I finally finished my first nonfiction book of 2026: The Great Game. For me personally, a few takeaways stood out above the rest:
1. A long-overdue crash course in history
I’ve always been hopeless at history. In middle school and high school, the subject never sparked the slightest interest. I figured history was useless. Turns out I was wrong. History is genuinely fascinating. Reading a history book gives you this strange, almost godlike experience of looking back at everything that happened before you were born.
This single book — a little over 300,000 Chinese characters — essentially built an entire macroeconomic and American-history framework in my head from scratch. For someone who walked in with virtually zero historical background, the marginal return was absurd. At a minimum, I now know who’s on the ten-dollar bill and what he accomplished, how two world wars propelled America into superpower status, the story of New York, humanity’s very first speculative bubble, and — most importantly — just how central capital is to the fabric of American society (The business of America is business) and the invisible force it exerts over politics and war.
2. History is genuinely useful
The robust, mature financial system we enjoy today didn’t materialize out of nowhere — it was forged through every catastrophe in history and the lessons people drew from them. By understanding what happened before, we can lower the cost of our own mistakes. Time moves forward, but human nature stays exactly the same. Studying history lets us avoid a staggering number of wrong turns.
A history book also doubles as a psychology textbook. History is just a mountain of events, and events are just the products of human action. What drives those actions is the brain — our deepest instincts and impulses. Reading history is a way to confront the weaknesses of our species, and that self-awareness helps us make better decisions.
It’s hard to miss the pattern in this book. Because it chronicles the rise of Wall Street’s financial empire, virtually every standalone episode follows the same arc: boom, then corruption and fraud lurking inside the boom, then collapse — followed by a brand-new boom.
Is there really any fundamental difference between the first tulip mania in human history and what we see today? None at all. If anything, the internet now amplifies the contagion of optimism and pessimism by orders of magnitude, compounded by algorithmic trading — which is exactly why modern market crashes hit harder and faster. By studying the financial crises of the past, maybe we can all keep a cooler head the next time euphoria takes hold.
History is eternal and unchanging — and it won’t change unless the force governing society is no longer human, but machine. Because human nature will always have its flaws, and those flaws don’t disappear just because we’ve been burned before. Human nature has weaknesses the way LLMs have hallucinations — weakness to humanity is what hallucination is to an LLM. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature…