So I’m going to limit myself to nonfiction books in this section. The majority of my knowledge comes from books. I know this is a bit unusual in a world of podcasts and twitter, but the stuff that really seeps in for me and that I retain ordinarily comes from reading plain old fashioned books. I am including only nonfiction although I have read and enjoyed a lot of fiction, I don’t see that as salient here. Also, I’m limiting it to books that gave me some brand new insight and that stayed with me meaningfully. I’m also limiting the list to the most important themes (in my view). The ones in bold are those that I consider particularly important. Aside from books, I get a large portion of my knowledge base from papers, so we can always address those in a future section, although that’s much more specific to the subject matter. And re Vitalik, the cohort of orbers keeps growing impressively so I think he will see the merit eventually, especially as it makes usage of the harberger tax which he has championed in the past. That said, I have instructed Eric as the chief orber to sell him on the idea when the time is right.

Crypto

• Digital Cash by Finn Brunton
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Narayanan
• Grokking Bitcoin by Kalle Rosenbaum
• Bitcoin Clarity by Kiara Bickers
• Applied Cryptography by Wiley
• The Blocksize War by Jonny Bier
• Crypto by Steven Levy

Finance / entrepreneurship

• Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
• Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright
• Adaptive Markets by Andrew Lo
• VC, an American History by Tom Nicholas
• The Mystery of Capital by De Soto
• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

Monetary history

• Free Banking in Britain by Larry White
• Payment Systems in the US by Benson Loftesness & Jones
• Bagehot by James Grant
• Competition and Currency by Larry White
• Good Money by George Selgin
• The Gold Standard (collection of essays) ed, Earle and Luther
• Money Free and Unfree by George Selgin
• The Theory of Monetary Institutions by Larry White
• When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson
• Monetary Regimes and Inflation by Bernholz
• Debt, the first 5000 Years by Graeber

Energy

• Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil
• Shorting the Grid by Meredith Angwin
• The Grid by Gretchen Bakke
• The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

History / biographical

• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
• Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell
• Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin
• Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
• Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp
• Always with Honor by Pyotr Wrangel

Philosophy / politics

• A World After Liberalism by Matthew Rose
• The World Turned Upside Down by Yang Jisheng
• Main Currents of Marxism by Kolakowski
• Bronze Age Mindset, BAP
• UR volume 1 by Curtis Yarvin
• Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima
• Harassment Architecture by Mike Ma
• The Theology of Liberalism by Eric Nelson
• Democracy – The God that Failed by Hoppe
• The Myth of the Rational Voter by Caplan
• L’Etranger by Camus
• Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Health, longevity, and nutrition

• Outlive by Peter Attia
• Lifespan by David Sinclair
• Deep Nutrition by Cate Shanahan
• The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz

Misc

• Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan
• Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
• The Information by Gleick
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Skunkworks by Rich and Janos
• Touching The Void by Joe Simpson