My reading list.

Gregory Zuckerman · 2019

"How Jim Simons built the world's most successful quant hedge fund from scratch."

Liaquat Ahmed · 2009

"The four central bankers who engineered the Great Depression — a cautionary masterpiece."

Bryan Burrough · 1989

"The definitive account of the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout — greed, ego, and billions."

David McWilliams · 2024

"A sweeping narrative of how money has shaped and been shaped by human civilization."

Eswar S. Prasad · 2021

"How the digital revolution is transforming currencies, central banking, and finance."

Jacob Goldstein · 2020

"Money is a made-up thing — and that's exactly what makes it so fascinating."

Edwin Lefevre · 1923

"The thinly veiled biography of Jesse Livermore, still essential reading after 100 years."

Richard Bookstaber · 2017

"Why financial crises defy our models and what agent-based economics can do instead."

John Kenneth Galbraith · 1954

"Galbraith's razor-sharp dissection of speculation, euphoria, and collapse."

Niall Ferguson · 2008

"Financial history as world history — credit, bonds, insurance, and the birth of global markets."

Niall Ferguson · 2010

"The life of Siegmund Warburg — the most influential banker few people have heard of."

Niall Ferguson · 2001

"Money and power from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first."

Niall Ferguson · 1998

"Volume I: the rise of history's most powerful banking dynasty, 1798–1848."

Niall Ferguson · 2000

"Volume II: the Rothschilds at the zenith of global financial power, 1849–1998."

Robert J. Shiller · 2000

"The book that warned of the dot-com bubble — and then the housing bubble."

Roger Lowenstein · 2000

"The spectacular rise and fall of Long-Term Capital Management — humbling in every sense."

John Kenneth Galbraith · 1958

"Private wealth amid public squalor — Galbraith's critique still stings."

John Kenneth Galbraith · 1990

"A sharp satirical novel from the economist — academia and the mutual fund world lampooned."

Benjamin Graham · 1949

"The bible of value investing. Buffett called it the best book about investing ever written."

Benjamin Graham & David Dodd · 1934

"The foundational text of fundamental analysis — dense, rigorous, indispensable."

George Soros · 1987

"Soros explains his theory of reflexivity — how markets shape the reality they try to predict."

Andrew Lo · 2017

"A Darwinian reframing of markets — evolution explains what rational models cannot."

Karl Polanyi · 1944

"The self-regulating market is a utopian fiction — and a dangerous one."

Michael Sandel · 2012

"When markets invade everything, we lose things we can't price — and don't notice until they're gone."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2001

"Luck masquerades as skill in markets — and in life. A humbling and irreverent read."

Adam LeBor · 2013

"The Bank for International Settlements — the world's most secretive financial institution."

Geoff White · 2023

"Inside the dark world of dirty money — how it moves, hides, and corrupts."

Matthew C. Klein · 2020

"Rising inequality at home fuels trade conflict abroad — a powerful structural argument."

Adam Tooze · 2018

"The 2008 financial crisis and a decade of political consequences across the globe."

J. Bradford DeLong · 2022

"The long twentieth century of unprecedented growth — and why it failed to deliver utopia."

Ken Miller · 2000

"An insider's view of the deals, the players, and the machinery of high finance."

Phil Champagne · 2014

"Satoshi Nakamoto's writings collected and contextualized — the founding documents of Bitcoin."

Jonathan Bier · 2021

"The civil war inside Bitcoin over block size — a lesson in governance without governments."

Roger Huang · 2022

"Crypto through the lens of Chinese political economy — an unconventional angle."

Charles F. Geddes · 1957

"Simon Patiño — the Bolivian tin magnate who became one of the wealthiest men in history."

Ian Johnson · 2023

"The citizens secretly documenting what the Party wants erased — courage in the face of erasure."

Michael Beckley · 2022

"The coming conflict with China — and why a declining power is the most dangerous of all."

Chris Miller · 2022

"Semiconductors are the oil of the 21st century — and the battle for them is already underway."

Josh Chin · 2022

"Inside China's quest to build the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus ever created."

Frank Dikötter · 2019

"Eight portraits of twentieth-century tyrants — the making of the cult of personality."

Julia Lovell · 2006

"China's long, frustrated pursuit of a Nobel Prize and what it reveals about national identity."

Frank Dikötter · 1992

"How racial thinking shaped Chinese nationalism and political thought from the 19th century."

