Erik Hill Reviews

Just what I was hoping it would be

Revisado: 10-11-23

Now I know Elon has his die hard fans and his die hard critics. I don’t fall into either category and in reading this book, my goal was to observe more than it was to declare which side is right. And I was relieved in the process of reading that Walter Isaacson seemed to be in the same mindset. He recognized the genius and charisma of Musk, while at the same time pointing out how damaging his erratic behavior could be and how brutal he could be to the people around him. The recurring theme of the book was that Elon had an extreme personality that was addicted to drama, extreme risk, conflict, and never accepting any lukewarm solution, and without these sometimes hazardous traits, he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish everything he did.

It’s impossible to read this book and not recognize Elon Musk’s virtues. He’s clearly very intelligent and ambitious. It was amazing to me how much he feels that humanity is hanging in the balance of all of his decisions. Back when he was in worse financial times, his mindset was – if I don’t save Tesla, we’re never going to have an electric car. If I don’t save SpaceX, mankind will never be multiplanetary. It’s this kind of thinking that gave him energy and motivation. If the weight of the world wasn’t resting on his shoulders, then it wasn’t interesting enough to spend his time on.

Because of this single-minded focus, naturally his personal life was more chaotic. Multiple marriages, complicated relationship with his children, fistfights, verbal abuse, and general brutalness to people. Also, it seems pretty clear from reading this that he’s incapable of relaxing. It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter if humans were on Mars, if everything was run by solar power, if AI was helping people do unimaginably great things… whatever the situation, he would still be working hundred hour weeks and yelling at his staff. It’s almost like that friction is the oxygen that he needs to breath or he’ll suffocate.

One side effect of this book is that I feel like I have an Elon voice in my head. Am I really optimizing everything that I’m doing? Could I explain what I’m doing in detail if someone were to ask me? Also I’m generally a person that likes to set goals, but after reading this, I’ve noticed that my goals in the day are wildly more optimistic. I think there’s something to setting extreme goals because the extremity of the goal gives you a greater degree of motivation. Also, focus on the question. It’s a lot harder to come up with the question than the answer, because inevitably, there is bias in the question. I also thought a recurring theme seemed to be that he saw life as a game. He played and designed a lot of video games, and that was an exercise in finding the algorithm of the game and then optimizing. That’s his exact strategy with life.

One final thought experiment. I really want to know what the world would be like if everyone on the planet had the same “hard core” attitude of Elon Musk. I really wish I could watch that play out. I imagine the world on fire. The question is whether that’s a metaphorical fire or a literal fire. I still can’t decide.

Overall, this book delivers on the promise, even if the story is incomplete. It’s very in depth and paints an interesting picture of a very brilliant and flawed man.

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David Goggins = Determination Personified

Revisado: 12-15-22

This book contains the heart of what people who read self help books are looking for.

David Goggins is a retired SEAL, ultramarathon runner, public speaker, and the best selling author of Can’t Hurt Me, which came out in 2019. I read that when it came out and David Goggins certainly has a life worth taking a close look at.
His approach to life is that we are all capable of greatness, but that greatness can only be revealed through suffering and pushing yourself to keep going when you feel like you’re done. His books are loaded with superhuman stories where his body was failing him but he just kept running.

I think his superpower is his ability to reframe the situation that he’s in. A broken leg and 50 more miles to go in a race? That’s an opportunity to find an inner greatness in yourself by overcoming all obstacles. Then he would follow through while the rest of us would have quit a long time ago. Actually most of us would never have started in the first place.

I loved this book because he talks more about his mental techniques. At one point in the book he says, “If you can’t do it, invent for yourself someone who can.” And apparently his alter ego “Goggins” has filled that role. Goggins is the drill instructor that always stops him from quitting. Goggins is always there, pushing him to keep going. I think there’s a powerful lesson there in employing the psychological separation.

What makes David Goggins and his books unique are a certain rawness that can only come from living a very difficult life. A lot of self-help books to me sound like they were written by a businessman who is trying to sell books. This is just him exposing his soul on the page, making him almost impossible to ignore.

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Fascinating, but with blind spots

Revisado: 05-20-22

This is one of four books that I've recently read about the pandemic, the other three being Uncontrolled Spread, by Scott Gottlieb, A Plague upon Our House, by Scott Atlas, and Preventable, by Andy Slavitt. I liked the first half of the book. Both her and Gottlieb do a good job explaining the shortcomings of the CDC and the lack of national coordination. I also liked that she didn't blame everything on Trump, like the Andy Slavitt book. She argues that if we do that, we might think we've fixed the underlying issues by voting him out of office, but that's just wishful thinking. I think she brings up a lot of good points about initial testing and the logistics of managing a pandemic.

The fascinating part of this book to me was comparing it to the Scott Atlas book. These two people hate each other so much. Scott Atlas joined the task force late in the game, and Birx immediately saw him as a Trump devotee in a lab coat that gave Trump justification to ignore her suggestions. Actually, my impression from reading this book is that Scott Atlas is some combination of Alex Jones and Rasputin. He was a plague that descended on the white house, twisting people into believing that we could ignore the pandemic because of herd immunity. Towards the end, Birx said that she refused to go to any meeting that Scott Atlas was present in.

