I had the song going through my head during the conversation, and you may find yourself, you know, yeah, on a beautiful podcast in a random part of the world talking about concrete with David Byrne.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy, something that both of us have observed multiple times on the podcast. By now, long-time listeners are tired of our observations, tired of our stories and stuff like that. No, but something that we both have observed, and it relates to our career, is that sort of big times of big change, financial crises, Covid, etc. Any time there seems to be some big turning point, it's sort of like a clearing in the woods where new ideas can be discovered and so forth. So we like sort of go down some path. Typically, I like to think of it as like a narrow path through a forest, and certain ideas we sort of go with, and then suddenly something changes. Nobody is necessarily an expert on this moment. The gap in awareness between the smartest and the least informed person starts to shrink about what's happening. And then there's like, there's a market for new ideas that emerges.
Yeah, I think there's a democratization process, I guess, that happens in times of crisis or major change. And we've talked about it in relation to the 2008 financial crisis, where back then you and I were in the early stages of our financial journalism careers, but we were basically on the same footing as people who had been covering banking and finance for decades at that point, because no one really knew what was going on. And so, as you say, this opportunity opens up.
Yeah. And suddenly you start to see new ways of approaching it. New entrants discussing certain things, new ideas, maybe.
So, for example, you know, people are like, oh, the works of Hyman Minsky, for example. Right. They're like, oh, maybe this guy who most people, even in economics, had not talked about very much, maybe he shed some light. We could go back and revisit him or even, you know, certain forms of what I would call like antique Keynesianism, etc. It's like, let's go back and see what people who we long discarded were saying. And maybe this could be useful.
Well, Minsky is a really interesting one because, again, I got into financial journalism in September 2008 and people were already bringing up the Minsky moment. And ever since then, it's become almost a cliche to the point where if I see a financial journalist talk about Minsky moment as if they just discovered it, yeah, I kind of get a little annoyed and it's a little bit cringe. But what I didn't know is that basically up until 2008, a lot of Minsky's ideas had been discarded.
That's right. So we have exciting guests and we don't have to talk forever. We're going to be speaking with someone who is primarily known for rediscovering the works of Hyman Minsky. No, that's not exactly true. But someone who has, in fact, talked about Hyman Minsky. We're going to be speaking with musician and author David Byrne. He has a new book out called Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. And he has a chapter on the Minsky revival. So, David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you. Thank you. In here somewhere. Yeah. Rocking. Yes. I could talk about Minsky.
Of course. You probably know a lot about it. Look, here's the thing. If we could spend the entire time in this conversation just talking about Minsky, as long as we also spend a minute talking about Moby Dick.
Okay. Would you also talk like I knew this was going to come up? No, but that's actually a legitimate example of what Sleeping Beauty is all about.
Why don't we just, to begin, give us the in-a-nutshell version of the book. What is a Sleeping Beauty and what are you trying to do here?
It's not my term, but I stumbled on it. Sleeping beauty is something that got a little bit of attention when it was first done. Could be an idea, could be a painter, could be an author, then kind of faded from view, became kind of forgotten. Maybe not entirely, but kind of. Yes, sank below the surface. And then at some point, for various reasons, got reappropriated and came back and was like, oh, yes, that is relevant right now. That's exactly what we're talking about now. And this person's already done it. Let's see if there's some information, some technique, some beautiful artwork, whatever it might be for us to appreciate.
You guys mentioned the, yes, 2008. Yeah. The crash, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. I have a whole section of the book on how catastrophes, including war, are kind of a way that these things get rediscovered. I decided to focus on how they got rediscovered as much as I could, rather than how they got forgotten. How they got forgotten tends to be the same stories all over and over again, institutional hubris or racism or sexism or we think we know better than people knew in the past, all those kinds of things. But I thought if we can find how they got rediscovered, that gives us a shot at finding the ones that are still out there.
For sure. There's some out there. So for the Minsky example, let's just start with that one, given our audience. But what's your, you know, we, I think everyone knows what a Minsky moment is. But maybe talk a little bit about the time before that became a journalistic cliche, and then also talk about what's the relevance of discovering Minsky post-2008, or maybe even what the relevance would have been discovering him before 2008, other than it makes convenient anecdotes for financial columns.
That's... Wow. Yes. When did he do? He did a lot of his work, I think was in the 60s, I think.
That's right. Yeah, yeah.
