Author Background
Hi, I’m Bryce. I live in California with my wife and two young children. I’ve lived in two countries and five U.S. states, although I trace most of my roots to the Pacific Northwest.
I’m a finance professional by trade and training: I spend my days researching businesses and industries. Being a good stock-picker is a vocation that rewards an objective and curious mind and punishes intellectual arrogance, and I love this about what I do. That said, I love to learn, read, and write about topics outside finance and business: history, geopolitics, macroeconomics, the human condition itself. In a sense, these retain relevance to my day job: markets are a mix of rational and social, and the economic systems underpinning stocks and businesses are a product of a history that we would dowell to understand.
As far as writing bona fides, I’ve been doing it with varying degrees of seriousness for a decade: daily journaling, a memoir of my high school years, reports on various industries and companies, and a historical fiction novel I self-published in 2021. I’ve enjoyed it all immensely, and excited to apply what practical skill I’ve gleaned to a new medium.
What is Ten Minute Major?
The basic idea is this: an easily-digested, high-level summary of concepts and phenomena from finance and business to politics and the humanities. This will include monetary economic theory vs. practice, what makes a “good” business, which U.S. presidents are over- or underrated, why American exceptionalism comprises strengths and weaknesses, why social critics create such polarized reactions in the societies they criticize, whether a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” really is “better by far, than a master of one”, and plenty more. As the name suggests, each piece should take roughly ten minutes to read—that is, between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Our goal isn’t to replicate or replace a college degree, but to offer a starting point to anyone—whether prospective students searching for a field that inspires them, professionals who want to broaden their horizons, or lifelong learners with burning questions—who are just looking for somewhere to start.
The human brain is fundamentally lazy: the heuristics that we’ve developed over millennia are designed to help us understand the world around us quickly and imprecisely. In The Most Important Thing,Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital Management, talks about second-level thinking being key to succeeding in finance—but second-level thinking did our ancestors little good at fending off mastodons; speed was the chief cognitive concern. Since then, our society appears to have changed at a faster rate than our brains, requiring often unpleasant cognitive “work”—System 2, in psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrasing —to make true sense of the world around us.
This is an important caveat. We want brevity to be our friend, but oversimplification is not invited to this party. We will strive to ask tough questions, explain what we can, and leave the reader with a sense for where to take it from there.
