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Allow me to regale you with tales of one of the smartest bags of plasma to ever ambulate across the stage before succumbing to planned obsolescence and (empirically speaking), being quiescent for an indeterminate amount of time. (It occurs to me that Shakespeare's original semantic construction of this sentiment cemented itself firmly in the depths of posteriors (i.e. posterity) for reasons that this formulation evinces none of, so I will try again. I am here to fuck your occiptal lobes with words and characters which clumsily circumscribe the time which one of the keenest minds in the history of big-brain-energetics piloted a bipedal robot across Jotunheim before catching an errant hammer with a suspiciously short handle, (i.e. the work of the trickster Loki in the form of a fly who bit a surly dwarven blacksmith (Sindri) upon his asshole while he was forging Mjölnir), right directly in his germline, thus cashing all of its lethal liquidity into what Ludwig von Mises called, "A Gonadal Götterdämmerung" and ensuring this brilliant mind could no longer beseech the hearts and minds of mortal denizens upon that plane of existence for a very long, (perhaps indefinite), amount of time due to investing his entire savings into precious metals with Birch Gold. While simultaneously occluding from his high powered perception, the fact that his untimely demise was a product of Útgarða-Loki, a giant, and known master of trickery, (in case the name didn't give it away), having tricked the piss drunk battle god into attempting to lift a giant grey cat which manages to arch it's back regardless of what he does and thus only allows him to lift a single paw, incensing the Thunder Lord until he begins to spin his hammer whilst muttering curses, until finally he screams, "FUCK THE NINE WORLDS!", and releases the deadly instrument to careen across the tundra like a meade powered railgun and strike Mr. Feynman, (with improbable precision), directly in the prickly knapsack and discombobulate and oblitify (sic) his corporeal triangulation. Imagine this:

You've encased Tom Cruise in a cube of frozen piss for the next Mission Impossible. Wait, let me start over. You've freshly emerged from a vat of sliquid silver silicone-based lube, your body glistening like a chicken tender writhing on the corrugated teeth of a Foreman Grill. You thought this might provide you some advantage whilst grappling with Inter-universal Teichmüller theory, but it has only served to leave you sexually agitated to the point of humping furniture. Repeated bouts of Turkish Oil Wrestling with abrasive fabrics has left your morsels tender and your cognitive nutrients depleted. You're simply too goddamn stupid to understand this. You’re so dumb you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. You might as well give up. Belching forth a the line of caustic invectives which follow: "The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.� You then collapse.

During the course of your angry nap, you experience a fitful dream. You’re in the midst of a grueling marathon. Your muscles are bathed in acid. Your lungs are a frozen ball of expanding gas crowding out your innards. With tremendous effort, and cussing so foul memory doesn’t permit you to recall it, you crest a hill. Off in the distance, you see the smartest people you know in your personal life, implacably approaching the finish. You realize that, with enough training, you could bridge the cognitive divide between you and them. “If I just buckle down and learn my multiplication tables, I can run shoulder to shoulder with Sara and Jimbo.� You think. They’re not so different from you, they just didn’t spend approximately 90% of their time playing Roguelike games and cursing when no systems of meta progression are present to lessen the torment between runs/watching videos on how to modify their newly acquired steam deck in order to play every smut game available on itch.io /rewatching Jersey Shore/teabagging molten subduction zones/dressing in all black and pretending to steal stuff from their own home when cars go by in the night/directing comrades to Ubuntu repositories in order for them to also experience unbridled smut on linux based operating systems of a handheld nature/eating fermented pineapple/zooming to pixel-depth on Aleister Crowley's nutsack/trying to become proficient with a Manriki-Gusari/attempting to scale a sheer cliff using only their wet underwear so they could proclaim from the summit: “She writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash!"
This thought lightens your burdens and you push on with renewed vigor.

Well, don’t get carried away, chief, because you stagger across the finish line like a spastic newborn giraffe doing The Butterfly and conduct a violent emesis of nutrients from both ends while pissing at right angles the entire time (don't try this). At this moment, a man comes trotting by your (geometrically peculiar) fetal form. His steps are springy and there’s a curious clinking noise that accompanies his gait. He’s got a mischievous grin and intelligent eyes. He doesn’t appear to be sweating and his breathing is relaxed. How curious, you think. At least you beat one person in this podiatric blasphemy. “You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.� You offer your cryptic condolences to the stranger as he sails past you with a good natured laugh.

“That’s Richard Feynman.� Someone says.

“Poor bastard.� You retch.

“That’s his tenth lap. He just does this shit for fun.�

As the man recedes into the periphery, you catch a glint of metal. Beneath his shorts you see what appear to be cybernetic ostrich legs with bio-memetic hydraulic ankles and responsive foot springs.

Well, shit, that wasn’t as uplifting as I intended it to be. My point is: There’s smart people that you can imagine emulating through linear improvements, and then there are people like Richard Feynman, who are a different kind of athlete (and arguably a damned cheater). If you read this book you’ll come to know a bit about an affable rascal, a maverick, a first principles thinker with a wicked sense of humor who was insatiably curious about the natural world. A person who wasn’t comfortable with understanding anything superficially. He had a low tolerance for horseshit, saying a lot that means very little, (forgive me, Dick), sloppy reasoning, people pretending to know things they can’t possibly know, and making things more complicated than they need to be. Here is a brief (far from exhaustive) list of things he applied his alien intellect to:

Quantum Electrodynamics.
Statistical Mechanics.
Parallel Computing
Radio construction and repair.
Playing bongo drums.
Superfluidity.
Criticizing the educational systems' emphasis on rote memorization.
Quarks.
Painting.
Participating in humanity’s potential swan song at Los Alamos.
Safe cracking.
Taking a cudgel to uppity philosophers.
Teaching.
Sussing out bureaucratic and engineering malfeasance in the wake of The Challenger Disaster.
Coercing ants to follow pheromone trails.
Cultivating an eccentric personality which makes for an interesting portfolio of anecdotes which comprise the bulk of this book.
Threatening to piss through a man in a bar bathroom.
Metabolizing oxygen.
Offering the best quote of all time on his deathbed. “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.�

Feynman is a personal hero of mine, and this is one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. It is genuinely funny, and if you come away from it without wanting to know more about how things really work, well, you’re dead to me. Let’s go out with a quote, because I’ve exhausted my word-bag.

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.� - Dick Feynman.

"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken." - The Late-Great Colonel Sanders.

Despair of your position on the continuum of human intellect with this book!