And his idea was, it's kind of behavioral economics. He was kind of saying, well, we don't exactly behave rationally. We don't always act in our best interests. I'm kind of summarizing here. Yeah, some people already know this, that when things are flush, we tend to assume that that's the way it's always going to go. We can just pile more, you know, invest more, do this. And we kind of ignore the danger signs and this and that. Needless to say, he has been proven right. Yeah. He's saying we're human beings. We behave according to these emotional instincts as opposed, we don't always act rationally. There was a nice story about him going on holiday with his family to Italy, and instead of going to see all the tourist sites, he started interviewing the people working in the little businesses in the towns they were visiting. And what do you want to find out? How do you do this? I went to his house. How are things working here? Yeah, tracing.
I can relate to that sort of thing. I think most of us, it's probably this curse of like trying to learn so much about the world. I don't know, maybe you're a little bit better at turning off now. I think we both have this curse. We go anywhere and like, we just, you know, try to enjoy it, but also like, how does this work and why is the price this way? How many hours do you work and how did you find your way into this job? So you go through in this book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. So many examples, including Minsky, including discoveries of Roman concrete, which we'll talk about, including the book Moby Dick itself, which we're definitely going to talk about. Well, what are you? And then, you know, as you talk about your conclusion, maybe we can like find a pattern that helps us discover old ideas or forgotten ideas consistently. But before we get to that, what do you talk to us about the process of assembling this book? Because there's thousands of Sleeping Beauties out there. How did you find the ones that you wanted to talk about, whittle them down, and like, talk to us about how this book arrived here.
There's lots of them. Yes. I'd write them up like a first draft of writing things up and then, you know, oh, this one, this was a good story or I see they're starting to fall into categories of how they got rediscovered and remembered. And I thought, okay, if I can, I need a nice little sampling in each of these categories. And then I think I'm good. I don't need to kind of overdo it. I'm not trying to be complete and incapable. Okay. I'm going to tell you every single Sleeping Beauty I've ever stumbled on. Often I stumble on them, be an article about something like you said, Moby Dick or whatever. Like, that can be something, you know, an article about Melville and they'd say, and like in one sentence, they go, Moby Dick was a failure. And he died penniless, something like that. And then they go on to talk about something else. It was like one sentence and, you know, you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You just buried the lead. Yeah.
From my point of view, that's the story. How did that happen? Because now, yeah, that particular book is revered. Wait, how did that happen?
Yeah. Let's. All right. Let's jump right into the Melville. Let's try. Yeah. Let's jump right into my favorite book, by the way.
Wow. You have to go back, wind back before that book, which makes the story kind of better. Before he started writing, he signed on as a kind of merchant sailor. And at the time, they would go whale hunting and hunting for all sorts of stuff in the South Seas and in the Pacific. So he was doing that. He found it to be a torturous, horrible, horrible experience. He and some others jumped ship on some island and looked after their island, of course, is gorgeous.
And you go to live there? Yeah, I get it.
But, yeah, except for the cannibals.
Except they were cannibals.
Yes, they were cannibals. But he managed. He got away from that, got to another island where he became like a farmer growing potatoes on this island. And eventually, he signs on with another boat. I think he eventually ends up in Hawaii, where the first one he deserted from arrives, and they go, you're guilty. And we're taking you back. And there's not much you can do about it, but yeah. And as in the book, he's witness to floggings and just horrible, horrible conditions and horrible treatment and, you know, insane captains and all this stuff. I mean, it's all there. So he writes a book. I think Typee was the first one about his South Seas adventures. He didn't say it was him, but it was. That's what it was. And I think the American publisher said, no, this is completely outrageous. Could not have happened. But I think there was someone in England who kind of was a witness who said, yeah, it did happen. All these awful things, all these awful things, this crazy stuff happened. And so they published it, and it was a massive hit. Huge. It became like one of the most popular books. So he wrote a sequel. It was called, I think, Omoo. Another kind of made-up island name that detailed more of these adventures. He didn't want to do another one. And he has friends with him. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne. They were friends up in western Massachusetts and whatever, and Hawthorne said, oh, you should maybe the next one draw on your experiences, but maybe the next one should be more allegorical. You should get away from just the adventure yarn.
And he should still spend hundreds of words describing nautical knots.
Yeah, but it's a little more fantastical. Yes. And so he did Moby Dick. I think first it was called just The Whale. Yeah. And it was a failure. I think, oh, in England, when it was published, I think they sold maybe 500 copies, which is not so good. He forgot, or maybe he forgot, but he didn't put the epilogue.
