Author: Roy Confino

Good reads 2018-2019

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One upside of a long commute is time to listen to books. Here are a few I heard over the past couple of years: These changed the way I think: Finnegan, Barbarian Days Taleb, Antifragile Taleb, The Black Swan Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ries, The Lean Startup McAfee and Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age Posner and Weyl, Radical markets Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces Bostrom, Superintelligence These are good reads: Taleb, Fooled by Randomness Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are Walker, Why We Sleep Aurelius, Meditations Brooks, Business Adventures Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing Eyal, Hooked Moore, Crossing the Chasm Thiel, Zero to One McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd Hoffman and Yeh, Blitzscaling Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Kupor, Secrets of Sand Hill Road Piketty, Capital Thorpe, A Man for All Markets Dalio, Principles Ridley, The Evolution of Everything Didn’t finish these: Pinker, Enlightenment Now Christakis, Blueprint Paul and Moynihan, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars Smil, Energy and Civilization Platt, Imperial Twilight

The day I almost got my ass kicked

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My orientation program at school included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled… I don’t know what my parents thought. Cuts and bruises, even black eyes, could be explained. Football, surfing, something. My hunch, which seems right in retrospect, was that they couldn’t help, so I told them nothing. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life On the first day of 8th grade the Double Shirt Crew almost kicked my ass. We had been playing soccer and I had scored the winning goal for my team. I was elated. This was really going to help me fit in. After the game ended, I began walking from the upper field towards the quad. I was alone – I didn’t know anyone by name and did not have any friends. It was late afternoon, a few minutes before recess. There was no one in the quad. As I arrived at my locker and began to open it, someone shoved me hard from behind. I slammed into my locker. I turned around – more scared and …

The first time I saw a dead body

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This is one of my earliest memories: I’m looking at the body of a dead soldier by the side of the road. The soldier is lying with his back to me near a burned tank. This was in Ethiopia in the late 80’s, during the civil war. I was 7 or 8. My father worked at the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa, and we “lived” in the city. I use scare quotes because when, every number of months, the rebels got close to the city, we would be evacuated to Israel. Then, when Mengistu’s army would push the rebels north, we would fly back. Until one day the rebels took the city. We returned to a liberated Ethiopia. I think the time I saw the soldier was the only time my family left the city during the war. At least I don’t remember other trips. So we spent our time In Addis. We lived in a large villa in a good part of time. A good part of time in Addis in the late 80’s …

A bit about me

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    I was born in Jerusalem in 1981. The first born child and grandchild (no pressure). Israel was quite a different place in 1981. One of the guests at my brit milah brought my parents disposable diapers (“from America!”) as a gift. Today I have three children of my own. When My eldest son asks me a hard to answer question (“What’s the best painting in the world?”) and I answer that it’s hard to answer that he says ask Google. So, It is safe to say there is a generation gap here. I’ll try to write here as often as I can.