The Matt Levine Exhaustion Index

For a number of reasons, I'm extremely tired right now. So tired that my first run at the previous sentence read "For a number of reasons, I've extremely tired right now." A good way of gauging how much my tiredness is impacting my capacity is how much of that day's Matt Levine column I'm able to read.

Money Stuff is... I don't know how popular it is relative to other things but it's certianly the finance newsletter I see people talking about the most. There's a good reason for this: the writing is very entertaining, and he writes about complicated things well. As Levine said in an interview:

Very early on, my sense was that there is an expectation that weird complicated niche topics have only weird niche audiences and that doesn't seem true. I think my readers, some of them are people who work in fairly technical areas of finance are like finally, I get to read about this fairly technical or like, I get to read about this adjacent technical area of finance that I find interesting because I work in a different technical area and I like technical stuff.

A lot of my readers work in tech and they're like, "I don't share anything about finance. I share about finance, I'm not that interested in it, but I like when you talk about complicated things. It's like the aesthetic appreciation of systems and complexity and the moving parts of the economic drivers of deals.

He's extremely fun to read, but only if you are in a position to receive complicated things. I can tell roughly how well I'm going to do at something intellectually demanding if I have a run at a Matt Levine column beforehand. If I get through no problem, go ahead. If I start OK but my eyes start sliding off, proceed with caution. If I can't even start, just go and chill and come back tomorrow. (The same here applies to speed of solving the NYT Mini, but I usually do that first thing in the morning anyway.)