The epilogue is where Ishmael survives. Yeah. And so the English reviewers said, no, no, no, you cannot tell a story like this if everyone dies. Because who wrote it? Then who wrote it? Who's the witness? We. Yeah. This is a rule of writing. And we didn't know this rule existed. But you can't. You can't do that. You can't have it where everyone dies.
And especially if it's written in the first person, right?
Yes. Who's telling the story and where's their information coming from? So right away he's just getting bad reviews as well as not selling too well. And the Americans were kind of, they looked up to the British reviewers. I don't know if that still happens, but yeah, they did. Yeah. And so even though he now put in the epilogue where Ishmael survives, it was too late. The bad reviews had kind of set the tone. And yeah, I think he went back to Hawthorne and said, what have you done to me? I'm sorry if I'm destroyed. Which he was. He did. He wrote other books. He wrote some weird stuff. He wrote an epic poem about the Civil War, the battles in the Civil War, kind of told from both sides. And in some ways it was kind of an anti-war poem telling the stories of all the carnage and everything, but viewed from both sides. That did not do well. He wrote the last one that came out was one called Billy Budd, and that was discovered after his death in a breadbox in a house where he lived.
That's where I keep all my unpublished manuscripts, actually.
Yeah. My breadbox is just filled with manuscripts.
Now, let's talk about the rediscovery, because I think so.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, I can sure go on. Yes. Yeah. I didn't get to that part. So now he's done. He's done. I think it was mid-1800s when he was publishing these. So kind of around the turn of the century, he's like nothing, forgotten. Someone was asked, I think, in the UK to write an article about him, and the Americans said, is he still alive? They didn't know. Yeah. Anyway, so one of the, we're going back to catastrophes and wars. Yeah. After World War One, people were asking themselves, how could we do this? How could we be so much killing, carnage, bloodshed? What are we made of psychologically or whatever else that allows us to do this? And his book kind of deals with that. It deals with kind of this psychology of all this stuff, and it deals with kind of colonialism and racism and all sorts of stuff. So after World War One, people are asking, who are we? Before that was just kind of adventures and seafaring stories and westerns and all this kind of heroic stuff. But now it's kind of like the doubt has been put in, and you know, yet. Does this book help us understand who we are?
Yeah, there's, you know, I mentioned my favorite book is Moby Dick. One of my other favorite books is this book, I don't know if you've read it, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In by the author C.L.R. James. And he talks about this a lot, that the Ahab character that Melville discovered, I mean, he created him, but arguably he discovered that character was this character that sort of anticipated essentially the great authoritarians of the 20th century, that when we go back and we might want to psychoanalyze individuals like Hitler and Stalin and so forth, that Melville, in a way, saw them coming, this new man, so to speak, or at least it appears that way in retrospect. It appears that there's maniacal behavior. And so the emergence of individuals later on suddenly makes Moby Dick such a compelling read.
I agree. I don't know if I have anything to add.
Yeah, I totally agree that. Yeah, that's, it's kind of amazing that something, I don't believe that somebody like an author like that can predict the future. Sure. But I do think they can see something in ourselves. They can see something in ourselves. He's had these kind of really incredible experiences and encountered kind of these really despicable people. Yeah. Where he can incorporate that and see that this is part of who we are. Yeah. And yeah. So that, yeah, later on, after we've all said, or everyone who was around for World War One sees kind of how low can we go? Do you start to go, yes. Is there some way to prevent this? Can we understand ourselves so that this doesn't happen again? Can we talk about concrete? I'd love to talk about concrete.
So there are a lot. So yeah, this is something we were talking about. So I have an interest in concrete, which is, you know, when I was younger and I was traveling to a lot of far-flung places, some of the most common ads and billboards that I would see in places like India or Myanmar would be for concrete brands, which you never see in the US or in Europe. You know, people aren't advertising by this particular type of concrete. So I was always really fascinated why concrete had like this position in those economies. But you point out in your book that actually the way we produce concrete nowadays, the most common way, isn't really the optimal technology for doing this. And there's actually a very ancient concrete technology that might be better in some ways. Can you describe what you found?
