Books I would like to read

I’m working my way through some longer books and haven’t been too energized by some of the stuff I’ve read recently, so thought I would try something different. Here are some books that I would love to read - if you write them, I will buy them!

Life and Work

The lives of rich people

What is it like to be really rich? Does it actually make you happier? I was driving from Tahoe to the Bay Area a few weeks ago (5-6 hours with traffic and small children) and found myself wondering how rich do you need to be to fly private to Tahoe. The obvious next question was “does that actually make people happy?”

I’m looking for a kind of companion to Millionaire Next Door, which was all about rich people who didn’t spend like they were rich. Are their peers who spend more than them any better off?

I’m also weirdly interested in the logistics behind their lives: are they consuming more childcare? At what wealth level (if any) do you stop changing diapers? At what point do you need to hire a “house manager” or person to manage your other “people” for you? Shows like Succession show small glimpses of this, but I’m interested in a very explicit “this is how it works.”

How to be a great employee

There are many, many books on how to be a good manager or leader. There are less, though, on how to be a good employee and effectively work within an organization. While managing and leading is an important part of many jobs, effectively working for your manager / leader is as - if not more - important. This doesn’t necessarily need to be super high level or philosophical - tactical advice is sometimes more helpful. Essentially looking for more content like this.

Business

Note: any views here are mine and mine only.

An in-depth examination of the fall of Intel

For decades, Intel was the world’s most important company and enabled our modern information age.

It designed the chips used in the vast majority of the world’s computers (think of the chips as the “brains” of these systems). It also had the most advanced technology to create chips, which is actually a big deal (creating modern chips is the closest things we have to magic today; new factories can cost tens of billions of dollars.)

But over the last decade or so, Intel blew its lead and become less irrelevant - for multiple reasons:

• A focus on financial engineering over actual engineering. During its dominant period, Intel used its cash flow to buy back shares (and pay a dividend), likely underinvesting in research & development and new facilities

• Technical stumbles and fiercer competition. Intel’s manufacturing capabilities were stuck for multiple years given some missteps, and it essentially ceded the lead to competitors TSMC (based in Taiwan) and Samsung (based in Korea). This is important, because making better performing chips (and computers / phones) requires that you constantly improve your manufacturing abilities.

• Missing opportunities: Intel famously turned down the opportunity to make the chips for the iPhone, missing out on the shift from PC to mobile. It recently came out that they also passed on the opportunity the chance to invest in OpenAI and design chips for it. Intel had super high market share in the PC and serve

• Overall bloat: Intel still has over 100,000 employees, more than both TSMC (who makes the world’s chips) and AMD (who design chips and is gaining share against Intel). While the company has done some restructuring, it is probably still not run as efficiently as it could

• Investor communication: while a smaller part of the story, Intel has also done a poor job communicating to investors. It has been working on a “turnaround” for 3+ years and didn’t properly manage expectations

It’s fascinating because it’s not a unidimensional failure (i.e., just due to one mistake or area of mis-execution).

Instead, their current position is the result of historic execution missteps (which take years to be fixed), strategic blunders, poor capital allocation decisions, and corporate bloat and inertia. As an American, I’m rooting for them and would love even more to read a book about a successful turnaround.

Conversely, the rise of Nvidia

Nvidia is worth roughly 3 trillion dollars. It is the third most valuable company in the world. 10 years ago, it was worth $10 billion - nothing to sneeze at, but there are 1,500+ other companies in that size range.

What happened?

As many people know, Nvidia has been the prime beneficiary from the current wave of AI investments. Its chips are the physical “brains” behind modern AI: - things we see like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, but also things we don’t, such as TikTok or Facebook’s recommendation algorithms or fraud detection or drug discovery.

While it seems like they might’ve luckily stumbled into this area, Nvidia’s success is the result of over a decade of investment, hard work, and vision from founder-CEO Jensen Huang. (Kind of the reverse of Intel - decline doesn’t happen overnight and neither does success).

Note: there is one book coming out early next year I will read, but would love more.

Science

Anything on all the cool stuff evolution has provided

Evolution and natural selection explains a lot about human behavior and physiology:

• Why we experience social anxiety (being sensitive to group dynamics was probably helpful at some period)

• Why we overeat junk food (as we didn’t have excess food for much of human history, so the people who really liked high-calorie food were able to better survive famines and pass on their genes

• Why, unlike many animals, we sweat (allowed us to run long distances without overheating to chase down prey)

It also has produced some cool thing in animals: turtles which use magnetic fields to navigate, beetles who lay eggs in burnt wood and can detect forest fires from tens of miles away.

For whatever reason, I just find the topic really interesting and would love to read more.

Anything on the replication crisis

The Replication Crisis refers to the current issue in the sciences where the results of many experiments cannot be reproduced, casting into doubt if the original experiment was “right.” Many books I read will cite studies, how do I know if the studies are valid or not?