Great book, well written, humorous author, and good explanations of some familiar econ 101 concepts. Well worth the read.

The author’s explicit purpose is to make the economic sciences interesting to the masses, because most people take Econ101 and their eyes glaze over at all the charts and then they think econ isn’t interesting, but really it is. And he goes through how governments can use economics to incentivise (or disincentivise, as the case may be) certain behaviors to try to overcome macro obstacles like global warming. Of course, he also covers the basics of money handling from the perspective of the Fed, all the normal 101 stuff too, but he skips the math and keeps things light. There’s a nice pitch in there supporting globalization too, for anyone that might still be against it, I recommend you pick this up for that alone.

I’m already disinterested in this book, so I’m going to be short and sweet in my review.

It’s kind of scatterbrained. It’s almost autobiographical in that it’s all about Tim Ferris and all the awesome things he’s done. He does his best to give lots of advice, some of it is practical and some of it is over the top.

The entire book is based around ways you can do less. Basically you come up with some side project that makes income, then you hand off all responsibility over managing that income on someone else and become a hands-off owner. This allows you to go “live the dream” doing whatever you’d like (he has plenty of advice here too)

He throws in random pickup advice (or “Comfort challenges” as he puts it):
—Maintain eye contact
—Ask for phone numbers
—Say no to everything for a day


There are insightful quotes beginning every chapter, which i did enjoy.

“Meetings are an addictive highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.” — Dave Barry

“If you must play, decide on 3 things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.” — Chinese Proverb


He also has some insightful task management tips:

Parkinson’s Law:
Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important.

Ask yourself tough questions:
If you had a heart attack and had to work only 2 hours a day (or week), what would you do?

Prioritize tomorrow’s to do list today.


He shares my despise for distractions, and will avoid meetings at all cost, insisting instead that people send him an email outlining the need for the meeting and producing a schedule for it. This forces people to get around some red tape (which they won’t do if the meeting isn’t absolutely necessary), and makes most meetings avoidable by answering the concerns completely by email.

It was a fast read, and I wasn’t that interested in it, but at least it was exactly what I thought it was when I got into it.

The collection of stories presented in this book were truly an inspiration. For those of you unfamiliar with the author, Feynman is a Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist. He was on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos and helped to develop the atomic bomb. He went on to profess physics at Cornell, and contributed meaningfully in several other fields.

The stories range from fixing radios as a boy, dealing with hazing when he joined his fraternity, picking safes to obtain confidential documents at Los Alamos, learning how to play the drums, to enjoying hallucinations in a sensory depravation chamber.

Feynman was an amazing person, and this book certainly illustrates it. Throughout, Feynman stresses an important point in education that no one seems to appreciate to this day. When educating, it’s equally important to understand what the content means as it is to understand the content. He gives an example of memorizing a physical law, say of light reflection, without knowing what kinds of real things the law applies to.

One of his stories is actually spent reviewing science texts for elementary students. Needless to say he ends up quite frustrated.

Overall, it was an interesting read. Although Feynman is quite modest in his story telling, a book about such an amazing man still came off as tooting his horn.

An introduction to statistics for the layman.

The book begins with some fun statistical findings, which I enjoy. It was reminiscent of Freakonomics (which Levitt co-authored) in that sense. The only thing it adds to it is a verbose explanation of how “super crunching,” a.k.a. statistical analysis, is changing the world by making better predictions than a human expert would. About 10% better, actually.

The book was way less entertaining than Freakonomics because it actually tried to explain regressions and confidence intervals. Those are like the first things they teach you in an introductory stats class. I believe that most people don’t take statistics classes, but anyone remotely interested in this book would’ve taken one. I think this book pretty much missed its mark here. By the end, I was getting a little annoyed at being treated like a dolt.

This book is essentially about some of the movers and shakers in Web 2.0, focusing particularly on the human fallout from Paypal.

Having had the privilege to meet the author of this book in person, let me start by saying that she’s a charming woman who has a bit of a web2.0 personality herself. She’s online at @sarahcuda (twitter), and http://www.sarahlacy.com/. I was favored enough to have a few drinks on her dime, but that won’t tarnish my review. Promise.

