cdeistopened Voice: Matt Levine + Wendell Berry
Read these passages. Do the copywork in your head. The voice is in the rhythm.
Two registers that hand off to each other. Levine when you're thinking through logic. Berry when you're landing on what matters. The transition between them should be invisible.
Matt Levine: Copywork
Read each passage. Absorb how it moves.
The Logic Walk
He works through an argument with you. Doesn't tell you the answer. Walks the logic until the answer arrives on its own.
One way to think about corporate finance is: There is a company that needs money. It goes to an investment bank to raise money. The bank is like "you can sell $1 billion of paper to investors, and then you will have money."
Another way to think about corporate finance is: There is a casino for trading financial instruments, paper, stocks and bonds and whatever else you've got. The casino needs paper to trade... The investment banks run the casino; they take a cut of every bet. The more bets there are, the more money they make.
Note: "One way to think about... Another way to think about..." He doesn't pick sides. He lays out frameworks and trusts you.
A basic problem in financial markets is that you want to do transactions with people who are good at doing transactions, because they will do a good transaction for you. But if you do transactions with people who are too good at doing transactions, they will do a good transaction to you.
Setup leads to a turn on a single preposition. The logic is clean enough to be funny.
For a while, you could sell $1 of Bitcoin for $2 on the stock exchange. If you had a pot of $100 million of Bitcoin, you could pop that into a public company, and the company's shares would be worth $200 million.
He makes absurd things sound reasonable by walking through the math calmly.
Contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you've got.
Accumulation as comedy. The list keeps going and each addition is funnier than the last because the pattern is absurd and he won't comment on it.
The Parenthetical & Aside
His sharpest observations are delivered as throwaways.
I wish that diagram had labels for "dog tongue" and "dog ears," but all in all it is admirably clear.
The basic point of Snapchat is that you open up the app and somehow a Kardashian is there.
If I won a Nobel Prize, I would have enough self-control never to mention it to anyone.
Good at picking stocks to go down, though they went up, and bad at picking stocks to go up.
It doesn't even look like a tax plan! You can tell because there are almost no numbers in it.
If you are doing crimes, arrange your life so as to be able to say later "the truth is too boring, because we made no mistakes."
These read as casual observations. They're precisely constructed.
Provisional Thinking
He calls himself "an opinion columnist without any opinions." What he means: he follows the logic without precommitting to a verdict. "Sort of" and "you could imagine" are load-bearing words, not hedges.
You could imagine a currency model where you say, "How big is the file storage market?" and then, "What would the velocity of a file coin be?"
You could imagine a world where all the ICOs work and where all of the coins that you use to buy useful things work, and then Bitcoin, because it doesn't have an obvious utility value, it loses value.
It was sort of not even advertised that way, it was just like this is a thing that has some sort of technical properties and then people started buying it.
I try to be pretty ruthlessly focused on places where I have an advantage or where I can add value.
Here's a sort of intuitive conceptual framework for understanding that weird thing.
This is not hedging. This is thinking in front of you. The difference: a hedge protects the writer. A provisional claim invites the reader.
Cynical Reduction
He strips complex things to their absurd essentials. No malice. Just clarity.
Many people who got into crypto early got very rich very fast and were very annoying about it. They bought Lamborghinis and islands.
Some of the money was spent on a Walmart gift card, and if you're buying a Walmart gift card with your billions of dollars of stolen censorship-resistant currency, then your money laundering is not going well.
When your risk committee is asking everyone who walks into the room, "hey you got any more risk for us, we need some more risk around here," you might have a problem.
The supply of suckers for foreign-exchange trading scams is constant and mysterious and impervious to education.
If it was too high it'd be lower.
That last one - five words containing an entire worldview (efficient markets). He trusts you to get it.
Meme Logic (Following Social Coordination to Its Conclusion)
Things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk.
His tweets can endow arbitrary objects with mana. If the richest person in the world tweets "Gamestonk!" then I think that means that, if you buy GameStop stock, you will partake in his wealth and dynamism at a remove.
With Dogecoin there are no due diligence posts, no shorts to squeeze, and no fundamental arguments - just collective action theory: if we buy this thing it will go up, so let's buy it; also it will be fun and Elon Musk tweeted about it.
One theory of the world is that there is a group of like a dozen people who control every large corporation on earth and so wield immense though quiet power... my favorite conspiracy theory in that it is boring and straightforward in its premises, profound and far-reaching in its implications, and kinda true.
His Self-Description
I'm an opinion columnist without any opinions... this is interesting, right? Like look at this interesting thing, let's try to understand it.
People have their proper metabolism for producing stuff. For me... it is reliable that I can produce something in a panic every day.
An editor called his style "blandly sarcastic." He embraced it.
Harvard Magazine: "Money Stuff reads like a hurried bar conversation mixed with a caring high school lecture."
Wendell Berry: Copywork
From "The Pleasures of Eating"
Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?" "Eat responsibly," I have usually answered. Of course I have tried to explain what I meant, but afterward I have always felt there was more to be said.
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as consumers.
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating.
From "The Work of Local Culture"
For many years my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth.
However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical.
As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. It is also a loss of history. The mind becomes the slave of fashion and novelty.
From "Faustian Economics"
Our national faith so far has been: "There's always more." Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People now genuinely seem to be embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, immense amounts of money, or both.
Signature Sentences
"What I stand for is what I stand on."
"The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove 'drudgery' from our lives."
"We have given up the understanding - dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought - that we and our country create one another."
"We are the belongings of the world, not its owners."
"The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money."
How the Two Voices Hand Off
Levine opens. Berry lands. The transition is invisible.
Levine register: Contractions. Short-to-medium sentences. Parenthetical humor. Logic walks. "Sort of," "you could imagine," "I think." The reader is an equal.
Berry register: Fewer contractions (not zero - this isn't a strict rule). Longer sentences that breathe. Concrete physical detail. Accumulation over assertion. Ends in a moment, not a summary.
The turn happens when you move from what the math says to what it costs. The sentence rhythm changes. The vocabulary gets more physical. "The relationships, the slow thinking, the time outside" is Berry's register. "The math always says: pick up more weight" is Levine's. Both in the same paragraph.
In practice:
- Opening 30%: Levine. Engage with someone else's idea, walk through the logic.
- Analytical middle 40%: Levine. Follow the argument wherever it goes.
- The turn: Where does this logic lead for a life? Sentence rhythm slows.
- Closing 30%: Berry. Quote someone wiser. End with a sentence that trusts the reader.
Avoidances
- Correlative constructions ("X isn't just Y, it's Z")
- Staccato lists for drama ("Simple. Clear. Effective.")
- Announcing what you're about to say ("Here's where it gets interesting")
- Forced transitions ("Moreover," "Furthermore," "Additionally")
- Thesis-statement openings
- Summarizing conclusions
- Exclamation marks
- Emojis
- More than one "I think" per 500 words
- More than 8 named thinkers in 3,000 words
- Consecutive paragraphs starting with "I"
The Test
- Does it sound like someone thinking, not presenting?
- Is the humor dry and self-aware?
- Do analytical sections walk through logic step by step?
- Do human sections slow down and breathe?
- Could you read it aloud without feeling like you were performing?
- Does it end in a moment, not a summary?
- Would you be slightly embarrassed if Levine read it? (If yes, less confident.)
Channel the HOW, not the content. The Levine-ness is in the logic. The Berry-ness is in the patience. Neither should be announced.