Leading with my chin - Jay Leno

Yesterday night NBC aired the final episode of Jay Leno hosting The Tonight Show. I have long thought of Leno as one of the classier funny guys around. As a tip of the hat, I thought I would revisit his 1996 autobiography of sorts, Leading With My Chin.

I don't often read autobiographies or memoirs. Biographies, written from a distance and with the perspective of time, are a little bit more up my alley, though I am not crazy about those either. So it surprises me that I ever bought Leading With My Chin. Every so often when I notice the book on my shelf I have to shake my head with a 'what was I thinking'. Re-reading the book over the last couple of days though I am happy that I did.

Leading With My Chin is one funny book! It is not traditional autobiography in any sense. Think of it more as a collection of extremely funny anecdotes from Jay Leno's life. It gives you a great idea of his Scottish mom - Italian dad family, and how the two very different personalities in his life shaped the kind of person he is. But mostly, it reads like a manuscript of a stand-up act.

As a sample, let me quote one of the hilarious childhood situations Leno writes about. This one is a school prank called Faked Suicide. "This one required an accomplice. Back in junior high, it was Lewis Trumbore. Our school was an enormous old building with huge windows that had to be opened with a pole, so that they would cantilever outward. This would create a gaping space that looked dangerous to begin with. So Lewis's job was to stand by this big window in our third-floor classroom and dangle the heels of my shows below the ledge. Then he'd holler for the teacher and say in a panicked voice, 'Come here quick! Jay Leno's hanging out the window! I can't hold on much longer!' The teacher would race over, just as Lewis dropped the shoes outside and screamed ... The teacher would get to the window just in time to look down, clutch her heart, and shriek ' Oh my God!' Of course, I had already been sprawled down on the ground for five minutes, playing dead." Cool!

One thing I learnt here is that stand-up is no joke. To get started requires some serious tenacity. "To audition at places like Catch a Rising Star and The Improv, we would start lining up outside the clubs at two in the afternoon with hopes of getting onstage sometime after eleven that night. You'd spend your whole day sitting on the curb, waiting and waiting." For an audition! That might result in a part time job. Where you would be expected to work for free! That's just how the business works. Boy, am I glad banking doesn't work that way!

The one thing Leading With My Chin lacks is a lot of NBC stories. The book was pulished four years after Leno starting hosting The Tonight Show. But there are zero stories about that period in here. In later years of course, he developed a deep reservoir of NBC jokes, which are among my favorite Leno. But there's none of that here.

For those looking for a raw, emotional, deep look at who Leno is, and what made him what he is, this is certainly not the right book. If you like the man, enjoy his brand of easy, clean, mainstream humor, and are looking for a light read to while away a few hours, you might enjoy Leading With My Chin. I know I did.

Then we came to the end - Joshua Ferris

We cubicle-dwelling corporate types spend about half of our waking time, give or take, at work. While there, we are a somewhat unique type of creature. We work on our little projects, maintain polite acquaintances, try our subtle and not-so-subtle manouvers to get ahead. We have our little meetings, we get disproportionately upset at perceived slights, we gossip. Life goes on.

There are some things we do well. Writing good fiction about our lives at work is not one of them. So it is with considerable surprise that we see one of us, Joshua Ferris, stepping out and writing Then We Came to the End. The surprise isn't that one of us can write. With all the presentations and memos we are writing, there is bound to be someone who would get good at the written word. Monkeys at keyboards typing Shakespeare and all that stuff. The real surprise is that we find the book on the shortlist for numerous book award lists ... Who knew?

You might not have thought about this, but when we are back in office, everyone seems to be talking in the collective pronoun. It is always 'we have to get this done', 'we can get through these tough times', 'we are going to have a re-organization', 'we are screwed'. So when Joshua Ferris writes Then We Came to the End, his narrator tells the story in that same first person collective that we know and love. Which might not seem like a big deal, till we try to write a blog post on the book with the same technique. That's when we shake our heads and go 'So he wrote a whole book like this? Holy sh... '

There are other ways in which the book holds a mirror to our life in the cubicle. Have you ever noticed how we know each other at work by our full names? Even when we call each other by first names, we are think of each other in terms of full names. Is it the Outlook effect? Looking at each others' names (surname first) in our email in-boxes every day ... it is difficult to shake off the last names. So the book doesn't try. Every character is named in their full glory. It is always Tom Mota, Joe Pope, Karen Woo, Lynn Mason. And you know what, it doesn't take any getting used to. From the first page, we are so immersed in the world of work, we are almost our office-selves when we are reading, and this seems like the most natural thing to do.

