Ranked by the number of mentions multiplied by the number of people mentioning it.
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
In the course of those readings and my study of stoicism, a lot has changed. Marcus Aurelius has guided me through breakups and getting married, through being relatively young and poor and relatively older and well-off. His wisdom has helped me with getting fired and with quitting, with success and with struggles. I’ve carried him to close to a dozen countries and moved him to multiple houses. I’ve turned to him for articles and books and casual dinner conversation. The one pristine white cover is now its own shade of tan, but with every read, every time I’ve touched the book, I’ve gotten something new or been reminded of something timeless and important.
— Ryan Holiday
Foundation (7 books)
by Isaac Asimov
In terms of sci-fi books, I think Isaac Asimov is really great. I like the Foundation series, probably one of the all-time best.
— Elon Musk
The Beginning of Infinity
by David Deutsch
We are not running out of resources. Sustainability is an emotional argument easily countered by history, physics and knowledge but it has become a virtue-signaling religion and people refuse to educate themselves. Read “The Beginning of Infinity,” rewrite your brain, and become…
— Naval Ravikant
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl
I think that the thing that struck me most about um Man's Search for Meaning was he has this paragraph in the book where he says, you know, we ask what is the meaning of life and he says that's wrong life is asking us what meaning we are going to create with our actions
— Ryan Holiday
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
by Richard P. Feynman
I loved him because Feynman was one of the first characters that I encountered that did science and serious work and was accomplished in so-called real life. He was a character, he was a happy person. He was deeply philosophical, he didn’t take himself nor life too seriously. He appreciated the mysteries of life, he appreciated living life and he had a lot of fun along the way. To me, he was like a full-stack intellectual hacker of life. And was just very inspirational to me as a kid, growing up.
— Naval Ravikant
Harry Potter series
by J.K. Rowling
[JK Rowling's] position in the culture is kind of weirdly split right because on the one hand there's her continuing legacy as the author of The Wizard books and on the other hand there's like almost her entire public persona that which we mostly experienced through Twitter which is basically obsessive bigotry towards trans people that's become sort of her definitive thing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Zero to One
by Peter Thiel
Replace the Micheal jordan book with Zero To One and it’s a good list
— MrBeast
Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
Try Borges’ short stories next, in “Collected Fictions” or “Labyrinths.”
— Naval Ravikant
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Re-Read The Masters You were in high school when you read The Great Gatsby for the first time. You were just a kid when you read The Count of Monte Cristo or had someone tell you the story of Odysseus. The point is: You got it right? You read them. You’re done, right? Nope. We cannot be content to simply pick up a book once and judge it by that experience. It’s why we have to read and re-read.
— Ryan Holiday
Lord of the Rings (3 books)
by J. R. R. Tolkien
Lord of the Rings [was my favorite book growing up]
— Elon Musk
Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
Depends what you want. Science or philosophy or...? Beginning of Infinity, Rational Optimist, Skin in the Game are all amazing. If you want more eastern philosophy, try Siddhartha, I am That, Jed McKenna.
— Naval Ravikant
Letters from a Stoic
by Seneca
Seneca one of my favorite stoic philosophers says, in fact, that we must read like a spy in the enemy's camp. Seneca writes letters from a stoic. He's a stoic philosopher and yet the philosopher he quotes most in his letters is Epicurus - his rival right. He says "I will quote a bad author if the line is good".
— Ryan Holiday
Stories of Your Life and Others
by Ted Chiang
Love Ted Chiang, but don’t think he needs my ideas.
— Naval Ravikant
The Republic
by Plato
so naturally led me to read one to read the Republic which is arguably Plato's greatest work if not one of the greatest political western philosophies of all time what a title everyone and again I was very happily surprised how much I enjoyed it
— PewDiePie
Why We Sleep
by Matthew Walker
New podcast is live: #126 – Matthew Walker, Ph.D. (@sleepdiplomat): Sleep and immune function, chronotypes, hygiene tips, and addressing questions about his book. https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker4/
— Peter Attia
The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
For example, instead of reading a business book, pick up Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Instead of reading a book on biology or evolution that’s written today, I would pick up Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Instead of reading a book on biotech right now that may be very advanced, I would just pick up The Eighth Day of Creation by Watson and Crick. Instead of reading advanced books on what cosmology and what Neil Degrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have been saying, you can pick up Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces and start with basic physics.
— Naval Ravikant
The Odyssey
by Homer
I also have a really old edition of The Iliad and the Odyssey which I'm very proud of a lot. It's probably one of my favorite books ever written highly recommend reading it.
— PewDiePie
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
1) The taste of (cold) revenge is by far the most underrated human experience. Not for cowards. Not be good for society except when revenge does not lead to more revenge. 2) Written ~170 y ago. I've never read more limpid more recent page turner.#Lindy = #ergodic seller! https://t.co/ODPZoPB6pb
— Nassim Taleb
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
Lord of Light, Snow Crash, Borges and Ted Chiang short stories.
— Naval Ravikant
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and basically what Douglas Adams was saying is: we don't really know what the right questions are to ask. The question is not "What's the meaning of life?" [...] In that book, which is really sort of an existential philosophy book disguised as as humor, they come to the conclusion that the real problem is trying to formulate the question. And to really have the right question you need a much bigger computer than earth. I think one way of characterizing this would be: The universe is the answer. What are the questions? The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. The more we expand consciousness to become a multi-planet species and ultimately a multi-stellar species, the more we have a chance of figuring out what the hell is going on.
— Elon Musk
Permutation City
by Greg Egan
Current reading list. Most into “The Beginning of Infinity” and “What is Life?” at the moment. pic.twitter.com/L1JncsXiIL
— Naval Ravikant
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Also, I have been hyping Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, because it is largely an exposition of his research of thirty-five and forty years ago, with filtering and modernization.
— Nassim Taleb
Bible
by
Envy is a syndrome, a complex of poisonous thoughts and feelings about people who have what we want but cannot get. It's not simply wanting what another person has. That's greed, which is a much more wholesome sin. Because wanting what someone has can inspire us, it can fuel our own ambition, it can even motivate us to improve ourselves. And sometimes people call that envy, but it's not really envy. It's emulation, or admiration. At worst it's what the Bible calls "coveting."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Dune (6 books)
by Frank Herbert
Dune series by Herbert also brilliant. He advocates placing limits on machine intelligence.
— Elon Musk
The Story of Civilization (11 books)
by Will Durant, Ariel Durant
Age of Napoleon [is my favorite], so far. The first books are a little dry. Gets much better when Ariel is co-author.
— Elon Musk
Culture (10 books)
by Iain Banks
If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks
— Elon Musk
The Illiad
by Homer
For maximum alpha, complete with fighting for princesses, the Iliad. Penguin audiobook at 1.25X speed is best. It was meant to be a spoken, not written, story. https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-odyssey/id1479199452
— Elon Musk
Poor Charlie's Almanack
by Charles T. Munger
[The five wisest people living today are] Jed McKenna, @KapilGuptaMD, Charlie Munger, @nntaleb One, and one who won’t want to be named
— Naval Ravikant
Life 3.0
by Max Tegmark
I'm gonna read Life 3.0 By Max Tegmark which is, he describes AI and how it, how it may or may not affect us in the future. He is a Swedish genius. I don't know if his genius, but he, the people compared to the Swedish Elon Musk and Elon Musk even praises the book. My parents recommended this as well, so I started already a little bit, and it's very interesting
— PewDiePie
Awareness
by Anthony de Mello
Popper, Deutsch, Schopenhauer, Osho, Krishnamurti, DeMello, Seneca, Kapil Gupta, Taleb, there are too many...
— Naval Ravikant
Skin in the Game
by Nassim Taleb
Nasim Talab had that great blog post and chapter in his book Skin in the Game about the intolerant minority.
— Naval Ravikant
Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu
Siddhartha, Vasistha’s Yoga, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching. I’m always going through one of these books at any given time and usually rereading for inspiration.
— Naval Ravikant
Range
by David Epstein
So there's a book behind you I was just thinking about when I think of you, one of my favorite books, Range. Have you read Range?
— Ryan Holiday
The Sovereign Individual
by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg
I think what does happen is that we're moving to the age of the sovereign individual. If you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it, even though it's almost 20 years old. It's very prophetic.
— Naval Ravikant
Superintelligence
by Nick Bostrom
Struggling hard to finish the superintelligence book. One 2 chapters left. Must... be... strong...
— Andrej Karpathy
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
I read 1984 by George Orwell before and it's one of my favorite books. It was a book that really left that impact on me and the meaning and the story tied together really gripped me and I think about it a lot.
— PewDiePie
The Book of Life
by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti, who is a lesser known guy, an Indian philosopher who lived at the turn of the last century is extremely influential to me. he’s an uncompromising, very direct person who basically tells you to look at your own mind at all times. So I have been hugely influenced by him. Probably the best book of his that I like is one called The Book of Life, which is excerpts from his various speeches and books that are stitched together.
— Naval Ravikant
The 48 Laws of Power
by Robert Greene
We’ve also had many of my favorite authors stop by and sign copies of their books, such as: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, and Finding Ultra by Rich Roll.
— Ryan Holiday
The Martian
by Andy Weir
I rarely give out 5/5, but this book was SO. GOOD. My usual complaints about many sci-fi books is that they spend a lot of time frolicking around with extended descriptions of vistas or facial features, or other basic literature mambo jambo. Instead, I am drawn to technical consistency, details and intriguing ideas. If you're like me, you will LOVE this book - it gets very nerdy very fast and stays that way for the entire duration of the book. The book offers a thrilling ride filled with science, calculations, and humor mixed in. There are many references to technical details spanning chemistry, biophysics, mechanical engineering, orbital mechanics, etc. The result is a believable and consistent backdrop that envelops the story. I had a lot of fun, found plenty food for thought, and I learned a lot! What else can you ask for? 5/5. 5/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Great Challenge
by Osho
Popper, Deutsch, Schopenhauer, Osho, Krishnamurti, DeMello, Seneca, Kapil Gupta, Taleb, there are too many...
— Naval Ravikant
Total Freedom
by Jiddu Krishnamurti
From “Total Freedom.” It’s all over but particularly “A Dynamic Society” and “Living in Ecstasy.” pic.twitter.com/sPhZSMwxPh
— Naval Ravikant
The Power Broker
by Robert A. Caro
There might be a week where I read several books and then there might be a couple weeks where i'm not reading or I'm just really struggling with one book like a book like The Power Broker might take me a couple weeks but I'm always reading and I'm reading short books and long books.
— Ryan Holiday
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
by Robert A. Heinlein
I think [The Moon is a Harsh Mistress] is Heinlein's best book, honestly.
— Elon Musk
The Gene
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
More recently, I’ve gained a lot from reading a diverse set of books and authors including Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert, On Immunity by Eula Biss, The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Eradication by Nancy Stepan.
— Bill Gates
The Black Swan
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, by Nassim Taleb, who is famous for The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. I sort of like his collection of ancient wisdom, In the Bed of Procrustes.
— Naval Ravikant
The Three-Body Problem
by Liu Cixin
There's a trilogy by Liu Cixin, a physics-based sci-fi thriller. [Talk about the dark forest hypothesis]
— Naval Ravikant
Endurance
by Alfred Lansing
I'm reading The Endurance and "by endurance we conquer" (Ernest Shackleton's family motto) struck me as a great piece of startup wisdom.
— Sam Altman
Atomic Habits
by James Clear
It’s when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like it’s falling apart, that we most need to develop good habits. I think about James Clear’s concept of atomic habits on a regular basis. To me, this is a sign of a great book—that even just thinking about the title has an impact on you. I love the double meaning of the word atomic—not just meaning explosive habits, but also focusing on the smallest possible size of habit, the tiniest step you can take to start the chain reaction that can in fact lead to explosive results.
— Ryan Holiday
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
When the Ayn Rand books were written in the 1950s, it felt like it was crazy. It's so bleak, so pessimistic, I think, or so busted, so broken. When I first read them in the late 80s, it still felt pretty crazy, and then the last decade, it's it's in many ways felt much more correct.
— Peter Thiel
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon
This is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon. When I was in college I really wanted to read it but this set was like 150 dollars or something and so I told my parents that i needed it for class.
— Ryan Holiday
Spiritual Enlightenment
by Jed McKenna
Read everything Jed McKenna ever wrote and you're going to get your fill on this stuff.
— Naval Ravikant
The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
For example, instead of reading a business book, pick up Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Instead of reading a book on biology or evolution that’s written today, I would pick up Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Instead of reading a book on biotech right now that may be very advanced, I would just pick up The Eighth Day of Creation by Watson and Crick. Instead of reading advanced books on what cosmology and what Neil Degrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have been saying, you can pick up Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces and start with basic physics.
— Naval Ravikant
The Fabric of Reality
by David Deutsch
“The next thing I would do is read The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. It's the best explanation of existence in existence…”https://getairchat.com/s/oUN9MCU1
— Naval Ravikant
How to Change Your Mind
by Michael Pollan
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
The Discourses of Epictetus
by Epictetus
Epictetus one of the great philosophers of all time from the great stoics of all time he summarizes his own book when he says the chief task in life is to separate things that are in our control from those that are not in our control.
— Ryan Holiday
Gödel, Escher, Bach
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Beginning of Infinity reminds me the most of Gödel, Escher, Bach in that it is very wide-ranging and stitches together ideas from many different disciplines. It’s very difficult to understand and follow completely. Everyone claims to have read it, but, as far as I can tell, very few people understand it.
— Naval Ravikant
Who We Are and How We Got Here
by David Reich
[...] this is a monument, not just a book. And the beginning of a new cultural program. [...]
— Nassim Taleb
Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
The book is called Ready Player One. It's a sci-fi book. I'm not particularly into sci-fi books, but this book, this book was a wild ride. I thought it was really, really fantastic.
— Casey Neistat
Twilight
by Stephanie Meyer
I think that you could certainly make an egalitarian relationship exciting in fiction but the way that you do that would be to put other kinds of barriers in the way. I mean I guess you look at something like Romeo and Juliet was as an obvious example where Romeo and Juliet are, I guess, more or less socially equal although you know, as medieval man and woman not really... but still there's not quite the class element that there is in say Pride and Prejudice or in Twilight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Why We’re Polarized
by Ezra Klein
Summer’s almost over. If you have time to sneak in another book or two – here are a few I recommend.
— Bill Gates
Outliers
by Malcolm Gladwell
I remember I first read The Tipping Point then I read Blink then Outliers then David and Goliath which is also very good, but then when I read Talking with Strangers last year [...] I remember I shot him an email and I said 'Malcolm this book is like the definition of mastery, it's like watching a master at work'. He took this subject matter that should have been so difficult and frankly not interesting and it's fascinating.
— Ryan Holiday
The death and life of great American cities
by Jane Jacobs
Some of the books that have changed my life and had the most influence on me: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 48 Laws of Power, The Black Swan, life is unpredictable. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Four Hour Work Week - Huge! 33 Strategies of War, obviously Robert Greene's Mastery. Pia Mellody, one of my favorite authors [Facing Codependence]. This biography of John D Rockefeller, maybe you remember it from The Obstacle is the way? This book by John Boyd [...] Malcolm X the autobiography, Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run. A friend of mine recommended this biography William Lee Miller on President Lincoln. It was one of the books that changed his life. Had totally changed how I thought about leadership. The War of Art, Turning Pro - two favorites from Steven Pressfield. Haruki Murakami's book on running 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. Ellison's Invisible Man. Again another book from Pia Mellody [Facing Love Addiction]. Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Taming the Tiger Within. The Brass Check - this book inspired the name of my marketing company and my book Trust Me I'm Lying. This is one of my copies of Meditations. Why Don't We Learn From History by BH Liddell Hart. Prescription For Adversity, a strange book biography of Ambrose Bierce that I like. Candide, interesting story I stole this from where I got married they had this on the shelf. I read it while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to get married and I thought hey I'm keeping this. [...] Second Mountain, this is a new addition to the shelf. Dr. Drew [The Mirror Effect] who introduced me to stoicism, Great! This is a cool book -Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer it's an analysis of Lincoln as if he was a writer. This book: Strategy by BH Liddell Hart influenced how I think about strategy.John Graves Hard Scrabble, influenced how I think about my farm. Fishing For Fun is a new book, I just read by Herbert Hoover about the philosophical benefits of fishing and yes Herbert Hoover, the president. Chesterfield's letters to his son [...] Seth Godin's the Dip, great book. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Jane Jacobs also amazing. Daniel Boorstin, great. Death Be Not Proud, beautiful book. So these are some of the books, it's my life shelf. [...] Oh Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, great! The Way To Love by Anthony De Mello.
— Ryan Holiday
The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
After reading all the Hunger Games books I was so sad that they were over, like I wanted to read them over and over again.
— Taylor Swift
12 Rules for Life
by Jordan B. Peterson
Why read Jordan Peterson when Camille Paglia is right there? Tired of male misogynists being promoted over more qualified female misogynists
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Deep Learning
by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville
There were very few books to draw on during my PhD for DL. Now there’s Ian Goodfellow et al. Deep Learning book and other resources (e.g. many talks, CS231n, etc).
— Andrej Karpathy
Homo Deus
by Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus, successor to Sapiens? Good, but nowhere near as good as Sapiens. Sapiens I think is the best book of the last decade that I have read. I loved Sapiens and I highly recommend it for everybody here. Homo Deus is a sequel and I think you all know that Harari is a genius, but the issue he had was, he had decades to write Sapiens. Then his editors probably said, “Wow! That made a lot of money, so can you please crank out a second book right away?” So they come up with one in a year or two and call it Homo Deus. Homo Deus is very insightful and very clever and very smart, but it’s basically got one big idea at the center. When you figure out that one idea, you don’t need to finish the whole book. Whereas with Sapiens, there’s lots and lots of great ideas in there and it’s just full of them, chock full per page.
— Naval Ravikant
The Vital Question
by Nick Lane
Easily one of my favorite books ever - Nick Lane is an excellent scientist author, mixing engaging presentation, highly intriguing ideas, and tons of technical details. I learned a lot about origins of life and unlocked a whole new level of appreciation of the fantastic cosmic story every one of us is a part of, with all of the happy accidents along the way. 5/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Steal like an artist
by Austin Kleon
A favorite book of mine (and popular in the store) is Steal Like an Artist. You borrow, of course, but the key is that no one has the same combination of influences as you. So it creates a unique equation.
— Ryan Holiday
Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Next book: Gay Science! And know what you want to do it's okay! I give you the pass! The first time I read Nietzsche I read Beyond Good and Evil I didn't understand a goddamn thing. Don't watch my book review it's embarrassing and I'm not gonna pretend I'm some Nietzsche scholar now either but I had a bad time first reading him because he was referencing all these different philosophers and I had no clue who they even were after reading more philosophy coming back to Nietzsche again my reaction was still bad because I went this guy was making fun of all my heroes what the *** so Nietzsche for me was a slow cook I will admit. But the best way to understand philosophy is to understand the person behind it and the more I feel like I had done that the more I came to love Nietzsche. Uh he loves his words he's very great at them he's very harsh and very brutal but you understand that he targets philosophers that he likes or that he at least admires to some degree.
— PewDiePie
Think on These Things
by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Popper, Deutsch, Schopenhauer, Osho, Krishnamurti, DeMello, Seneca, Kapil Gupta, Taleb, there are too many...
— Naval Ravikant
Six Easy Pieces
by Richard P. Feynman
Start with The Beginning of Infinity. Then read Matt Ridley, Nick Szabo, David Deutsch, Nassim Taleb, Schopenhauer, Peter Thiel, Popper, Feynman, Art DeVany, Scott Adams, Jed McKenna. Recognize them when they challenge socially enforced mass-delusions with science and logic.
— Naval Ravikant
Direct Truth
by Kapil Gupta
It moves around. Keep coming back to I Am That, Direct Truth, Vasistha's Yoga, Jed McKenna, and Ashtavakra Gita.
— Naval Ravikant
The Road to Serfdom
by Friedrich A. von Hayek
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
American Caesar
by William Manchester
Have you read the William Manchester biography of of MacArthur [...] It's incredible!
— Ryan Holiday
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
I think that you could certainly make an egalitarian relationship exciting in fiction but the way that you do that would be to put other kinds of barriers in the way. I mean I guess you look at something like Romeo and Juliet was as an obvious example where Romeo and Juliet are, I guess, more or less socially equal although you know, as medieval man and woman not really... but still there's not quite the class element that there is in say Pride and Prejudice or in Twilight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Player of Games
by Iain M. Banks
This is another example of a popular sci-fi that I simply cannot stand. I forced myself to make it through hundreds of pages thinking that it might get better later but gave up halfway through, at a point where some alien females were described as wearing jewels. I'm sorry, but I cannot accept human-like qualities naively attributed to alien beings, it's one of my greatest pet peeves. This is another one of those sci-fi that are really a vanilla story that _happens_ to take place in the future. It is a story first and a sci-fi second, and I like my books the other way around. I debated between 2/5 and 1/5, but I hated the sheer naivety and childish "little green men on mars"-like ideas in the book so much that I'm going to go with 1/5. 1/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer
No, I think Dan Carlin is one of the people, like, when Dan Carlin is one of the people that really started getting me excited about, like, revolutionizing education. Because, like, Dan Carlin instills, instilled, I already like, really liked history, but he instilled like, an obsessive love of history in me, to the point where like, now I'm fucking reading, like, going to bed, reading like part four of the "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," or whatever. Like, I'll look up, like, dense-ass history.
— Grimes
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
I think it's Anna Karenina where it's: all happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy. In their own special way I think something like the opposite is true of companies: all great companies are special in a good way and then all failed companies somehow generic and and failed.
— Peter Thiel
Game Changer
by Matthew Sadler, Natasha Regan
Huge congratulations @NatashaRegan123 @gmmds on winning the FIDE Chess book of the year!! It's been great fun collaborating with you on this, and seeing the wonderful influence that #AlphaZero and your brilliant Game Changer book has had on the game we all love. https://twitter.com/FIDE_chess/status/1280856803530719234
— Demis Hassabis
Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
A man with low IQ becomes a subject in an experiment that promises to increase intelligence. The book is written in a journal form and chronicles the transformation. Whether you will enjoy the book comes down to your motivations coming in. I read this book primarily because I find the the topic of increasing intelligence / superintelligence to be interesting. Hence I enjoyed the first half of the book. Unfortunately, the book later turns into something more similar to a drama, having little to do with scifi and more with human relationships. However, if you're only looking for a good story with a fun speculative added element and a hint of philosophy then you might just enjoy it! 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Better Angels of Our Nature
by Steven Pinker
Junk Science: severely flawed thesis/handling of data.
— Nassim Taleb
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track
by Richard P. Feynman
Start with The Beginning of Infinity. Then read Matt Ridley, Nick Szabo, David Deutsch, Nassim Taleb, Schopenhauer, Peter Thiel, Popper, Feynman, Art DeVany, Scott Adams, Jed McKenna. Recognize them when they challenge socially enforced mass-delusions with science and logic.
