This book wasn’t even on my radar until I grabbed a coffee with my friend Charlie Tillinghast. He mentioned it covered some of the backstory behind how he started Factal, so naturally, I picked up a copy.

While I’m glad I bought it for the few pages featuring Charlie, that’s where the highlights end.

To be honest, the writing style is rough. The whole thing reads like a giant, bulleted “To-Do” list for entrepreneurs, but without any real “aha” moments. Even worse, it occasionally felt like an unabashed marketing brochure for the author’s other books and articles.

The book is packed with stories about real founders, but it consistently chooses surface-level skimming over deep, actionable insights. There were two notable exceptions—Titan Casket by Scott Ginsberg and, to a lesser extent, Seemore Meats and Veggies by Cara Nicoletti—where the storytelling actually had some meat on the bone.

On the bright side? It’s a quick 180 pages with a font so large I could probably read it from across the room in good lighting.

Unless you’re looking for a specific anecdote about a friend, I’d skip this one.

For some time now, I have had this urge to learn a bit about Quantum Physics. Well, maybe it started when a recruiter reached out to me about a CEO job at a quantum computing company on the East Coast. I was intrigued, to say the least. I had no qualifications whatsoever. Turns out, he had seen me run a company called Quantum Spatial (a geospatial company)… and you can put the rest of the story together.

Anyway, I finally searched the internet a bit and picked up this book. I would not recommend it. It is too basic. Most of the book could have fit into 10 pages. If any of you know a good book on this subject for a beginner like me, please do let me know.

I had picked up this book at an airport store on my way to Uruguay. I was impressed by another of his books – Think Again. This one did not disappoint either.

He dives into how to bring out the potential in every human being, of oneself, as well as bringing the same out in others. In the process, he breaks down a few myths and misperceptions.

The biggest one is how we judge and elevate people based on peak performance, not the journey there. The point is that if you want to understand a person’s full potential, it is not about the peak reached but about how much one has traversed to get there.

For oneself, he asserts that we stop learning as we grow up because we are unwilling to embrace the awkwardness of learning. Imagine picking up a new language. We wait to become experts before we feel ready to talk to native speakers. But the process of becoming an expert goes right through the heart of talking to native speakers while you are learning – and in the process overcoming the fear of making mistakes and being awkward.

He also asserts that to achieve full potential, one needs to accept imperfection. (the art of Wabi Sabi). Trying to be perfect will lead one down a very narrow path instead of developing new ones. He quotes this art of balancing the flawed with the flawless in words that appealed to me:

“There is a crack, crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

Another important concept he stresses is that the path to full potential will not be linear. You will get stuck, have to back out, and then seek alternate paths. If you are not getting stuck, you are not on a path of full potential. “The roundabout path to forward progress”, as he says.

When it comes to helping others reach their full potential, he has a couple of important pieces of advice for all leaders. First, focus on what makes a great team, and it is not the same as putting great individuals together. The other is to judge a person’s character more than their talent. Talent sets the floor, but character sets the ceiling.

What is character? The author says that character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition. Your basic instinct for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.

Some interesting direct quotes:

“Getting better is a worthy accomplishment in and of itself.”
“Ambition is the outcome you want to achieve. Aspiration is the person you hope to become.”
“Teaching is a surprisingly powerful method of learning.”

I forget how I landed up with this book. I think I was reading an article in The Economist that mentioned this book.

It is a fascinating book to understand what causes some of the grave ills of social media. I used to see all the young kids constantly on their phones. But from The Economist article, I learnt that constant social media doomscrolling is affecting the older generation even worse.

The author does not delve very deep into certain aspects of psychiatric issues caused by social media, like loneliness, anxiety, and so on. Instead, he focuses much more on how social media causes mass hysteria around conspiracy theories and deep echo chambers, to the point that ordinary people are becoming unhinged from reality.

He has studied Facebook and YouTube in the greatest detail. Interestingly, not much analysis of TikTok was presented, but he suggests that its algorithms are doing exactly the same.

It stems from the social media company single-mindedly chasing screen time – or the user’s attention. This is clearly driven by profit motives (ad revenue is proportional to the time you spend on an app or site).

As a second step, the social media companies created algorithms to feed you more stuff that they deem will keep you on the screen. The algorithms have developed this magic by constantly studying the behavior of millions of human beings. In and of itself, it does not have any value judgment – but a very good idea – based on data, what will make you stay on the screen.

And the third part is the foible of us human beings. We are attracted to salacious news items. We discount data that goes against our beliefs and instead are likely to believe more data that supports our belief – even after we are told that the data source is spurious!! And if enough people say it, we take it as a cardinal truth.