The book main stages characters like Max Levchin (Paypal, Slide), Peter Theil (Paypal, Clarion Capital), Marc Andreesen (Netscape, LoudCloud, Ning), Reid Hoffman (Paypal, LinkedIn), Ben Trott (Six Apart), Zachary Nelson (Oracle, McAfee, NetSuite), Jeremy Stoppleman (Paypal, Yelp), and Russel Simmons (Paypal, Yelp).

Most, if not all, of those men are worth many millions of dollars.

I’m not prone to becoming starstruck, so for much of the book I was actually a little bored. I already knew much of the history of the web, version 2.0 included, so that aspect wasn’t particularly new to me. I have even met a few people from that list just in the normal business dealings of my job. Given those advantages and shortcomings I have toward fully appreciating Lacy’s book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good makes a great introduction to the web2.0 world. Lacy goes into a fair amount of detail about the personality traits of these successful entrepreneurs, so I feel like I know each of them a little better. I have never seen a better aggregation of the relationships between the markedly successful people of the internet.

The point I most appreciated was tangential to the main storyline and only received a few pages of attention. At the beginning of the epilogue she discusses the mental impact of economic bubble collapses. Research conducted regarding the tech bubble has shown that of the companies funded at the peak (1999), 50% were still around 5 years later. That’s better odds than the restaurant business. The effects of the bubble bursting were far more psychological than economic.

Overall, I wouldn’t say I learned much that’ll be useful day to day. The points I did pick up made the read worthwhile. If you’re interested in getting closer to the stars of silicon valley, then I highly recommend it.

This is my first exposure to Heinlein, and I must say, I’m impressed. The characters developed throughout are compelling and the dialogue has moments of sheer genius. The intelligence and wit expressed by the author through his characters is fantastic. This is one of few science fiction books that forces you to question the world as it stands.

I found a lot of my thoughts mirrored back to me as I was reading, albeit expressed much more eloquently by Heinlein than I would’ve put them myself.  Jubal Harshaw, arguably the main character of the story, has a lot in common with me with regard to personal philosophies.

Here are a couple quotes of his that give you some idea of his attitudes.

“Customs, morals - is there a difference? Woman, do you realize what you are doing? Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don’t you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn’t have it.”

“Sit back down—and for God’s sake quit trying to be as nasty as I am; you don’t have my years of practice. Now let me get something straight: you are not in my debt. You can’t be. Impossible—because I never do anything I don’t want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it. So please don’t invent a debt that does not exist, or before you know it you will be trying to feel gratitude—and that is the treacherous first step downward to complete moral degradation.”

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

To top that off he’s a lawyer, a doctor, a pompous jackass, an art snob, and a renowned author. Basically he’s my idol.

I wish I could tell you more, but it would ruin the book. Suffice it to say, it’s a story about a man from mars. And that doesn’t do it any justice. I highly recommend it.

This review is not for you if you:
a) Like baseball for its intricacies
b) Like the Oakland A’s

Feel free to stop reading now if you met any of the above criteria.

My first experience with this book, buying it, was a bad one. It was among the recommended industry reading, straight from my CEO, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I looked all over the business section and wandered the store noticing a few other titles that looked way more interesting including the infamous “Handbook for the Limbless” and the bestseller “The Romance of Cement.” When I finally found it it was in the Baseball section. Who knew that bookstores had baseball sections? Certainly not me. At this point that I knew this book was a bad idea. Baseball is, after all, the most boring sport ever invented. The only thing that could possibly be worse than sitting through an entire baseball game is READING about a baseball game.

Nevertheless, I had a plane ride home and needed to kill the time somehow.

300 pages later I can summarize the book in 4 sentences.

Statistics are a better indication of quality than isolated observations, which is why baseball scouting is flawed. Nobody in MLB wants to pay attention to statistics because they either aren’t running a business or they’re too stuck in their ways to let anything like a few measly numbers get in the way of their decisions. This creates market inefficiencies where players with good statistics are undervalued just because they don’t look good, and these inefficiencies can be exploited. Oh, and Billy Beane is the shit.

That was the book. Don’t bother reading it.


Obviously the important part here for my industry is that market inefficiencies can be detected through statistical analysis. That’s all well and good, except the analysis is only mentioned as abstract revelations that Ivy league graduates experience. Hardly revolutionary. Next up is Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, which looks more useful already, and I’ve just seen the cover.