— Naval Ravikant
Benjamin Franklin
by Walter Isaacson
I really liked [Isaacson's] biography of Benjamin Franklin who I would say is certainly one of my heroes. He seemed like a really great guy. I think in the case of Franklin he did what needed to be done at the time it needed to be done, so he was in different fields. He sort of thought about what's the most important thing that needs to be accomplished right now and then worked that.
— Elon Musk
Elon Musk
by Ashlee Vance
Did you ever read Ashley Vance's biography on Elon Musk, the first one? He did a book on Elon four or five years ago and my take away from that was that he just did this a little too early. I learned a lot but Elon's still in the middle of disrupting the world which is why this Walter Isaacson one is great, because it's now and a lot more has happened in the last four or five years, and you can really start to see his impact on the world. This felt like a more appropriate time to do a biography on Elon.
— MrBeast
The Choice
by EDITH EGER
Dr. Edith Eger is a complete hero of mine. At 16-years-old, she’s sent to Auschwitz. And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. Eger’s mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who we’re going to be inside of them, what we’re going to hold onto inside of them.
— Ryan Holiday
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
a fun read even if you aren’t a sci-fi fan. I finished the whole thing in one weekend.
— Bill Gates
The Origins of Virtue
by Matt Ridley
The Origins of Virtue, The Evolution of Cooperation, The Strategy of Conflict. Or just play multiplayer negotiation games like Diplomacy.
— Naval Ravikant
Genome
by Matt Ridley
Matt had a bigger influence on pulling me into science, and a love of science, than almost any other author. His first book that I read was called Genome. I must have six or seven dog-eared copies of it lying around in various boxes. It helped me define what life is, how it works, why it’s important, and placed evolution as a binding principle in the center of my worldview. That’s a common theme that runs across Matt’s books.
— Naval Ravikant
Tools of Titans
by Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss's book of what he's learned from a lot of high performers.
— Naval Ravikant
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
by Jack Weatherford
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
Diaspora
by Greg Egan
Yes agreed, diaspora is amazing, but I think it’s best to read permutation city first. Same with player of games and consider phlebas, although maybe it’s just cos that’s the order I read them in.
— Demis Hassabis
Energy and Civilization
by Vaclav Smil
[What are you currently reading?] [...] The Beginning of Infinity [...] The Fabric of Reality [...] I also have a book called Scientific Freedom which is kind of about how you do high quality scientific research. [...] Something Deeply Hidden, which is a book on the many universes theory by Sean Carroll. There is No Antimemetics Division, a sci-fi novel that I just finished. The Disappearance of the Universe. Energy and Civilization. When Money Dies.
— Naval Ravikant
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
God, this thing is huge, it's like the "Infinite Jest" of TERFery. So "Troubled Blood" is a detective novel about the simmering heterosexual tension between two investigators. That's really what Rowling is best at isn't it, simmering?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
by Carlo Rovelli
Deutsch, Taleb, and Feynman mainly. Also Bohr, Schrödinger, Mandelbrot, Chait, Gödel, Rovelli, others (I know, some are mathematicians and some have never written a formal book on philosophy). On the non-physicist Western side, currently reading Schopenhauer.
— Naval Ravikant
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The only upstanding aesthetician in all of Western history is the respectable English gentleman Oscar Wilde. According to Wilde: - [Oscar] "Those who find ugly meanings "in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. "This is a fault. "Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things "are the cultivated. "For these, there is hope. "They are the elect to whom beautiful things "mean only beauty."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Principles
by Ray Dalio
On the other side of our cognitive biases is elite-level success. Ray Dalio’s financial firm, Bridgewater, has methodically and systematically worked to remove their cognitive shortcomings and their performance speaks for itself. Ray open sourced Bridgewater’s methods in Principles and the results were good evidence that collectives can operate at higher levels when they are open and honest about and can see past their cognitive flaws.
— Bryan Johnson
Good Calories, Bad Calories
by Gary Taubes
Response to "Are there any books you haven’t mentioned that you feel would make your reading list?"
Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond
He put Guns Germs and Steel and Naomi Klein's book justiably in "fiction".
— Nassim Taleb
Einstein
by Walter Isaacson
This was my second read of an Einstein biography, this time by Isaacson. Coming from Isaacson, the book is well-written and seemed very thoroughly researched. Overall a great read, but if I had to complain my biggest issue is that the emphasis was not allocated very well. For instance, a huge portion of the book is devoted to Einstein’s personal life, reading through his correspondence with his love interests. It’s interesting for a while, but after some point I thought we were intruding a little too much, and that it was stretched out and uninformative. Conversely, some very interesting portions of his life are under-represented. In one chapter he publishes his streak of 1905 papers, and in what feels like a few pages later he is a scientific celebrity. This period, where the community is discovering and processing him as a person from nowhere who made sudden and large contributions is among the most interesting, and very sparsely covered. There could have also been much more space for his works’ retrospectives - how do scientists today see his theories, in what ways was he right or wrong based on our current understanding of physics? This book was written in 2007 but so few of these interesting retrospectives are present that it may have as well been published in 1955. I thought this was a huge missed opportunity. A few more fun parts of the book I enjoyed: - Einstein did not describe himself as atheist and in fact frowned on them. Instead, he subscribed to something similar to Spinoza’s god - an abstract, pantheistic, impersonal god. I think I mostly self-identified as an atheist until now but I’ve been swayed to Einstein’s view by this book, as it was nicely presented by Walter Isaacson with help of original texts by Einstein. - Einstein strongly disliked nationalism, and thought of himself as a citizen of the world. An interesting view, expanded on nicely in the book. - I liked the anecdotes surrounding Einstein’s Nobel prize. Most people felt strongly that he should get one, but the situation was more politically charged than may seem at a first glance. In the end, Einstein received the Nobel for photoelectric effect, not for his much more impactful theory of general relativity. - The book goes into quite a lot of detail on how Einstein was rejected by almost every single academic institution prior to his 1905 papers. Luckily, it turns out that a patent office is not a bad place for an academic tenure. - The book goes into quite a bit of fun details about the massive Einstein hysteria in the public. A scientific celebrity of that scale is quite singular in our history - it was relatively unprecedented back then, and we also haven’t seen quite the same phenomenon since. I wish we did. - It was also fun to think about Einstein’s stubborn refusal to accept Quantum Mechanics despite mounting evidence throughout his life (“He does not play dice”). The irony is that many established senior scientists were on the defense of the old order when Einstein first formulated GR, and now here he was much later (as an established senior scientist) stubbornly defending the old order in face of attacks from QM. This irony was not lost on Einstein at all either, but he still refused to correct for this persistently observed bias across history. As a scientist, I hereby resolve to overcompensate in accepting new paradigms once I’m older :) I developed a new appreciation for Einstein after reading the book, and there were plenty of fun parts and anecdotes that made this quite worth the read. 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The War of Art
by Steven Pressfield
My other favorite books is the Steven Pressfield's war of Art. My copy of this book is, you know, 10-12 and 13 years old now and it's filled with all sorts of different notations and, you know, things that I took from it.
— Ryan Holiday
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
[About Fahrenheit 451] it is so bad, it is so terrible. I think it is a perfect example of a book that the moral is the core center of the novel which just makes it so god damn boring.
— PewDiePie
The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In my opinion the beauty of fiction is when you have characters that are interesting and a story that really grips you in a way that the ideas behind it isn't as transparent and they have so much more impact - Dostoyevsky does this best ('Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot')
— PewDiePie
The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien
A delightful adventure story full of charming characters and unexpected twists and turns, The Hobbit is a classic in its own right. Building on the rich world of Middle-earth that Tolkien created, this book is a must-read for anyone who loves fantasy or adventure stories.
— Andrej Karpathy
Lying
by Sam Harris
Sam Harris is a pompous hypocrite (writes book about how lying is terrible and then advocates lying to keep Trump from being elected) who is visibly and audibly detached from reality. How far he has fallen.
— Elon Musk
The fifteen decisive battles of the world
by Creasy, Edward Shepherd Sir
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
I think that you could certainly make an egalitarian relationship exciting in fiction but the way that you do that would be to put other kinds of barriers in the way. I mean I guess you look at something like Romeo and Juliet was as an obvious example where Romeo and Juliet are, I guess, more or less socially equal although you know, as medieval man and woman not really... but still there's not quite the class element that there is in say Pride and Prejudice or in Twilight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Did you ever read Ashley Vance's biography on Elon Musk, the first one? He did a book on Elon four or five years ago and my take away from that was that he just did this a little too early. I learned a lot but Elon's still in the middle of disrupting the world which is why this Walter Isaacson one is great, because it's now and a lot more has happened in the last four or five years, and you can really start to see his impact on the world. This felt like a more appropriate time to do a biography on Elon.
— MrBeast
Our Mathematical Universe
by Max Tegmark
This book brought up so many scientific possibilities that I had obviously no clue about they were never taught to me in school and to me they're just mind-blowing. I really don't want to sound like that one ninja tweet I can't stop thinking about Quantum fixes or whatever it is.
— PewDiePie
How Innovation Works
by Matt Ridley
Matt, you have this new book out, How Innovation Works. It’s a must-read for entrepreneurs and government officials who want to either be innovative themselves or foster innovation in their geography or society. Frankly, if you were an entrepreneur, self-styled inventor or innovator, this is probably the cheapest, fastest education you can get on the history and future of innovation. I highly recommend it.
— Naval Ravikant
The Great Influenza
by John M. Barry
I've talked about John M. Barry's book The Great Influenza which is an incredible book that I think everyone should have read at the beginning of this pandemic
— Ryan Holiday
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
by Karl Popper
Nobody agrees on what the right philosophy is and they contradict each other. So I would say read Deutsch / Popper and leave it at that.
— Naval Ravikant
Memoirs of Hadrian
by Marguerite Yourcenar
I like The Inner Citadel a lot. Memoirs of Hadrian. Donald Robertson's book is also very good
— Ryan Holiday
The Untethered Soul
by Michael A. Singer
Michael Singer, by the way, he has a good book called The Untethered Soul.
— Naval Ravikant
The Power of Now
by Eckhart Tolle
Hard on Twitter. You can read DeMello, J Krishnamurti, Jed McKenna, Michael Singer, Rupert Spira, Osho, Tolle, etc.. Different ones appeal to different people.
— Naval Ravikant
The Dip
by Seth Godin
Some of the books that have changed my life and had the most influence on me: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 48 Laws of Power, The Black Swan, life is unpredictable. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Four Hour Work Week - Huge! 33 Strategies of War, obviously Robert Greene's Mastery. Pia Mellody, one of my favorite authors [Facing Codependence]. This biography of John D Rockefeller, maybe you remember it from The Obstacle is the way? This book by John Boyd [...] Malcolm X the autobiography, Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run. A friend of mine recommended this biography William Lee Miller on President Lincoln. It was one of the books that changed his life. Had totally changed how I thought about leadership. The War of Art, Turning Pro - two favorites from Steven Pressfield. Haruki Murakami's book on running 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. Ellison's Invisible Man. Again another book from Pia Mellody [Facing Love Addiction]. Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Taming the Tiger Within. The Brass Check - this book inspired the name of my marketing company and my book Trust Me I'm Lying. This is one of my copies of Meditations. Why Don't We Learn From History by BH Liddell Hart. Prescription For Adversity, a strange book biography of Ambrose Bierce that I like. Candide, interesting story I stole this from where I got married they had this on the shelf. I read it while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to get married and I thought hey I'm keeping this. [...] Second Mountain, this is a new addition to the shelf. Dr. Drew [The Mirror Effect] who introduced me to stoicism, Great! This is a cool book -Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer it's an analysis of Lincoln as if he was a writer. This book: Strategy by BH Liddell Hart influenced how I think about strategy.John Graves Hard Scrabble, influenced how I think about my farm. Fishing For Fun is a new book, I just read by Herbert Hoover about the philosophical benefits of fishing and yes Herbert Hoover, the president. Chesterfield's letters to his son [...] Seth Godin's the Dip, great book. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Jane Jacobs also amazing. Daniel Boorstin, great. Death Be Not Proud, beautiful book. So these are some of the books, it's my life shelf. [...] Oh Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, great! The Way To Love by Anthony De Mello.
— Ryan Holiday
Lifespan
by David Sinclair
David A. Sinclair, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He is the co-founder of the journal Aging, where he serves as co-chief editor. Dr. Sinclair's work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that drive human aging and identifying ways to slow or reverse aging's effects. In particular, he has examined the role of sirtuins in disease and aging, with special emphasis on how sirtuin activity is modulated by compounds produced by the body as well as those consumed in the diet, such as resveratrol. His work has implications for human metabolism, mitochondrial and neurological health, and cancer. Dr. Sinclair obtained his doctoral degree in molecular genetics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1995. Since then, he has been the recipient of more than 25 prestigious honors and awards and in 2014 was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Dr. Sinclair recently authored the book Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don't Have To. Aging – a process that began the moment we were born – is generally thought of as inevitable. Although aging isn't a disease, it is the primary risk factor for developing many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. In turn, many of these conditions hasten the aging process, setting up a vicious cycle of cellular damage and systemic loss of function. A growing field of research, led by a few innovative scientists proposing radical, contrarian ideas, suggests that aging might not be as inevitable as once thought. In this episode, Dr. David Sinclair discusses exciting new findings in the field of aging research, with special emphasis on the roles of sirtuins, resveratrol, and NAD+.
— Rhonda Patrick
The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson, Snow Crash, amazing, amazing book. He also did The Diamond Age. There’s nothing quite similar to Snow Crash. Snow Crash is in a league of its own.
— Naval Ravikant
Tiny Beautiful Things
by Cheryl Strayed
I love Cheryl Strayed, she's a great writer. She says all sorts of brilliant things. If you haven't read her book 'Dear Sugar' [Tiny Beautiful Things] you absolutely should.
— Ryan Holiday
Vasistha's Yoga
by Vālmīki
It moves around. Keep coming back to I Am That, Direct Truth, Vasistha's Yoga, Jed McKenna, and Ashtavakra Gita.
— Naval Ravikant
The Order of Time
by Carlo Rovelli
Deutsch, Taleb, and Feynman mainly. Also Bohr, Schrödinger, Mandelbrot, Chait, Gödel, Rovelli, others (I know, some are mathematicians and some have never written a formal book on philosophy). On the non-physicist Western side, currently reading Schopenhauer.
— Naval Ravikant
Transmetropolitan
by Warren Ellis
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
On the Genealogy of Morality
by Friedrich Nietzsche
I find this book thrilling to read, honestly, and I am not easily thrilled, especially not by philosophers. I think this book in particular gets me because especially if you were raised Christian, this is so the opposite of everything we were ever taught to believe that it almost feels like, dirty. Like should I be reading this? Is this allowed?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
by Stephen R. Covey
7 habits of highly effective people, I’m on my second listen, hands down the best book ever.
— MrBeast
Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Nick wrote the book called Hatching Twitter and I've talked about this here on this show before, because it was reading his book Hatching Twitter which is about how Twitter came to be, that literally motivated me inspired me, gave me the confidence to start my own technology company.
— Casey Neistat
Fifty Shades of Grey
by E. L. James
Christian Grey is not a groper. Have you even read it?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Fault in Our Stars
by John Green
Must admit to liking "The Fault in Our Stars" too. Sad, romantic and beautifully named
— Elon Musk
Twelve Against the Gods
by William Bolitho
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
> You could also read Richard Rhodes "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb" Already did, great book
— Andrej Karpathy
Troubled Blood
by Robert Galbraith
J.K. Rowling is a popular author who used to write whimsical stories about a wizard school, but who now writes books about transvestite serial killers masturbating into stolen panties because she's lost her goddamn mind.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Outlive
by Peter Attia
Congratulations to @PeterAttiaMD on his new book Outlive. A great read and clearly a labor of love. pic.twitter.com/HfJatHcKSb
— Bryan Johnson
Scale
by Geoffrey West
Have you seen Scale by West? Log scale, but humans are outliers. Exercise has a net effect of lowering the total beats, see @drjohnm's book.
— Nassim Taleb
The Obstacle is the Way
by Ryan Holiday
It's Ryan being like talking about, yeah, talking about Marcus Aurelius and like how you apply that to life. And it's like, these are sort of the ponderings, is that a word? The things that I pull from his books that I underline that mean so much to me. And now, he's delivering them to me in a medium that actually works better, which is these little clips, still read his books. I just mean it's better than underlining a chapter and trying to find that dog eared page. And that's been really brilliant.
— Casey Neistat
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
I was very impacted by "The Selfish Gene". I thought that was a really good book, it helped me understand altruism as an example and where it comes from. And just realizing that the selection and the levels of genes was a huge insight for me at the time and it cleared up a lot of things for me.
— Andrej Karpathy
Molecular Biology of the Cell
by Bruce Alberts
I like to reach for textbooks sometimes. I feel like books are for too much of a general consumption sometimes and they're too high up in the level of abstraction and it's not good enough. So I like textbooks, I like "The Cell". I think "The Cell" was pretty cool. [...] And then I'm also suspicious of textbooks honestly because as an example in deep-learning there's no amazing textbooks and the field is changing very quickly. I imagine the same is true in say synthetic biology and so on, these books like "The Cell" are kind of outdated. They're still high-level, like what is the actual real source of truth? It's people in wet labs working with cells. Sequencing genomes and, yeah, actually working with it. And I don't have that much exposure to that or what that looks like. So I still don't fully, I'm reading through the cell and it's kind of interesting, and I'm learning but it's still not sufficient I would say in terms of understanding.
— Andrej Karpathy
Solaris
by Stanisław Lem
Honestly, I love Lem's ideas and treatment of aliens and this book definitely does not disappoint on that front, but everything else outside of that was just not great, making the book very difficult and tedious to finish. The characters are drawing out every single dialog, everything is always kept so very mysterious, everyone is always confused or unwilling to communicate properly, no-one acts like a good scientist, and the technological capability of the ocean is dubious. The story and its events just did not really add up. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
I’ll go reread a favorite novel, such as A Man in Full or The Moviegoer or Memoirs of Hadrian.
— Ryan Holiday
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
by Mark Manson
We’ve also had many of my favorite authors stop by and sign copies of their books, such as: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, and Finding Ultra by Rich Roll.
— Ryan Holiday
From Strength to Strength
by Arthur Brooks
Reading and enjoying the new book by @arthurbrooks, From Strength to Strength, and love the quote, "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad." (I believe attributed to Brian O'Driscoll)
— Peter Attia
Essentialism
by Greg McKeown
"Essentialism" In a very confusing world where my options are now practically infinite, and everyone is battling for my time and attention, I needed an operating system with which to live life. Many times while I was growing up I felt like I was drowning, never able to keep up while everything flew right by. This book feels like the guide on how to handle it all. Greg McKeown defines essentialism as "The disciplined pursuit of less, but better". When I began listening to this book I had the strange feeling that someone was describing the path that I'm already on. Like flashing a light down a dark tunnel that you're crawling through. I could immediately see where I was headed. Just felt real it felt like a relief. It felt like clarity on how to act and what to do.
— Nathaniel Drew
The inner citadel
by Pierre Hadot
I like Donald Robertson's book *How To Think Like a Roman Emperor* but the best book about Stoicism that's not written by one of the Stoics has got to be *The Inner Citadel* by Pierre Hadot.
— Ryan Holiday
The Code Breaker
by Walter Isaacson
Isaacson does a good job highlighting the most important ethical questions around gene editing.
— Bill Gates
The Inner Game of Tennis
by W. Timothy Gallwey
Have you read 'The Inner Game of Tennis'? [...] okay, so one you have to read it if you like tennis! But I believe it's Tom Brady's favorite book.
— Ryan Holiday
Numbers Don't Lie
by Vaclav Smil
My favorite author’s new book might be his best one yet. Each chapter covers one of 71 facts about the world that help you understand how history ties together. I unabashedly recommend it to anyone who loves learning.
— Bill Gates
Fooled by Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, by Nassim Taleb, who is famous for The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. I sort of like his collection of ancient wisdom, In the Bed of Procrustes.
— Naval Ravikant
Antifragile
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Taleb is one of my favorite writers if you haven't read the Black Swan or Anti-Fragile or Fooled by Randomness you absolutely should.
— Ryan Holiday
The Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell
I think if a Malcolm Gladwell book came out today like The Tipping Point came out today I think it would not sell five million copies because um now people would want to know specifically how to create tipping points.
— Ryan Holiday
Nexus
by Ramez Naam
Nexus is a (programmable) operating system layer over the brain that allows people to program their minds (e.g., download a "Bruce Lee" package), and communicate directly with the minds of others. The book's plot involves a protagonist scientist who wants to release the technology for good, and a government organization who wants to stop it (or at least massively slow it down) in its tracks for fear of unintended consequences. I quite enjoyed the world-building pieces of this book. The Nexus operating system is interesting and is described in quite a lot of technical detail. More generally, the world features a large number of human body/mind augmentations that can be purchased. We also get a glimpse of some post-humans and we're teased with ideas of human hive minds. Unfortunately, after the awesome world-building is over in the first ~third of the book, the plot mostly transitions into what feels like a long chase sequence / thriller, and loses some of its grandeur. 5/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Intelligent Investor
by Benjamin Graham
They don't realize that a book can be the greatest investment you ever make in your life that's what Warren Buffett said. He said the single best investment he ever made was buying a copy of Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor.
— Ryan Holiday
Counsels and Maxims
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Popper, Deutsch, Schopenhauer, Osho, Krishnamurti, DeMello, Seneca, Kapil Gupta, Taleb, there are too many...
— Naval Ravikant
The Ride of a Lifetime
by Robert Iger
This is one of the best business books I’ve read in several years. Iger does a terrific job explaining what it’s really like to be the CEO of a large company. Whether you’re looking for business insights or just an entertaining read, I think anyone would enjoy his stories about overseeing Disney during one of the most transformative times in its history.
— Bill Gates
xkcd
by Randall Munroe
Finally, I love the way that former NASA engineer Randall Munroe turns offbeat science lessons into super-engaging comics. The two books of his that I’ve read and highly recommend are What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, and XKCD Volume 0.
— Bill Gates
A New Kind of Science
by Stephen Wolfram
Witness here how salaried physicists are dismissing @stephen_wolfram Wolfram's automata BEFORE even hearing him Just as Freeman Dyson publicly dismissed *A New Kind of Science* c. 2002; it turned out that he did not read the book. & pple who refused to read it referred to Dyson! https://t.co/8PfnQVG1k7
— Nassim Taleb
Reality is Not What it Seems
by Carlo Rovelli
Deutsch, Taleb, and Feynman mainly. Also Bohr, Schrödinger, Mandelbrot, Chait, Gödel, Rovelli, others (I know, some are mathematicians and some have never written a formal book on philosophy). On the non-physicist Western side, currently reading Schopenhauer.
— Naval Ravikant
Children of Time
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Interesting premise on a very high level - follows an alien civilization "booting up" from scratch, intertwined with the shenanigans of a rebooted spacefaring human civilization. Enjoyed the idea of the "classicist". Severe lack of technical bits and pieces, making it overall a quite "soft" sci-fi. A little too long, could probably be compressed by 5X of more. The attempt at world building is valiant, but ultimately quite shallow and not very believable. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Finite and Infinite Games
by James P. Carse
I have read Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. It's a decent book. I'm not sure it needed to be a book. I think would have made a great blog post.
