Hello the weather today can't decide whether it wants to be sunny or cloudy so This lightness situation it's gonna change a lot. I just want to warn you today I'm going to be talking about a beautifully foolish endeavor by Hank Green This came out in July it is very new and it is the sequel to an absolute remarkable thing by Hank Green So at the end of an absolutely remarkable thing April was dead or was she and the cars are disappeared And there's this just takes everything to a whole new level It is the ultimate showdown between good and evil on the good side We have April and the gang and the hope that humans are benevolent and on the evil side We have capitalism and the hubris of men and all of that plus a bunch of alien technology I've heard a lot of people or maybe it's just Hank coming at me from like 15 different angles saying that This sequel is considered better than the first like like the rare time that a sequel is better than the first book So I had really high expectations and it didn't quite live up to it sadly It was a really fun romp like the last time But as I shall explain it just kind of got to the point where I didn't buy it like I didn't buy the narrative Let's start with the good parts like an absolutely remarkable thing It was just so whimsically creative the sort of Devices that Hank came up with there's this thing called the book of good times which Appears to characters and like tells them what they have to do and it's like it's reading their mind and knows the future But it's just like a magical instruction book and I love that there's also like magical Sparkly white stone stuff. There's a monkey like there's just a lot of fun things happening I also really liked how there were a bunch of kind of separate narrative going on with the different characters that kind of all Interweaved I thought that was really well done But the bit where I started having issues with it um was that I feel like the book Exists to put forth Hank Greens views about life in the world And to be fair I agree with him on a lot of those points big and small Be talking about fame he's talking about money the nature of ideas human purpose power especially in terms of the internet haters punditry Hiring diversely like one and a million things and it feels like he's kind of constructed this narrative to be able to put forth his views about all of that stuff And it just shakes out to be really unrealistic to me like the the crux of Like the the climax Um, it just seems really unrealistic is just like how all of the all of the things in the world have come together For what happens in this book? I just don't buy it. There are a lot of kind of insightful points in it though And I wanted to bring out two about the same same topic Um, here's what I know about internet media companies They will do whatever they can to make money. Oh certainly. They're all run by idealistic sounding progressives But when it comes to add whether or not to use their customers to make more money they will do it and I work for a startup and I know what that feels like and then still talking about this company about 20 pages later This company's created false scarcity because I think that's the best way to capture the value they're creating And then someone says creating the value is what people publicly praise but capturing value is what is actually rewarded Which is like really the the crux of business, right Lots of clever stuff like that, but that leads on to my main criticism of the book Which is that there are five narrators equal my Andy Miranda and Carl um and with the possible exceptional Miranda They all have the same voice they all have this really developed internal monologue that methodically explains This like homogeneous mostly homogeneous viewpoint about the world and I would constantly forget Who the first person perspective was like in almost every chapter I would just like forget who was who who I was because they all sounded the same Which is a shame they were all like different enough characters like I Recognize that they had different characteristics and in different thoughts and feelings sort of um But they all kind of all of their internal monologue was so consistent with each other Um to the point that it it just felt like a parable all that being said it was a really fun book You know if you take it with a pinch of salt that it's not going to be really realistic And it is just going to be a bit of a sci-fi adventure very fun and satisfying conclusion especially all of the The whole space alien stuff in the broader context of how that physically works I think was a really cool strategy Um loads of loads of really cool bits but yeah that whole different but same perspective thing Really threw me off which is a great shame if you've read it Did you have a similar kind of experience? Did you pick up on that at all? Did you pick up on it but it not bother you or um do you just completely disagree with me? I would love to hear that down in the comments below This has been a video about a beautifully-feelation devout by Hank Green And I will see you soon for another one. Bye