Interesting concept with what seemed like middling execution. Everyone knows Adam Smith for being commonly misquoted about invisible hands and whatever nonsense the Randians are spewing nowadays. Something about not regulating bitcoin I think. I was surprised that Russ doesn't want to discuss Smith's best known "Wealth of Nations," no, Russ wants to talk about "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." In TTOMS, Smith talks about how to live a good life, which mostly seems to revolve around this quote:

“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.”

It's a good quote. A great quote even. Smith has some good, traditional old-privileged-white-man wisdom to share about being "lovely" which roughly equates to acting in good conscience and being a moral and helpful person.

And as such, this book started really strong, but unfortunately it didn't build on that concept much and ended up stalling out about halfway through. I was impressed with the prescience that it seems Smith had. Russ set himself up for a banger of a book. But sadly, it seemed like the author recycled the same few core ideas around "being lovely" with a smattering of slightly different examples for the second half of the book. It's like going on a road trip, leaving town with no traffic, finding cheap gas to fill up the car with, clean windshield and empty road in front of you, only to have your radiator blow 20 miles outside of town. Lots of build up for a big disappointment.