— Naval Ravikant
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
by Richard Bach
"Jonathan Livingston Seagull" This is one of the very few books I've ever read multiple times throughout my life. It's very simple. I think that's why I like it so much. This book is definitely not for everybody, and I do believe that it requires an open mind. But for those that can connect with the story, I feel like it has a lasting impact. It's the story of Jonathan, the seagull that is unsatisfied with just learning how to fly. This is a bird with an intense desire to learn and to push limits and boundaries. This book is about his journey, the stages he goes through, the obstacles that he faces. I almost don't want to say anything else about it, maybe because I don't want to give the wrong idea or to elevate expectations. You could almost call this a children's book. You can easily read it in one sitting, but trust me when I say that it will live in your mind for far longer than that.
— Nathaniel Drew
The Boys
by Garth Ennis
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
One of the earliest books I read this year was the 'Brave New World' written by Aldous Huxley. I loved this one especially because it is a good mix of comedy and ,intentional or not I don't know, and how grim it gets, how dark it is which really delivers this impactful meaning behind it.
— PewDiePie
The Millionaire Next Door
by Thomas J. Stanley
More Experts I recently read a bestseller called The Millionaire Next Door, an extremely misleading (but almost enjoyable) book by two “experts,” in which the authors try to infer some attributes that are common to rich people.
— Nassim Taleb
Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
I thought I would really enjoy this book: a problem of epic proportions, a struggle for survival through science/technology... Unfortunately, this book is like taking The Martian, removing many of the best parts (humor, compelling characters you actually care about), and then making it (what feels like) 10 times longer. It's dry, it lacks focus, pace and clarity. For example, I was frustrated to read about Dinah's problems with her robots or other trivialities when the entire plant Earth downstairs is about to burn. We just barely get to learn something about how the social order copes with the impending doom - a copout. In the end I couldn't take it anymore so I skipped through some of the later parts and then read the synopsis on Wikipedia. More importantly, this experiment confirmed to me that I loved the The Martian not just because it was about science and had lots of nerdy details, but because it was legitimately a fun, interesting, compelling and _appropriately sized/paced!_ story. Seveneves is not. EDIT: found this gem on another review: "The moon exploded, humanity is on the brink of extinction and I just might die of boredom." +1. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Daemon
by Daniel Suarez
A dying man leaves behind a distributed set of daemon programs that infect the world, acting collectively as a kind of superintelligence. Unfortunately, the book lacks in logical consistency: Wait, the program can run a large chunk of the global economy, reads minds with complex invented equipment, and operates a fleet of self-driving vehicles with complex sensing and yet when it speaks to you you must answer either yes or no or otherwise it cannot parse your response? The book also lacks in pacing, with long stretches that become boring or tedious. The real objective of the program is not revealed for a long time, and even once it is, it’s not very convincing and a letdown. The ending is abrupt and the story doesn’t build up into anything. It feels as though the author became tired of the story and just wanted to finish the book already. Inconsistent, tedious, and ultimately unsatisfying. 2/5. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
What I learned losing a million dollars
by Jim Paul
Present! A few other recommendations: What I Learned Losing $1 Million Dollars by Jim Paul Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb Resilience by Eric Grietens How They Succeeded by Orison Swett Marden
— Ryan Holiday
Why Nations Fail
by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
Finished reading "Why Nations Fail" as part of Mark Zuckerberg's book club :) Good read, interesting topic. More https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1393566633
— Andrej Karpathy
Sustainable Energy
by David J.C. MacKay
This book offers a great overview of issues surrounding Energy policy in the UK (and the world). There is a lot of analysis of the various renewable energy sources and their potential of helping us replace fossil fuels over the next few decades. Economics of every choice is only briefly touched on, however. Still, the book offers a nice and fairly exhaustive exploration of our options and lays out most of the issues surrounding the implementation. David MacKay (author) is also first and foremost a revered scientist who studies this because he cares, which in my view makes him easier to trust on facts, figures and opinions. 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville
I think Moby Dick, I probably to be honest, I'm probably not really ready for it yet, but I'm really glad I read it. Look forward to read it again at some point in the future.
— PewDiePie
Right-Wing Women
by Andrea Dworkin
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sexual Personae
by Camille Paglia
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Unfollow
by Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan left the Westboro Baptist Church in 2012 after a crisis of faith precipitated by a power struggle within the church. She wrote about all this in her book "Unfollow", which is honestly a pretty interesting account of deconversion and the circumstances that lead to someone leaving a hate group.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Safe Haven
by Mark Spitznagel
Spencer gets it. (All explicitly in the book"Safe Haven".)https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-04-04-2023/card/wait-your-hedge-fund-made-how-much--WRy8YA3lZ9404Qx3unVT
— Nassim Taleb
Sun and Steel
by Yukio Mishima
There are some nicer books that I have that are actually quite rare I guess the Sun and Steel. It's just like I don't think they print this anymore so it kind of feels weirdly important to own if that makes sense.
— PewDiePie
The Power
by Naomi Alderman
Summer’s almost over. If you have time to sneak in another book or two – here are a few I recommend.
— Bill Gates
The Lincoln Highway
by Amor Towles
Summer’s almost over. If you have time to sneak in another book or two – here are a few I recommend.
— Bill Gates
The Ministry for the Future
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Summer’s almost over. If you have time to sneak in another book or two – here are a few I recommend.
— Bill Gates
Dominion
by Tom Holland
OK, OK, restarting w/some corrections. For comments. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1544296263822213120 pic.twitter.com/US4P4JhU3T Tom Holland holds an edge over other current authors and intellectuals: the rare coupling of wide erudition and remarkable clarity of mind, two attributes that appear to be negatively correlated, as if the presence of one caused the other one to flee. This confers the ability to spot things other professionals don't catch immediately, in spite of sharing the same ensemble of information - what in my trading days we used to call "connecting the dots". And these discoveries, in spite of being hard to detect, appear obvious, even trivial after the fact. Holland is effortlessly ahead of his time: ten years ago, he was savagely attacked by the high priest of late Antiquity, the extremely decorated Glenn Bowersock, for his book on the conditions surrounding the birth of Islam. Then, only half a decade later, Bowersock quietly published a book making similar claims. So this entire book revolves around one simple, but far-reaching idea. By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head. The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use the cross - the punishment for slaves -as a symbol; it had to be some type of joke in their eyes. There is also the presence of skin in the game. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a video game to the Lord but the real thing. The argument "I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don't" applies within humans and in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God by suffering as a human allowed humans to be equal to Him. Christianity had the last vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the "'Levites ). For Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods. What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. The mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. "Without Paul, there would be no Akiva" claims the theologian Israel Yuval as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity. Further East, Shite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will accompany Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of martyrdom; these can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin. But it is clear that the latest position of supreme leader has been guided by the Catholic hierarchy. Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from "the eye of the needle" in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of communism. Likewise it took more than a millennia for the "neither slave nor free" in Galatians 3:28 from epistle to execution. As to the "neither Greek nor Jew", alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state -the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush's policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.
— Nassim Taleb
I Don't Want to Talk About It
by Terrence Real
Excited to share that Terry Real's new book “Us” comes out this week. Order 👉 https://bit.ly/3sHr4s0 Stay tuned for a 2nd podcast with him soon. Check out my podcast with Terry from 2020 where we discuss “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”: https://bit.ly/3aAPtJO pic.twitter.com/XiAa45zVPp
— Peter Attia
A Man in Full
by Tom Wolfe
I’ll go reread a favorite novel, such as A Man in Full or The Moviegoer or Memoirs of Hadrian.
— Ryan Holiday
The Circadian Code
by Satchin Panda
I've left a detailed YouTube comment. You've mischaracterized the point I was trying to make. Your contention on the time difference is weirdly lazy. Finally, Dr. Panda's book as a meaningful contribution of COI is hysterical in light of your own patreon call-to-action.
— Rhonda Patrick
Keep Going
by Austin Kleon
.@austinkleon's books are some of my all-time favorites about writing/creativity. So it was pretty cool to have him at my book store The Painted Porch signing copies of his books including the 10-year anniversary edition of Steal Like An Artist. Grab a copy while we have them.
— Ryan Holiday
A Calendar of Wisdom
by Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoy
Some books I leaned on often throughout this were The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy.
— Ryan Holiday
Dying Every Day
by James Romm
I would add one other little book, Seneca book. I love 'Dying Every Day by James Romm. [...] I found this to be a fascinating biography about the intersection of philosophy and practice of which Seneca was not perfect.
— Ryan Holiday
Titan
by Ron Chernow
6 Books Every Ambitious Young Person Should Read The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro. Titan by Ron Chernow. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Cyropaedia by Xenophon
— Ryan Holiday
Totto-Chan
by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
One of my absolute favorite books Totto-Chan the little girl at the window.
— Ryan Holiday
An Elegant Defense
by Matt Richtel
Matt Richtel’s fascinating book about the immune system
— Bill Gates
What makes Sammy run?
by Budd Schulberg
What Makes Sammy Run and The Moviegoer--two favorites in the store too
— Ryan Holiday
V for Vendetta
by Steve Moore
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
Planetary
by Warren Ellis
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
by Carol Tavris
That’s sort of pushed Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) into the now number three spot, just ahead probably of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! It’s weird, isn’t it? It says something about us, the books we like to give people, doesn’t it?
— Peter Attia
The Sun Rises in the Evening
by Osho
Can I recommend one Osho book? I would recommend a book called "The Sun Rises in the Evening". I haven't read all of it yet, I've been going through it, but it's my favorite one so far and I'm savoring it. I've literally been half highlighting half of every page.
— Naval Ravikant
The Transformed Cell
by Steven A. Rosenberg
[For people on my career path, I'd recommend] biographies of people who have ‘built skyscrapers’ (my term); for example: [...]
— Peter Attia
His Master's Voice
by Stanisław Lem
On the topic of sci-fi’s I really like books written by scientists turned writers because I find the world building to be much more compelling, interesting and logically consistent. Recently I enjoyed [this].
— Andrej Karpathy
Conflict is Not Abuse
by Sarah Schulman
I recently read a book by Sarah Schulman called "Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair". Basically Schulman's argument is that, in various contexts from romantic relationships to community infighting to international politics, the overstatement of harm is used as a justification for cruelty and for escalating conflict.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
One of my favourite quotes from a book, another great book I read actually, I recommend, Norwegian Wood by Murakami. - "Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives we nurture death."
— PewDiePie
Don Quijote de la Mancha
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Everyone knows Don Quijote for its humour and for how silly it is and what a loveable character it is but, and yes it is, it is very humorous, but after reading it I realised that it is so much more than just that. And I'm so glad I read it. It's my favourite piece of classical literature that I have ever read. [...] It's the longest book I've read but it is also the longest book I've ever enjoyed and honestly, I can't wait to reread it. I could go on more, but there is really no point. It is quite hard at some points. I would be lying if I said that it was the easiest read I ever had but it is 100% worth it! Check it out! Don Quijote 5 out of 5. Beautiful, so glad I read it!
— PewDiePie
In the Buddha's words
by Bodhi Bhikkhu
Afterwards I read In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon. This book is amazing.[...] I was super fascinated by this book. This is just a very selected part of it. I don't want to get into all of it. If you're interested in Buddhist teaching, this is a great book to start off with.
— PewDiePie
No longer human
by Osamu Dazai
I absolutely loved reading this book. Dazai clearly is a phenomenal writer and this is everything I would want from a novel.
— PewDiePie
The discovery of France
by Graham Robb
Until I discovered, reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, a major fact that led me to see the place with completely new eyes and search the literature for a revision of the story of the country.
— Nassim Taleb
The Dark Forest
by Liu Cixin
loved this book. when I want to get my mind in a forward looking state, I'll listen to one of the final chapter and then do some work.
— Bryan Johnson
De bello Gallico
by Gaius Julius Caesar
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
The Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide
by James Fadiman
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
Intercourse
by Andrea Dworkin
Like if you're straight, do you want to publicly debate whether your marriage is valid? Andrea Dworkin claimed that penetrative heterosexual intercourse is inherently an act of violence. I've noticed most straight men don't want to have calm, civil discussions about that.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Transsexual Empire
by Janice Raymond
Now it's true that trans exclusionary radical feminism began as an offshoot of far-left lesbian separatism, with academic feminist Janice Raymond writing in 1979 that transsexualism should be morally mandated out of existence. But the Gender Critical movement was always destined to become a right-wing movement, because it has the structure of a right-wing movement; taking women's fear and rage toward familiar men and displacing it onto an unfamiliar outsider.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Under a White Sky
by Elizabeth Kolbert
More recently, I’ve gained a lot from reading a diverse set of books and authors including Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert, On Immunity by Eula Biss, The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Eradication by Nancy Stepan.
— Bill Gates
The Gay Science
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Next book: Gay Science! And know what you want to do it's okay! I give you the pass! The first time I read Nietzsche I read Beyond Good and Evil I didn't understand a goddamn thing. Don't watch my book review it's embarrassing and I'm not gonna pretend I'm some Nietzsche scholar now either but I had a bad time first reading him because he was referencing all these different philosophers and I had no clue who they even were after reading more philosophy coming back to Nietzsche again my reaction was still bad because I went this guy was making fun of all my heroes what the *** so Nietzsche for me was a slow cook I will admit. But the best way to understand philosophy is to understand the person behind it and the more I feel like I had done that the more I came to love Nietzsche. Uh he loves his words he's very great at them he's very harsh and very brutal but you understand that he targets philosophers that he likes or that he at least admires to some degree.
— PewDiePie
Class
by Paul Fussell
There's this amazing book written in like 1980 by Paul Fussell called "Class." And it's about social classes, socioeconomic classes. And the highest class is called the X class, which is a class like above and beyond. I might be butchering this. And what they have in common with the lowest class, which are the destitute, is that the richest people in the world never handle money and don't have to deal with phones or anything like that. And then the destitute have no money to handle and they don't deal with phones or other people or anything like that. So like there is this, the polar ends of the spectrum.
— Casey Neistat
Contact
by Carl Sagan
Did the creator of the universe give us a message? For example in the book "Contact", Carl Sagan, there's a message for any civilization in digits in the expansion of Pi and base 11, eventually, which is kind of an interesting thought.
— Andrej Karpathy
The Birth of Tragedy
by Friedrich Nietzsche
My daughter is dancing to techno over this copy of the birth of tragedy by nietzsche - what a queen pic.twitter.com/GajRCEVDen
— Grimes
Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
by Charlie Mackesy
Courage is also asking for help. This is a little book I like to read to my young children, it's called The Boy The Fox The Horse and the mole and he says asking for help isn't giving up - it is refusing to give up.
— Ryan Holiday
Everything Happens for a Reason
by Kate Bowler
Have you read uh do you know who Kate Bowler is. No oh you would love her?
— Ryan Holiday
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole’s great book A Confederacy of Dunces was universally turned down by publishers, news that so broke his heart that he later committed suicide in his car on an empty road in Biloxi, Mississippi.
— Ryan Holiday
The Second Mountain
by David Brooks
Have you read the book the Second Mountain by David Brooks? [...] I think you would like that book it's really good.
— Ryan Holiday
Around the World in Eighty Days
by Jules Verne
Most things exist in science fiction before they exist in the real world. Like Jules Verne. I just think it's fun, I feel like my job as an artist is to just sort of like throw out ideas into the world and some of them are probably going to be huge failures and some of them might be good.
— Grimes
Mastery
by Robert Greene
Robert Greene’s metaphor for mastery (if you haven’t read Mastery, you must) is being on the inside of something.
— Ryan Holiday
Status anxiety
by Alain de Botton
6 Books Every Ambitious Young Person Should Read The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro. Titan by Ron Chernow. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Cyropaedia by Xenophon
— Ryan Holiday
Cyropaedia
by Xenophon
6 Books Every Ambitious Young Person Should Read The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro. Titan by Ron Chernow. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Cyropaedia by Xenophon
— Ryan Holiday
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
by Donald Robertson
I like Donald Robertson's book *How To Think Like a Roman Emperor* but the best book about Stoicism that's not written by one of the Stoics has got to be *The Inner Citadel* by Pierre Hadot.
— Ryan Holiday
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles).
— Ryan Holiday
Only the Paranoid Survive
by Andrew S. Grove
If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible. GM & Chrysler went BK last recession. “Only the paranoid survive.” – Grove
— Elon Musk
The Moral Animal
by Robert Wright
One might think what does the the ideas in The Moral Animal which is my favorite book of yours connect to your work on buddhism
— Ryan Holiday
Play Nice But Win
by Michael Dell
On today's episode of the @dailystoic Podcast I talk to founder and CEO of one of America’s largest technology companies @MichaelDell about his new book Play Nice But Win, the balance between trusting yourself and experts, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/7X3wrVrmIn pic.twitter.com/SmRWTbMeGl
— Ryan Holiday
History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides
Let's say someone you know hears that you know History of the Peloponnesian War might help you understand the jostling between the United States and China, you know, don't just go buy that book off the shelf and think you're going to read it if you've never read some work of ancient history before.
— Ryan Holiday
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The line I always like to quote is uh from Milton's Paradise Lost: the mind is its own place and of itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell.
— Peter Thiel
L'Étranger
by Albert Camus
I have a couple good recommendations yeah starting off with a stranger by Albert Camus [...] It's a short read it's it's entertaining, if you haven't read a book in a while and want to get back into it I think this is a great place to start. I loved it so much I read his other works.
— PewDiePie
The Dawn of Everything
by David Graeber
You muuuuuuuuuust read the next Graeber and @davidwengrow !
— Nassim Taleb
Envy A Theory of Social Behavior
by Helmut Schoeck
In a 1966 book titled "Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior", the sociologist Helmut Schoeck argued that rather than being- That's very German name. Helmut Schoeck. It's putting me in a German mood, sweetie. Hallo meine Lieben. Heute gibts ein neues Video! I just get worse at German every year. Schoeck argued that rather than being the result of social or economic inequality, envy is a universal experience across all human societies, including very egalitarian ones.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
David and Goliath
by Malcolm Gladwell
I remember I first read The Tipping Point then I read Blink then Outliers then David and Goliath which is also very good, but then when I read Talking with Strangers last year [...] I remember I shot him an email and I said 'Malcolm this book is like the definition of mastery, it's like watching a master at work'. He took this subject matter that should have been so difficult and frankly not interesting and it's fascinating.
— Ryan Holiday
The Aeneid
by Virgil
On today’s @dailystoic podcast I talk to Classics scholar and professor @ShadiBartsch about how to use the classics as a way to reflect and think critically about oneself, her translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/PlQLVEu7GQ pic.twitter.com/wpks7wjcXn
— Ryan Holiday
Bhagavad-Gita
by Vyasa
This is the oldest wisdom in the book. Go to the Bhagavad-Gita. It says you are entitled to your labor but not to the fruits of your labor.
— Naval Ravikant
The Splendid and the Vile
by Erik Larson
This book has nothing to do with viruses or pandemics. But it is surprisingly relevant for these times. @exlarson provides a brilliant and gripping account of another era of widespread anxiety: the years 1940 and 1941.
— Bill Gates
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
by Yukio Mishima
Any advice for people getting into Yukio Mishima? What would I advise? Just read it, it's great! Read the tetralogy. I want to reread Mishima. That was a comfy time just plowing through all this literature. Could read some Mishima. [...] they're all in japan my whole library but I love this book (The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea) so much I bought another copy of it. It's weird with a Japanese author because I love his writing style or his prose so much but it's obviously translated so what does that really say, you know, can I say that I like an author's style of writing even if it's translated?
— PewDiePie
Lord of Light
by Roger Zelazny
Lord of Light, Snow Crash, Borges and Ted Chiang short stories.
— Naval Ravikant
Being Aware of Being Aware
by Rupert Spira
Krishnamurti, I don’t know, Kapil Gupta, Rupert Spira.
— Naval Ravikant
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
As Jon Ronson, author of a great book on public shaming put it, "I suppose that when shamings are delivered "like remotely administers drone strikes nobody needs "to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. "The snowflake never needs "to feel responsible for the avalanche." And that's how you get these situations where you have hundreds of people endlessly bashing someone who's already been knocked to the ground, and feeling all the while like they're punching up.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Against the Grain
by James C. Scott
OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6
— Nassim Taleb
Elements of information theory
by T. M. Cover
OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6
— Nassim Taleb
Thing Explainer
by Randall Munroe
Great book by Randall Munroe who who is the creator of xkcd.
— Naval Ravikant
The Big Picture
by Sean Carroll
I love Sean Carroll, but I can't bring myself to finish this book. This is not some kind of cool science book. It's a little too much too long too high-level philosophy, re-iterating the same things over and over again, and just overall meh. Someone else less familiar with physics might like it. EDIT: I accidentally read this book again forgetting that I already had. I have to start by saying that I actually love Sean Carroll and adore his presentation/teaching ability. That said, I had to skip over a bunch of it because the book is primarily a work of philosophy and history, and a concatenation of the first 2 paragraphs of popular science articles on topics of physics. The part I actually loved was the Appendix, where he discusses the Core Theory in quite a lot of detail. If that 2 page explanation was expanded into the length of this book it would be an easy 5/5. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Unwritten
by Mike Carey
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
Creativity, Inc.
by Ed Catmull
There's brilliant book called creativity Inc that was written about Pixar. I try to collect together all these different experiences and and figure out how to translate them into a scientific context.
— Demis Hassabis
Leonardo da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
This is an engrossing, well-paced biography that is a pleasure to read. I'm left with a deep and motivating admiration of many facets of Leonardo's character, especially his eager mind, attention to detail, thinking from first principles, his use extensive use of physical notebooks, and, most intriguingly, his use of art as a thinking tool. It's fascinating to get a glimpse of someone so far ahead of his time, and it's fun to think about what he would make of today. 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Blitzscaling
by Reid Hoffman
I got to read an early copy of this, and have been waiting for it to come out so that I can recommend it to everyone
— Sam Altman
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field
by Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon
Vasishta Yoga, The Book of Nothing, Math (Better Explained), Skin in the Game, 12 Rules for Life, The Path to Love, Faraday Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, Direct Truth, The Gay Science, Permutation City, The Order of a Time, and many, many others.
— Naval Ravikant
Pandaemonium, 1660-1886
by Humphrey Jennings
My favorite book of the year is Pandaemonium. Incredible read.
— Sam Altman
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
by Richard P. Feynman
But Popper is too stern, so let us leave him for later and, for now, discuss the more entertaining and jovial Richard Feynman, the most irreverent and playful scientist of his day. His book of anecdotes, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, conveys the idea of the fundamental irreverence of science, which proceeds through a similar mechanism as the kosher asymmetry.
— Nassim Taleb
The Score Takes Care of Itself
by Bill Walsh
Have you read The Score Takes Care Of Itself?
