I finally finished my first nonfiction book of 2026: The Great Game. For me personally, these were the biggest takeaways:
1. A long-overdue crash course in history
I’ve always been hopeless at history. Even in middle school and high school I couldn’t muster any interest in it — I figured history was useless. Turns out I was wrong. History is actually fascinating. Reading a history book gives you this marvelous god’s-eye view, looking back at everything that happened before you were even born.
This one hefty book, all by itself, basically built out my macro framework for the global economy and American history. For someone like me who came in with almost no historical background, the marginal returns were absurdly high. At the very least, I now know who the man on the ten-dollar bill is and what great things he did; how two world wars propelled America to superpower status; the history of New York; the first speculative frenzy in human history; and — most important of all — I came to see just how much capital matters to American society (“The business of America is business”), and the invisible power it wields over politics and war.
2. History really does help
The sound, mature financial system we enjoy today owes everything to the lessons humanity drew from past disasters. Knowing what has already happened lowers the cost of our own mistakes — because times change, but human nature doesn’t. A careful post-mortem on history can spare us a great many wrong turns.
A history book also carries a great deal of psychology within it. History is just a pile of events, and every one of those events was made by people. And what drives people’s decisions is the brain — human nature itself. Reading history lets us reflect on humanity’s weaknesses, and that in turn helps us make better decisions of our own.
The pattern is hard to miss in this book. Because it chronicles the rise of the Wall Street financial empire, nearly every episode boils down to the same arc: a boom, then the corruption and fraud that fester inside the boom, then the crash — and then a new boom begins.
Was tulip mania, humanity’s first speculative craze, fundamentally any different from what happens today? No. If anything, the internet now multiplies the spread of optimism and panic many times over, and with algorithmic trading layered on top, today’s market crashes hit harder and faster than ever. Perhaps, by studying the financial crises of the past, we can all keep a clear head through the next boom.
History never changes, and it never will — not unless the day comes when machines, not people, run society. Human nature will always have its flaws, and no amount of failure ever fixes them. Humans have flaws the way LLMs have hallucinations: flaws are to us what hallucinations are to an LLM — not a bug, but a feature…