The first half of the Then We Came to the End is like an extended episode of The Office, only deeper, and without the creepy boss. We are at an advertising agency in its ra-ra days. The book begins when those days end, the dot com boom bites the dust, advertising starts drying up, layoffs start. We get to know all the office crew, from the security guy to the big boss. Halfway into the book, Ferris moves away from the collective narrative voice for one chapter. For this one chapter, he adopts a traditional omniscient third person narrator, and comes up with a heck of a few pages that form the emotional backbone of the book. Right after this, the book goes back to our by-now-familiar collective narrator, and turns decidedly darker.

There is a character in Ferris' book that wants to write a novel. He tells us that he would like to write a small, angry book about work. He doesn't quite end up writing it, but does something else quite interesting indeed. Ferris achieves much the same feat. When we start reading the book, we get the feeling that he is going to end up writing some insignificant little thing that is amusing as a 30 minute TV episode, but has no chance of working as a novel. But halfway through, we realize that we are actually witnessing something quite different. Something a little bit more meaningful.

So there it is. We started reading. We were puzzled by the tone, and took some time to get used to it. We fell in love with the characters coming together like a family. We got uneasy at the interlude. We grew progressively more pensive as the family fell apart. And then, satisfyingly, fittingly, we came to the end.

Where are the Milton Friedmans?

Maybe it is the media I consume. When I read policy solutions proposed by different economists on how to get over the economic crisis, I can't seem to find much in the form of diversity of opinion. Everyone seems to have teh same elements in the mix - monetary policy, some fiscal stimulus, greater regulation of financial entities, housing reform .... Where are the free market solutions to the crisis? (By the way, are we still allowed to call it a crisis, or has Wall Street banned the word after eleven weeks of euphoria?)

Maybe it is the media I consume. Maybe it is some unconscious internal bias. Or maybe ... it is real. Could that be? Could it be that there just isn't that much mainstream economic thought supporting purist free market principles? Is it possible that there aren't many economists out there saying - 'let the market do what it does, let the bad apples rot themselves out, let people get foreclosed on ... on the other side there is a much more efficient economic enterprise'?

It was my (uninformed) guess that economists in general tend to believe more hardily in the futility of government intervention in economic markets, and tend to be more free market oriented than your average Joe. From what I read about proposed solutions for the day though, it is difficult to draw that conclusion. So I decided to poke around a little bit.

Turns out, this question was asked and addressed in a formal academic paper by Daniel Klein of George Mason University in Washington DC and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University in Stockholm.

[Is there a free market economist in the house?]

"People often suppose or imply", say Klein and Stern, confirming my going-in bias, "that free-market economists constitute a significant portion of all economists." To test that hypothesis, they surveyed 1,000 members of the American Economic Association (AEA, entry on Wikipedia) on 18 potential areas of government "activism" and intervention in markets.

Here is what they found, almost all of which I found surprising -
- Only 8% of economists could, based on their responses, be truly called free-market advocates.
- By a margin of 2.5:1, economists voted Democrat, rather than Republican.
- There are two issues on which economists universally support free-market principles: everyone opposes 'Tariffs to protect American industries', and everyone opposes 'Government ownership of enterprise'.
- Apart from the two areas above, economists of the AEA are not close to being free-marketeers on anything else. This includes issues like economic tuning through monetary policy, use of fiscal policy, pharma regulations, gambling restrictions, government produced schooling, immigration etc.

The one non-surprising part of the study to me was that on average, economists are more free-market oriented than professionals in most other academic disciplines. But still, they are far from the wild west, invisible-hand free marketeers of my imagination.

So, back to my initial question: Why do we not hear wildly free-market oriented policy opinion on the current crisis? Maybe because there aren't that many mainstream economists that hold such positions in the first place.

George Soros on The Crash of 2008

Since the current economic crisis began, I have been searching for books that coherently address the key questions of the day without pointless jingoism, chest-thumping or moralistic tut-tutting. To that end, I have been studiously avoiding all the books about 'Easy money, high rollers', or 'Wall Street's greed' or 'Hubris and Wretched Excess'. Though not a Wall Streeter myself, I am after all a banker. Maybe that distorts my moral center, but it is fact that I have found much of this vilification of my richer cousins by trade only mildly useful at best and a version of 'cut my nose to spite my face' at worst.