All this, when done on a large scale – where no human being can truly understand the AI algorithm’s complexity anymore – leads to extreme behavior from human beings. To the point, people have killed people – and in extreme cases, genocides like that in Myanmar – purely based on believing something to be true since the algorithms kept feeding one kind of item only.

The author has a strong point of view: owners of social media need to bear significant responsibility for this and should be held accountable. The owners, on the other hand, claim that it would be a violation of free speech. They have sometimes taken action when faced with political or social pressure, but things regressed soon after.

I think the problem manifestation is clear (people are killing people, and human beings are suffering from deep psychological issues – this is undeniable). However, the solution is equally unclear. In fact, the author does not seem to offer any elegant solution beyond suggesting that we hold social media owners responsible for what their algorithms do.

I would recommend reading this book.

By: Chris Miller

A few weeks back, when I was in Dallas, I got a chance to meet up with my friend from yesteryears – Rashmi Mathur. She has been an executive at Texas Instruments (TI) for over three decades. We were discussing the state of TI today and, in general, the state of chip manufacturing worldwide. I find her very engaging in conversation.

She encouraged me to read this book. This was a great read if any of you are interested in the science, manufacturing, or geopolitical realities of chip-making.

The ubiquitousness of the humble chip is not readily realised by us. Most everything we use today has some chips in it – from coffee maker to dishwasher to remote to some of the blinking Christmas lights I put on yesterday. Most cars have 1,000 to 3,500 chips in them. Every year, the world produces more than 1.2 trillion chips!! That is like 150 chips per man, woman, and child… every year!!

Some of the more fascinating things I learnt included the fact that TSMC has technology that can create those layers on the chips that are 2 atoms thick! Two atoms!! That is a fraction of what the coronavirus looked like.

The book takes the reader through the history of chip making and how concentrated chip manufacturers and the manufacturers of machinery (such as lithography) used by chip manufacturers are. Sometimes, there is only one or two such manufacturers.

The most absorbing part was understanding the race between China and the USA on the chip front. And how Taiwan is squarely in the middle of all this.

The only disappointing part for me is that the book, while explaining the stranglehold the USA has on certain parts of chip manufacturing (e.g. software for those machines), did not delve into how China has quietly built up a monopoly on the rare earth minerals (or rather the refineries for those minerals) that are required for chip making. And successfully used that recently to shake off some US tariff threats on the chip trading front.

Would certainly recommend this book.

This book is a bit different from Gladwell’s other books. In fact, the book is an anthology of nineteen real-life stories in which the author seeks to draw out key lessons and insights.

Part One is all about how obsessives, pioneers, and other varieties of minor genius create endurable products and ideas. This goes from Chop-a-matic to women’s hair dye, birth control pills, and how dogs are tamed. There is a chapter about Nassim Taleb and how he was able to get past our biases about applying agency to outcomes.

Part Two is about theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses. This part was a bit more intriguing to me. In the Enron story, the author shows how, unlike the Watergate scandal, Enron was not trying to hide anything. Everything was there in the 10-Qs and 10-Ks. However, it was beyond the understanding of any normal investor to comprehend the complexities of the filings. There was nobody on Wall Street who would actually read them up and break them down for the normal investor. This is a peril of too much information.

Another interesting story demonstrates how the homeless problem can be solved (and has been in certain cities) in a way that costs far less than keeping them on the street. But it is nearly impossible to do so because the solution would run counter to our considered moral and political principles.

Part Three is about personality, character, and intelligence. The author delves into data showing that the largest value-creating companies were actually started by people past their mid-40s, yet we somehow equate genius with precocity. My favorite topic was how our interviewing process never gets the information we really need to hire a candidate.

But my absolute favorite chapter is “Are smart people overrated?”. To be fair, I like it so much because it aligns with my beliefs. I have picked many a losing argument with self-styled talent experts, board members, and peer groups on this topic. So, there is that bit of bias from personal experience on my side there.

I enjoyed reading the book. I think you will too.

By Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee

I picked this book up after reading a review in The Economist. It has been a fascinating read for me. If nothing else, it has shattered many of my assumptions and beliefs about COVID, including the origin and containment measures.

At the core, the two political analysts discuss how healthcare experts assumed a significant role in public policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in the adoption of social measures that were highly focused on saving every single life – often with data that was known to be incorrect – instead of considering the larger harm it would cause to the population, both in the short term and in the long term.

It also highlights how the media and journalists abandoned their duty to question decisions and instead joined in vilifying anyone who held an opposing viewpoint. They reserve their harshest comments for scientists and health experts, who often resorted to name-calling any other scientist or health expert who might have cast doubts. Which, the authors point out, goes against the basic definition of science.

