orlo flock

A complete waste. 4 hours I'll never get back.

Reviewed: 03-13-23

This was hands down the worst book I've listened to in years. I found this book in a list of "life changing" books and based on the title which imo has a lot of potential, I got it. I told my wife I had gotten what I thought was a book about learning to play "the long game" or about a "life without boundaries" and was excited to dive in. I found too late that I was diving into a wading pool filled with crap.

It starts with what I think the author intends to be a definition of a finite and an infinite games but reads as a confusing jumble of words without direction. The best he does is to define a finite game (like chess, football, war, politics, etc.) has a beginning, an end and a winner, and then essentially defines an infinite game as something that is not a finite game.

And it gets worse from there...

The rest of it reads like the author found a 2 page essay he wrote as a 6th grader after reading Ayn Rand's philosophy, didn't understand it, and then read some Nietzsche, didn't understand it either, and tried to shuffle them into one big idea. Then the adult author decided to turn that essay into a full sized book using only a thesaurus and zero original ideas.

There are multiple occasions where I went back to listen to paragraphs and pages really trying to get what the author was saying and ended up understanding less after rereading it. There are multiple occasions where the author makes a statement and then deems it an unquestionable fact and continues to build on it while I was thinking to myself "I'm not sure that that is true at all".

I waded through the rest of the vague speech and shitty metaphors mostly due to the sunk cost, a lack of another book, and the hopes that some coherent thread might emerge. I was disappointed. I ended up finishing it just so that I could write an all in honest review.

Save yourself 4 hours and a credit. Find something else to read.

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IMHO the best piece of literature ever written.

Reviewed: 12-16-22

Title says it all.
Great narration too.

Here are 11 more words to allow this to post. Boop!

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Been an eon since a book rocked my world like this

Reviewed: 10-20-22

I couldn't write this review directly after listening to the book. I was unprepared for the insights that this book gave me about the future and I had to take a step back and drink it all in. These guys (the authors) are prophets in the truest sense of the word. Using reason and recognizing trends and extrapolating in a detailed way they essentially made a bunch of predictions. Being written in 1997 they predicted nearly everything that has happened since with eerie detail all the way down to predicting something unexpected to change the world in 2020. Many of the predictions that are still to come in the future I can already see playing out in the daily news and I have entirely changed my outlook and plans for the future.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you are an investor or even just a person trying to figure out a plan for the next few harrowing years of turmoil then make sure to put this book on the list. You won't regret it.

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Lack of direction and non actionable

Reviewed: 09-21-22

I'm interested in the future of AI technology and got this book hoping to learn more about AI was and what I should expect from it in the future. I was very much disappointed.

This book starts with a fictional story about an AI supercomputer taking over the world via the blunder of it's creators with no context. The few next chapters are about the author patting himself on the back and telling the audience that he gets invited to dinner parties at Elon Musk's house and that he thought that something needs to be done about the future ethics/dilemmas of computers. Then a few chapters on how he personally defines life into categories from bacterias to mammals to humans and finally to computers. He spends a couple chapters splashing about explaining how all his super cool friends have differing theories on the future of AI. Then outlines a whole bunch of scenarios that Super AI could take from Dominant Autocratic to Docile Servant based off of his friends notions. Then, completely randomly, there are a few chapters about how to harness energy from black holes and quasars (solutions for problems that, if needed, we're hundreds years from being able to implement) but he never explains why we would need to harness that energy or puts it into the context of what it has to do with AI in general. Then he goes back to patting himself on the back about how he started a group to think about the ethics and dilemmas surrounding AI and how he got his smart rich friends to invest in it. Lastly in a chapter about what the reader can do, he outlines a set of rules that should govern AI research that he and his friends created.

In short the author is clearly smart and connected, don't forget connected, but lacks organization or a real point. I learned a thing or 2 about AI but if you are looking to really learn something about AI and the future I'm sure there are better resources. Frankly, I only finished this book because I don't believe in writing a review for a book until you've choked down the whole thing to give the author the chance to redeem their self. In his case, he failed to do so.

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Life changer!

Reviewed: 09-14-21

If you haven't read this book, put it on your list. It builds foundations.

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meh.. cliff notes of zappos book

Reviewed: 10-19-20

the first 3/4 of this is a recap of the zappos book. the last quarter is a few blurbs about how sweet Google and Method are. Zero new or novel ideas. Pass

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2 people found this helpful