Balaji’s Recommended Reading
BOOKS
“I do like these technical books. Most people's favorite book, seems to almost always be fiction… it's extremely rare somebody mentions a technical book. I've always been surprised by that. Why isn't there like a New York Review of Books for technical books? Why doesn't that exist?”
-Balaji Srinivasan
Math and Science
Richard Feynman’s Lectures by Richard Feynman.
Feynman was assertive and intellectual. He definitely was not a passive or submissive nerd, as was the common image of an intellectual in those years.
Feynman showed you could be different. You could break out of that stereotype as an academic. Now, I can kind of see that consciously, but it wasn’t clear to me then. Now I can map that trajectory of academic then entrepreneur then independence. I can see the trajectory of returns on disobedience, or intellectual assertiveness.
Seemingly simple questions often have very complicated answers. The answer to “why is the sky blue?” has an irreducibly complicated answer. I also learned the concept of the “cargo cult,” how people would just repeat things without their own internal checks.
If you take all the people who could understand the Feynman Lectures, they could probably appreciate Hamlet. But not conversely.[1]
Princeton Companion of Mathematics by Timothy Gowers.
If I were stuck on a desert island this is the one book I want, because it's basically all of math. It's Written by a Fields medalist who is also an extremely good editor and writer. You can spend endless hours on this book. You can keep going back to it and you'll always learn something. This is my number one book from a technical standpoint.[37]
Schaum's Outlines by Joel Lerner and James Cashin
This is a great series of books. They’re yellow books from the early 2000s, Schaum’s outline of probability and statistics or Schaum’s outline of accounting. It’s amazing how many people have studied accounting or something, but you just give them Schaums and ask them to do the first 10 problems in accounting, they struggle.[10]
I use pen and paper, offline, with schaums kind of thing on a nice table with some coffee is almost like meditation. It's very relaxing. It's like lifting weights, doing it to kind of keep yourself sharp.[37]
1000 Exercises in Probability by Geoffrey Grimmett and David Stirzaker
This is evergreen. Learning how to do Markov chains and solve the eigen values will never ever not be helpful. This stuff requires more energy to read, but it keeps you sharp.[37]
The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil Gershenfeld
This book is almost 25 years old (sheesh!) and there are now more modern methods for some of the topics discussed, but in terms of just packing a punch per page I really enjoyed this back in the day. [1]
Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Paul Tipler [37]
Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham
I’ve always liked compendium.[37]
Visual Complex Functions by Elias Wegert
Fun book proposes plotting all complex functions as colored contour plots. Kind of an obvious idea, but it's carried through systematically here.[1]
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos [37]
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel [37]
Test-Driven Development with Python: Obey the Testing Goat: Using Django, Selenium, and JavaScript by Harry Percival
It's got a funny name, but it's like, really, really good. It's really good. And the reason is, it just sort of teaches you how to test things that are bigger than just a simple function. And it will make if you, if you code Python applications of any scale, it will make your coding better there.[37]
For Founders
Where Is My Flying Car? by Josh Storrs Hall
Just read it.[1]
High Output Management by Andy Grove [37]
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
We’ve all read Grove. Only the paranoid survive.[1]
The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary
The preprint went viral on Hacker News a while back. Brian Armstrong and I used parts of this at Coinbase and Naval Ravikant has used this at several of his companies. We found it helpful![1]
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley
How tech founders always had to fight against the establishment, just like the present day.[4]
The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg.
If you want to find startup ideas here’s the book. It came out in the late ’90s. It’s the most prescient thing in the world. With most bestsellers, you can distill 300 pages into a one-page summary. This book is the opposite. You can take one page and turn it into a Ph.D thesis.[30]
It's the kind of non-technical book I actually read and reread with a pen and paper next to me, trying to expand the sentences to extract meaning and implications.[32]
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez.
This fundamental cycle in technology: people get really amped about a technology, then you try to actually do it, you find it’s actually hard, most people get demoralized and they quit. It’s those people who stick it out in the trough that make things actually happen. That happened with the dot-com bubble. Everyone was hyped about it in 2000, then crashed. But eventually, they did build all these massive businesses. It happens on larger cycles as well. Carlota Perez has this whole theory about why that happens.[30]
Indistractable by Nir Eyal
Nir Eyal's bestselling book tackles the problem of modern distraction by empowering us to break the bad habits at the root of the issue. He delves into the deeper psychology causing us to go off track, an ancient problem even Plato lamented. Eyal does this without the usual techno-moral panic, writing, "We can get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us." Eyal's model synthesizes decades of peer-reviewed studies into a practical tool anyone can use.[33]
The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
Useful for anyone trying to bootstrap a new community or network, which is virtually every founder these days.[1]
History
The more history you read, the more you realize that the past is as surprising as the future.