The authors first point out that, before COVID-19 actually hit, how to deal with a viral pandemic was well studied and documented as late as 2019 by multiple agencies worldwide. Without fail, each had concluded that measures such as masks, social lockdowns, and the like would not work. It has not, in the past, either. The virus, once it reaches community spread, can only be dealt with by achieving herd immunity. Like it or not, it will be exposed to everyone. Till a vaccination could be quickly made, such measures of masking and isolation were to target those who were most likely to be fatally affected. This included the old and folks with certain medical histories. This would allow prioritization of valuable medical resources and “flatten the curve”.

For the first few days, that was indeed the response. The authors then detail how China’s touting of the success of shutting down the Wuhan district and then the WHO writing glowingly about it (which the authors contend did not take into account open and truthful data), and then Italy – the first Western country – shutting the country down, everybody threw their manuals away and followed suit.
This, the authors say, was because of a mistaken goal of trying to save every single life at an enormous price to the community. That price is not only about taking personal freedoms away but also about the vast economic and mental health costs that the world will reel thru for decades. The authors believe that health officials aiming for “no lives lost” is a commendable goal. But they are not the ones to make public policy. That has to be done by elected officials with input from many experts, including those outside of health, as well as experts with opposing views. After all, the people elect officials, not elites, to tell them the rules.

The authors outline the significant costs that society is currently bearing. They are fairly scathing about the “elites” (”laptop workers”) who turned a blind eye to the “essential workers” who still had to go to work, and a vast majority of lower-income people who lost their livelihood, temporarily supported by government dole out, and continue to struggle today. They talk about how people died alone and not surrounded by their loved ones, how families could not be around the final rites of their loved ones, and how the mental health of a whole generation of kids has been permanently damaged.

The authors take readers through a wealth of interesting history – how the lab theory of origin was actively shut down by certain powers in the health field, despite severe doubts from others. They discuss how it was widely known that masks were of virtually no use against this particular virus – certainly not in the way most citizens were using them. They further take us through how there was overwhelming data about the effectiveness of the first vaccination, but none of the booster doses have been proven to be of that level of fidelity.

The authors painstakingly take us through the data of red states versus blue states. And how the political leaning of folks led to the timing of the measures. Red states, almost without fail, opened up faster but were far slower in vaccinations. Governors of red and blue states differed markedly in their responses, resulting in significantly different outcomes in terms of COVID-19 cases and deaths. And yet, virtually all of them returned to power with significant margins.

Remember Sweden? They were vilified for not taking what was then considered the appropriate steps. The topic was hotly contested there, too. However, they adhered to the original game plan. As a result, while they initially took a larger hit than most other countries, in the end, all their statistics (until vaccinations were available) turned out to be the same as those of others. Just like the original handbook on pandemic has predicted!! And they today have far fewer cases of economic displacement or mental health issues compared to the beginning of the pandemic.

Ultimately, the authors are careful to point out that mistakes are often made during the heat of the moment. And not everybody has the same way of looking at an event. However, now that we are much separated from the pandemic, there needs to be a national debate. If not, they are afraid that we will commit the same mistakes of leaving public policy to elite experts in a field, and worse, shut down each other without listening to the other side of the debate. Worse, all in the name of “science”!

A must-read, in my opinion.

I was listening to this Harvard professor’s Ted Talk on the difficulties of having engaging conversations and how to overcome some of them. Picked her book up which is essentially a research into what makes conversations interesting and what does not. A lot of the input is from simulated exercises of speed dating.

There are some interesting things to pick up from the book no doubt. Some of the pointers, I am sure, we are all aware of but the book serves as a good reminder. To finish the whole book though, you really need to be interested in the science behind conversations. Which can quickly turn to be fairly dry.

Some interesting things I learnt:

1. Most of us think our conversations are worse than they actually are!
2. A good conversation is usually devoid of “strong opinions”
3. Conversation, at the end of the day is a huge coordination game that requires a staggering amount of simply guessing the other party’s mind.
4. The name of the book is actually an acronym for what the author says makes for a good conversation – Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness
5. Topic : The author says prepping for conversation is the best option. Most would object to this might becoming rehearsed but she cites a lot of research to prove otherwise. If not anything else, it helps, per her, in switching up when the conversation gets stuck or go “up” and “down” in the pyramid of familiarity as the conversation progresses.
6. Asking: Even insincere questions is a form of caring. No boomer asking or repeated questions. Follow up questions are most engaging.
7. People who ask more questions are better liked.
8. This is interesting: Researchers never found any evidence that asking sensitive questions is more dangerous than asking benign ones!
9. Levity: Find the fun, rather than trying to be funny. Compliment effusively. Laugh
10. We massively underestimate the positive impact of compliments and overestimate how bothered or uncomfortable they can make somebody.
11. Kindness: This takes work. Speak respectfully and listen responsively.
12. Calling people by their names (or by other preferred forms of address) matters tremendously!
13. Great listening is not to be equated with silence and attention. Great listening is expressed through verbal response.
14. Group Conversations: These are more tricky. There are fluid status hierarchies in topic to topic. Take a stewardship mindset.

