Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedRecommends Writing My Wrongs.
11 Sept 2025 Lenny's Podcast $46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder)
“Another book that I recommend a lot is Shaka's book, his first book, Writing My Wrongs. He has a new book that I think is better, which is called How to Be Free. It's not quite out, or maybe it's releasing. It's releasing next month, so I recommend it.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ben Horowitz
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 11 Sept 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people, not including your own books? So two that I learned a lot from, one is The Weirdest People in the World, which it's a kind of big history book, but through an anthropological kind of cultural lens. It's really fascinating. It explains an awful lot about how society works and how little changes in the rules completely change the culture. One of the things that he basically endeavors to explain, why did the West get ahead on the rest of the world? It kind of comes down to a weird anomaly with the Catholic Church, where they enforced monogamous marriage. And it turns out that the natural state of humans is polygamy, but the problem with polygamy is, there's no cooperation among men, which is a problem. And as a result, and then everything is secret, so there's no sharing of knowledge, because it's all kept in the family, in what he calls kin-based culture. It leads to something called kin-based culture. And even recipes won't be shared if you're in a kin-based culture, because it's a secret. So you can't build science, you can't build cities, you can't build big companies. So because the West kind of enforced broad monogamous marriage early, it was able to evolve into all these things. And he kind of shows why and how. He does these psychological tests today with people from monogamous marriage culture, Western culture, and kin-based culture. And the psychology is completely different. He gives examples like if a person murders another person, is that still murder if that person who did the murder is your brother? And in Western society, yeah, that's a murder. In kin-based culture, it's not a murder. It's just not. And so that's really different. And so morality is different, everything comes off of that. So it's just a fascinating, fascinating book. So that's one. Another book that I recommend a lot is Shaka's book, his first book, Writing My Wrongs. He has a new book that I think is better, which is called How to Be Free. It's not quite out, or maybe it's releasing. It's releasing next month, so I recommend it. What it does is, it goes through how did he work his way out of prison and solitary confinement to his current psychology, and what are the techniques he used? They're very powerful, very powerful ideas. CEOs always asks me, "How do you deal with it? How do you deal with it?" They'll ask in a work-life balance. It's like, "What are you talking about? No work-life balance for CEOs," or particularly entrepreneur CEOs, come on. But what do you do? Do you meditate? Do you do this or that? But he kind of goes through the things that you really ought to do. That's what I would recommend, if somebody's wondering, how do you deal with all this pressure? I love this. Just the whole idea of Shaka being this help for CEOs, someone that killed someone, went to prison, led a prison gang. I just love that, how valuable his lessons-…
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