I first learned of Lyn Alden last year, and my first impression of her – – in my typical puerfile, immature, superficial way – – was my amazement at the sound of her voice. She makes the whole “Elizabeth Holmes voice” thing seem utterly trivial. You can get a quick sense of this by listening to just a couple of minutes of this interview with her and another woman.
Ms. Alden sounds, to me, like a really cool bro from the late 1970s who skateboards, smokes weed from time to time, and is really into science fiction. That’s the vibe I get.
It occurred to me how brain-dead I was when I would look into the comments section, expecting it to be slathered with “OMG HER VOICE!” type remarks, but there was not a single one. Not. One.
Instead, they were all talking about how incredibly smart she was. So, I felt like an ass and decided I might want to get past the mental age of 13 sometime in my life.
To that end, when I saw she was coming out with a new book called Broken Money, I pre-ordered it. The book arrived last week, and I read it cover to cover during my cross-country plane trip.
I’m not going to craft some huge review like I did with the Elon book. On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, I’d give it 4 stars, and here’s why:
- GOOD: The first 40% of the book or thereabouts. It’s riveting. I learned a tremendous amount about economic models, the importance of reserve currencies, and, by far the biggest takeaway, the actual reasons why the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency in the first place. As I was reading this first chunk, I was thinking to myself how amazing this book was and how excited I would be to tell everyone about it. There’s a lot of history in here which was new to me and I truly enjoyed.
- BAD: Ya know, that isn’t quite the right word, because there’s nothing “bad” at all about the remainder of the book. It’s just that it’s very, very focused on Bitcoin and its potential as a quasi-reserve currency. My trouble is that the author gets really into the nitty-gritty of a lot of this stuff. Lyn Alden’s knowledge is so deep and vast that a lot of it was simply beyond me, and although she tries to explain certain concepts with examples, I’m either too stupid or too lazy to actually absorb the information. Thus, whereas I was highlighting the book heavily at first, I found myself flipping through the pages at a faster and faster speed as I got toward the end.
(Side note: if you honestly think I was going to have a third bullet point called “The Ugly“, you cut me to the quick – – do you honestly think I’d engage in such a hackneyed writer’s trope?)
In any case, I certainly got my money’s worth. If the book had been just the first 200 pages, instead of the full 500, I’d probably be giving it a better review! However, I’m sure there are plenty of people who would get plenty out of the “meat” of the book in the final 60%.