— Ryan Holiday
Quiet
by Susan Cain
A great book on introverts is Susan Cain's book Quiet but I think generally people waste far too much time on these things.
— Ryan Holiday
The Righteous Mind
by Jonathan Haidt
What should I read? Just trying to fall the fuck asleep. Recently read and enjoyed: the Righteous Mind, Mistborn & I'll Give You The Sun
— Simone Giertz
Becoming Steve Jobs
by Brent Schlender
[For people on my career path, I'd recommend] biographies of people who have ‘built skyscrapers’ (my term); for example: [...]
— Peter Attia
The Double Helix
by James D. Watson
[For people on my career path, I'd recommend] biographies of people who have ‘built skyscrapers’ (my term); for example: [...]
— Peter Attia
The Emperor of All Maladies
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Response to "Are there any books you haven’t mentioned that you feel would make your reading list?"
How to Be a Bawse
by Lilly Singh
GIRLLLLLL! Was flipping through your book a couple of days ago and was like 💪💦😍
— Simone Giertz
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
by Franz Kafka
At least read the Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony. Each readable in a sitting.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
by Ted Chiang
The story starts strong, interesting and pregnant with potential but ultimately fizzles, dissipates and meanders around relatively silly and implausible dilemmas. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
A Fire Upon The Deep
by Vernor Vinge
Only chapter 1, describing a flowering Superintelligence, really awesome read. Later chapters went downhill.
— Andrej Karpathy
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas S. Kuhn
Kuhn is much more important. That book will change how you see a lot of things.
— Ryan Holiday
Economics in One Lesson
by Henry Hazlitt
The main thesis of this book is that the economy is a complex dynamical system and government's efforts to tamper with a free market economy is a game of whac-a-mole where a variety of hard-to-see n-th order (n>1) negative consequences dominate the intended easy-to-see positive consequences, resulting in an overall net loss for everyone. This thesis is illustrated with the use of few dozen example settings per chapter that are seemingly different (e.g. tariffs, rent control, unions, minimum wages, government infrastructure projects, technological creative destruction, price fixing, savings, etc), but are in fact argued to be instances of the same general pattern and the same recurring fallacies. If you already share the philosophy (e.g. you like Austrian school of economics, libertarian philosophy, capitalism, Ron Paul, and you worship the free market as the ultimate decentralized planning and allocation system), and you already have a working knowledge of economics then this book will supply you with a lot of additional ammunition of examples and arguments for fighting your socialist or keynesian friends. You’ll love it and walk away with an even peakier posterior over your mastery of economic philosophy. Unfortunately I do have to critique the book in some respects: - It does assume quite a bit of economics knowledge that it does not bother to explain sufficiently, leaving me a little perplexed in some sections. i.e. this is not a textbook. More worryingly, - The author just can’t hold back his feelings and resorts to ad hominem attacks too frequently, multiple times citing unidentified individuals that have clearly caused him a lot of emotional pain as too stupid to understand his very basic lesson. These attacks add nothing. I was strongly reminded of Richard Dawkins’ related and unfortunate tendency to mock those who do not accept what he views as self-evident. - The book is, as is often the case, a very one-sided account of the central thesis, frustratingly lacking in any hints of counterexamples or uncertainties. For example I would have loved to see the discussion at least touch on, e.g. wealth distribution inequality and the related and tightly coupled inequality in power, externalities, social darwinism, historical precedents of government projects (e.g. atom bomb, space program, etc), etc. In summary, I enjoyed the book overall but I was hoping for less of a "I have it all figured out, look it’s so elementary, and there are no good arguments to the contrary" vibe and a more complete treatment of the topic (and preferably without ad-hominem attacks for bonus points). Still an overall recommended read. 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
This book details the history of Xerox PARC, which set up a research lab that invented many aspects of modern computing and then failed to capitalize on it (at least to the extent that many people thought they should have). I was happy to see the author resist the obvious and often-retold narrative of a corporation that was simply too dumb to realize what their visionary research division had. The book instead paints a more realistic picture, mentions some of the tensions present between a corporation and a research lab and dispels the overly simplistic notion that Xerox would have clearly become immensely successful if they only followed up on the research. This is mostly our benefit of hindsight and there are many other variables at play. You'll get a sense of the history, some of the drama, some of the background story behind the inventions. But unfortunately the book doesn't spend a lot of time talking about the layout of the lab, or some of the philosophy that led to its success in research. Neither does it try to generalize, observe, or contrast. Therefore, sadly the book felt mostly as an enumeration of facts rather than an attempt at their interpretation in a wider picture. This is understandable because the former is relatively easy, but the latter is not. 3/5 - I liked it. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind
by Julian Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness: The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. There’s a mouthful for you, by Julian Jaynes.
— Naval Ravikant
Where Good Ideas Come from
by Steven Johnson
There are really only two core ideas in this book: 1. That innovations are best modeled as ideas having sex, in the sense that they don't pop into existence but instead each idea is formed by the process of mixing elements from previous ideas (recombination), or slightly improving on an aspect of the idea (mutation). This view makes all of our innovations look similar to intellectual animals, with their own family trees. And 2. That these innovations don't happen in sudden eureka moments inside the mind of one person, but instead happen over time through "slow hunches" that incubate inside an obsessed mind, while that mind is engaged in liquid networks of other minds. These two core tenants are supported with several briefly-discussed fun historical examples. However, I think the book could have been slightly shorter, it rambles a bit and stretches some assertions a bit, but overall it gives some food for thought. 3/5. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Waking Up
by Sam Harris
@rneppalli @BrianGrazer Loved "Waking Up." Also check the Raptitude blog.
— Naval Ravikant
The Foundation
by Joel L. Fleishman
Thus, in The Foundation: A Great American Secret, another recent volume on the topic, Joel Fleishman asks whether society is getting its money’s worth. Are foundations living up to their “responsibility for achieving significant social impact through their programs”? And he answers: “The best response is clear evidence that foundations are adding significant value to the money they handle and investing it to create the highest possible level of benefits for society. Otherwise, why should society continue to subsidize them?”
— Peter Thiel
The Tartar Steppe
by Dino Buzzati
Until I read ["The Opposing Shore"], Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life.
— Nassim Taleb
A Thousand Brains
by Jeff Hawkins
Understanding how the connections in our brains give rise to consciousness and our ability to learn may help lead to great breakthroughs in the way we solve the world’s hardest problems. This is one of the most fascinating books I read this year.
— Bill Gates
Ways of Seeing
by John Berger
Last time I was reading the only book I’ve ever read, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, I noticed this description of glamour in the context of advertising: “Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.” And I felt kind of attacked, because glamour is very important to us. And by us, I mean the gays.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima
Right after reading the... The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, I loved it so much and I wanted more because it was so short. I read "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" and I absolutely LOVED IT!
— PewDiePie
The Machine Stops
by Edward Morgan Forster
Worth reading The Machine Stops, an old story by E. M. Forster
— Elon Musk
Ignition!
by John Drury Clark
There is a good book on rocket stuff called 'Ignition!' by John Clark, that’s a really fun one.
— Elon Musk
Masters of Doom
by David Kushner
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
Storm of Steel
by Ernst Jünger
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer
The specifically feminist criticism of the romance novel goes back at least to Germaine Greer, who included a long rant about them in her 1970 manifesto "The Female Eunuch", in which she condemns romance readers as "women cherishing the chains of their own bondage."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Masochism
by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Gilles Deleuze
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Civilization and Its Discontent
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Gender Trouble
by Judith Butler
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Psychopathia Sexualis
by Richard von Krafft-Ebing
You were a lady, you were dressed in China, you were something perfect, slightly sacred. - This is the view taken by 19th century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of "Psychopathia Sexualis", one of the first attempts to scientifically study human sexuality, so scandalous at the time of publication it had to be printed in Latin to keep the hoi polloi from getting notions.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
There was a book called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee that really changed the way I looked at life.
— Taylor Swift
Nicomachean Ethics
by Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics! Wow what a fun title! Please tell me more Felix! Okay I will! Aristotle the greatest one, no, no, no one of the greatest philosopher of all time. He studied under Plato though he taught Alexander the Great himself. He said all these amazing things thought women had less teeth than men. You could have just checked bro, you had a wife I Googled it. Bro what happened I want to know? Nicomachean Ethics is the first philosopher book that I read that discusses the idea of happiness and 2 300 years or whatever later it is goddamn relevant.
— PewDiePie
Life Ascending
by Nick Lane
I used to think that the origin of life was this magical rare event. But then you read books like, for example, Nick Lane, "The Vital Question", "Life Ascending", et cetera. And he really gets in, he really makes you believe that this is not that rare. [...] I do feel like the story in these books, like Nick Lane's books and so on, sort of makes sense and it makes sense how life arose on earth uniquely. And yeah, I don't need to reach for more exotic explanations right now.
— Andrej Karpathy
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
I put Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow on my summer books list back in 2019
— Bill Gates
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
by Ruth Benedict
I read the sword and chrysanthemum, I don't know if that's how you say it. It was written by Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist that was hired by the American government during World War II as an attempt to understand the Japanese people and their mindset at the time [...] Some people say it's not accurate, some people say it is. I just found it really interesting.
— PewDiePie
Gates of fire
by Steven Pressfield
There's a line in um one of Steven Pressfield's books I love. Have you ever read his stuff? [...] You would love uh the War of Art or he has this novel called Gates of Fire that's amazing
— Ryan Holiday
The Daily Laws
by Robert Greene
I’ve always loved the “daily read” format, I’ve recommended some of my favorites here before, I’ve been lucky enough to publish one of my own, and now I feel even luckier to have been able to help Robert bring this book into existence. People ask me all the time, Where should I start with Robert Greene? What book should I read first? It’s been impossible to answer, so I suggested he do a book that was a kind of greatest hits album, a book that captures the totality of his brilliant, life-changing thinking. And now that book exists! Even though I’ve read and reread all of Robert’s books, this book has not left my desk since I got my copy.
— Ryan Holiday
Deep Work
by Cal Newport
Cal is not just one of my favorite thinkers, not just one of my favorite authors, but also one of my favorite people to talk to. I think Cal holds the record for most appearances on the Daily Stoic podcast (you can listen to our conversations here, here, here, and here). But anyone doing knowledge work in the 21st century has to be familiar with Cal’s concept of deep work. This is a book that explains how to cultivate and protect that skill—the ability to focus, be creative, and think at a high level.
— Ryan Holiday
Turning pro
by Steven Pressfield
This book is so good and so perfect for the moment, whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, a parent or a movie producer. Because the early 2020s have been separating the amateurs from the pros. When times are good, you can be soft and lazy. But when the going gets tough? I hope this book can be an investment in yourself this year. As Steven writes, “I wrote in The War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.”
— Ryan Holiday
Leadership In Turbulent Times
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
This is an absolutely incredible book. I think I marked up nearly every page. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and it is so clearly the culmination of a lifetime of research… and yet somehow not overwhelming or boring. Distillation at its best! I have read extensively on each of those figures and I got a ton out of it. Even stuff I already knew, I benefited from Goodwin’s perspective. This is the perfect book to read right now—a timely reminder that leadership matters.
— Ryan Holiday
Phosphorescence
by Julia Baird
I LOVED Julia Baird’s biography of Queen Victoria and have raved about it many times. When I heard she was writing a follow up, I assumed it would be another biography. I did not expect this powerful, inspiring book about resilience and powering through.
— Ryan Holiday
My Side of the Mountain
by Jean Craighead George
Have you read Hatchet? Or My Side of the Mountain?
— Ryan Holiday
Shadow Divers
by Robert Kurson
I recommended it below but Shadow Divers is great. So is River of Doubt.
— Ryan Holiday
Ashtavakra Gita
by Swami Chinmayananda
It moves around. Keep coming back to I Am That, Direct Truth, Vasistha's Yoga, Jed McKenna, and Ashtavakra Gita.
— Naval Ravikant
Painting as a pastime.
by Winston S. Churchill
Churchill wrote a book called Painting as a Pastime and I was like 'What?' Why would... first off I don't think people think of Churchill as a writer but that's how he made his living.
— Ryan Holiday
Fishing for fun--and to wash your soul
by Herbert Clark Hoover - President of the USA (1929-1933)
Herbert Hoover actually wrote a book called 'Fishing for Fun' and then in parentheses the subtitle is 'or how to wash your soul'
— Ryan Holiday
The Red Queen
by Matt Ridley
I read his book The Red Queen, which laid out the age-old competition between bacteria, viruses and humans—a topic that’s extremely relevant today.
— Naval Ravikant
The evolution of everything
by Matt Ridley
His book The Evolution of Everything continued that theme towards everything evolving.
— Naval Ravikant
Plutarch's Lives; Volume 1
by Plutarch
Some of the best biographies I’ve read: Plutarch’s Lives (Vol. 1 & 2) by Plutarch The Power Broker by Robert Caro The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari Totto-Chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi Titan by Ron Chernow
— Ryan Holiday
Sherman
by B. H. Liddell Hart
Books on strategy that stand the test of time: - History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides - All the works of BH Liddell Hart - The Book of Five Rings by Musashi - The Prince by Machiavelli - 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
— Ryan Holiday
The Last Question
by Isaac Asimov
I did read the whole thing, but he doesn’t address heat death or maximum entropy anywhere. His definition of God is of a partial (eventually, infinitesimal) creature, which doesn’t make sense. Asimov tackled this better in “The Last Question.” Anyway, too much for Twitter.
— Naval Ravikant
Hard Scrabble
by John Graves
Some of the books that have changed my life and had the most influence on me: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 48 Laws of Power, The Black Swan, life is unpredictable. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Four Hour Work Week - Huge! 33 Strategies of War, obviously Robert Greene's Mastery. Pia Mellody, one of my favorite authors [Facing Codependence]. This biography of John D Rockefeller, maybe you remember it from The Obstacle is the way? This book by John Boyd [...] Malcolm X the autobiography, Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run. A friend of mine recommended this biography William Lee Miller on President Lincoln. It was one of the books that changed his life. Had totally changed how I thought about leadership. The War of Art, Turning Pro - two favorites from Steven Pressfield. Haruki Murakami's book on running 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. Ellison's Invisible Man. Again another book from Pia Mellody [Facing Love Addiction]. Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Taming the Tiger Within. The Brass Check - this book inspired the name of my marketing company and my book Trust Me I'm Lying. This is one of my copies of Meditations. Why Don't We Learn From History by BH Liddell Hart. Prescription For Adversity, a strange book biography of Ambrose Bierce that I like. Candide, interesting story I stole this from where I got married they had this on the shelf. I read it while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to get married and I thought hey I'm keeping this. [...] Second Mountain, this is a new addition to the shelf. Dr. Drew [The Mirror Effect] who introduced me to stoicism, Great! This is a cool book -Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer it's an analysis of Lincoln as if he was a writer. This book: Strategy by BH Liddell Hart influenced how I think about strategy.John Graves Hard Scrabble, influenced how I think about my farm. Fishing For Fun is a new book, I just read by Herbert Hoover about the philosophical benefits of fishing and yes Herbert Hoover, the president. Chesterfield's letters to his son [...] Seth Godin's the Dip, great book. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Jane Jacobs also amazing. Daniel Boorstin, great. Death Be Not Proud, beautiful book. So these are some of the books, it's my life shelf. [...] Oh Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, great! The Way To Love by Anthony De Mello.
— Ryan Holiday
Grant
by Ron Chernow
If you read the new Chernow book he paints a nuanced picture of Grant's presidency that I found quite compelling.
— Ryan Holiday
Bottle of Lies
by Katherine Eban
Thank you Sam! And thank you for pointing me in the direction of @KatherineEban's amazing book.
— Peter Attia
Probability, random variables, and stochastic processes
by Athanasios Papoulis
I always always recommend the book by Anastassios Papoulis. 1) Never start with stats, start with probability. 2) Never read a stat textbook not written by a probabilist. Beware, there are plenty, plenty, plenty of stats books written by psychologists! https://t.co/tVYO73HLFB
— Nassim Taleb
Watchmen
by Alan Moore
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
The Sandman
by Neil Gaiman
No single favorite, but I liked V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Sandman, and The Unwritten.
— Naval Ravikant
Striking Thoughts
by Bruce Lee
When you combine things you're not supposed to combine people get interested.
— Naval Ravikant
This Is Water
by David Foster Wallace
Beautiful gift from my friend @kyle_tman ... I’ve listened more than 100 times to the audio (easy to find: google “DFW this is water”) each time learning something, even incrementally, new and now I’ll add this method of consumption to one of the most important speeches ever given (or at least ever heard by me...). Thank you, Kyle.
— Peter Attia
Rules for radicals
by Saul David Alinsky
No, it's a brilliant book that anyone involved in politics or strategy or marketing should read, whatever their persuasion.
— Ryan Holiday
Reinforcement Learning
by Richard Sutton
I also liked Sutton’s Reinforcement Learning book, which I methodologically read cover to cover over few weeks and reimplemented a lot of in ReinforceJS.
— Andrej Karpathy
Profiles of the Future
by Arthur C. Clarke
First I would highly recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s “Profiles of the Future” (see my review on Goodreads). It’s a wonderful study of the science and art of predicting the future.
— Andrej Karpathy
Fiasco
by Stanisław Lem
On the topic of sci-fi’s I really like books written by scientists turned writers because I find the world building to be much more compelling, interesting and logically consistent. Recently I enjoyed [this].
— Andrej Karpathy
The Black Cloud
by Fred Hoyle
On the topic of sci-fi’s I really like books written by scientists turned writers because I find the world building to be much more compelling, interesting and logically consistent. Recently I enjoyed [this].
— Andrej Karpathy
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It
by Kamal Ravikant
My brother wrote it, so I'm biased. But it's brilliantly written.
— Naval Ravikant
Fool's Errand
by Robin Hobb
Mainly read fantasy though (prefer it over Sci-Fi), favorite writer is @robinhobb
— Simone Giertz
Rendezvous with Rama
by Arthur C. Clarke
quite enjoyed, thanks (again) for another great recommendation!
— Andrej Karpathy
The Myth of Male Power
by Warren Farrell
For this video I decided to actually do some research for once, and the first thing I did was read the foundational text of the modern men's rights movement, which is "The Myth of Male Power" by Warren Farrell. Actually I listened to the audiobook 'cause let's be honest, reading is hard.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It was the longest one I read, and I- I mean that. Sometimes this book was very hard to get through, but the parts that shines in this novel truly shines.
— PewDiePie
Chaos Kings
by Scott Patterson
Scott Patterson @pattersonscott and I are doing Part 2 Wednesday. Please post in the🧵any question you may have so far related to Part 1. -- A Discussion With Scott Patterson's About His Book Chaos Kings, Part 1 https://youtu.be/VuoCxJ9y8-0?si=1p0RyMNfphiC1JTf
— Nassim Taleb
Ecrits
by Jacques Lacan
I'm not really personally convinced that it's super worth it to read Lacan's Ecrits unless you fucking are really devoted to it. Because I already read... I do think Bruce Fink is pretty good on this topic. Not really sure that you need to read actual Lacan because he's impossible to comprehend.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Lacanian Subject
by Bruce Fink
I'm not really personally convinced that it's super worth it to read Lacan's Ecrits unless you fucking are really devoted to it. Because I already read... I do think Bruce Fink is pretty good on this topic. Not really sure that you need to read actual Lacan because he's impossible to comprehend.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Wages of Destruction
by Adam Tooze
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
Stalin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Stalin: Court of the Red Czar by Montefiore (If you want some real nightmares)
— Elon Musk
Eros the Bittersweet
by Anne Carson
I love Eros the Bittersweet! I've read that book at least twice all the way through, probably three times. Honestly it's really good, especially if you are, you know, in a stage of life where you're struggling with limerence. It's a great book about limerence.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Midnight Sun
by Stephanie Meyer
A lot of romance novels are written with a very strong male perspective in them. One thing that I kind of speculate about is I do think that a lot of women read romance novels and identify with the man right, so I mean for example you know Twilight Stephanie Meyer has rewritten in this 2020 book Midnight Sun which is just the Twilight story but told from Edward's perspective.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Programming Massively Parallel Processors
by David B. Kirk, Wen-mei W. Hwu
I read this book and then I was surprised that I still understood so little of the kernels that started to appear as llm.c contributions, beating mine. It's a pretty good 101 intro. Learning CUDA is like that horse meme, all the learning resources you can find on the left, then… pic.twitter.com/C0k1WZqkQM
— Andrej Karpathy
Bad Therapy
by Abigail Shrier
Every parent should read this https://twitter.com/anymanfitness/status/1765817754538348633
— Elon Musk
My Secret Garden
by Nancy Friday
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
All About Love
by bell hooks
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Complete Poems of Sappho
by Willis Barnstone
And then there's Eros, the problem child. Eros is the aching, passionate longing of romance novels, of Sappho's poetry, of "Romeo and Juliet".
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Why We Love Serial Killers
by Scott Bonn
There's a German word for this, because of course, vorfreude, which means pre-pleasure; the pleasure of anticipation. It's the reason that we gift-wrap presents. As Ted Bundy said, "The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself." So true. Anticipation is the basic pleasure of eroticism. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Dreams of a Final Theory
by Steven Weinberg
I actually read this book, must have been a high school, called Dreams of a Final Theory by Stephen Weinberg.
— Demis Hassabis
A Good Man
by Mark Shriver
Book rec: A Good Man by @Mark_Shriver Helped me rebuild my parent identity and my parent-child relationships when transitioning through a divorce. A short clip on what I found useful.https://youtu.be/KlBaHlZR16Q?t=1755
— Bryan Johnson
Stone Butch Blues
by Leslie Feinberg
I actually just read Stone Butch Blues for the first time and it's, I mean it's kind of, it's pretty dark so warning but it's kind of a revelation about the history of queer experience in America.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Mr. Wizard's 400 Experiments in Science
by Don Herbert
You take moth balls and you put them in vinegar the mothballs sink but then bubbles go on them and then they rise the bubbles pop and then they fall and they start dancing. Art! And we did a bunch of those, we learned all of those from a book called Mr Wizard's world's science experiments you can do at home. Great book!
— Casey Neistat
Anti-Oedipus
by Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze
I actually haven't read Anti-Oedipus. I've read Deleuze's book on masochism and I liked that so...
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Gay Revolution
by Lillian Faderman
According to historian Lillian Faderman, "Anita Bryant created fervent activists out of those who'd previously been content simply to enjoy their newfound freedoms."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Anita Bryant story
by Anita Bryant
For the short remainder of her career, gay activists protested her events, they shut down the tour for her book about how persecuted she was by the militant homosexual. And they succeeded in turning public opinion against Anita Bryant to the point that she became virtually unemployable in mainstream entertainment. It helped that she came across as kind of a judgmental prude, that even hip straight people didn't want to be associated with.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
by Anita Bryant
Anita described her most intense adolescent memory as a feeling of intense ambition: "...a relentless drive to succeed at doing well the thing I loved."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Irreversible Damage
by Abigail Shrier
Rowling says her primary "concern" about young trans men is the loss of fertility. [The book Irreversible Damage displayed]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
On Immunity
by Eula Biss
More recently, I’ve gained a lot from reading a diverse set of books and authors including Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert, On Immunity by Eula Biss, The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Eradication by Nancy Stepan.