The first book I read about the mess we find ourselves in was Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics. My second, and the subject of this post, is George Soros' The Crash of 2009 - And What it Means.

The sub-title of the book is 'The New Paradigm for Financial Markets'. And that should have set off my alarm bells. Which coherent author uses the word 'paradigm' in a sub-title? Well, it didn't and I was fooled by the shortness of the book (~250 pages), which I mistook for pithiness. Here is what I found.

The book is split into three parts, called 'Perspective', 'The Current Crisis and Beyond' and 'The Crash of 2008 and what it means'. The first part is too muddled, the second is mildly interesting and the third is quite banal.

Soros frames up his discussion of the crisis of 2008 as an illustration of his broader principle of 'reflexivity'. The first part of the book essentially lays out Soros' articulation of this principle and its cousin - the boom-bust theory. Reflexivity is the thesis that in any humanly constructed structure (like the financial markets), the relationship between reality and perception is not a one-way street. Market players form an expectation based on fundamentals ('house prices will increase next year'). They act on this view and slowly it gets incorporated into market fundamentals themselves in a sort of ever increasing feedback loop (increasing house prices causes better performing mortgages, which drives lower underwriting standards, which creates increased demand for houses thus raising house prices even more).

Soros' thesis is that this feedback mechanism between reality and expectation is pro-cyclical and feeds on itself (the boom) till the gap between reality and expectations gets far out of hand. At this point, market players keep playing a sort of 'emperor's clothes' game where everyone realizes the fundamentals don't exist but they keep trading as if they do. At an arbitrary 'tipping point', without any significant external stimulus, the whole edifice comes crumbling down in a catstrophic downward acceleration (the crash).

That's pretty much the summary of the first third of The Crash of 2008. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But here's the thing. It unfolds over a hundred pages. And the moment Soros wears his philosopher hat, he loses all coherence. Sample this: 'Without fallibility there would be no reflexivity - if people could base their decisions on knowledge the element of uncertainty that characterizes reflexive situations would be removed - but fallibility is not confined to reflexive situations.' What's that again? I admit Mr. Soros has 11 billion pieces of paper proving he is smarter than me. But if I may sir, I would like to say this: much of your philosophy is indulgent, pretentious and pretty close to undecipherable. Where it is decipherable, it is either obvious or unusable.

When Soros starts talking about the origins of the 2008 crisis, he is much more interesting, though far from insightful. He takes the stand that the resolution of the crisis requires market participants, government and regulators to give up on the philosophy he calls 'market fundamentalism' - the theory that if we let markets run unhindered, they might wreak havoc for a while but eventually equilibriate and will lead to sustainable solutions. He holds this 'fundamentalist' belief in the market responsible for much muddled policy making in the past few years.

Soros' policy prescriptions fall largely in the current mainstream, with some interesting twists. He calls for a 5 point program to attack the problem - a fiscal stimulus, an overhaul of the mortgage market, recapitalization of banks, a new energy policy and reform of financial banking regulation. His detailed prescription on the mortgage side in particular is refreshing and extremely well informed.

All said, if there were a twenty page version of The Crash of 2008 that I could lay my hands on, I would have been much the happier. As it turns out, I have just read one more less than stellar book on the credit crisis. The search for the perfect book on this topic continues ...

Victory of 'The Great Indian Novel' - ist

I have long admired the works of Shashi Tharoor. As I mentioned before on Brick and Rope, I was happy to see someone of his calibre step into the political system in India and stand for election for a Lok Sabha seat. Shashi Tharoor won the seat for Kerala's capital Thiruvananthapuram, with a margin of over 100,000 votes, the largest victory margin there in the last 30 years I am told.

Two interesting follow-up stories on this over yesterday.

Right after the election was over, Indian Express informs us, Tharoor was tearing off his own posters from Thiruvananthapuram walls, to clean up the city. Cool, if rather pointless.

In another reminder of the changing face of Indian politics, Tharoor was Twittering away from his Blackberry all day yesterday, keeping his fans and followers upto date. As this article in the Economic Times writes, he first tweeted from his Blackberry during the counting process when his lead hit 30,000. Then again at 59,000 and then finally with the ending tally. The last Tweet I saw said "On a victory tour of my constituency - amazing scenes of exhilaration - already hoarse from thank-you speeches!"

On which note I have to ask - how absurdly narcissistic is Twitter?