-Balaji Srinivasan
As the chestnut goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Starting to think a simple annual history exam would gauge a population’s immunity (or susceptibility) to a wide variety of deadly mind viruses. Educate via short films, run contests to test retention.[1]
The Gray Lady Winked by Ashley Rindsberg
10/10 recommendation. Everybody in crypto should read it. I put this up there with The Sovereign Individual.[29]
Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson.
Jill Abramson, former editor of the New York Times, on how business imperatives and pageviews drove the editorial process.[1]
AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee's book holds up very well today in key ways. I initially thought it'd be a pop overview of AI. But it's actually a history of the Chinese tech ecosystem. Many of his takes on the speed of execution and innovation have now proven out.[1]
Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham
Fire arguably made us human. This book talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain. It relaxed an evolutionary constraint and made us smarter. We've been co-evolving with technology for a very, very long time, arguably, evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It's what distinguishes man from animal.[37]
Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich
The canonical popular summary of his school of thought, along with Cavalli-Sforza’s older book on the History and Geography of Human Genes. The brief argument is: our true history is written in our genes. Mere texts can be faked, distorted, or lost, but genomics (modern or ancient) can’t be.[4]
This book also makes it clear history is a boneyard. There’s probably not a single ethnic group on the planet that simply peacefully occupied their plot of land since “time immemorial.” One tribe’s homeland was once their distant ancestors’ frontier.[4]
Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA by Daniel Carpenter
Early in my career, I hadn't thought much about regulatory barriers. Most people don't really hear bad things about the FDA. This book taught me why. It talks about how the reputation of that agency being key to its power. It's written by an FDA sympathizer, but you can read it with a different lens on it. The US FDA is the most powerful regulatory agency to the world. How did the FDA become so influential? How exactly did the FDA cultivate a reputation for competence and vigilance?[35]
The Truth Machine by Michael Casey & Paul Vigna
More and more frequently, I point people here for an accessible explanation of how blockchains allow us to establish certain kinds of truths even in adversarial environments.[1]
The Internet of Money Volume 1 by Andreas Antonopolous
With Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas Antonopoulos wrote one of the best technical books on digital currency. With The Internet of Money, he's matched that feat by compiling his talks into one of the best books on Bitcoin for a broad audience. Highly recommended![1]
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
If you read Seeing Like a State, there’s a sense in which the term “real name” is a misnomer. A better term is a state name — a name which makes you legible to the state.[1]
From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew
An example of a well-run state.[1]
History Has Begun by Bruno Maçães
Bruno’s thesis is that America is increasingly becoming a virtual society, focused on make-believe above all. I have to agree. This novel vantage point unifies many otherwise opposed schools of thought. Fantasies of the past, delusions about the present, visions of the future.[1]
The Craft by John Dickie
Anyone working on NFT collections should understand the history of the Freemasons. Many of their rituals could be usefully updated for the digital era. With modern technology, could feel like real magic.[1]
Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silvergate
This is all about enforcement discretion. In the DOJ, for example, US Attorneys have plenary authority in their territory and the ability to press charges or not as is their wont. You may be familiar with this in the context of the highway patrol: a policeman has the power to pull you over, and need not justify his decision to not pull all the other speeding motorists over.[1]
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. [4]
Principles for Dealing with the Changing Economic Order by Ray Dalio
how today’s America resembles the Dutch and British empires of the past in terms of its monetary overextension.[4]
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin
how quantitative methods can identify recurrent cycles.[4]
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe
how a cyclic theory of history forecasts a serious American conflict in the 2020s (written in the mid-1990s).[4]
How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough
reminds us that the tech era is very new, only really about 10 years old, and only began in earnest with iPhone adoption. [4]
A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
A broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries.[4]
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
What the Soviet Union was actually like.[4]
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine
How the Soviet Union actually worked.[4]
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
How journalists “befriend and betray” their subjects for clicks, a book taught in journalism schools as something of a how-to manual.[4]
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists by Antony Sutton
How different groups of capitalists funded the communist revolution.[4]
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Antony Sutton
How different groups of capitalists funded the fascist revolution.[4]