Balaji’s Recommended Reading

Kindle: probably a better recreational app than Twitter

Books

(Since there are so many links in this section, you may prefer a digital copy. Go to Balajianthology.com to get a digital version of this chapter.)

Math and Science

I do like these technical books. Most people's favorite book seems to be fiction, or sometimes nonfiction. It's extremely rare for somebody to mention a technical book. I've always been surprised by that. Why isn't there a New York Review of Books for technical books? Why doesn't that exist?

The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman

Feynman was assertive and intellectual. He definitely was not a passive or submissive nerd, which was the common image of an intellectual when I was growing up.

Feynman showed you could be different. You could break out of that stereotype as an academic. Now I can see that consciously, but it wasn’t clear to me when I was younger. Now I can map the trajectory of academic, then entrepreneur, then independence. I can see the trajectory of returns on disobedience, or intellectual assertiveness.

From Feynman, I learned that 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 just repeat things without their own internal checks.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Timothy Gowers

If I were stuck on a desert island, this is the one book I would 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.

Schaum's Outlines by Joel Lerner and James Cashin

This is a great series of books. They’re yellow books from the early 2000s that explain different subjects; for example, there’s a Schaum’s outlines of probability and statistics and a Schaum’s outlines of accounting. Many people have studied accounting, but if you give them Schaum’s and ask them to do the first ten problems in accounting, it’s amazing how many of them struggle.

I use pen and paper, offline, to read and work through Schaum’s on a nice table with some coffee. It's very relaxing, almost like meditation. It's like lifting weights; I do it to kind of keep myself sharp.

One Thousand Exercises in Probability by Geoffrey Grimmett and David Stirzaker

This is evergreen. Learning how to do Markov chains and solve the eigenvalues will never, ever not be helpful. This stuff requires more energy to read, but it keeps you sharp.

The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil Gershenfeld

This book is almost twenty-five 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.

Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Paul Tipler

Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham

I’ve always liked compendiums.

Visual Complex Functions by Elias Wegert

This fun book proposes plotting all complex functions as colored contour plots. That’s kind of an obvious idea, but it's carried through systematically here.

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

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 really, really good. It teaches you how to test things that are bigger than simple functions. If you code Python applications of any scale, this book will make your coding better.

For Founders

Where Is My Flying Car? by Josh Storrs Hall

Just read it.

High Output Management by Andy Grove

Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove

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!

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley

This explains how tech founders have always had to fight against the establishment, just like the present day.

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 PhD thesis.

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.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez

This discusses the fundamental cycle in technology: people get really amped about a technology, then they try to actually do it, they 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. Carlota Perez has a whole theory about how and why that happens.

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.

The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen

This is useful for anyone trying to bootstrap a new community or network, which is virtually every founder these days.

History

The more history you read, the more you realize that the past is as surprising as the future.

As the chestnut goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. I’m starting to think a simple annual history exam would gauge a population’s immunity (or susceptibility) to a wide variety of deadly mind viruses.

The Gray Lady Winked by Ashley Rindsberg

I give this a 10/10 recommendation. Everybody in crypto should read it. I put this up there with The Sovereign Individual.

Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson

Jill Abramson, former editor of the New York Times, explains how business imperatives and pageviews drove the editorial process.

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

Describing how journalists “befriend and betray” their subjects for clicks, this book is taught in journalism schools as something of a how-to manual.

AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee's book holds up very well today. I initially thought it'd be a pop overview of AI, but it's actually a history of the Chinese tech ecosystem. Many of Lee’s takes on the speed of execution and innovation have now proven out.

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. Fire relaxed an evolutionary constraint and made us smarter. We've been co-evolving with technology for a very, very long time, arguably for evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It's what distinguishes man from animal.

Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich

This is the canonical popular summary of Reich’s school of thought, along with Cavalli-Sforza’s older book, 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.

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 its plot of land since “time immemorial.” One tribe’s homeland was once its distant ancestors’ frontier.

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 the reputation of that agency being key to its power. It's written by an FDA sympathizer, but you can read it through a different lens. The US FDA is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world. How did the FDA become so influential? How exactly did the FDA cultivate a reputation for competence and vigilance?

The Truth Machine by Michael Casey and 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.

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!

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

If you read Seeing Like a State, you’ll see there’s a sense in which the term “real name” is a misnomer. A better term is a “state name”—a name that makes you legible to the state.

From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew

The story of Singapore’s incredible transition, told by their leader Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore is an example of a well-run state, one we can all learn from.

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 involving fantasies of the past, delusions about the present, and visions of the future.

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, rituals and secret societies could feel like real magic.

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

This is all about enforcement discretion. In the DOJ, for example, US attorneys have plenary authority in their territories 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.

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.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio

Dalio describes how today’s America resembles the Dutch and British empires of the past in terms of its monetary overextension.

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin

This discusses how quantitative methods can identify recurrent cycles.

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe

Written in the mid-1990s, this book shows how a cyclic theory of history forecasts a serious American conflict in the 2020s.

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough

McCullough reminds us the tech era is very new and only began in earnest with iPhone adoption.

A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug

This is a broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Read this book to learn what the Soviet Union was actually like.

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine

Read this book to learn how the Soviet Union actually worked.

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists by Antony Sutton

Sutton tells us how different groups of capitalists funded the communist revolution.

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Antony Sutton

Sutton tells us how different groups of capitalists funded the fascist revolution.