— Bill Gates
Eradication
by Nancy Leys Stepan
More recently, I’ve gained a lot from reading a diverse set of books and authors including Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert, On Immunity by Eula Biss, The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Eradication by Nancy Stepan.
— Bill Gates
Intelligence
by Stuart Ritchie
My review of that book on "intelligence"https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R6SACJFYYTD40?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp https://twitter.com/QuietLion/status/1594378465503244288
— Nassim Taleb
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
by Dennis E. Taylor
It's a bit like The Martian with its upbeat, lighthearted, comic-relief tone, but without any of the intriguing hard sci-fi components. Fun and interesting in the first 25% but dramatically downhill from there. Naive ideas about alien life and civilizations. Doesn't really have an ending. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Andromeda Strain
by Michael Crichton
My favorite part about this book is that it is a bio-heavy hard sci-fi from an era that was otherwise decidedly all about space. An alien microscopic organism makes first contact with humans - super cool concept! I also very much appreciated the writing style, which spares the reader of the typical English major literally minutiae of the color, contours or feel of every single person, scene or thing, and spends its effort on the story, ideas and world-building. Subtract a star because I still feel like there is plenty of missed opportunity in this book around the fascinating concept, and the ending is oddly rushed. I also didn't really understand some parts that felt a bit non-sensical, e.g. around the evidence and presence of conversion between mass and energy. Ah well still worth a read! 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Call Sign Chaos
by James N. Mattis
General Mattis talks about his idyllic childhood in Washington and he says the greatest gift that his parents gave him was that they introduced he and his siblings to the world of ideas [...] this is what instills in him a lifelong love of learning and of books. He says in his memoir, this is an important line i hope everyone remembers, it says if you haven't read hundreds of books about what you do you are functionally illiterate you will be incompetent because your own experiences are not broad enough to sustain you.
— Ryan Holiday
True Age
by Morgan Levine
Congratulations, @DrMorganLevine! You can find her book (now out) at https://www.amazon.com/True-Age-Cutting-Edge-Research-Clock/dp/0593329287 A deep dive on Morgan’s fascinating work can also be found in our recent podcast together on the FoundMyFitness channel. Episode 72 https://twitter.com/agingdoc1/status/1521124390796251136
— Rhonda Patrick
Surface Detail
by Iain Banks
Have you read "Surface Detail" by Iain Banks? "Surface Detail" is my favorite depiction of a, oh wow, you have to read this book. It's literally the greatest science fiction book, possibly ever written.
— Grimes
The years of Lyndon Johnson
by Robert A. Caro
Robert Caro in his books on Lyndon Johnson he was saying something like um it's not that power corrupts it's that power reveals.
— Ryan Holiday
Childhood's End
by Arthur C. Clarke
I'm sorry but I am unable to accept or tolerate tales that feature biological humanoid aliens who speak English and have faces and etc. I cannot concentrate on anything else in the plot, it is drowned out by the persistent screech of rage in the brain. A whole cast of characters come and go and become relevant and then irrelevant. If you like The Independence Day but wish the aliens were friendly little best buddies forever you will like this book. Sorry I'm being too mean but it just didn't resonate. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
How to Be a Leader
by Plutarch
There's a great book it's a new translation of Plutarch called How to be a Leader and he has a good line he says a leader must be able and willing to do anything but can't do everything.
— Ryan Holiday
Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, one of the best quotes from this book summarizes it completely - it's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything
— Ryan Holiday
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
by Mordecai Richler
Ooh The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. This was actually recommended to me by Dov Charney [...] wonderful fascinating novel that everyone should read.
— Ryan Holiday
Blue ocean strategy
by W. Chan Kim
I love this book it changed how I think about marketing and business competition.
— Ryan Holiday
The gift of failure
by Jessica Lahey
Failure is a gift and you are depriving your children of that gift when you do everything for them
— Ryan Holiday
Happy People Are Annoying
by Josh Peck
hey @ItsJoshPeck my sister is housesitting for us and found my copy of your book. also appears that she’s reading it in the bath. anyway, great book pic.twitter.com/U258szXugC
— Casey Neistat
The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English
by F. G. Fowler
And then I read the dictionary, masterpiece, mastery.
— MrBeast
Understand
by Ted Chiang
It's beautiful and the closest I've read to what it may think like to be a superintelligence.
— Andrej Karpathy
Life Force
by Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis
New podcast episode with @PeterDiamandis and @TonyRobbins on their new book Life Force, GRAIL cancer screening blood test, longevity escape velocity, the $101M Age reversal XPrize, space travel, gene therapy, organogenesis, and more!https://youtu.be/6OyynalpLLI
— Rhonda Patrick
Death be not proud
by John Gunther
So i found this book it's called Death Be Not Proud, it was written in 1949.
— Ryan Holiday
Born to Run
by Bruce Springsteen
Have you read the the Springsteen uh biography born to run, his autobiography?
— Ryan Holiday
Crisis of Conscience
by Tom Mueller
I read a good book uh called Crisis of Conscience.
— Ryan Holiday
The Diary of Anne Frank
by Frances Goodrich
You know you read uh Anne Frank's diary and you see this precocious you know beautiful young girl who who's struck down in her prime
— Ryan Holiday
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
I read two books before I read yours, that that sort of informed my reading. Maybe people have brought this up to you but I stupidly reread Cormac McCarthy's The Road at the beginning of the pandemic and then I also recently read a book which you might not have read [...] Called Lincoln on the Verge.
— Ryan Holiday
A Man at Arms
by Steven Pressfield
I love Steven [...] his new book is incredible, uh A Man At Arms, but Steven's been a mentor of mine since I started as a writer and I reread Gates of Fire at the beginning of the pandemic and I'm very glad i did.
— Ryan Holiday
Montaigne
by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig who I know you love wrote this amazing biography of Montaigne.
— Ryan Holiday
Letters to a Young Athlete
by Chris Bosh
I was lucky enough to help Chris bring this book into existence. Obviously, I am biased, but I think this is a book that very much needs to exist and Chris is a wonderful thinker and philosopher about sports, craft, the drive to win and responding to adversity. You can listen to my interview with him (recorded at the front table at the bookstore) here, but do read the book. He’s great. I think this is a future classic.
— Ryan Holiday
How to Live
by Sarah Bakewell
The book is spectacular. It was a bestseller in the UK and was featured in a 6 part series in The Guardian. The format of the book is a bit unusual, instead of chapters it is made up of 20 Montaigne style essays that discuss the man from a variety of different perspectives. Montaigne was a man obsessed with figuring himself out — why he thought the way he did, how he could find happiness, his fetishes, his near-death experiences. He lived in tumultuous times too and he coped by looking inward. We’re lucky he did, and we can do the same.
— Ryan Holiday
Parting the Waters
by Taylor Branch
I’ve raved about some of my favorite epic biographies before: Robert Caro’s LBJ and William Manchester’s Churchill, among others. Well, add another to the list: Taylor Branch’s definitive series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present is not to watch the news, but to read history.
— Ryan Holiday
First Principles
by Thomas E. Ricks
On today's @dailystoic Podcast, I talk to historian @tomricks1 about his newest book First Principles, the founding fathers familiarity with the ancient Stoics, the wisdom that was embedded into the constitution, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/kYJ4cDrtBF pic.twitter.com/Q6bPlwJbbS
— Ryan Holiday
Yes to Life
by Viktor E. Frankl
Mind-blowingly there was a new Viktor Frankl book this year. They discovered a collection of old lectures and essays that he'd written and they gave it this incredible title that hit me so hard, it's 'Yes to Life in Spite of Everything'
— Ryan Holiday
Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
I read every book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein.
— Bill Gates
Strategy
by Freedman, Lawrence.
I read Lawrence Freedman's book and it's called the Future of War. I don't know if you read it but he wrote he wrote that great book Strategy and he was sort of looking at how at every generation they thought things have fundamentally changed and are different and how how naive that assumption turns out to be every single time
— Ryan Holiday
On looking
by Alexandra Horowitz
I read this great book On Looking by alexandra Horowitz and she talks about taking this walk with her kids and trying to see the walk through her daughter's eyes and what she catches herself realizing is that her daughter doesn't know that the walk starts when they leave her house. Her daughter thinks that the walk starts when she says we're taking a walk
— Ryan Holiday
Ressentiment
by Max Scheler
Most of the time, envy is most harmful to the person who envies. The philosopher Max Scheler called it "a self-poisoning of the mind." There's a Christian saying that "envy is the only sin that gives no pleasure." Because the other sins are fun, right? Greed, gluttony, lust, that's what I call a good time.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Explaining Postmodernism
by Stephen Hicks
Like there's a video on YouTube of the philosophy professor Stephen Hicks doing a version of the postmodernism is resentment argument, and in the comments section there's a bunch of people saying, "This describes Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the democrats." Does it though?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Talking to Strangers
by Malcolm Gladwell
I remember I first read The Tipping Point then I read Blink then Outliers then David and Goliath which is also very good, but then when I read Talking with Strangers last year [...] I remember I shot him an email and I said 'Malcolm this book is like the definition of mastery, it's like watching a master at work'. He took this subject matter that should have been so difficult and frankly not interesting and it's fascinating.
— Ryan Holiday
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
I find Maya Angelou crazy inspiring and the more that I learn about her the more I am blown away both by what she did and who she was. I found her writing, especially about the black experience, incredibly eye-opening and furthermore her lifestyle offers an alternative to the unfortunate hustle culture that we see today.
— Nathaniel Drew
Roman honor
by Carlin A. Barton
If you want a book to start here's some: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, Roman Honor Carlin Barton, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca's Letters.
— Ryan Holiday
Lights Out
by Thomas Gryta
How could a company as big and successful as GE fail? I’ve been thinking about that question for several years, and Lights Out finally gave me many of the answers I was seeking. The authors give you an unflinching look at the mistakes and missteps made by GE’s leadership. If you’re in any kind of leadership role—whether at a company, a non-profit, or somewhere else—there’s a lot you can learn here.
— Bill Gates
A Promised Land
by Barack Obama
I am almost always interested in books about American presidents, and I especially loved A Promised Land. The memoir covers his early career up through the mission that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. President Obama is unusually honest about his experience in the White House, including how isolating it is to be the person who ultimately calls the shots. It’s a fascinating look at what it’s like to steer a country through challenging times.
— Bill Gates
The Overstory
by Richard Powers
This is one of the most unusual novels I’ve read in years. The Overstory follows the lives of nine people and examines their connection with trees. Some of the characters come together over the course of the book, while others stay on their own. Even though the book takes a pretty extreme view towards the need to protect forests, I was moved by each character’s passion for their cause and finished the book eager to learn more about trees.
— Bill Gates
The River of Doubt
by Candice Millard
I recommended it below but Shadow Divers is great. So is River of Doubt.
— Ryan Holiday
Taming the Tiger Within
by Thích Nhất Hạnh
Seneca's essay On Anger is worth reading and so is Agnes Callard's stuff on anger. I also like Taming the Tiger Within and there is an old AA book called You Can't Make Me Angry.
— Ryan Holiday
I am That
by Nisargadatta Maharaj
It moves around. Keep coming back to I Am That, Direct Truth, Vasistha's Yoga, Jed McKenna, and Ashtavakra Gita.
— Naval Ravikant
The New Jim Crow
by Michelle Alexander
Like many white people, I’ve tried to deepen my understanding of systemic racism in recent months. Alexander’s book offers an eye-opening look into how the criminal justice system unfairly targets communities of color, and especially Black communities.
— Bill Gates
Breath from Salt
by Bijal P. Trivedi
This book is truly uplifting. It documents a story of remarkable scientific innovation and how it has improved the lives of almost all cystic fibrosis patients and their families. This story is especially meaningful to me because I know families who’ve benefited from the new medicines described in this book. I suspect we’ll see many more books like this in the coming years, as biomedical miracles emerge from labs at an ever-greater pace.
— Bill Gates
The evolution of cooperation
by Robert M. Axelrod
The Origins of Virtue, The Evolution of Cooperation, The Strategy of Conflict. Or just play multiplayer negotiation games like Diplomacy.
— Naval Ravikant
The Decay of the Angel
by Yukio Mishima
Any advice for people getting into Yukio Mishima? What would I advise? Just read it, it's great! Read the tetralogy. I want to reread Mishima. That was a comfy time just plowing through all this literature. Could read some Mishima. [...] they're all in japan my whole library but I love this book (The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea) so much I bought another copy of it. It's weird with a Japanese author because I love his writing style or his prose so much but it's obviously translated so what does that really say, you know, can I say that I like an author's style of writing even if it's translated?
— PewDiePie
The Histories
by Herodotus
they didn't meaningfully choose seems, well... The Greek historian Herodotus tells a story about the Persian King Xerxes ordering the sea to be whipped with 300 lashes after a storm destroyed his bridge. Which seems irrational, right? To punish a force of nature. Leave my beautiful wet wife alone!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Punisher
by Chuck Dixon
The skull is the symbol of "The Punisher", the Marvel comics' vigilante anti hero. The Punisher's real name is Frank Castiglione but he changed it to Frank Castle, I guess 'cause he's ashamed of his Sicilian heritage. Disappointing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Courage
by Osho
I liked it. But these kinds of books aren’t quick reads, they’re inspiration to self reflect.
— Naval Ravikant
Life After Google
by George Gilder
I thought I would try to double these three ideas up as a sort of a book review of a Gilder's terrific book Life After Google, so I'm gonna give you three contrarian ideas but I'm gonna weave in a little bit of a book review of a Life after Google as well.
— Peter Thiel
The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness
by Andy Puddicombe
For years, I was a skeptic about meditation. Now I do it as often as I can—three times a week, if time allows. Andy’s book and the app he created, Headspace, are what made me a convert. Andy, a former Buddhist monk, offers lots of helpful metaphors to explain potentially tricky concepts in meditation. At a time when we all could use a few minutes to de-stress and re-focus each day, this is a great place to start.
— Bill Gates
Moonwalking with Einstein
by Joshua Foer
If you’re looking to work on a new skill, you could do worse than learning to memorize things. Foer is a science writer who got interested in how memory works, and why some people seem to have an amazing ability to recall facts. He takes you inside the U.S. Memory Championship—yes, that’s a real thing—and introduces you to the techniques that, amazingly, allowed him to win the contest one year.
— Bill Gates
The Rosie Project
by Graeme Simsion
All three of the Rosie novels made me laugh out loud. They’re about a genetics professor with Asperger’s Syndrome who (in the first book) goes looking for a wife and then (in the second and third books) starts a family. Ultimately the story is about getting inside the mind and heart of someone a lot of people see as odd, and discovering that he isn’t really that different from anybody else. Melinda got me started on these books, and I’m glad she did.
— Bill Gates
The Best We Could Do
by Thi Bui
In her memoir The Best We Could Do, for example, Thi Bui gains a new appreciation for what her parents—who survived the Vietnam War—went through. It’s a deeply personal book that explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee.
— Bill Gates
Hyperbole and a Half
by Allie Brosh
You will rip through it in three hours, tops. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. I must have read Melinda a dozen hilarious passages out loud.
— Bill Gates
What If?
by Randall Munroe
Finally, I love the way that former NASA engineer Randall Munroe turns offbeat science lessons into super-engaging comics. The two books of his that I’ve read and highly recommend are What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, and XKCD Volume 0.
— Bill Gates
Cringeworthy
by Melissa Dahl
All of these responses illustrate exactly what writer Melissa Dahl says in her book "Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness". According to Dahl, "The moments that make us cringe are when we're yanked out "of our own perspective, and we can suddenly "see ourselves from somebody else's point of view."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Woman's Hour
by Elaine Weiss
Some books to read in 2020: - Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch - Keep Going by @austinkleon - The Second Mountain by David Brooks - The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss - My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George - Range by @DavidEpstein - How To Keep Your Cool by Seneca
— Ryan Holiday
Candide
by Voltaire
I read this copy of Candide on the day of my wedding with @samagerie five years ago because it was on the shelf at the venue. Then I stole it and took it home with me. "Il faut cultiver son jardin." https://t.co/XrcR89W1yS pic.twitter.com/yde8ZcoYsd
— Ryan Holiday
The Creative Habit
by Twyla Tharp
I wanted to do a little reading. This is a passage from Twyla Tharp who wrote an amazing book called the creative habit.
— Ryan Holiday
The rise of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris
When I was 19 years old, I met @drdrewpinsky and asked him for some book recommendations. These are the three he gave me...and my Amazon receipt. That question changed my life and I still have the books. Passing along the recommendation if you haven't re… https://t.co/hACtooDiZS pic.twitter.com/SjsXXw4lrG
— Ryan Holiday
The 33 Strategies of War
by Robert Greene
In 2006, I went for a walk with @realtuckermax in New York City. He bought me this book and put me on a path to becoming a writer. You never know what moments or people will end up changing your life. https://t.co/YWJ9UEfLje pic.twitter.com/ngJ2yz63Mx
— Ryan Holiday
The Fish That Ate the Whale
by Rich Cohen
8 Life Changing Biographies To Read: Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch The Power Broker by Robert Caro Socrates by Paul Johnson Totto-Chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi Eisenhower by Jean Edward Smith Edison by Matthew Josephson The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen Sherman by B.H. Hart
— Ryan Holiday
Shock Value
by John Waters
Then when I was working on Opulence, I needed a voice actor to do a line from John Waters's book. And it was my co-director, Theryn, who suggested, "Don't you think Buck Angel sounds kind "of like John Waters?" And I said, "Well, he just messaged me on Insta, "let's see if he wants to do it." And I just loved the idea of having Buck Angel as John Waters in the video credits. Like a trans icon playing a gay icon.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The End is Always Near
by Dan Carlin
I understand that some of the book's content has appeared in Dan's Hardcore History podcasts, but since I've only listened to a sparse few a lot of the book was relatively new material to me. I thought the premise of the book was excellent: Things look quite good right now and it's hard to imagine civilization regressing substantially, but history is filled with examples of exactly that over and over again. Just how optimistic should we be today that we can avert the same fate? I expect that Dan could write an excellent book laser focused on exploring this, but while the book does do a bit of it now and then, more often than not it also distracts itself and goes off on tangents of what feels like filler / irrelevant content. For example, we're discussing the Assyrian empire, the Roman empire and their fall, but then we also randomly learn a little too much of the treatment of children in history, or the details of various bombings during the second world war. What is the point of these? I would have preferred if the book stuck more closely to its core theme, with multiple examples of powerful empires rising and falling unexpectedly, with an analysis of what made that happen, and whether that analysis applies to today. This is something we half get, which is still fun. Enjoyed overall! 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Growth
by Vaclav Smil
Vaclav Smil is one of my favorite thinkers, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his new book about the growth of *everything*.
— Bill Gates
These Truths
by Jill Lepore
I’ve read a lot of books about history over the years, and These Truths by Jill Lepore is the most honest and unflinching account of the American story I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the most beautifully written.
— Bill Gates
Lincoln
by Fred Kaplan
Some of the books that have changed my life and had the most influence on me: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 48 Laws of Power, The Black Swan, life is unpredictable. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Four Hour Work Week - Huge! 33 Strategies of War, obviously Robert Greene's Mastery. Pia Mellody, one of my favorite authors [Facing Codependence]. This biography of John D Rockefeller, maybe you remember it from The Obstacle is the way? This book by John Boyd [...] Malcolm X the autobiography, Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run. A friend of mine recommended this biography William Lee Miller on President Lincoln. It was one of the books that changed his life. Had totally changed how I thought about leadership. The War of Art, Turning Pro - two favorites from Steven Pressfield. Haruki Murakami's book on running 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. Ellison's Invisible Man. Again another book from Pia Mellody [Facing Love Addiction]. Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Taming the Tiger Within. The Brass Check - this book inspired the name of my marketing company and my book Trust Me I'm Lying. This is one of my copies of Meditations. Why Don't We Learn From History by BH Liddell Hart. Prescription For Adversity, a strange book biography of Ambrose Bierce that I like. Candide, interesting story I stole this from where I got married they had this on the shelf. I read it while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to get married and I thought hey I'm keeping this. [...] Second Mountain, this is a new addition to the shelf. Dr. Drew [The Mirror Effect] who introduced me to stoicism, Great! This is a cool book -Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer it's an analysis of Lincoln as if he was a writer. This book: Strategy by BH Liddell Hart influenced how I think about strategy.John Graves Hard Scrabble, influenced how I think about my farm. Fishing For Fun is a new book, I just read by Herbert Hoover about the philosophical benefits of fishing and yes Herbert Hoover, the president. Chesterfield's letters to his son [...] Seth Godin's the Dip, great book. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Jane Jacobs also amazing. Daniel Boorstin, great. Death Be Not Proud, beautiful book. So these are some of the books, it's my life shelf. [...] Oh Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, great! The Way To Love by Anthony De Mello.
— Ryan Holiday
The Strategy of Indirect Approach
by B. H. Liddell Hart
Some of the books that have changed my life and had the most influence on me: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 48 Laws of Power, The Black Swan, life is unpredictable. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Four Hour Work Week - Huge! 33 Strategies of War, obviously Robert Greene's Mastery. Pia Mellody, one of my favorite authors [Facing Codependence]. This biography of John D Rockefeller, maybe you remember it from The Obstacle is the way? This book by John Boyd [...] Malcolm X the autobiography, Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run. A friend of mine recommended this biography William Lee Miller on President Lincoln. It was one of the books that changed his life. Had totally changed how I thought about leadership. The War of Art, Turning Pro - two favorites from Steven Pressfield. Haruki Murakami's book on running 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. Ellison's Invisible Man. Again another book from Pia Mellody [Facing Love Addiction]. Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Taming the Tiger Within. The Brass Check - this book inspired the name of my marketing company and my book Trust Me I'm Lying. This is one of my copies of Meditations. Why Don't We Learn From History by BH Liddell Hart. Prescription For Adversity, a strange book biography of Ambrose Bierce that I like. Candide, interesting story I stole this from where I got married they had this on the shelf. I read it while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to get married and I thought hey I'm keeping this. [...] Second Mountain, this is a new addition to the shelf. Dr. Drew [The Mirror Effect] who introduced me to stoicism, Great! This is a cool book -Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer it's an analysis of Lincoln as if he was a writer. This book: Strategy by BH Liddell Hart influenced how I think about strategy.John Graves Hard Scrabble, influenced how I think about my farm. Fishing For Fun is a new book, I just read by Herbert Hoover about the philosophical benefits of fishing and yes Herbert Hoover, the president. Chesterfield's letters to his son [...] Seth Godin's the Dip, great book. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Jane Jacobs also amazing. Daniel Boorstin, great. Death Be Not Proud, beautiful book. So these are some of the books, it's my life shelf. [...] Oh Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, great! The Way To Love by Anthony De Mello.