Yeah, I'm going to go back to your experience because I had a similar experience. Have been to different places around the world. And you see, it seems kind of incongruous. You see places where sometimes the vernacular buildings in one place are kind of beautiful, and then you see these concrete kind of bunker type things, and you go, that's what was being pushed on people as being, this is what it means to be modern. One of the people mentioned in the book is from Lithuania, I think, and she said, she's from the University of Miami. And she says that, yes, when she was growing up, same thing, concrete was pushed as this will make modern housing. Yeah, right. Trash chutes, clean kitchens, big windows. Oh yeah. All the stuff, you're not going to have these falling, little falling down wooden houses. We're going to enter the modern world. And in her words, we'll be living in the future. And so it was a big campaign to sell this stuff all around the world. It happened in the US too. There was all these books about make your house out of concrete. And anyway, yeah, the story is that the Pantheon, the building in Rome, the temple in Rome is 2,000 years old, has the largest unreinforced dome in the world. Still doesn't have a crack in it. And 2,000 years old. The companies that make concrete now for parking lots and all kinds of stuff, of course, it's reinforced with rebar. They rate themselves to last 50 years. Five zero. 100. If we're lucky. So you've got to ask yourself what happened. And yes, did we just lose the recipe? Sort of. But, you know, it's a little more complicated than that. The Romans used it a lot. These were big civic projects. They cost a lot of money. And to build the Pantheon or the Colosseum, which is also made of concrete blocks, the aqueducts, which are made of concrete blocks, all this kind of stuff cost a lot of money, a lot of manpower. And in the course of empire, as the empire spreads out, more resources are going to kind of keep the borders intact and all that kind of stuff. And the communities from the far-flung parts of the empire, they're not so interested in using concrete. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is made of brick and mortar. It's a, they have their own way of doing things. But so when the Roman Empire collapses, I think in 470, somewhere around there, that's it. They don't make it anymore. Nobody makes it anymore. And so it's not like the recipe got completely lost. Was this guy Vitruvius who wrote a book about architecture, and he includes how to make concrete in it? I think it was in 20... Well, I'm remembering my dates. I think it was 20 BC that he did this. It was rediscovered in the Renaissance, 1400s. So that's quite a few years later. But it was considered, oh, this is an historical bit of curiosity. We don't need to do that. But they liked his information about proportions, so Leon Battista Alberti and all these other architects in that period took inspiration from him. Now I'm losing my dates. But I think it's in the 1800s. A guy in England makes something called Portland cement. So we've really gone a long time. He makes something from Portland cement, starts a factory in the UK, and this is the precursor to modern concrete. It's not as good as the Roman stuff. It takes more energy to make, puts out a lot of CO2 in the process, doesn't last as long, but it is back. And it's a French guy, I forget his name, it's a French guy, maybe 30 years later, comes up with the idea of putting rebar in to give it some tensile strength. So it's going to be better for bridges and all this kind of stuff. And yeah, so wow. By the 1800s, 1900s, it's being pushed as like, this is the stuff you can build big things, bridges, highways, buildings, everything. You know, all this stuff you can build out of it. I mean, and then I can go into, I mean, what a huge energy cost this is in the scope of this stuff.
Yeah, as we know, it doesn't last. So it's, China does more of it than pretty much anywhere else. Yeah, but the guy who invented Portland cement, was he just unaware of the Roman recipe or was he maybe thinking about other things like, you know, it's cheaper to build. We don't have to get special ash from Mount Vesuvius or whatever it is. Did he have other considerations?
Yeah. There was a thought that they'd look at the Roman recipe and think, oh, it's special because they use the ash from Vesuvius. They got this, yeah, the secret sauce. And we don't have that. So we have to do with what we have. They also saw the Roman stuff. This kind of was going to lead to the solution. The Roman stuff has all these little white specks in it. And they thought, they just didn't know how to mix it. Well, they didn't have the mixing technology. We can do that. So, yeah, we're okay, and ours is better. Basically, ours is better. It's kind of a biased prejudice, whatever, that we have, that whatever we know is better and smarter than whoever went before. Let's just another kind of, yeah, example of how irrational we can be. So, but it was these little specks, they're called lime clasts, that there was some material scientists at MIT who started looking into it about 15 years ago or so, and they did a test where they had the Roman stuff, and they had some contemporary stuff, and they poured water on it, and the water eventually went through the contemporary stuff.
Which leads to cracks, right?
Which leads to cracks. Yes, especially if it gets cold. But even if it doesn't, and then with the Roman stuff, it goes in and some of the lime clast stuff, the little white specks, dissolve and the cracks heal up. It's self-healing. But the other stuff, especially if it's got rebar in it, the water gets in. If it hits the rebar, rebar is going to rust and crack and can expand, the rusting rods expand and make more cracks. So 2023, the folks at MIT started a company, and they're going to start making, they've started to make the Roman stuff. Whether the world kind of takes to it, that remains to be seen. But it has been rediscovered.