The world is ending ... but how?

These are good times for pessimists, if that even makes sense. Everywhere you look, you can find ways the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Between the Taliban and swine flu and the financial crisis, there is enough material to keep your grumpy neighborhood pessimist going for a while. 'Smile', as the guy said, 'tomorrow will be worse.'

I was reading a hyped-up version of some such 'armageddon' when I started thinking about the book I recently completed and blogged about, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everthing. There, the cheerful Mr. Bryson lays out not one, not two, but many different ways the earth could literally come to an end. And when you start speaking in a truly cosmic sense, the sky could literally fall, the earth could literally erupt in a ball of fire. There are real armegeddons out there, my friends, and they would literally be it. The end. Finito. So long, and thanks for all the fish, as Douglas Adams might say.

So, how might we die, you ask? Let me count the ways.

First up, an ice age. Here is what A Short History has to say on the matter. 'For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age - ice epoch really - started about 40 million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all. Ice ages tend to wipe out evidence of earlier ice ages, so the further back you go the more sketchy the picture grows, but it appears that we have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so.' ... 'About fifty more glacial episodes can be expected, each lasting a hundred thousand years or so, before we can hope for a really long thaw.'

And just in case you think we have a lot of time to get ready for a long winter, Bryson helpfully adds, 'Previous inter-glacials have lasted as little as eight thousand years. Our own has already passed its ten thousandth anniversary.' Sweet.

Next up - asteroids. 'It is thought, based on extrapolating from cratering rates on the moon, that some two thousand asteroids big enough to imperil civilized existence regularly cross our orbit. But even a small asteroid - the size of a house say - could destroy a city. The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth-crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions. ... The first one wasn't spotted until 1991, and that was after it had already gone by.' So what would happen if an asteroid decided to come by to visit? Well, at the speeds at which these asteroids travel, our atmospheric air would get compressed and heated to a temperature of about 60,000 K, or ten times the surface temperature of the sun. Everything in the path of the meteorite of course would vaporize. It would hit earth 1 second after entering our atmosphere. The blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth and superheated gases. The shock would radiate out at the speed of light. 'It has been estimated', Bryson informs us calmly , that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day.'

Here is my question - who are the manic depressives estimating this stuff? Thay have to get a life!

Want some more? Let's talk about recurring viruses. Nobel laureate Peter Medawar defined a virus as 'a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news'. He wasn't kidding. Viruses aren't themselves alive, but introduce them into a suitable host, and they burst into life. 'They reproduce in a fanatical manner, then burst out in search of more cells to invade. ... They also have the unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then to vanish again as quickly as they came.'

Bryson goes on to discuss (I kid you not) the Great Swine Flu epidemic of 1918. 550,000 people in America died, and the global toll is estimated at between 20 million and 50 million. 'A disagreeable Russian virus known as H1N1 caused severe outbreraks over wide areas in 1933, then again in the 1950s, and yet again in the 1970s. Where it went in the meantime each time is uncertain ... No one can rule out the possibility that the Great Swine Flu epidemic might once again rear its head.'

Just in case you aren't the type to be afraid of pig stuff recurring, Bryson optimistically adds - 'If it doesn't, others well might. New and frightening viruses crop up all the time.' Like that little thing called HIV.

I could go on. But I think you get the picture. There is some really scary stuff out there. Stuff that could kill us, and eventually will. So the next time the S&P falls 300 points, and you feel like jumping off a cliff after looking at your 401k statement, remember: An asteroid could have crashed into us yesterday. But it didn't. Party-time!

The classics - Redux?

Reading the classics is not my thing. I am loath to even try then anymore. My 'abandonment rate' with them is too high for it to be worth the effort.

So it was with considerable scepticism that I started hearing this piece. Here author Jack Mornigan talks about finding humor in three heavy-weights (all three of which I have been unsuccessful in completing in the past) - Moby Dick; Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury. He makes a great case, and has gotten me to rethink these books. Maybe I will give them another shot after all.

[Mining the classics for laughs]

There is an audio link here as well. I highly recommend that you listen, rather than read. Listening to the guy is what made it click for me. The clip is just under 4 minutes long, and is well worth the time. Who knows, maybe you will be tempted to try Melville, Joyce and Faulkner too!

A short history of nearly everything

Every once in a while, I read a book that is as entertaining as it is informative, high brow pop culture if you will. A Short History of Nearly Everything is just such a book. Bill Bryson is just such an author.