I think this was a missed opportunity for Dr. Birx, because she dismisses Scott Atlas as not only a crazy person, but the nexus of evil. If she really wanted to discredit him, she should have brought up his specific arguments. In Scott Atlas's book, he claims that she had an obsession with testing rates even though that was misleading for reasons a, b, and c. Instead of talking about a, b, and c, she attacks his credentials or misrepresents what he's saying. She should be making the best case that she possibly can for him and then explain why it's all wrong. Further blind spots that I wish she would have addressed in this very lengthy book: People dying with vs. people dying from covid, the realistic health costs of the lockdown measures, including missed treatments and screenings, and the reliability of the data source for the numbers that she's basing her models off of.

(To be fair to Dr. Birx, I think Scott Atlas's characterization of her is also absurd. I give her more credit for honestly doing what she thinks is in the best interest for the country.)

The second half she continues to beat the same drum about testing, masking, social distancing, and so on. I kept thinking, there were many phases to this pandemic. Initial infections, asymptomatic spread, mass cases, vaccines being available, delta, omicron... It seems that no matter what phase we're in, the answer is always the same. I can't help but think that her suggestions may be fitting in one stage, but is that really the answer through all stages? I'm skeptical.

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Man vs Rock - the 127 hour chess match

Revisado: 07-31-20

This is one of my favorite movies, though I have found that it’s hard to convince anyone to sit through a movie with this movie’s plot summary. An outdoorsman gets his arm stuck under a rock and after being mentally tortured for days, he decides to cut his arm off. It sounds dark and depressing, like an outdoor nature version of the movie Saw. Instead, both the movie and the book are the opposite of dark and depressing. This is a true story that happened in 2003 and I remember hearing about it at the time. It sounded so insane to me, like it was on some other world. I couldn’t imagine what would be going through a person’s mind to say, “Ok, I will now break my bones and cut through my arm with this dull blade.” I’m very glad that he survived and I’m even more glad that he wrote a book to walk us through his thought process.
Why is this an effective book? Through a plot device of something as simple as a giant rock, this story pins down (pun intended) the essence of being a person and finding a will to live. In reading the book, you can clearly see the stages that he goes through, starting with denial then proceeding to anger, despair, humor, acceptance, and ultimately an absolutely focused mind on walking out of that canyon. Even though you know he gets out, it works because all of his states of mind are so understandable. Through the ordeal, he has to stay calm and logical even though the most likely outcome of the situation is that he dies in these insignificant and obscure circumstances. How can you not panic? This is crucial in this primal chess match that he’s playing against the boulder on top of his arm. It’s a classic tale of man vs. nature constrained into a very stationary setting.
The book divides this story with flashbacks to how he came to love the outdoors. I found myself waiting for him to get back to the main story, and I would be okay with a truncated back story. However, I loved the sideways flashes to what his friends and family were doing at the time. Had they not acted, Aron most likely would have escaped from the boulder only to die at some other part of the canyon, which would have been the least satisfying conclusion I can imagine.
Aron describes the moment that he cut his arm off and stepped back from the rock as the happiest moment in his life. It’s a profound thought, and a profound insight into the nature of happiness itself. Maybe I should take back what I said at the beginning. Maybe the Saw franchise was on to something.

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A great way to pass the time on a plane ride

Revisado: 07-29-20

Cold Storage is about a rapidly growing fungus with superintelligence. After it kills a lot of people, they move it underground into a secret facility. Thirty years later, it escapes. The old man who dealt with the situation in the seventies has to come back and finish the job once and for all. Meanwhile, two unsuspecting teens go exploring and find themselves trapped in the complex where the fungus has started to take over.
Pros: 1) I liked the characters. They were believable even when the situation was absurd. 2) The plot flowed well, and it was an easy book to finish quickly. 3) The fungus was an interesting idea and I was highly entertained hearing the fungus’s reasoning on how to adapt to certain situations. 4) I laughed out loud in parts. David Koepp can be a funny guy.
Cons: 1) The fungus ultimately didn’t make sense. Why can the fungus do x, but not y? I asked myself that a lot through the book. 2) Even though I liked the characters, I didn’t feel that much suspense in the story. I knew that the main two teenagers weren’t going to face the gruesome deaths that the other characters faced, because that would violate the tone of the story that he had already established. In order for someone to die, the book needs to first demonstrate that they weren’t very good people to begin with. They you can feel okay about whatever they suffer through. That’s not going to happen when you take a deep personal dive into someone’s back story. 3) Going along with 2, I didn’t take the story that seriously. It’s a book with an obvious setup, enjoyable as it was. It ends along the lines that you probably thought it might.
Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll remember much from this book, even if I did have a lot of fun reading it.