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, is a heartfelt tale about the author’s (Neil Strauss) experiences joining and working his way up the chain of the pickup community. It describes in exquisite detail the boons of mastering this art, but stresses the debilitating effects that this exploitative behavior causes. The book reads like a good soap opera, constant drama engulfs all the characters, and we readers are entertained by their successes and sympathize with their failures.

Why the hell am I reading this?
Good question, I’m glad you asked. Literally 5 unrelated people recommended it to me. Two of those were after I broke up with my girlfriend, and one of those probably thought this would help my game, but we’ll get into that shortly. Anyway, when 5 respectable sources tell you to do something, it’s usually worth looking into.

The premise:
There are practice-able routines and actions that can get women to date you (AND put out). Does it work? I bet it does. Their strategy is impeccable. Approach indirectly, directly is too confrontational; we don’t want them on the defensive. “Open” them, it doesn’t really matter how. Ask a question, say something provocative, whatever, just start a dialogue. Then demonstrate value. This can be anything, but the examples in the book were what turned me off. They have gimmicks: ESP tests (people pick 7 70% of the time when choosing a number between 1 and 10), rune readings, “best friend tests”, magic tricks, and other skills that basically amount to reading body language. No doubt these things require practice, but they’re too gimmicky to appeal to me. After you’ve established value, which you usually do while ignoring your target (people want what they can’t have), then you finally show interest, isolate her, establish sexual tension, and go in for a kiss. Succeeding in that, she’s bound to give you at least a phone number. There are several other techniques in the book about escalating situations physically. One of them involves biting her wrist, then her neck, then theoretically she bites you back, and you make out. There’re even steps on how to get her to agree to sleep with you once she’s at your place and you’re being physical. I believe some of them would work too—on almost anyone.

My issues:
It’s always hard to put what I want in a woman succinctly. Any given list of adjectives is going to be deficient somehow. Nevertheless, here’s one anyway. Intelligent, independent, beautiful, witty, stable, fun, outgoing, confident…If you’re a woman like that, I don’t think you’d fall for a lot of the routines in this book. Then again, maybe you would, just because some of them are interesting and fun. That’s the thing though, it would just be for fun. The people that use these routines and become embedded in this society do so because they gain a sense of self worth through success with women.
I think many women don’t realize it, but confidence is easy to fake. It’s easy to tell with some people: (ex-)jocks with 17 popped collars, that guy saying whatever he can to be the center of attention, people that buy tons of drinks for everyone around them to be the center of the party—These are people that need attention, they need their ego stroked to feel worthwhile. That’s not the pickup artist approach. Being cocky-funny and “peacocking” (the act of wearing something ridiculous to attract attention and show you can pull it off) are much more subtle ways to exude confidence. Those are things I’ve done before, though I am by no means well practiced. I like to think that women can see through the former type of confidence, though experience has showed me differently, and I’m certain most women can’t see through the latter. That confidence—being the alpha male of a group—is what will make a woman pick you out of a crowd.
If that confidence is real, it stems not from the constant encouragement of others, nor even success with women, but from having a high self esteem. People with a high self-esteem don’t need to delve deeply into pickup art, because they aren’t validated by women.
Nevertheless, there are a few points to take away that may improve your social and sex lives.


Takeaway points:
Grow a pair. I thought I was blunt already, but I’m not nearly forward enough. Pay attention to subtle signs from people you’re flirting with, and open opportunities for them to give you more. One of the recommended indicators of interest pushed is to squeeze her hand. If she squeezes back, she’s into you. There’s a lot of social overlap with books like Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Establish rapport, get them saying ‘yes’ immediately, etc. Basically I take a much too laid back role in flirting. I’ll work on it.
“…a man never chooses a woman. All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.”

I also need to work on openers and anecdotes. I need a few interesting stories I can tell that’ll be fun for anyone. Openers could even be questions applicable to my own life, that way it’s way less shady than a completely fake routine. Also, telling girls that aren’t in tech that I’m a computer scientist seems to be a huge turnoff. I promise, I’m still cool. I need a way to establish that coolness before they get a chance to ask me what I do.

The author also stresses how people that are in “the game” for long periods of time lose their respect for women. Girls just become machines that respond certain ways to certain routines. They debase them to make rejections hurt less, and find it hard to establish meaningful relationships. The author has an epiphany when dealing with his best friend, “Perhaps it was really shared emotion and experience that creates relationships.”
I don’t want to lose my respect for women—some of my most meaningful relationships have been with women, and that’s not something I’d give up.