Jacob Shymanski

Connect bigger ideas to how they affect individuals.

Explain how people affect the world and how the world affects people.

You need to talk about both individuals and the big picture.

And you can't focus on just one of them, otherwise it's shallow.

If you're just talking about a person, then it's like disconnected from the world.

It's like, why do I care about just a single person in a vacuum?

Why do I care about the entire world without connecting to the people within it?

There has to be a connection between the two.

And a book that I can recommend along these lines is Careless People by Sarah Witt Williams, which I've talked about on the show before.

She was a high-level executive at Meta, formerly Facebook, for years during the 2010s.

And what she exposes in this book is the attitude and the philosophies of people, of high executives in big tech, right?

And it connects the people who run these companies to the actions and the policies that these companies enact and have huge impacts on the world.

She's connecting the people who run it to the world that is deeply affected by these companies.

Fantastic memoir, Careless People, Sarah Wynn Williams.

But the overall messaging in his self-written biography, The Son of Yellow Earth, which came up, by the way, before he came to power, so this was written on the way up, is that he embraced and accepted the reality of China, life among the peasants, life of the ordinary people.

And you can trace, quite amusingly, the timeline between the years when Xi Jinping is living in a cave, defecating in a wooden communal barrel, living without electricity and reading by lamplight and performing manual labor in the fields and eating peasant food,

And at the very same period, a young Donald Trump is hitting the party scene in Manhattan and making the social pages of the newspapers for the first time.

So you're talking about two men with six years between them.

Xi Jinping is the younger man, but a completely different set of experiences and worldview.

And...