Ben Nelson

Fantastic examination of sex

Revisado: 05-04-25

Many cited studies and coherent narrative suggesting normative sex as culturally produce was not how our ancestors did it.

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Great insight into alternative treatment

Revisado: 07-11-24

Really enjoyed this text and have recommended it to friends. There are many stories and studies here that should be taken to heart.

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Poor mans django unchained

Revisado: 07-06-24

It begins well and fits the original story but devolves into a revenge tale. The whole thing is like the movie Django unchained but worse in the second half. The last line before he kills the slaver is absolutely laughable, i giggled at it the whole situation was so silly. The reflections on philosophy were interesting and i wish they were explored more. There’s so much more that could be said about the lives of slaves and the impact on that time period and what it echos to today. Instead, you get slop with bits of good information. The style of writing was fun to read but ultimately it was a hard book to finish.

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Trite, filled with vapid examinations

Revisado: 01-08-24

The author has an understanding of some of the big wigs in the media of the tech landscape. The bad guys: the zuckerbergs, peter tiel, elon musk, sandberg, larry elison, steve jobs, etc. He his incredibly harsh in his critique and has a fundamentally sound understanding of philosophy and makes many apt points of observation. His examination however is hollow. He makes no attempts and understanding other than a skin deep point of view from media reports and Edgar filings. He does present interesting things that I did not know about my own industry (spoiler alert, I'm biased). But he fails in both his critiques and in his lack of praise for what the tech industry has done. For one, he almost entirely neglects the biases of race and gender in the tech industry as well as homophobia even back to the beginning (Alan Turing famously was chemically castrated by the British government and then killed himself as a result, none of this is mentioned in the book). He does not mention that a 'programmer' early in the industry was comprised almost entirely of women, who were later sidelined for men when the jobs became high paying and high status. He fixates on Ayn Rand and individualism in the industry, which is an odd problem for tech in particular, but he also fails to even mention open source technology, the individualism encouraged by early proponents of computers, the wonderful technologies that were built on the foundations of thinkers like Noam Chomsky (a radical activist), Claude Shannon (a pioneer in information technology) and others. Even his critiques fail to mention things like Marvin Minsky (the most famous name in artificial intelligence research up until OpenAI's ChatGPT creation) being on the Jeffery Epstein lists. The MIT design lab was mentioned as a small footnote along with the Stanford D School. My point being that philosophically, this work was incredibly weak. He fails to mention any reformers, activists, or even people who recognize the flaws of the industry outside of Timnit Gerbu. Cathy O'Neil (author of Weapons of Math Destruction - a fantastic work) would be aligned with many points of his work, yet he fails to mention her.

I'm disappointed I wasted time reading this. It was at best just a hit piece on the very recent developments in tech industry, not in computer science, data science, or any science really. The author uses gotcha headlines and nobody's like James Damore to paint a picture of carte blanche racism and sexism within tech as a whole. It's just an incredibly weak argument for an industry that empoyees millions of people of all shapes, colors, ethnicities, backgrounds and opinions and that's just in the US alone. He also fails to even mention people that would help shape his argument of tech as the evil empire, like Palmer Luckey founder of Anduril and Oculus who is a psycho, or Sam Bankman-Fried, and spends little to no time on the critique of Theranos and why that was possible to happen.

Just weak. Do better. I expected a hit piece, but this was just soft. It also only focused mostly on roughly the last 10-15 years of the industry, with the exception of his focus on the PayPal mafia. There is so much more to explore in this topic, even in the negative light the author took which could be much, much more interesting.

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The best book I've ever read about king

Revisado: 01-05-24

Fantastic. Read it. Includes so much history and gives context to the man. The narration is great too.

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Lots of empty platitudes. One good chapter on boundaries

Revisado: 10-20-23

There isn't much substance to this but i guess that's what I've come to expect from audible originals.

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Unbelievable except it was real.

Revisado: 06-18-23

Absolutely incredible story. Recommended if you watched the HBO series. Just as good and insightful. It's insane that this actually happened.

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Naked lunch is totally incomprehensible

Revisado: 08-06-17

Would you try another book from William S. Burroughs and/or Mark Bramhall?

I've read Junky by Burroughs and enjoyed it but the seminal book by him is awful

What do you think your next listen will be?

I'll listen to something more sensible

What about Mark Bramhall’s performance did you like?

It was clear as you could be given the material

What character would you cut from Naked Lunch?

All

Any additional comments?

I had no idea what was going on in this story at any given time. The first 2 chapters are good and then it devolves into the interzone madness and I think Burroughs just wanted an excuse to write the most trashy thing he could. It makes 0 sense. He was high as a kite.

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meh

Revisado: 02-12-16

really hard translation. should've went with an abridged version. couldn't drive and listen and understand.

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