I was drawn to this book one fine day, listening to an interview given by the author – a Nobel Laureate – with Neil deGrasse Tyson in the SpaceTalk show.

A fascinating thing about death that I have observed is that while this is the one given thing – perhaps the only given thing – moment we are born, we are, as individuals and as a group, a bit unwilling to talk about it. Trying to bring the topic up with my own family, even in the context of planning out what happens after my death, I immediately face angry demands of why I would bring up that topic. A Martian would have observed these discussions and concluded that we do not talk about death, perhaps because not talking about it will make it go away.

In the interview, Venki starts by asking, “What is death?” This seemingly innocuous question has some interesting facets. We have none of the cells we were born with. Are we dead? We have cases of reviving people whose hearts had stopped. Were they dead? In fact, Venki goes on to expound on the deaths of cells and tissues, simple animals, human beings, and then takes on the deaths of towns, villages, countries, and civilizations.

This book digs into the physiological causes of death. Quite paradoxically, after spending centuries and billions of dollars, while we understand a lot about what happens to our bodies at the sub-cellular level – and that has given rise to great medicines – we are still not entirely on the up and up about what really causes aging.

That said, we have come to understand that the same mechanism that prevents cancer also gives rise to aging. Evolution has made sure that the cancer-preventing mechanism dominates in our youth when we can reproduce, even if it comes at the cost of aging and dying when we cannot.

The author is fairly down on attempts by humans (he is particularly tough on the rich – especially the Silicon Valley moguls) who are trying to live forever. Even if it were possible – and he expressly believes this cannot be true – he points out the troubles it will cause to society, the economy, and one’s own quality of life. Living forever is not the same as setting the clock back. You are not going to be in your 20s again. In fact, he points out that we have doubled our life expectancy in the last century. We are not exactly that happy with the extra time we have!

But, what blew me away was the origin of the mitochondria, which is central to aging.

One of the finest philosophical comments when paraphrasing another author is “Life is an interruption in an eternity of personal nonexistence.”

Some of the other interesting thoughts that caught my attention.

* It is a curious facet of human psychology that even if we accept that we ourselves will be gone, we feel a strong need to be remembered.

* Unlike humans, most insects and grain crops reproduce only once.

* Natural selection rarely asks for the good of the species or even groups. It is entirely focused on an individual’s fitness – defined by the ability to reproduce.

* Menopause is a curious phenomenon unique to humans, mostly. Why such an abrupt change in a female from being able to reproduce to not being able to is not fully understood.

* Mammals typically have roughly the same number of heartbeats over their lifetime – about 1.5 billion. Humans did too. Till we figured out in the last century how to double our lifespan with the aid of hygiene and medical science. Humans were the same, except that in the last 100 years, our lifespan has doubled.

* DNA’s damage response is a balance between cancer and aging. It is a mechanism that has evolved to benefit early in our life – when we are likely to pass our genes, even if it costs us later.

* Larger species generally live longer than smaller ones because they have slower metabolisms and can also escape predation. But within species, smaller breeds generally live longer than larger ones. This might have something to do with how much growth hormone they make.

* There is strong evidence that damage to our mitochondrial DNA is an important factor in aging. Mitochondria themselves are the evolutionary descendants of a bacterium that was swallowed by a single-celled organism. Over millions of years, the bacteria managed to transfer most of their genes into the host’s genome while retaining a few. The reason is not quite well understood.

* We inherit these mitochondria entirely from the mother’s side.

* Physical activity turns on some of the same pathways that stimulate mitochondrial production in tissues ranging from our muscles to our brains.

* Although the number of centenarians has grown in recent decades, the number of supercentenarians (110 years or older) has not changed and remains very small.

This book was referred to me by Prabasaj-da, and it continues my search to understand quantum theory a bit more than I ever have.

The book is structured like Galileo’s famous dialogue Two New Sciences — in fact, the subtitle is “A Galilean Dialogue.” There are three protagonists: Silvati, who champions quantum theory; Simplicio, who holds more firmly to classical physics; and Sagredo, the purportedly wise go-between.

Reviews in this format tend to be positive, but this conversational style doesn’t quite work for me. The exchanges sometimes felt twisted and conjured up unnaturally. A couple of times, Simplicio’s questions landed exactly on the thought I had in that moment — but those were the exceptions. I generally prefer reading prose and pausing to think on my own.

The content itself is solid. It dives into the questions any early learner like me will encounter in quantum physics. For that reason, I think it would shine as a group read — something to discuss together rather than work through alone.

It’s under 100 pages and an easy read.

“Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution”

I think it was John McGehee who recommended this book in a Facebook comment. I’m genuinely grateful to him, because this turned out to be a fantastic read. It’s especially insightful for a layperson like me. At times it does get confusing, but that’s the nature of the subject, not a failing of the author.

My biggest aha moment came when Rovelli explains that what we think of as an object’s properties are actually relative to the observer. If we could not observe something, we would not even think of it as having properties. Quantum physics started to feel a bit more approachable once I grasped this core idea: reality is made up of relations rather than objects.

The explanation of superposition, especially when it involves understanding entanglement between two objects from the perspective of a third observer, was harder to wrap my head around.

One thing I really enjoyed was how Rovelli weaves in the personal histories of the great physicists in this field. It adds a human touch to an otherwise abstract topic. In the second half of the book, he dives into philosophical debates, particularly between Lenin and Bogdanov, and questions like “What does meaning mean?” I’ll admit, I sometimes wondered what this had to do with quantum physics, but the writing is clear and engaging enough that I still enjoyed it.

There’s a striking line in the book: “I is a process, not an entity.” It takes a bit of thought to unpack. What we call the “self” isn’t really a fixed object, but a flow of sensations and feelings we experience in the moment.

My favorite quote, though, comes from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine. Rovelli uses it while discussing how we perceive the world. It’s not that we passively receive signals and then interpret them. The brain is constantly predicting, and the eyes mainly report deviations from those predictions. The quote goes:

“External perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination’.”

That one really stayed with me.

A few other memorable lines from the book:

“Abandoning assumptions that seem self-evident can lead to greater understanding.”

“Never express more clearly than you are able to think.” (Niels Bohr)

“However mysterious the mind-body problem might be for us, we should always remember that it is a solved problem for nature.”

“The external point of view does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it.”

I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

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.