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Mixed bag, but ultimately satisfying

Revisado: 07-26-20

I don’t have a lot of experience with Star Trek, but I have just enough to appreciate most of the inside jokes. I know that redshirts are the extras that go to dangerous places with the important characters. Their deaths are meaningless. Naturally, then, why not write a book from their perspective? What would it be like to be a redshirt, seeing your fellow redshirts die off in insane deaths that don’t make any sense? The main characters of this book realize this and they’re trying to steer clear of the captains on the ship, doing whatever they can not to be sent on away missions. It starts off funny, and I was laughing out loud.
Then they find someone who’s been hiding away for a while and he’s the crazy guy that knows the truth – they’re a part of a TV show. That’s where this novel breaks the fourth wall a bit too much for me. I used to be a fan of books and movies that did this, but I’m starting to see the shortcomings. It makes the book feel like a gimmick instead of a story.
I also have to complain about the dialogue. I love John Scalzi as a writer, but he goes way over the top with using the dialogue tag ‘he/she said.’ I’m not saying this as a suggestion that he replace said with something more descriptive, because I would despise reading that even more. But you need something else, because this sounded ridiculous. Also with the dialogue, everyone sounded the same. I would start to get a sense of the different characters in the beginning, but by the end, everyone talked like everyone else. It’s good dialogue, just… same dialogue. Basically, every character in the book morphed into John Scalzi.
To his credit, he ended the book very well with a plot shift I didn’t see coming. It mostly brought everything together and I wasn’t as annoyed by the fourth wall break.
Long story short of the progression of my grade on this: Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs sideways, thumbs down, thumbs up.

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A philosophical modern day fairy tale

Revisado: 07-25-20

Before I review this book, I have to start by talking about The Remains of the Day, an earlier novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s the story of a straight-laced butler in early 20th century Britain and how his code of ethics interacts with his coworkers and changing times. I read it last year and I have to say, it was easily the best fiction book I’ve read in a while. The characters were so well written and the theme of the story is the kind that you remember long after the book is over. A+. I thought I would try another of his books to see what else this author can do.

The Buried Giant is very different from what I was expecting. It unfolds like a fairy tale in King Arthur times, with dragons, knights, and magic. An older couple go off to find their son in a nearby town, but there is a fog of forgetfulness across the land. Bad things have happened that people don’t want to talk about. Even within their own lives, things have happened to these people that they have completely forgotten. They set out on this adventure which escalates as they run into other characters that shed light on what’s really going on in England. On one level, I loved the sequence of events in the story, because it manages to stay simple yet unpredictable. This is the kind of tale that I want to memorize so I can tell it around a campfire, should that occasion arise. On another level, it’s obvious the author is making a deeper point. What is that deeper point? I’m still thinking about it. Perhaps it’s to ask the question if we’re better off keeping dark secrets hidden instead of exposing them. Perhaps it’s exposing how we as people are content not to talk about uncomfortable things, especially in our relationships with other people. The ending of the book doesn’t exactly wrap everything together, and it’s the kind of ending that will drive me crazy. The only solution is to read the book again. I’m okay with that. Let’s go back to once upon a time…

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Science writing done right

Revisado: 04-08-20

In 2018, I read The Hunt for Vulcan and it was one of the top reads of the year. It was the story of how scientists discovered Uranus, Neptune, and tried to discover Vulcan before Einstein put an end to that silly idea. This one was similar in style, except that I’m embarrassed to say that this one is a lot harder to follow along with. I’ve never had a firm grasp on magnetism or electricity, so a lot of the technical details went over my head. Actually, I think the author did a good job of dumbing it down, I just need to have a firmer grasp.
Long story short, Faraday was Maxwell’s hero and Faraday found that there was a connection between magnetism and electricity. Maxwell is regarded as one of the greatest scientists in history because he pulled the magic trick that all scientists are constantly trying to pull- unify disparate natural phenomena with a simple equation. This is what Maxwell did with magnetism and electricity, and it took a combination of expertise in math and physics. The physicists of the day couldn’t understand it because it was too math based and mathematicians couldn’t understand it because it was too physics based. Hence, we have a genius on our hands.
The author pulls the interesting trick of making Maxwell’s demon the narrator of the story. It’s a quirky idea, but I’m still not completely sure about what Maxwell’s demon is, besides the fact that he likes to make fun of the miniscule understanding of humans. What I got from this book is that Maxwell’s demon has the appearance of reversing entropy in unpredictable ways. I still don’t have the whole story about why this is important or how it connects to everything else, but you can only do so much in one book. First, I’m going to do some reading about magnetism, electricity, and the second law of thermodynamics. Then I’m going to read this one again. That annoying little demon is taunting me.

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Meryl Streep should do more audiobooks!

Revisado: 08-07-18

Meryl Streep is the female equivalent of Morgan Freeman. It might have been too good, in fact, because instead of listening to the story, I was thinking about how good her voice is.

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The reasonable left

Revisado: 07-10-18

In the show John Adams, there's a scene where John Adams is talking to Sam Adams about the upcoming revolution, and Sam says that it's time to take a side. John says, "I'm on the side of the law. Is there another side?" I love Mr. Dershowitz similar impartiality here, and his "if the shoe was on the other foot" test of partisanship. Well written, well thought out, and I think he makes an effective case. He also brings up a lot of questions that the constitution leaves open that I hadn't considered before. Can the president pardon himself? What role does the judiciary play in impeachment? It's interesting to examine these as yet unopened constitutional questions.

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