Category: Reading List
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Sam Harris’ Waking Up Podcast – What Happened to Liberalism?
“The united front of the [American] left broke down over identity issues… There was a retreat to the universities… People on the left really abandoned electoral politics and instead develop this idea that all social change happens through social movements that are tied to identity. And we ended up with gender theory and race theory…
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This Week in Startups – Casey Winters and Jason Calicanis talk about CAC and Planning Sustainable Growth
In this great episode, Casey and Jason go in depth on topics around customer acquisition cost and how to measure the sustainability of your product or service’s key actions. This feeds into a great conversation about what steps to take before a growth phase to make sure you can survive it. This leads into a…
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❤️ Robert Greene – The 48 Laws of Power
This book was recommended by a friend. He said it reminded him of a shared favorite of ours, How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It reminds me of The Game by Neil Strauss. This book could be used for great evil, or for good. And like The Game, it will certainly…
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❤️ Tim Ferriss – The Four Hour Work Week
A few years ago, I made an unusual friend. He was a traveling houseless graphic designer who worked very little and made far more money than I did. Everything he owned fit into a small backpack, and he was essentially in permanent vacation mode, while working online whenever he wanted to. He introduced many interesting…
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❤️ Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy – The Ethical Slut
At burning man last year, I attended a wedding. There is some sweet 360 footage in a recent post about burning man. The bride and groom gave unusual vows, promising to respect and never try to change one-another rather than the traditional vow of forsaking all others. And there were other differences from the traditional…
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💩 Chris Guillebeau – The $100 Startup
This book is a great primer on bootstrapping what it calls a “micro-business,” or a one-person business. There are lots of great tips about how to build the first relationships and focus on creating value for your product or service. There is also some focus on how to identify the business that will fit well with your…
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Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged
I first read this book in 2010. It was a gift from the senior development engineer at Build.com during a series of interviews I had there. It is the kind of book that gives you a lot more questions than answers. There is a knife’s edge today which I feel myself balancing on. On one…
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[Documentary] Adam Curtis – HyperNormalisation
Adam Curtis is an amazing documentarian and this is his best work yet. HyperNormalisation focuses on the culture in the USSR at the end. Curtis describes the meaning behind the title, “…everyone knew that the system in place wasn’t working and that the politicians didn’t believe it any longer. Yet at the same time, because they…
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[Documentary] Adam Curtis – All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
Years ago, I came across this documentary series and was struck by its intense and unusual style. Adam Curtis has become one of my favorite documentarians. Luckily for me, he is prolific. His new documentary Hypernormalisation is one of his best. All of his work is about the interplay between power and economics and politics.…
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Neil Strauss – The Game
This is a book about a group of terrible people. A few months ago, I was sitting in a cafe drinking some coffee, when I noticed an odd-looking man reading this book. I Googled the title, and found that it was a New York Times nonfiction best seller about an investigative journalist infiltrating the pickup…