lived in L.A. for decades, and I’ve never ever heard ANYBODY say this.

So Gladwell’s credibility is cratering. He fits the facts to his theories. But why I’m mentioning him at all is the tone of his voice. An orator who knows more than you do, who is coming down from the mountaintop to deign you with his brilliance. The elocution is so offensive. Just talk like a regular person. Furthermore, when you use this fake gravitas in support of your sponsors, it makes my stomach turn. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

P.S. My original post on the book “Anna de Monte Laughs Last”: https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/08/21/anita-de-monte-laughs-last/

P.P.S. “Death of an Artist – Season 1” is available on all podcast platforms, just search.

They have no idea how AI works.

Once you get past the poker, “On the Edge” is a very deep exploration of concepts known and unknown. You’ll feel like there’s an alternative universe out there, and not only are you not a member, do you really care?

I took a philosophy course in college that was deadly, if for no other reason than it was taught at eight in the morning by an aged guy who seemed ready to pass. Philosophy is not something I think about, never mind the fact that it does not pay.

But it turns out there are all these philosophers and philosophies in the tech/bleeding edge world.

Like “Effective Altruism.” I heard that bandied about when SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried), got in trouble. I thought it was just a guy using his money to achieve good ends. But NO! It’s a whole philosophy. And it’s in battle with the Rationalists. Really.

And then there are the philosophers debating doom. Whether the world is going to end and when. And how many people have to die in order to rub out humanity.

Really.

As for Sam Bankman-Fried…

What you’ve got to know is it was the emperor’s new clothes. Everybody bought the act, the VCs, the investors. Here you’ve got a guy from MIT who shows up in shorts and spews all this opportunity, all this money to be made, he must be right, let’s give him boatloads of cash.

But when Silver sits down with him even before the FTX crash, SBF says such insane things it’s amazing, anybody listening wouldn’t have thought he was off his rocker. SBF was all in, with concepts that made no sense, that relied on trust that people don’t have. Like we’ll put all your money in a black box and you’ll get a token in exchange, and then everybody will get rich when the tokens go up! Who is going to put millions into that? Hard-earned cash for air? That didn’t come to be.

But crypto…

Crypto started as a new banking system, with traceable assets, that would reduce friction in exchanges.

That’s not what it ended up to be. But Andreessen Horowitz is so deep into it, it wants its return, even though crypto is now a giant casino. And casinos are built on marks. Are you sitting at home really thinking you know more than, or even as much as, the people in control, who do this every day?

This is what has happened in politics. Which leads to crypto. All the authorities have been taken off the table. People are led into the wilderness by a pariah, telling them riches are in the offing.

Well, in truth many crypto investors lose money. There’s little talk about this because the losses are spread over such a large number of people.

Furthermore, just like Vegas itself, you hear about the winners, but the losers?

And then it comes down to AI, which the average person thinks they understand but they don’t.

As for being ready for prime time… I was reading Emily Nussbaum’s highly reviewed but unread by many book on reality TV, “Cue the Sun!” If you haven’t been a consistent viewer of reality television, don’t bother. But if you watched, you’ll learn some interesting stuff, like the only person who actually lived in the “Real World” house during the first season was Julie.

Anyway, Nussbaum writes in depth about “The Bachelor,” a show I’ve never watched. And talks about Trista Rehn, how everybody on the inside believed she’d win the first season, and how she ultimately married that firefighter, had kids and has lived happily ever after.

I decided to Google her. And Google’s AI told me that TRISTA WAS A FIREFIGHTER!

Yes, it made a mistake. A HUGE mistake. And if I hadn’t known a little about Trista and her life, I would have bought it.

So if you’re depending on AI… You never know when it will hallucinate, get it wrong.

But the story is AI combs data, on the web. And it can come up with remarkably relevant and correct answers, but also can be totally wrong. So the AI companies hire humans to correct it. And it keeps getting smarter and smarter but does it ever truly get smart enough?

But the bottom line is you type a question… Silver analogizes it to a symphony orchestra. The conductor assigns everybody their part, they go off to practice…

Every word is assigned a token. Those in charge of each token go in search of answers. But the violins work together, before they report back to the conductor.

And all the instruments are working on different tokens simultaneously. And at the end, they show up with their info, pop it into a translator and voila, you’ve got an answer.

But how exactly did AI do it?

What is happening on those token searches. How are the different instruments/token owners collaborating? THEY DON’T KNOW, ONLY THAT IT WORKS!

Really.

You’ll learn all this and more if you read “On the Edge.”

But you’re going to really have to want to read it. Because it’s five hundred pages long. And it’s a mess, it doesn’t hold together. There’s this overall theme of risk, as evidenced in poker, devolving into game theory and other mathematical concepts, but then there’s detailed investigations of Vegas, Silicon Valley, crypto, AI, that really don’t need to be in the same book. Yes, they’re tied together by risk…but Silver is so deep into his endeavor that he can’t see the forest for the trees. Like a college student delivering a paper in order to get a grade, to evidence completion, comprehensibility and quality are not reached, never mind even being the goals.

However, there is a lot of stimulating info contained within the book’s pages. But very few will read it. Because they’ve never had to read a book like this. People don’t want to put in hours to read something that is not straightforward, that they have to mentally wrestle with.

Unfortunately, that’s where the rewards are.

Will there be better books on these subjects?

Well, you’ve got Michael Lewis, a great writer whose belief in himself and his ideas is so strong that he was totally snookered by SBF, never mind the parents in “Blind Side.”

And the people interviewing Silver… They’ve got neither the time nor the inclination to read the book. who’s going to dedicate in excess of ten hours to do so, they’re busy building their brand, becoming famous!

But if you want to know more about America, the divide between Silicon Valley and the east coast intelligentsia, you will gain a ton of insight from reading “On the Edge.”

But be forewarned, it’s not easy.

The legendary writer of “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “MacArthur Park” and many more discusses his hits, his history and his tenure on the ASCAP board!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jimmy-webb/id1316200737?i=1000667071654

 

 

 

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/8a152c29-0c62-4931-80aa-9d5a2de36512/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-jimmy-webb