— Ryan Holiday
The image
by Daniel J. Boorstin
Some of the books that have changed my life and had the most influence on me: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 48 Laws of Power, The Black Swan, life is unpredictable. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Four Hour Work Week - Huge! 33 Strategies of War, obviously Robert Greene's Mastery. Pia Mellody, one of my favorite authors [Facing Codependence]. This biography of John D Rockefeller, maybe you remember it from The Obstacle is the way? This book by John Boyd [...] Malcolm X the autobiography, Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run. A friend of mine recommended this biography William Lee Miller on President Lincoln. It was one of the books that changed his life. Had totally changed how I thought about leadership. The War of Art, Turning Pro - two favorites from Steven Pressfield. Haruki Murakami's book on running 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. Ellison's Invisible Man. Again another book from Pia Mellody [Facing Love Addiction]. Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Taming the Tiger Within. The Brass Check - this book inspired the name of my marketing company and my book Trust Me I'm Lying. This is one of my copies of Meditations. Why Don't We Learn From History by BH Liddell Hart. Prescription For Adversity, a strange book biography of Ambrose Bierce that I like. Candide, interesting story I stole this from where I got married they had this on the shelf. I read it while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to get married and I thought hey I'm keeping this. [...] Second Mountain, this is a new addition to the shelf. Dr. Drew [The Mirror Effect] who introduced me to stoicism, Great! This is a cool book -Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer it's an analysis of Lincoln as if he was a writer. This book: Strategy by BH Liddell Hart influenced how I think about strategy.John Graves Hard Scrabble, influenced how I think about my farm. Fishing For Fun is a new book, I just read by Herbert Hoover about the philosophical benefits of fishing and yes Herbert Hoover, the president. Chesterfield's letters to his son [...] Seth Godin's the Dip, great book. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Jane Jacobs also amazing. Daniel Boorstin, great. Death Be Not Proud, beautiful book. So these are some of the books, it's my life shelf. [...] Oh Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist, great! The Way To Love by Anthony De Mello.
— Ryan Holiday
Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
Robert Greene's books at best in class here. Must reads. Vanessa Van Edwards is also good. Dan Ariely too.
— Ryan Holiday
Alchemy
by Rory Sutherland
4 hours dinner conversation with @rorysutherland and Rohan @Silva in a Pakistani restaurant in London (2 bottles of wine, but no Negroni). You must buy two copies of Rory's book, in case one is stolen, lost, damaged (by the rain), or self-destructs. pic.twitter.com/Xa5WFOGCNt
— Nassim Taleb
René Girard's Mimetic Theory
by Wolfgang Palaver
It's more of an overview book because I couldn't make it through his actual writings.
— Naval Ravikant
Pre-Suasion
by Robert B. Cialdini
I don't think I needed to read the entire book to get the point but it was still good to read it.
— Naval Ravikant
Thinking physics
by Lewis C. Epstein
On the back cover it has this great little pitch it says "the only book that's used in both grade school and graduate school" and it's true it's all simple physics puzzles that can be explained to a twelve-year-old child they can puzzle over and it can be explained to a 25 year old grad student in physics.
— Naval Ravikant
Math (Better Explained)
by Kalid Azad
Current reading list. Most into “The Beginning of Infinity” and “What is Life?” at the moment. pic.twitter.com/L1JncsXiIL
— Naval Ravikant
Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic
by Osho
The Great Challenge. Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic. And this:https://t.co/6WvUpIjpKV
— Naval Ravikant
Woman in the dunes
by Kobo Abe
I really recommend reading it, even if you heard me spoil it because it is a really fun, nice read. I mean, come on, it even has pictures in it. What more can you ask for? The [...] I would give this a 4 out of 5. It's a really nice book.
— PewDiePie
Old Man's War
by John Scalzi
This is a humorous medium-ambitious space opera sci-fi. As far as ideas and world building go, I enjoyed some of the concepts (e.g. "smart blood"), but found others highly naive / dubious (silly biological aliens, etc). The story is enjoyable, but doesn't try too hard to wow. Overall, a satisfying bite of a story-driven sci-fi if you can forgive the unrealistic universe. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Zero
by Charles Seife
Here's the list 0) Number: The Language of Science 1) When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought 2) Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea 3) A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age 4) Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1080502548446949378
— Bryan Johnson
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
I tweeted out on twitter asking if their were any recommendations for Japanese authors because I enjoy reading Murakami (After the Quake, Norwegian Wood, Killing Commendatore, 1Q84, Kafka on the Shore)
— PewDiePie
The Sound of Waves
by Yukio Mishima
I read some of his [Yukio Mishima's] more weird stuff - 'The Sound of Waves', 'Sun and Steel', 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' -, his short stories - 'Death in Midsummer and Other Stories'. There is so much great work from him that I feel, I enjoy every page that I read.
— PewDiePie
Altered Traits
by Daniel Goleman
There’s a great book out there called Altered [Traits], which I read this year, that I think does a great job of parsing that concept out. Which is [...] we don’t meditate for the state. The state can be pleasurable. To be honest, I don’t find it that pleasurable. I don’t actually enjoy meditating that much. Sometimes I do, but as many times as I do, it’s difficult for me, it’s work.
— Peter Attia
Summa Theologica
by Thomas Aquinas
3- Current bibles: The Bible, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Works by Aquinas, Montaigne, etc. They fail editorial criteria. Editors don't understand books, Academics don't get scholarship. Why?@rorysutherland : employees' objective is minimizing blame in case of failure.
— Nassim Taleb
Mind of Napoleon
by J. Christopher Herold
An incredible primary-source portrait on a brilliant (but obviously deeply flawed) individual. Broadly applicable thoughts.
— Sam Altman
The Inferno
by August Strindberg
Last but not least, the Inferno by August Strindberg, or [August Strindberg]. Again, this is not a good introduction to August Strindberg. [...] It's very fascinating but very bizarre to read, like reading the notes of a madman almost.
— PewDiePie
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
When I was younger I loved reading and I loved sharing, discussing books with my granddad. Obviously I was really young, I was like 10 or 12, so I don't know how much of a discussion it was. But he was so happy and fascinated that I was.. I liked reading and we read Sherlock Holmes because he loves Sherlock Holmes. He tried to get me into this private Sherlock Holmes group but I was too young to really understand. I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid.
— PewDiePie
The Presidents Club
by Nancy Gibbs
Just about to finish this book for the second time. Damn, I can’t say enough about it. If you have even a modicum of interest in US history post WWI, this is beyond required.
— Peter Attia
Dragon's Egg
by Robert L. Forward
This book must absolutely be commended for its inventiveness, while staying within the limits of the scientifically plausible. Overall a very enjoyable hard scifi read, but if I had to critique some things, it would be: 1) the aliens are slightly annoyingly too human-like (would have appreciated an attempt at something more perplexing / foreign), 2) some parts of the book drag on for a very long time without being interesting (e.g. the various escapades of the cheela that take up a large portion of the book), 3) the cheela civilization is not imagined in a satisfying detail, and 4) the ending is a little too abrupt and naive for my tastes. A little bit like Sagan's Contact, where I would prefer a bit more of the more likely Lem's Master's Voice. overall a recommended read for anyone who loves hard scifi! Just feel free to skim some of the boring parts until you get to the last ~20% of the book, and prepare to have your intelligence insulted just a little bit when it comes to antrophology instead of the physics. 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Hero of the empire
by Candice Millard
Have you read any of Robert Kurson? Shadow Divers, Pirate Hunters, and his new one, Rocket Men is out soon. Rich Cohen is also a master of this genre (Tough Jews, The Fish That Ate The Whale). I also love Candace Millard (Destiny of the Republic, The River of Doubt and her Churchill book).
— Ryan Holiday
Seta
by Alessandro Baricco
Upload the cover of a book you love without saying why and mention the person who invited you (@mcapellanus) and invite 8 others for #WorldBookDay. @csandis @VergilDen @holland_tom @peterfrankopan @petelx60 @BrankoMilan @BellesLettresEd pic.twitter.com/kQKcFvlqJj
— Nassim Taleb
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
I wanted to read another classic which is, my eye is so itchy, I'm sorry, the Old Man and the sea
— PewDiePie
The Elephant in the Brain
by Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson
Most Intolerant Minority, Skin in the Game, Elephant in the Brain, cross-generational hedonic adaptation, and broad funnels + tight filters. That was this week. I can’t remember last month.
— Naval Ravikant
Probability theory and applications
by S. R. S. Varadhan
Sub-imbecile, Denbo, Varadhan dealt with thin-tails. Read Silent Risk, imbecile. And Russell didn't even deal with probabilistic payoffs. As to Mandelbrot, I gave him his dues. Sub-imbecile.
— Nassim Taleb
Invariances
by Robert Nozick
No, Nozick was out. I read 5 of his books, though. But I had to bite the bullet: time away from Cicero is time burned.
— Nassim Taleb
Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
The best books I read this year. Most were old (some very old), some new, some old but felt new. You can follow along on my reading list email (https://t.co/9yuC15FLai) if you want more recommendations next year. If you're stressed out and want to start … https://t.co/25uvubl5Zz pic.twitter.com/Qcwv0sAGt0
— Ryan Holiday
The forge of christendom
by Holland, Tom Dr.
Also @holland_tom took real risks for his book, followed something to its logical conclusion.
— Nassim Taleb
Ender’s Game
by Orson Scott Card
It's alright. It's a bit like like Harry Potter in space, but not as fun or inventive. Another example a basic scifi that many people like, and I just can't really understand. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Modelling Extremal Events
by Paul Embrechts
Best exposition is the first 3 chapters of Embrecht's book.
— Nassim Taleb
Bird by Bird
by Anne Lamott
Oh this is a great question. First off, just read any form of amazing writing. Doesn't matter if it is John McPhee writing about volcanos or Michael Lewis writing about flash trading. You just want to see the craft done well. As for specific writing related recommendations? Bird By Bird Tiny Beautiful Things Orwell's essay on writing Zissner's Writing Well And if I may be so bold, I think Perennial Seller is worth a shot.
— Ryan Holiday
Being Wrong
by Kathryn Schulz
[For people on my career path, I'd recommend] biographies of people who have ‘built skyscrapers’ (my term); for example: [...]
— Peter Attia
10% Happier
by Dan Harris
Response to "Are there any books you haven’t mentioned that you feel would make your reading list?"
The Murder of Sonny Liston
by Shaun Assael
Did not... have you read the new book on Sonny Listen? https://twitter.com/thashadow/status/817793571193556994
— Peter Attia
The Opposing Shore
by Julien Gracq
5 additional books I recommended pic.twitter.com/hhRW6Kabtg
— Nassim Taleb
Un amore
by Dino Buzzati
Yes and I have also read Buzzati on how to find love in a bordello.
— Nassim Taleb
Falling into grace
by Adyashanti
Krishnamurti was incredibly influential on me. When I first read him in my late thirties, it was like a bomb went off in my head. He was speaking in a language that was completely removed from my own. He wrote in a very complex form of English where he used certain words in a way that didn't line up with what I had learned over my entire life. But it had the feel of truth to it. He laid out a clear, consistent, and integrated philosophy of what it means to be conscious and free. That said, it's a very advanced read. I've given Krishnamurti to some of my friends and they just hand it back and tell me that it didn't make any sense to them. I think it's better to start with something simpler like Eckart Tolle, Adyashanti, Jed McKenna, or Osho.
— Naval Ravikant
Explaining Social Behavior
by Jon Elster
Notes on one of Elster's books. He is the MAIN social science thinker; gets Lindy Effect @avermeule @biillyb pic.twitter.com/KMYP3kNCz8
— Nassim Taleb
Blindsight
by Peter Watts
I thought I was going to enjoy this book because I was told that it has nice, hard-sci-fi-like aliens. Unfortunately, I learned that that this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The aliens were great and fun to contemplate, but there's something about the writing, the way the story is structured and the events that unfold that was simply off. The story is difficult to parse - Peter Watts doesn't hand it to you on the silver platter, for your enjoyment. He makes you work for it, and writes the story in a way that, I thought, required a lot of inferences and reading between the lines. There were also large passages containing some back story for the main character that I didn't fully understand the point of. In summary, I don't think I fully got all the details of this book in a first reading and I emerged somewhat confused about what just happened, and I'll just blame it on the book :) 3/5 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Star Maker
by Olaf Stapledon
I wanted to like this book a lot, but unfortunately I struggled to finish reading and ultimately emerged disappointed. The book is ambitious in its grandeur but falls short of delivering a punch. We get confronted with many alien worlds and ideas but none of them intrigued me simultaneously with inventiveness and plausibility. The book gets more and more abstract and religious towards the end. Wait, the stars and nebulae have their own minds and consciousness? I'm not prepared to accept this proposition based on a few vague paragraphs. I reject the idea. I reject the rest. I thought I was reading a scifi book but found myself inexorably reading something much closer to the Holy Bible remixed by someone drunk on the scale of the cosmos. In addition to critiquing the inclusions and choices I could also critique plenty of glaring omissions. For instance, we didn't get to see a single synthetic species? I understand that the book was written in 1930s, but it still bugs me. 2/5: It was okay. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
by Daniel Ingram
@yashmankad Core Teachings of the Buddha, free online.
— Naval Ravikant
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran
@ricardo_afonso_ The Prophet is a beautiful book, enjoy :-)
— Naval Ravikant
The Art of War in the Middle Ages
by Charles Oman
This is correct--art of war in the Middle Ages.
— Sam Altman
The Science of Conjecture
by James Franklin
Stands above, way above other books on the history and philosophy of probability.
— Nassim Taleb
Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
This book was exactly what I am usually most afraid of: a "basic" sci-fi written by a non-technical author. It is a nicely written tale with grandeur whose primary focus are people and relationships, and oh, it happens to be set in the future. If you enjoy reading flavored and elaborate descriptions of sunsets, environments, or people's facial features with a few scattered mentions of different solar systems here and there (so that it qualifies as a sci-fi), this book is for you. But if you're interested in exploring possible futures, with a specific focus on ideas, technologies and their consequences in a consistent and elaborate universe, you'll get bored very quickly. 2/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Stargirl
by Jerry Spinelli
I read this book called Stargirl that is about this girl who is very different than everybody else in her school so people call her weird, but no matter how much they make fun of her she just continues to be herself and pretty soon that individuality rubs off on everybody else, they all wanna be like her. So Stargirl was an amazing book that I read.
— Taylor Swift
A for Andromeda
by Fred Hoyle
You know how Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud is a fantastic and interesting hard scifi book? This is nothing like that. It is a sloppy, boring, linear and shallow disaster that reeks of missed opportunities and dubious ideas about artificial intelligence and alien life. I can't imagine a less exciting portrayal of receiving intelligible communication from a different galaxy. Any sciency details (which I've enjoyed the most in Black Cloud) and descriptions of the nature of the code or how it is decrypted, how the computer works, details of the communication protocol, any deeper conversations with the computer -- all missing. There are so many missed opportunities everywhere that it literally hurts in my chest to think about it. Some Spoiler Alerts below: By far the biggest disappointment was Fred's portrayal of the artificially intelligent computer which seems anything but intelligent. It appears to experience emotions such as anger (seriously, Fred?), it consistently makes clearly suboptimal decisions (such as killing people early - wouldn't it try to be very friendly to lure humans into false sense of security?), and it supposedly doesn't understand emotions. I would expect an AI as the one described to have a very good understanding of emotions and why they are there in biological bodies evolved through natural selection, as they could be perfectly logically understandable as evolutionary heuristics for successful survival and reproduction. I would have expected more deeper insights from Fred Hoyle but was consistently disappointed with how shallow and mainstream his ideas were. The super-intelligent alien thing in the end is stupefied by the power of love and rebels against its master - are you f*** kidding me? Did a 6-year-old come up with these ideas after reading Galaxy Zack: Monsters in Space? I half expected the alien body to be green, have tentacles and antennas. There are many other problems with the plot line, various logical inconsistencies and the terrible and unintelligible writing, but I'll just stop here. Just awful. 1/5
— Andrej Karpathy
JavaScript
by Douglas Crockford
Highly informative and helpful for understanding the nuances of JavaScript
— Andrej Karpathy
The Giving Tree
by Shel Silverstein
In school I became obsessed with poetry really early on because, you know, my favorite books were the Dr. Seuss books and Shel Silverstein and like you know the books were you have the stories that come together through rhyming. And that was always my favorite book to read because it sounded like a song.
— Taylor Swift
The One World Schoolhouse
by Salman Khan
To someone well-versed on education discussions, this book contains a lot of obvious. I feel like most reasonable people will nod along as they read this book without much disagreement, as a lot of it is not very controversial. For example, a very "insightful" chapter spends several paragraphs getting the point across that some kids learn differently from other kids, or at different pace. The parts I did find interesting were first, Salman's historical account about some of the beginnings of Khan Academy, and second his vision for the ideal classroom (even though it was only discussed in a few rather vague paragraphs). I am a fan of Khan Academy (their mission, not their current execution), but I did not get very much out of this book, so 3 stars seems appropriate. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
How to Create a Mind
by Ray Kurzweil
Kurzweil's book offers an overview of the biological brain and briefly overviews some attempts toward replicating its structure or function inside the computer. He also offers his own high-level ideas that are mostly a restatement of what can already be found in other books (such as Hawkins' On Intelligence) with a few modifications (he admits this himself though at one point, for which he gets bonus points). Finally, he applies his Law Of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) to field of AI and produces some predictions for the future of this field. The good: Nice thought experiments section, nice overview of the biological brain (both old brain/cortex and their function), reasonably ok philosophical mambo jambo parts about consciousness and whether it is possible for a computer to be a mind (if you're into that), some analysis of relevant computational trends. By the end, you're almost convinced we're almost there! The bad: First, his own theories are extremely vague and half-baked (though I forgive this. If he knew more he would be busier with things other than writing this book) and essentially reduce to some form of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model. That's not especially exciting, I think most researchers in the field will agree on such high-level things. I also find it puzzling that he claims to be talking about the mind in its entirety, but then his exposition focuses almost entirely on temporal modeling/prediction aspects and mostly ignores a lot of other magical components of a mind, such as a flexible and efficient knowledge representation / inference engine, or a reinforcement learning - like actor /critic system that surely exists somewhere at the core of all of our learning and reasoning. All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in some pointers to our efforts to replicate a brain in the computer, who wants to learn a bit about the biological brain, or who's into the philosophy of it all. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
In Defense of Food
by Michael Pollan
This book really changed the way I look at food and will certainly lead to changes in my eating habits. I didn't want to ruin life for my older self (as I found out, almost all most serious western diseases can be attributed to mostly nutrition) so I resolved to drill down into nutrition science over the last few weeks in an attempt to identify a healthy diet. I've skimmed several books, read a number of articles, a few papers, blogs and so on, but it was all a trip down the rabbit hole of complexity that is the human body and its interaction with digested food. I was exhausted and become more confused than certain about anything as I read about all the conflicting diets out there and all the evidence supporting or conflicting all of them. What a mess. I was about to give up in confusion when a friend recommended this book to me. I come from a scientific background, so when I am faced with a problem (such as nutrition) I have a sudden impulse to right away try to drill down into details: of all components of a human body, the nutrients in foods, studies that show how they behave and interact in the body, etc. This book champions an approach that I ordinarily look down on, but it does a great job of convincing the reader that it is the best approach we have at the moment. Mainly, it argues that we should keep it simple, look at the few uncontroversial nutrition facts we have established, consider some history, and apply some common sense. In short, this book is the most honest, balanced and frank attempt I've seen so far to exploring the problem of healthy nutrition and by the end the conclusions seem clear. Warmly recommended! 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
3/5. Few thoughts in review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/490735236
— Andrej Karpathy
The invisible gorilla
by Christopher F. Chabris
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, in their book The Invisible Gorilla, show how people watching a video of a basketball game, when diverted with attention-absorbing details such as counting passes, can completely miss a gorilla stepping into the middle of the court.
— Nassim Taleb
Happy Accidents
by Morton A. Meyers
Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.
— Nassim Taleb
I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov
This was certainly an interesting experience, given that the short stories in this book were written at about 1940-1950, but the events the in book take place at about 2070. (i.e. right now in 2012 we are almost exactly half way there) The book contains 9 short stories, from which the ones I would most recommend are Reason and Evidence. What strikes me as most interesting is the nature of predictions in the book. Some predictions are too pessimistic and some are too optimistic, but in funny ways. Here are examples: - The robots in 2070 are described to be heavy, metalic, and have diaphragms. More likely, we'd now think that robots at that time will be made of super light-weight carbon fibers, and they certainly won't have diaphragms when we can just use speakers? - Most interestingly, in charge of the hardcore theory of robots are ... mathematicians. In fact, the positronic brains are seen to yield behavior based on solutions of differential equations. These days, we would most likely not think of including (pure) mathematicians in robotics, and we rarely ever think of algorithms in AI/Machine Learning in terms of differential equations. (wait, should we? ) - One story mentions that the protagonists recorded a video, and that he had to to get it developed. Interesting that it was not obvious that this limitation would not be overcome by 2070, and that we wouldn't be using film. - Even though some of the above contain severely pessimistic views of the world, Isaac imagines us to have hyperatomic drives in 2070, that allow for easy interstellar travel. It is strange to think that we can conquer space, but still need to "develop" a video. Anyway, overall I liked the stories. Many of them essentially come down to an almost detective-like story, where there is something wrong with the robots, and the protagonist has to figure out how the observed behavior has come about from the 3 laws and logical inferences. In general I like the idea that sufficiently advanced robots will become so complicated that we will lose the ability to fully interpret their behavior. There will simply be too many moving parts, and what we observe in terms of the behavior will only ever be the tip of the iceberg. The underlying, perfectly deterministic and individually understandable complexity will simply collapse all together into one term, and we will call it personality. I look forward to these times, at some point around 2070 (sounds reasonable to me). 4/5
— Andrej Karpathy
Catherine the Great
by Robert K. Massie
Just finished Massie's book on Catherine. An amazingly expansive and compelling portrait of an incredible woman. Highly recommend.
— Elon Musk
Kant and the Platypus
by Umberto Eco
I read Plato and the Platypus by Umberto Eco, which I found brilliant [...]
— Nassim Taleb
The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker
Note: I do not disrespect psychologists because I don't know their works. It is precisely BECAUSE I read their crap. Between 2002 and 2005½ I read >200 psychology books and took notes. (Here 3 books by Pinker @sapinker who claims I didn't read his junk) pic.twitter.com/EH1VNTZgU4
— Nassim Taleb
7 Powers
by Hamilton Helmer
Hamilton Helmer understands that strategy starts with invention. He can't tell you what to invent, but he can and does show what it takes for a new invention to become a valuable business
— Peter Thiel
A Poison Like No Other
by Matt Simon
Actually I was reading the book "A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies" just last week. I didn't realize the extent to which plastics have come to permeate and mess with our entire environment. It's not just about the polymer granules of… https://twitter.com/rezendi/status/1826299346239009263
— Andrej Karpathy
The Alignment Problem
by Brian Christian
I'm a third of the way through this book. It's hard to understand why we're not obsessed with alignment and on the other hand it's entirely expected we humans wouldn't be.