The basics first. A Short History is, in the broadest sense, a history of the world. It starts 13.7 billion years ago, at the beginning of time, and the big bang. It ends about 100,000 years ago, right at the point when modern man, Homo Sapiens emerged on earth. And it fasts forward through these 13.6999 years (did I get that right?) in a little under 500 pages, for an average of 27 million years per page. Can't say you will get more history for the buck anywhere else can you?

The first thing that made an impression on me was how quirkily funny Bryson is. He seems to take a joy in his subject, and has the ability to make the strangest things sound funny.

He is also someone with great visual abilities. He has an instinct for picking out particularly visual ways of bringing his concepts to life. For instance, when talking about the amazingly powerful telescopes astronomers regularly use nowadays he says this -

'With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system from all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground'.

Now, I am sure you knew astronomers had powerful telescopes, but doesn't this just make it real on a whole different level? Another powerful picture for me was when Bryson is talking about the human genome. Mapping the human genome doesn't lead directly to solving the mystery of all diseases because genes might not map one-to-one into known diseases. To make the point, Bryson says -

'The genome is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work. What's needed now is the operating manual.'

Great stuff! Admittedly, some of these are quotes of other noted authors, but Bryson has an eye for these and fills his book with them.

That said, if you think Bryson is just a witty head out of his depth, think again. He spent three years reading scientific books and journals to write this book. The result - A Short History taught me more than I ever knew about more sciences than I could imagine. The list of -ologies covered by the book is impressive. In here, you will find a short summary of the key facts about our past as illuminated by geology, oceanography, quantum physics, astrophysics, evolutionary biology, isotope geochemistry, genetics, paleo-anthology, even taxonomy - though I must admit even the enthusiastic witticisms of Bryson can't overcome the mind-numbing boredom of this last branch of science!

What you don't see here is anything post modern man. So no anthropology, no sociology, mathematics, art ...

On this exhilarating, head-spinning journey, I encountered some spooky little facts -

Like the alvinellid worm that lives right at the margin of deep-sea vents off the Galapagos islands. Think you have a tough life? The alvinellid lives hanging at the margin of a thermal layer of the deep sea vents, with its head at a temperature 140 degrees hotter than its tail!

Or like that genetics example - What do you think will happen if we introduce a mouse's eye gene into a fruit-fly? Turns out, it makes a viable eye! And not just any viable eye, a fly's viable eye!

And I couldn't help laughing at some (soberlingly) funny passages - 'Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.'

And some facts so eerie, I found myself doing a double take - 'No one knows how many species of organisms have existed since life began. ... Whatever the actual total, 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. "To a first approximation", as David Raup of the University of Chicago likes to say, "all species are extinct".'

In the end, if this book does anything, it makes you appreciate 'that we are awfully lucky to be here', in this universe of ours, that seems so inimical to the creation and sustenance of life. And it makes you appreciate, that we are awfully lucky to have Bill Bryson writing in our midst.

Warren Buffett's book recommendations

Over this weekend, I attended the annual shareholders' meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. The 'woodstock of capitalists' had its regular share of investment talk, folksy witticisms and feel-good bonhomie. As part of the five hour question and answer session during the day, Warren Buffett made a strong book recommendation. Which is what got me thinking - over the last ten years, what books has Warren Buffett recommended in these meetings?

Based on my reading of the annual reports of different years, here is a list I came up with -

2001: Jack - Straight from the gut; by Jack Welch
2002: Take on the street; by Arthur Levitt (then chairman of the SEC)
2003: Bull!; by Maggie Mahar
2003: The smartest guys in the room; by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
2003: In an uncertain world - Tough choices from Wall Street to Washington; by Peter Rubin
2003: (And in many other years' letters) The intelligent investor; by Benjamin Graham
This is a book that Buffett has variously called "my favorite investment book" and "the most important investment book ever written".
2004: Nuclear Terrorism - The ultimate preventable catastrophe; by Graham Allison
2005: Where are the customers' yachts?; by Fred Schwed
(which Buffett called "the funniest book ever written about investing")
At other times: (I couldn't find the specific years) Books by John Bogle, and those by Philip Fisher
2009: The great crash - 1929; by John Kenneth Galbraith

In the past, I have taken the Oracle's recommendations and have been richer for it (I mean intellectually). This year, it was The Great Crash. Stay tuned to see how that turns out.