I had picked up this book randomly at an airport bookstore. Did not have much expectations. Turned out to be a fairly interesting one. Won’t go to the extent of recommending this book but if you come across one, it is a good read. A few good observations and insights from the author.

This is more of a scientific look at what is optimism and anecdotes of how optimism made a difference in the world. It certainly is not about how you can be an optimist. On that point, the second part of the subtitle is a bit misleading. This is no self help book.

The author starts with his personal tragedy of losing his wife at a very young age after their first and only pregnancy. From there it dives straight into why “Optimism is the only true moral courage” (quote from Shackelton and his incredible voyage of getting lost and yet getting every person back home alive – which included going back to an uninhabited island to retrieve the ones that had to stay back).

An interesting concept is that of “optimism gap”. People tend to be more optimistic about their personal future but far less of that of the society. Even more interesting find is that the richer the country, the larger the gap! Interestingly, we extend that optimism to those close to us but it weakens as we go further. (Lawyers are an exception to this!! They see their futures more closely tied to the world’s futures)

“Optimism bias” is built into most human beings. Our expectations – even when given data on reality – supersedes most all likely scenarios. In fact, we tend to be more optimistic on things that are desirable, mundane or controllable.

So, what is the case for an essentially positive illusion that optimism is? The author argues that while optimism may not make the outcomes better (too many uncontrollable variables), it will make you better able to deal with them without becoming stressed. Upon reflection, I concur with this when I think about friends and colleagues in my life.

Another way of looking at it was articulated by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci who was imprisoned by Mussolini and suffered appallingly. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The ability to see the world for what it is and press on anyways.”

A few more interesting learnings for me –

(*) We tend to pay more attention to information when it holds positive implications for our futures and less when it has negative

(*) Mark Zuckerberg quote – “Optimists tend to be successful; pessimists tend to be right!”

(*) Research has shown that while, in general, people with higher incomes are happier than poorer people at any given time, they don’t get any happier if there’s any general increase in income. It seems that our happiness is less about how much we make but more about how much we make in comparison to people around us!

(*) “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Towards the end of the book, the author dives deep about two very relevant topics of today – AI and Climate warming. I am not sure he did a good job of drawing the connection of his discussions to the topic de jure.

P.S. There is an irritating part where a few paragraphs are repeated word for word in two different chapters. Seems like an editing snafu.

This is a near 400 page book that is a must read, in my opinion, for every person. Young or old. One of the better books which takes a stab at trying to make sense of what is going on in the world. Not that the conclusions are going to be any less scary. But it frames all the changes in the world going on in a thoughtful framework.

Of the various systems – fascism, communism and liberalism, only the last had survived. First one died after Second World War. Second died with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But liberalism is also dying now. Ecological collapse and technological disruption (that brought globalization) has out sped liberalism. We know the system is not working but we do not know what the new system will be. Across the whole world, we are seeing this struggle against liberalism. While different people/country are taking different approaches all are agreed on good international relations and are equally against immigration.

The scariest prediction the author makes is that technology will concentrate wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer that will create massive new “useless” class. This will lead to social and political upheavals the likes of which we have never seen before.

We are looking at an era where technology changes will need people to continuously retool themselves. In theory, it sounds good. In practice, that is impossible. The emotional cost of realizing one does not have a job and skills are useless and needs to start re-learning… over and over again will give rise to mental issues that is going to throw the society into turmoils it has not seen.

The author gets into another controversial topic. It starts with the theory that democracy is a superior system because it gives everybody a choice to rationally decide what is best for them. And then goes to prove that the “rational” part is overblown. We are not rational at all and certainly most of us are not knowledgeable enough to know what is best for us. Richard Dawkins – the famous evolutionist – when asked about Brexit had asked the interviewer a head scratcher – “why are you asking me to vote? I am not an economist. I am not an expert on this. I want experts to tell me what is good for me.”. In the end, the author says, we vote the way we “feel” not what we “know” to be best for us.

One observation I am personally very aligned with the author is the fallacy in believing in what the media says. I get into regular debates with the TikTok generation on this. Media, as the author points out is not about truth. It is about getting your attention. Getting your eyeballs is what makes them money. The data they gather on you when you are paying attention to what they are saying is what is then sold to advertisers and others. You would do the same if owned a media channel (or were an influencer or had your podcast) – provided you wanted to make money off it.

The big question about AI and super accelerated technology is this… who gets to own “Big Data”? The author suggests both Big Tech and Government are extremely bad choices. Government slightly more so.

And this only concludes the first part of the five part book. If this has intrigued you, you will love the rest of the book too.