In Chapter 7 of Eat People…and Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs published by Portfolio/Penguin Group (2011), Andy Kessler explains the book’s title this way:

He has concluded that “the best way to leverage Abundance and Scale and to create Productivity is to get rid of people…Now I’m not suggesting we actually eat anyone…But we do need to get rid of worthless jobs…There’s nothing productive about [many different kinds of jobs], though they may be temporarily necessary until someone, a true Free Radical writes a piece of code to make them obsolete. That’s how you create productivity…If you look at the world through a productivity filter, a lot more things start to make sense, especially about who is pulling their load and who is just along for the ride.”

My Take

1.  According to Kessler, “I guess in its simplest form, a Free Radical is someone who not only creates wealth for themselves, but at the very same time, improves the world, makes life better, and increases everyone else’s standard of living.”

2. Free Radicals are “free” in the sense that they feel unencumbered by rules and regulations whose sole purpose is to sustain the status quo and those who defend it; they are “radical” in that they are not hostage to what James O’Toole characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

3. In this book, Kessler offers seven rules that can guide and inform the initiatives of those who are determined “to not only create wealth for themselves, but at the very same time, improve the world, make life better, and increase everyone else’s standard of living.”

4. Those who are unwilling and/or unable to support such initiatives should at least get the hell out of the way.

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Andy Kessler is a former hedge fund manager turned author who now writes on technology and markets. His first book was Wall Street Meat (2003) followed by Running Money and How We Got Here (2005), The End of Medicine (2007), and most recently, Eat Peaople (2011). Kessler is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and has also written for The New York Times op-ed page, Wired, Forbes Magazine, The Weekly Standard, LA Times, The American Spectator magazine as well as for the techcentralstation.com and thestreet.com websites. He has even written a piece of fiction for Slate –adding, “bet you can’t find it.”