— Bryan Johnson
How The War Was Won
by Phillips Payson O'Brien
Really value books/people who can reframe a popular narrative into an original thesis
— Bryan Johnson
The Ickabog
by J.K. Rowling
It reminds me of that tweet where she tweeted about her children's book The Ickabog and then like accidentally control-pasted the text of some insane screed about trans people and terfs that she had been writing elsewhere. It's kind of the fascinating paradox of JK Rowling in general it's that there's this kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing where it's like "oh children's author who writes whimsical stories about wizard school" on one hand and on the other hand it's like these insane venomous diatribes about the transsexuals.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
There's an interesting book called In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado about her experience being in an abusive lesbian relationship and like one of the difficulties of how do you talk about that
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Guns of August
by Barbara W. Tuchman
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
The Encyclopedia of Military History
by Richard Ernest Dupuy
Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman The Gallic Wars by Caesar Twelve Against the Gods by Bolitho Genghis Khan by Weatherford The first one on the list will take a while to get through, but is very much worthwhile. Admittedly, this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day. I hope someone makes an audiobook of The Encyclopedia of Military History by Dupuy and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Creasy.
— Elon Musk
Main Street Millionaire
by Codie Sanchez
Codie congratulations on the book launch, pre-ordered
— Bryan Johnson
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein
You know sometimes reading one book will cite another and then that takes you on a journey [...] I recently did a Patreon video about what I'm calling Granola Fascism or what people often call Conspirituality now, the kind of combination of right-wing conspiracy theory culture with new age spirituality. And I guess I was reading this book by Naomi Klein "Doppelgangers" which in large part deals with this topic. Naomi Klein cites Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Natural Causes" which is about the wellness movement and I was like oh I've never heard of that book but it sounds relevant so then I'll go read that too.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Natural Causes
by Barbara Ehrenreich
You know sometimes reading one book will cite another and then that takes you on a journey [...] I recently did a Patreon video about what I'm calling Granola Fascism or what people often call Conspirituality now, the kind of combination of right-wing conspiracy theory culture with new age spirituality. And I guess I was reading this book by Naomi Klein "Doppelgangers" which in large part deals with this topic. Naomi Klein cites Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Natural Causes" which is about the wellness movement and I was like oh I've never heard of that book but it sounds relevant so then I'll go read that too.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Essential 55
by Ron Clark
Ron wrote a book called The Essential 55. The book became a huge success and was profiled on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
— MrBeast
Z
by Therese Fowler
A copy of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald was observed by Taylor's bed
— Taylor Swift
Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
It is interesting to read Orwell’s account of the Spanish civil war. He started out fighting for the communists …
— Elon Musk
Facing Up to Scarcity
by Barbara H. Fried
SBF’s Mom wrote a book about how being a moral squiggly worm is ok and his Dad teaches people how to avoid taxes while simultaneously writing Sen Karen’s evil tax policy! pic.twitter.com/Xq17G5J0Cv
— Elon Musk
Life and Death
by Stephanie Meyer
In 2015 Stephenie published "Life and Death", a gender-swapped reimagining of the first novel. Yes, she transgendered "Twilight". "Twilight" has gone woke.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
by George Eliot
In 1856, Mary Ann Evans, known by her masculine pen name George Eliot and often considered one of the greatest novelists of all time, wrote an essay called "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" in which she complained that "lady novelists" write unrealistic, wish-fulfillment fantasy schlock, with absurd Mary Sue self-insert protagonists who every man falls in love with. You know all the same complaints that people make today about romance fiction.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
It Ends With Us
by Colleen Hoover
In the 2000s it was "Twilight", and then in the 2010s, it was the "Twilight" fanfiction "Fifty Shades of Grey". At the time I'm making this video, it's a novelist called Colleen Hoover, who's sold six trillion books about dangerous alpha males named Ryle. I promise that in whatever year you're watching this video, there's currently some lady novelist who's caused an outrage writing stories about a dangerous, wealthy, controlling alpha male.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
An Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex
by Thomas Gisborne
When I was young, in the 18th century, ladies were advised to read what we called "conduct books," such as Thomas Gisbourne's "An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex", which instructed the reader in proper feminine virtues. Doesn't that sound exciting?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
by Samuel Richardson
The first best-selling English novel ever was a romance published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson called "Pamela or Virtue Rewarded". "Pamela" tells the story of a virtuous 15-year-old girl named Pamela Andrews, who's employed as a maidservant by the wealthy pervert Mr. B, who repeatedly attempts to seduce her, kidnap her, sneak into her room at night. And the whole time Pamela is like, "Nay, I shan't acquiesce to this licentious rake. For my innocence and virtue are more dear to me than my life. And if the cost be my felicity, so be it. For I shan't subject my poor mother and father to the ignominy of-" In the end Mr. B is so impressed with Pamela's virtue that he reforms his rakish ways and marries her, which is supposed to be the reward, I guess, for Pamela's chaste behavior. It's a Cinderella rags-to-riches fantasy, with a Prince Charming who's not so charming.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected
by Eliza Haywood
Anti-Pamelists wrote parody novels like Eliza Haywood's "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected". Wow, what a savage burn. And Henry Fielding's "Shamela". Both of which reframe Pamela as a gold-digging social climber.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Shamela
by Henry Fielding
Anti-Pamelists wrote parody novels like Eliza Haywood's "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected". Wow, what a savage burn. And Henry Fielding's "Shamela". Both of which reframe Pamela as a gold-digging social climber.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Whatever we think of its "morality," "Pamela" became the template for romance novels where a young, inexperienced, impoverished girl becomes an object of fascination for an older, richer man with a dangerous edge. In the 19th Century "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" both fit this description, though "Pride and Prejudice" is obviously much more agreeable to 21st century morality than "Pamela".
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Gentle Rogue
by Johanna Lindsay
In the 20th century the term "romance novel" became associated with mass-market paperback romances, derogatorily known as "bodice rippers," like Johanna Lindsey's "Gentle Rogue", with the classic Fabio clinch on the cover.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
The point I'm trying to make is that there's a historical continuity from "Pamela" to "Twilight". Stephenie Meyer's contribution is that she took the classic romance formula, combined it with the lurid sexiness of "Dracula", and then Mormonized it to the point it became appealing to 21st century teenagers and moms.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein
by Sabina Spielrein
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Ego and the Id
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
by Erich Fromm
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Melanie Klein
by R. D. Hinshelwood, Tomasz Fortuna
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sexuality and The Psychology of Love
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious
by Carl Jung
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Freud on Women
by Sigmund Freud
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Feminine Psychology
by Karen Horney
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Savage Appetites
by Rachel Monroe
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Females
by Andrea Long Chu
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Sexual Politics of Meat
by Carol J. Adams
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers
by Jude Doyle
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Flying
by Kate Millett
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Anticlimax
by Sheila Jeffreys
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Berlin's Third Sex
by Magnus Hirschfeld
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Men Possessing Women
by Andrea Dworkin
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Straight Mind and Other Essays
by Monique Wittig
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Twilight Director's Notebook
by Catherine Hardwicke
I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory. Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Natural History of the Romance Novel
by Pamela Regis
In her "Natural History of the Romance Novel", romance scholar Pamela Regis says quote, "The 'barrier' is the conflict in a romance novel; it is anything that keeps the union of heroine and hero from taking place."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Love and Limerence
by Dorothy Tennov
It's similar to what the psychologist Dorothy Tennov called "limerence." Limerence is like an adult crush, sexual by nature, intense to the point of obsession and anguish. Eros, or limerence, or romantic love, whatever we want to call it, is the emotional impetus of the "Twilight" saga.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats
It's the moment of obstructed desire John Keats described in his Ode on a Grecian Urn. "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Rules
by Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider
Like in the '90s, there was this infamous dating manual for women called "The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right". It included such advice as, "always end phone calls first, don't accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday." In other words, play hard to get.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sonnet 147
by William Shakespeare
Desire is desire for desire. Shakespeare says something similar in Sonnet 147. "My love is as a fever longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease" Shakespeare compares desire, that is love, eros, to a sickness that wants to perpetuate itself.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Sonnets
by William Shakespeare
Craving is like Shakespeare's description of lust in Sonnet 129. "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, a bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." Aww poor baby. Bill was really having a hard time of it in those sonnets.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sex and the Failed Absolute
by Slavoj Zizek
Lacan says something similar, I'll quote Zizek's summary because Lacan is illegible. If you don't care about philosophy, just ignore these names. Close your eyes and pretend this isn't happening. Quote, "The drive's goal-to reach its object is 'false,' it masks its 'true' aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement by repeatedly missing its object." This is the trap of yearning, of unrequited love and of nostalgia. You yearn for good old days because you lack them.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Importance of Being Ernest
by Oscar Wilde
"In The Importance of Being Ernest", Algy says- - The very essence of romance is uncertainty. - Uncertainty is also the very essence of gambling. It's why I wasted $2000 playing Egypt Quest.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Library
by Pseudo-Apollodorus
In an ancient Greek myth, Zeus and Hera are feuding about whether men or women enjoy sex more, so they summon the transsexual prophet Tiresias to resolve the issue and Tiresias says, "Of 10 parts a man enjoys one only, but a woman enjoys the full 10 parts." Which sex is more sexual? Controversial. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
2 Billionaires in Vegas
by Nicole Casey
That's why a common feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
3 Bosses' assistant
by Nicole Casey
That's why a common feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
That's why a common feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
by Sigmund Freud
Two gorgeous monster boys fight over Bella and they carry her around and they tell her how much they love her and want to protect her. All the other girls are jealous of my cool boyfriend. So by association, I must be cool too. If you're a "Twilight" reader and you identify with Bella, these are exciting fantasies to have because they gratify, what Doctor Father calls, "His Majesty the Ego, the hero of every day-dream and every story." All of this I think is pretty obvious. But where things get controversial, and to many people disturbing, is when you start introducing darker themes into your romantic wish fulfillment fantasies. [Book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Flame and the Flower
by Kathleen Woodiwiss
It's the reason bodice-rippers are called bodice-rippers. They were notorious for these "ravishment" scenes where bodices are, you know, ripped. [Book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Men in Love
by Nancy Friday
This resulted in a book which is very explicit and which challenges assumptions about feminine sexuality being sort of soft and gentle and mushy. [Book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Countdown to Zero Day
by Kim Zetter
In the Stuxnet book it was alleged that these programs are quite large and developed across multiple teams often of different capabilities, e.g. in that case an Israel team (of relatively lower sophistication) owned the delivery mechanism and US the (more sophisticated) payload.
— Andrej Karpathy
Le Labyrinthe des égarés
by Amin Maalouf
An excellent book on modern historical dynamics, covering the stories of the rise of Japan, the Soviet Union, China, & the U.S. I learned tons lot of stuff. It reads like a novel. COI Disclosure: Maalouf did not ask me to comment. pic.twitter.com/JqOmJ1HubD t's the kind of book I didn't know I had to read.
— Nassim Taleb
The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right, especially chapter 4 https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAudiobook?id=1688749502
— Elon Musk
Quand la Chine s'éveillera… le monde tremblera
by Alain Peyrefitte
A prophetic book I just found in my parent's library, titled (tr.) When China Wakes Up... the World Will Shiver. 53 years ago, a French diplomat thought dynamically in a world lacking in clarity of mind. I read it as a child. Today, play the same exercise. pic.twitter.com/X8eQD2WqfP
— Nassim Taleb
Quran
by Anonymous
I read a translation of the Quran when I was around 12. Helpful to understand.https://quran.com/en
— Elon Musk
The Second Law
by Stephen Wolfram
It's w/some excitement that found of (personalized) copy of this book in my mailbox. If I hadn't known @stephen_wolfram v. well personally for 21 years, I would have thought that he was a committee of >12 researchers. Furthermore: 1) His output is accelerating w/time; 2) The… pic.twitter.com/ul5L18FoV4
— Nassim Taleb
Objective Knowledge
by Karl Popper
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
Allegory of the Cave
by Plato
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
Know Yourself
by Awad Balyani
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
The Joyous Cosmology
by Alan Watts
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
The Book
by Alan Watts
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
The Way of Zen
by Alan Watts
“Baruch asks, if I were to write a protocol for myself, what would it be to become enlightened? The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper. The reason for that is because this journey could… pic.twitter.com/oIYEgHKIj0
— Naval Ravikant
Destined For War
by Graham Allison
Again, could not recommend this book more. Audio version is great. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAudiobook?id=1641134711
— Elon Musk
Chocolate Wars
by Deborah Cadbury
I'm reading like books like I just read Chocolate Wars, I read uh Milton Hershey's biography, I've read all these books and I'm like calling people who like wrote the books and I'm like yo what did you learn?
— MrBeast
Hershey
by Michael D'Antonio
I'm reading like books like I just read Chocolate Wars, I read uh Milton Hershey's biography, I've read all these books and I'm like calling people who like wrote the books and I'm like yo what did you learn?
— MrBeast
What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?
by Stephen Wolfram
OK, OK, we found for #RWRI 18 the best possible person for the Q&A, the one who literally wrote the book on ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/QpFuC6sJOr
— Nassim Taleb
Radical Inclusion
by David Moinina Sengeh
When I first met @dsengeh in 2011, I was blown away by his intellect, his ambition, and his sense of humor. His new book is a must-read for anyone who wants to help create a truly inclusive world. https://b-gat.es/40WpcKk
— Bill Gates
Extra Focus
by Jesse J. Anderson
A lot of the themes, ideas and even like direct quotes in this video around ADHD and ADD, a lot of those were taken from an author named Jesse J Anderson. He writes about uh he writes about those things and he does it in a very like relatable humorous way. So if any of this kind of stuck with you, or felt familiar to you, or any of these ideas uh discussed in the video you should definitely check him out!
— Casey Neistat
Hell's Angels
by Hunter S. Thompson
I'm a huge fan of Hunter Thompson like huge. I've read every one of his books.
— Casey Neistat
A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?!
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
This seems like it should work pic.twitter.com/J1ATScZ2Te
— Grimes
Bless This House
by Anita Bryant
Green was allegedly a controlling and abusive husband: "Only as a practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband. Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord." - Anita Bryant, Bless This House (1976)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
At Any Cost
by Bob Green
Anita's husband pleaded to supporters. - "How would you men feel if you opened a letter, and there was a photo of your wife's head superimposed on some other female nude body in the most lewd and shocking sexual act you can imagine?" - Bob Green, At Any Cost (1978)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee
by Nat Hentoff
Civil libertarian, Nat Hentoff wrote in his 1992 book "Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee", that the orange juice boycott reminded him of a little thing called McCarthyism.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Bless this food
by Anita Bryant
As an alphabet mafiosa, sometimes I just can't fit The Most Dangerous game into my busy lifestyle of destroying the family and recruiting children. Whenever a new box arrives, I get out my copy of "Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook".
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
Disrupting feminist meetings is a feminist tradition. Haven't you heard of the Lavender Menace? In 1969, Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique" and founder the National Organization for Women and Second Wave feminism in general, coined the phrase "Lavender Menace" to describe the threat she believed that lesbians posed to the Women's Movement. Friedan was worried that being associated with lesbians would make it easy to dismiss the movement as a bunch of mannish man-haters.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
SCUM Manifesto
by Valerie Solanas
Is it fair, say, to pretend that Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol, who advocated male extermination in her Society For Cutting Up Men manifesto, is representative of feminism as a whole? Many anti-feminists over the years have done exactly that. But it's not fair, is it?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
Let's not pretend that past movements have never made demands before everyone was ready. Because there there never has been and never will come a time when everyone is ready. I mean, Mary Wollstonecraft published the "Vindication of the Rights of Women" in 1792, and misogyny, in case you hadn't noticed, remains rampant.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Preventable
by Devi Sridhar
I’m excited to see @devisridhar‘s book in paperback. Her way of thinking about preparing for the next pandemic is one we should all pay attention to.
— Bill Gates
Weather for Dummies
by John Cox
Recently I was telling a friend about Weather for Dummies. This was not unusual—it’s actually one of the first books I recommend to anyone who wants to understand the weather and how it’s affected by climate change.
— Bill Gates
The Atmosphere
by Frederick K. Lutgens, Edward Tarbuck
Although it’s intended as a textbook for a college-level course, it’s quite accessible for anyone who’s motivated to learn about how the Earth’s climate works.
— Bill Gates
Physical Geology
by James S. Monroe, Reed Wicander, Richard Hazlett
Part of the joy of reading it is that you get into subjects you probably learned about in elementary school—like plate tectonics and volcanoes—but in way more depth, which makes them even more interesting.
— Bill Gates
Planet Earth
by John Renton
I appreciate this book for two reasons: because it’s fascinating on its own, and because it introduced me to John Renton as a teacher. After reading Planet Earth, I watched his series of video lectures, Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology, on The Great Courses.
— Bill Gates
The Song of the Cell
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
And I recently read Mukherjee’s newest book, The Song of the Cell, which is about how understanding cells is key to improving human health.
— Bill Gates
Physics for Scientists and Engineers
by Raymond A. Serway, John W. Jewett
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Physics for Scientists and Engineers Study Guide
by Gene Mosca, Todd Ruskell
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Portable TA
by Andrew Elby
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Calculus 8th Edition
by James Stewart
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Biology
by Neil Campbell, Jane Reece
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Chemistry
by Geoffery Davies
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Physics For Dummies
by Steve Holzner
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Chemical, Biochemical, and Engineering Thermodynamics
by Stanley I. Sandler
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Materials Science and Engineering
by William D. Callister Jr., David G. Rethwisch
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Fundamentals of Nuclear Reactor Physics
by Elmer E. Lewis
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Nuclear and Particle Physics
by Brian R. Martin
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Nuclear Physics (Milestones Series)
by Harry Henderson
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Introduction to Nuclear Engineering
by John R. Lamarsh, Anthony Baratta
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Advanced Engineering Mathematics
by Erwin Kreyszig
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Structure of Materials
by Marc De Graef, Michael E. McHenry
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
The Basics of Crystallography and Diffraction
by C. Hammond
An email from my younger self. In 2008 I wanted a bunch of science textbooks.
— Bill Gates
Toxic Exposure
by Chadi Nabhan
Monsanto, Roundup, and Nabhan's book "TOXIC EXPOSURE" with Nassim Nicholas... https://youtu.be/bAFxC5h6cEI via @YouTube
— Nassim Taleb
The Haywire Heart
by Christopher Case, John Mandrola, and Lennard Zinn
Have you seen Scale by West? Log scale, but humans are outliers. Exercise has a net effect of lowering the total beats, see @drjohnm's book.
— Nassim Taleb
Enchiridion
by Epictetus
Everyone always talks about stoicism "Marcus Aurelius he was so cool he was like an emperor but also philosopher" okay sure absolutely but don't sleep on Epictetus! Wait a minute sleep on? Sleep on Epictetus? The Enchiridion by Epictetus, last name base name. On the very first page he describes stoicism perfectly it's almost like they came up with it!
— PewDiePie
Look Great Naked
by Brad Schoenfeld
Dr. Brad Schoenfeld is a professor at Lehman College, CUNY, in the Bronx, New York. His research primarily focuses on muscle adaptations to strength training and muscle hypertrophy. He has published more than 300 articles about exercise science and sports nutrition, making him a leader in these fields. Dr. Schoenfeld began his career as a competitive bodybuilder and personal trainer, giving him a unique practical lens through which he communicates his academic expertise.
— Rhonda Patrick
Look Great Naked Diet
by Brad Schoenfeld
Dr. Brad Schoenfeld is a professor at Lehman College, CUNY, in the Bronx, New York. His research primarily focuses on muscle adaptations to strength training and muscle hypertrophy. He has published more than 300 articles about exercise science and sports nutrition, making him a leader in these fields. Dr. Schoenfeld began his career as a competitive bodybuilder and personal trainer, giving him a unique practical lens through which he communicates his academic expertise.
— Rhonda Patrick
Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy
by Brad Schoenfeld
Dr. Brad Schoenfeld is a professor at Lehman College, CUNY, in the Bronx, New York. His research primarily focuses on muscle adaptations to strength training and muscle hypertrophy. He has published more than 300 articles about exercise science and sports nutrition, making him a leader in these fields. Dr. Schoenfeld began his career as a competitive bodybuilder and personal trainer, giving him a unique practical lens through which he communicates his academic expertise.
— Rhonda Patrick
Sexual Homicide
by Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas
Beach reads
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Michael Jordan
by Roland Lazenby
Replace the Micheal jordan book with Zero To One and it’s a good list
— MrBeast
Salvation
by bell hooks
I have not heard of the Love Trilogy by bell hooks. I mean, I know that bell hooks has written books about love. I should really read those!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Communion
by bell hooks
I have not heard of the Love Trilogy by bell hooks. I mean, I know that bell hooks has written books about love. I should really read those!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man - The Christ
by Helgard Müller
I saw pictures of people at a Trump rally holding this book. So obviously I had to get a copy.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
How to Live
by Derek Sivers
I love this book and I've recommended it a number of times because it charts its way through the space of self-consistent philosophies for life, none of them strictly right or wrong. I love the idea that, as miraculously conscious entities that we are, we experience a kind of awareness and are empowered to adopt a philosophy and a system for life. This book is an enumeration of ways of being, view on life and its purpose and morality. For me the enumeration in this book is only a step 1, and has given me a lot of food for a more fundemantal theory. E.g. a slider that controls how much you care about people at a different radius away from you (you alone, family, community, all people alive, people alive in the future), how you measure the distance function (e.g. proximity/genetics), and over what time (e.g. right now or in the future and how far). Or how much you value hedonism vs. meaning. Or whether your sense of worth/meaning is more internally or externally driven. Etc. But the 27 answers are then the narrative that emerges out of a certain setting of these more fundamental variables in some interesting high-dimensional space of personal philosophy. 5/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Marked Children
by Thea Booysen
@Thea_Booysen I see your book is out, just snagged 10 :) pic.twitter.com/Roe4yaorLX
— MrBeast
Not Much of an Engineer
by Stanley Hooker
Rereading The Life of Greece by Durant. In recent months, read American Caesar, Masters of Doom, Not Much of an Engineer, Wages of Destruction and Storm of Steel. Not much book fiction lately. Video games seem to have better stories these days.
— Elon Musk
Stoic Warriors
by Nancy Sherman
Nancy Sherman who is an instructor here for many years, a wonderful writer and thinker about stoicism, and her book Stoic Warriors she talks about how we get the concept of stoicism wrong. There's a difference between uppercase stoicism and lowercase stoicism.
— Ryan Holiday
The Quickening
by Talulah Riley
Congratulations on your new book! pic.twitter.com/rSVM7zRBAh
— Elon Musk
Love Wins
by Rob Bell
Yeah have you read uh 'Love Wins' by Rob Bell, I think you would really like it. I read it a couple years ago and he's basically talking about the idea that like maybe hell is not a place that you go to in the afterlife and that's kind of more of a stoic argument.
— Ryan Holiday
Us
by Terrence Real
Excited to share that Terry Real's new book “Us” comes out this week. Order 👉 https://bit.ly/3sHr4s0 Stay tuned for a 2nd podcast with him soon. Check out my podcast with Terry from 2020 where we discuss “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”: https://bit.ly/3aAPtJO pic.twitter.com/XiAa45zVPp
— Peter Attia
American buffalo
by Steven Rinella
I just reread uh American Buffalo, which I told you is one of my favorites.
— Ryan Holiday
The Seventh Letter
by Mihai Spariosu
The posthumous novel by my late friend Mihai Spariosu, RIP. Saw the book's progression over the past 20 y. “Entertaining & gripping ...Plato, Socrates & the Academy/ Plato’s philosophy without abstraction, as the ideas are imbedded in the narrative.”https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737922819?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
— Nassim Taleb
Corto Maltese
by Hugo Pratt
OK, OK, my reply to the recommended list of summer reads: 1) A practical (short) manual of Latin grammar. 2) Corto Maltese (complete collection, preferably the Ballad of the Salty Sea in text form) 3) Safe Haven by Spitznagel [it can also be read in the winter & other seasons] https://t.co/eDMryP4n03
— Nassim Taleb
The Accidental Superpower
by Peter Zeihan
Actual quite excellent and solid recommend to anyone interested in a framework for thinking through geopolitics, with the caveats of the same points I raised in my earlier review of Disunited Nations. 5/5
— Andrej Karpathy
The Night of the Gun
by David Carr
There's a great book by David Carr called, A Night of the Gun or something like that, it's sort of an addiction memoir
— Ryan Holiday
Old School
by Tobias Wolff
In his book, Old School, Tobias Wolf’s semi-autobiographical character takes the time to type out quotes and passages from great books to feel great writing come through him. I do this almost every weekend in what I call a “commonplace book”— a collection of quotes, ideas, stories and facts that I want to keep for later.
— Ryan Holiday
First
by Evan Thomas
I just read this great book by Evan Thomas about uh Sandra Day O'Connor um who I knew like next to nothing about.
— Ryan Holiday
Novacene
by James Lovelock
[What's the meaning of life, C?] Have you, did you read "Novacene" yet, by James Lovelock? I haven't even finished this, so I'm a huge fraud yet again, but really early in the book, he says this amazing thing. I feel like everyone's so sad and cynical. [...] I just keep hearing people being like, "Fuck, what if we're alone? Oh no, ah!" And I'm like, "Okay, but like, wait, what if this is the beginning?" In "Novacene," he says, I'm, this is not gonna be a correct, 'cause I can't like memorize quotes, but he says says something like, what if our consciousness, right now, is the universe waking up. What if instead of discovering the universe, this is the universe. This is the evolution of the literal universe herself. We are not separate from the universe. This is the universe waking up. This is the universe seeing herself for the first time.
— Grimes
I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream
by Harlan Ellison
have you read the sci-fi short story, "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream"? [...] You should read that.
— Grimes
Show Your Work!
by Austin Kleon
.@austinkleon's books are some of my all-time favorites about writing/creativity. So it was pretty cool to have him at my book store The Painted Porch signing copies of his books including the 10-year anniversary edition of Steal Like An Artist. Grab a copy while we have them.
— Ryan Holiday
The Bitter Lesson
by Rich Sutton
One of the best compact pieces of insight into the nature of progress in AI.
— Andrej Karpathy
Finding Ultra
by Rich Roll
We’ve also had many of my favorite authors stop by and sign copies of their books, such as: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, and Finding Ultra by Rich Roll.
— Ryan Holiday
How to Fight Anti-Semitism
by Bari Weiss
How to Fight Semitism by Barry Weiss, the jews are one of the most persecuted attacked groups in all of human history.
— Ryan Holiday
Hold Me Tight
by Sue Johnson
Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson, I was recommended this by a therapist but basically she says that all couples are in a dance and one person reaches out and the other person pulls away and then this creates a toxic cycle in a relationship and so it's about recognizing this dance and stopping it before you end up in these long arguments and fights where no one gets what they want.
— Ryan Holiday
Origin
by Jennifer Raff
I spoke with anthropological geneticist @JenniferRaff about her new book "Origins" and the genetic history of America on today's Daily Stoic Podcast. Listen here: https://t.co/h6mTssAr5W pic.twitter.com/fSSnVKcydu
— Ryan Holiday
What Made Maddy Run
by Kate Fagan
I had Kate Fagan on the podcast who wrote this amazing book called uh what makes Maddie run about this uh collegiate uh runner who who ended up committing suicide.
— Ryan Holiday
The Useful Knots Book
by Sam Fury
Next book, this is the book that truly matters this is the book that changed my life ,okay, The Useful Knots book How to Tie the 25 Plus Most Practical Knots [...] I guess that's the thing with the book it tells you the philosophy of knots. You know any idiot can tie a knot but the goal is to tie a knot that is fast, strong and also easy to untie.
— PewDiePie
Lost & Found
by Kathryn Schulz
On today's @dailystoic podcast I talk to @kathrynschulz about the perpetual disconnect between reality and rhetoric, the importance of confronting darkness and dealing with grief, and her new book Lost & Found: A Memoir. Listen here: https://t.co/9Luo3yfiJj pic.twitter.com/QpfLyLIF3F
— Ryan Holiday
Empower
by Tareq Azim
On today's @dailystoic podcast I talk to NFL trainer and author Tareq Azim about his new book Empower, the distinction between ego and confidence, the power of meditating on death, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/rclqYMCAQG pic.twitter.com/fcfyaSAjPs
— Ryan Holiday
The Storm before the Calm
by George Friedman
Current reading list. I don’t think I could keep up if not for audible + Zone 2 stationary trainer. pic.twitter.com/dGlDKTg2R0
— Peter Attia
Woke Racism
by John McWhorter
Current reading list. I don’t think I could keep up if not for audible + Zone 2 stationary trainer. pic.twitter.com/dGlDKTg2R0
— Peter Attia
The Sleepwalkers
by Christopher Clark
This is a really good book, and has been on my mind watching the Ukraine situation develop
— Sam Altman
Boundary Boss
by Terri Cole
On today's @dailystoic podcast I talk to psychotherapist and author @terri_cole about her new book Boundary Boss, the power of saying no, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/FUvtawfNPl pic.twitter.com/GjtcqK1mqa
— Ryan Holiday
Out of Darkness
by Ashley Hope Pérez
The high school my sons will go to has been in the news for challenging a book called Out of Darkness, about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out, the school doesn’t even carry that book.
— Ryan Holiday
Lawn Boy
by Jonathan Evison
The high school my sons will go to has been in the news for challenging a book called Out of Darkness, about segregation in a Texas oil town in the 1930s. More comically, another parent angrily protested an example of gay sex from a book called Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison at one of our school board meetings in September…but as the school librarian later pointed out, the school doesn’t even carry that book.
— Ryan Holiday
Not My Idea
by Anastasia Higginbotham
They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles).
— Ryan Holiday
King and the Dragonflies
by Kacen Callender
They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles).
— Ryan Holiday
New Kid
by Jerry Craft
They’ve also helped donate thousands of copies of books like Not My Idea by Anastasia Higginbotham, King and the Dragon Flies by Kacen Callender, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and New Kid by Jerry Craft, among others, to give away to students in my local community (as a result, one small publisher told me they’re having to print extra copies of some banned titles).
— Ryan Holiday
This Is Your Time
by Ruby Bridges
Ruby Bridges wrote a children's book um and uh i'm reading the back of it and she's only 66 years old and you're uh 79 80 it's not it wasn't that long ago that this happened.
— Ryan Holiday
The stranger in the woods
by Michael Finkel
Did you read The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel?
— Ryan Holiday
Lincoln on the Verge
by Ted Widmer
I read two books before I read yours, that that sort of informed my reading. Maybe people have brought this up to you but I stupidly reread Cormac McCarthy's The Road at the beginning of the pandemic and then I also recently read a book which you might not have read [...] Called Lincoln on the Verge.
— Ryan Holiday
Corruptible
by Brian Klaas
On today's @dailystoic podcast I talk to professor @brianklaas about his new book Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, why we should minimize the psychological distance between leaders and the people they lead, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/SsPETAeqWO pic.twitter.com/V4TK6U9ZgF
— Ryan Holiday
The Mutiny on Board H.M.S. Bounty
by William Bligh
I was i was just reading a book about Captain Bligh and mutiny on the bounty and it was it was a really interesting book and it reminded me of this expression "character's fate".
— Ryan Holiday
Doing Good Better
by William MacAskill
I can recommend the book Doing Good Better by William MacAskill! It’s all about breaking down what constitutes effective altruism
— Simone Giertz
Four Thousand Weeks
by Oliver Burkeman
As I’ve said before, I carry this memento mori coin in my pocket to remind me: You can leave life at any minute. Let that determine what you do and say and think. (I also have a piece of a tombstone on my bathroom counter). Oliver Burkeman’s new book illustrates the same point well–we have roughly four thousand weeks on this planet. How will we spend them? How should we think about them? And don’t be deceived by medical advancements. As I said in my monuments talk, I got to know a guy who lived to be 112. That’s still ‘only’ like 5,800 weeks.
— Ryan Holiday
The Last Lion
by Willian Manchester
I’ve raved about some of my favorite epic biographies before: Robert Caro’s LBJ and William Manchester’s Churchill, among others. Well, add another to the list: Taylor Branch’s definitive series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to become an informed citizen in the present is not to watch the news, but to read history.
— Ryan Holiday
Victoria The Queen
by Julia Baird
I LOVED Julia Baird’s biography of Queen Victoria and have raved about it many times.
— Ryan Holiday
How to Be a Farmer
by M. D. Usher
On today's @dailystoic podcast I talk to professor M.D. Usher about about his new book How to Be a Farmer, what the Stoics mean by living in accordance with nature, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/zxn9YAzf2m pic.twitter.com/ae5i1DCOHC
— Ryan Holiday
This is Vegan Propaganda and Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You
by Ed Winters
to-read
— Andrej Karpathy
Empire of the Summer Moon
by S. C. Gwynne
Have you uh... S.C. Gwynne who wrote uh Empire of the Summer Moon one of the greatest uh nonfiction books I think of all time. I've had him on the podcast but did you read his book The Perfect Pass?
— Ryan Holiday
The Perfect Pass
by S. C. Gwynne
Have you uh... S.C. Gwynne who wrote uh Empire of the Summer Moon one of the greatest uh nonfiction books I think of all time. I've had him on the podcast but did you read his book The Perfect Pass?
— Ryan Holiday
A Guide to the Good Life
by William B. Irvine
Stoicism was a philosophical movement developed during the Hellenistic period and later practiced by a number of prominent historical figures, including Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. I was reminded again that this time period saw a flourishing of many competing schools of philosophy with their own ideas about the human condition and their own physical meeting locations to concentrate their followers; these have all but disappeared in the modern times. Human psychology has not changed much on the scale of 2,000 years, making a lot of these schools of thought quite relevant to this day. This work organizes this body of literature into a kind of classical antiquity self-help book. I realized that, without knowing it, I was already following many of the psychological tips and tricks that, according to the stoics, leads to tranquility and the absence of negative emotion. The book goes into much more detail, but among these are negative visualization to fight our psychological natural tendency of "hedonistic adaptation" (the practice of imagining a regression to your living condition along various dimensions to appreciate its presence), projective visualization, active self-denial (e.g. temporary practice of poverty to appreciate wealth), categorization of worries into those you do or do not have control over, which e.g. leads to fatalism w.r.t. the past and the present, meditation (not in the buddhist sense of clearing your mind, but quite opposite a deliberate, intense psychological practice of the above techniques), etc. A little bit too long, a little bit too bloated and repetitive, but good fun. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
How the Word Is Passed
by Clint Smith III
This was one of the absolute best books that i read this year. [...] I really love this book. This is how the word is passed - a reckoning with the history of slavery across America.
— Ryan Holiday
Indian Givers
by Jack Weatherford
This book 'Indian Givers' not the most politically correct title I will grant you that [...] I just seriously found this book utterly fascinating. It's very rare that I read a book and almost nothing in it had I heard before, did I know about and that's what I felt was happening on page after page of this book.
— Ryan Holiday
Martha
by Agnes De Mille
This was a biography of Martha Graham [...] it was just amazing. I'm fascinated with anyone who is truly great at what they did.
— Ryan Holiday
Victory Over Myself
by Floyd Patterson
I'm not a huge boxing fan but I read two books: Victory Over Myself, this is the autobiography of Floyd Patterson [...] I just love the title of this book 'Victory Over Myself' to me that's the essence of what stoicism is the victory over oneself. [...] Great book, I really love this.
— Ryan Holiday
The harder they fall
by Budd Schulberg
One of my favorite boxing books this book 'The Harder They Fall by Bud Schulberg. Now I've read this book at least two other times. I remembered this book as being a deeply influential life-changing book for me because it's the fictional memoir basically of a public relations man, a press agent as they used to call him, who's sort of in this corrupt broken world and he's struggling to get out of it but he likes the money, he likes the attention. He keeps telling himself he's going to get out of it, he just needs like one more job.
— Ryan Holiday
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
by Britannica Editors
Maybe read through the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'd recommend that. You can always skip subjects, so you read a few paragraphs, and if you know you're not interested, just jump to the next one.
— Elon Musk
Robert E. Lee
by Guelzo, Allen C.
On today’s @dailystoic podcast I talk to Historian Allen C. Guelzo about his new book Robert E. Lee: A Life, the importance of cherishing/protecting democratic principles, Lincoln’s complexity of depth and Lee’s complexity of confusion, and more. Listen: https://t.co/ZTPzugZzbY pic.twitter.com/BcV9ynZahM
— Ryan Holiday
Founders
by Jimmy Soni
I haven’t read the book, but Soni’s questions were incredibly insightful & his attention to detail was superlative
— Elon Musk
Walking Miracle
by Ryan Shazier
On today’s episode of the @dailystoic Podcast I talk to former NFL linebacker @RyanShazier about his new book Walking Miracle, how he managed to overcome incredible adversity after a career ending spinal cord injury, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/iKwomzUBfs pic.twitter.com/O22j2HAXBI
— Ryan Holiday
Twelve and a Half
by Gary Vaynerchuk
On today's @dailystoic Podcast I talk to entrepreneur @garyvee about his new book Twelve and a Half, how to get comfortable with vulnerability and emotional development, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/GO8xyd8W5e pic.twitter.com/ZLKX41THs7
— Ryan Holiday
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
This book made me think about what life with super intelligent robots might look like—and whether we’ll treat these kinds of machines as pieces of technology or as something more.
— Bill Gates
Hamnet
by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell has built her story on two facts we know to be true about “The Bard”: his son Hamnet died at the age of 11, and a couple years later, Shakespeare wrote a tragedy called Hamlet. I especially enjoyed reading about his wife, Anne, who is imagined here as an almost supernatural figure.
— Bill Gates
Speed & Scale
by John Doerr
I read a lot of great books this year—including John Doerr’s latest about climate change
— Bill Gates
Hurst The Heart
by Valentin Fuster
I made a mistake. I wrote that "nobody reads textbooks for pleasure". Well, I now do. 1) They look like old illuminated MS (unlike drab books), #Lindy. 2) Much, much more pleasureable to read physically than digitally (in spite of, or owing to, the weight: 2 vol = 24lbs). pic.twitter.com/qFHq71pRm7
— Nassim Taleb
Harrison's principles of internal medicine. - 18. ed.
by Anthony Fauci
I made a mistake. I wrote that "nobody reads textbooks for pleasure". Well, I now do. 1) They look like old illuminated MS (unlike drab books), #Lindy. 2) Much, much more pleasureable to read physically than digitally (in spite of, or owing to, the weight: 2 vol = 24lbs). pic.twitter.com/qFHq71pRm7
— Nassim Taleb
The Good Kings
by Kara Cooney
On today's @dailystoic Podcast, I talk to @KaraCooney about her new book The Good Kings, ancient strategies that were used to gain and maintain power, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/kiOSoiZs1X pic.twitter.com/MAnAZs1PPl
— Ryan Holiday
The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
I read Lawrence Freedman's book and it's called the Future of War. I don't know if you read it but he wrote he wrote that great book Strategy and he was sort of looking at how at every generation they thought things have fundamentally changed and are different and how how naive that assumption turns out to be every single time
— Ryan Holiday
The Messianic Character of American Education
by R. J. Rushdoony
It's sort of an extreme writer but there's the Rushdooney book from 1963 that I think it was his best book.
— Peter Thiel
Rationality
by Steven Pinker
On today's @dailystoic Podcast I talk to @sapinker about his new book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, the importance of pursuing effective altruism, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/9R1Ds3Ec2G pic.twitter.com/nQQqDgG8kM
— Ryan Holiday
The American Experiment
by David M. Rubenstein
On today's @dailystoic podcast, I talk to American billionaire David Rubenstein about his new book The American Experiment, his original concept of patriotic philanthropy and giving back after coming from a middle class family, and more. Listen here: https://t.co/jIbzbYO9Mm pic.twitter.com/hZm7nDP88K
— Ryan Holiday
Leaders
by Nixon, Richard M.
I read a book that Nixon wrote. It's this fascinating book called Leaders where Nixon wrote about all the leaders he had spent time with and I just love, yeah I love that story and it's [...] just called leaders, it was really interesting. He's actually a very intelligent interesting person despite the big stain on him in history.
— Ryan Holiday
Great contemporaries
by Winston S. Churchill
There's another similar book to the Nixon one that Churchill wrote called Great Contemporaries.
— Ryan Holiday
The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
paparazzi followed me 2 a shoot so I tried 2 think what I could do that would yield the most onion-ish possible headline and it worked haha pic.twitter.com/9w8pPwIFAq
— Grimes
The Affirmation of Life
by Friedrich Nietzsche
I actually wanted to make this video because I think you will really like Nietzsche as well. He's a german philosopher born in 1844 and before we dig too much into this I just want to preface by saying that you know I'm not an expert I'm just making this video to hopefully inspire you guys to dig into his readings as well because there's so many misconceptions about Nietzsche that sort of makes you wonder if anyone's ever actually read him? As someone who did read him and didn't understand anything but for me it was really fun to discover just how wrong I was. [...] What Nietzsche actually stood for was something really beautiful and that I think a lot of these teenagers could benefit from which is his life affirming philosophy.[...] Nietzsche wants you to recognize life and all its suffering and at the end of it say yes that was life, one more time please once more and that's life affirmation and that's to me it's the beauty of Nietzsche.
— PewDiePie
Here, Right Matters
by Alexander Vindman
On today’s episode of the @dailystoic podcast, I speak with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman about his book Here, Right Matters, the difference between physical and moral courage, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/ohxXrcv0jP pic.twitter.com/K5Cvu3YUUD
— Ryan Holiday
High Five
by Adam Rubin
On today's @dailystoic Podcast, I talk to author @Rubingo about his newest book High Five, the magic that is being able to express yourself creatively, following your destiny and inspiring others to do the same, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/uARaDl6Yns pic.twitter.com/zlqdEBLKPs
— Ryan Holiday
This Bright Future
by Bobby Hall
On today’s @dailystoic podcast, I talk to recording artist @Logic301 about his new memoir This Bright Future, dealing with pain and struggle in an expressive and creative way, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/4CFGrjzb8i pic.twitter.com/PBjjHJWsMc
— Ryan Holiday
The Gift of Fear
by Gavin De Becker
What am I missing by choosing to worry or be afraid? One of my favorite books is the Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker and he says when you worry ask yourself what am I choosing not to see right now?
— Ryan Holiday
Our Own Worst Enemy
by Tom Nichols
On today's @dailystoic podcast, I talk to @RadioFreeTom about his new book Our Own Worst Enemy, how to bridge the gap between detailed knowledge and the public conversation, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/ONIcfrbLsA pic.twitter.com/KfhxgeDCOT
— Ryan Holiday
The Practice of Groundedness
by Brad Stulberg
On today's @dailystoic podcast, I talk to author @BStulberg about his new book The Practice of Groundedness, practical steps to alleviate the anxiety that comes with the lifelong pursuit of greatness, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/YHobJGkJit pic.twitter.com/hal7vRneQ1
— Ryan Holiday
The theory of moral sentiments
by Adam Smith
Adam Smith who was the economist, he wrote the Wealth of Nations but he also wrote a book called the Theory of Moral Sentiments which is this sort of brilliant book about philosophy and kind of like why we do the right thing.
— Ryan Holiday
The Art of Living
by Epictetus
On today's @dailystoic podcast, I talk to @sharonlebell about her translation of Epictetus – The Art Of Living, the imbalance in the Stoic writings concerning gender roles, and more. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/ILEziisc9U pic.twitter.com/ly50IBBDpI
— Ryan Holiday
Plague
by Albert Camus
I read his other works the plague as well which is uh equally amazing
— PewDiePie
What do you say?
by William Stixrud
On today's @dailystoic podcast I talk to Dr. William Stixrud and @NedJohnson about their new book What Do You Say?, facing adversity and building resilience, and more. Listen to the interview: https://t.co/ibXjqMpapP pic.twitter.com/XSA3g1kNtg
— Ryan Holiday
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
by Richard Rorty
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
In Search Of Lost Time Vol 4
by Marcel Proust
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
by Anna Freud
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Brazen Femme
by Chloë Brushwood Rose, Anna Camilleri
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Speculum of the Other Woman
by Luce Irigaray
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Melanie Klein
by Robert D. Hinshelwood, Tomasz Fortuna
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Selected Melanie Klein
by Juliet Mitchell
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Psychedelic Experience
by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sex, Art and American Culture
by Camille Paglia
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Rhetoric
by Aristotle
"Pain at the good fortune of others" (- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 10) is how Aristotle defined envy. And I think it's interesting that whenever social media erupts in outrage over luxury music festivals, or Kim K's birthday party, or Jameela Jamil's... privileged pores? -no one ever uses the word "envy." It's like we're averting our eyes, avoiding confrontation with this dark aspect of our own psychology.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Histoire de la Révolution Française
by Adolphe Thiers
The slogan "Eat the rich" actually originates with the philosopher of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who supposedly said, - "When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!" (- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, anecdotal, in Histoire de la Révolution Française, Adolphe Thiers) And fair enough. That's a good source of protein. But take it from me kids, cannibalism is one of those tricky things. It's hard to do just once.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The World as Will and Representation
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Seen on Contrapoints nightstand in the video Envy
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
by Marquis de Sade
Seen on Contrapoints nightstand in the video Envy
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
"Us" actually reminds me of "A Christmas Carol", a story about the guilt of the rich if ever there was one.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy
She quotes a bigoted argument made by the wife-killing protagonist of Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata", who resents that women and Jews find a kind of paradoxical power in their own oppression.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Grimm's Fairy Tales
by Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm
In fact in the original Brother's Grimm version, the queen first tries killing Snow White with beauty accessories, poisoning a comb and lacing her to death with a corset. I wish I could die that way. What's really striking is the pure kamikaze malignity of it all.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)