Frank Dikötter · 2008

"Republican China was pluralist and modern — until the revolution changed everything."

Frank Dikötter · 2013

"The dark years 1945–57: how liberation became terror in the People's Republic."

Frank Dikötter · 2010

"Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million died — the deadliest man-made catastrophe in history."

Frank Dikötter · 2016

"The decade of chaos that broke China — and the memory it is still forbidden to examine."

Jon Halliday & Jung Chang · 2005

"The definitive, devastating biography — Mao as cold-blooded megalomaniac."

Julia Lovell · 2019

"How Maoism spread from China across five continents and still shapes insurgencies today."

Ezra F. Vogel · 2011

"The most authoritative account of the man who remade a nation of a billion people."

Yang Jisheng · 2012

"A Chinese journalist's secret account of the Great Famine — written at enormous personal risk."

Richard McGregor · 2010

"The secret world of China's Communist Party — how it really runs the country."

Henry Kissinger · 2011

"Kissinger's grand account of Chinese strategic culture and his own extraordinary role in it."

David Shambaugh · 2021

"From Mao to Xi — the evolving nature of leadership at the apex of Chinese power."

Desmond Shum · 2021

"An insider's account of wealth, power, and corruption at the highest levels of Chinese society."

Bruce J. Dickson · 2021

"Why the Party remains popular — the paradox of authoritarian support in China."

Rush Doshi · 2021

"China's grand strategy to displace American order — drawn from the Chinese documents themselves."

Owen Matthews · 2019

"Richard Sorge — Stalin's master spy in Tokyo, and perhaps the greatest spy who ever lived."

Joseph Torigian · 2022

"Elite politics and the CCP's paradox of power — loyalty, betrayal, and the will of the Party."

Henry Kissinger · 2014

"A meditation on the concept of world order from the master practitioner of realpolitik."

Anil Seth · 2021

"Consciousness is a controlled hallucination — Seth's theory of the self is both strange and convincing."

Roger Penrose · 1989

"Penrose argues consciousness cannot be purely computational — and builds a case from quantum mechanics."

Donald Hoffman · 2019

"We don't see reality as it is — we see what helped our ancestors survive."

Matthew Cobb · 2020

"The history of brain science is a history of metaphors — clocks, telegraph wires, computers."

Peter Godfrey-Smith · 2016

"The octopus as a window into the evolution of mind — deeply strange and deeply moving."

Erich Neumann · 1954

"The development of consciousness mapped through myth — a Jungian tour de force."

Aldous Huxley · 1954

"Four hours on mescaline opened Huxley's reducing valve — and gave us a new language for inner experience."

C.G. Jung · 1933

"Jung's most accessible collection — archetypes, the unconscious, and the spiritual problem of modernity."

Jordan B. Peterson · 1999

"Myth, meaning, and the architecture of belief — Peterson's most rigorous and ambitious work."

Terence McKenna · 1993

"The Amazon, DMT, and the edge of the explainable — McKenna at his most visionary."

James Fadiman Ph.D · 2011

"Safe, therapeutic, and sacred — the handbook for responsible psychedelic research."

Gabor Maté · 1999

"ADHD as a gift in the wrong environment — Maté reframes the condition with radical compassion."

Oprah Winfrey & Bruce D. Perry · 2021

"Trauma shapes development in ways we rarely acknowledge — and healing starts with that question."

Wallace J. Nichols · 2014

"Water, the brain, and the science of why being near it makes us calmer, happier, more creative."

Mircea Eliade · 1951

"The definitive comparative study of shamanic traditions across cultures and centuries."

Joseph Campbell · 1988

"Campbell in conversation with Bill Moyers — the hero's journey explained with warmth and wonder."

Ethan Mollick · 2024

"AI as collaborator, not tool — how to live and work with the coming intelligence."

Michael Bazzell · 2021

"The definitive manual for open-source intelligence gathering from one of the field's top practitioners."

Marshall McLuhan · 1964

"The medium is the message — and McLuhan's extensions of man still feel fifty years ahead."

Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan · 1988

"The tetrad applied to every technology: what does it enhance, obsolesce, retrieve, reverse?"

Marshall McLuhan · 1962

"The printing press made the modern individual — McLuhan traces how typography restructured the mind."

Marshall McLuhan · 1967

"McLuhan's most typographically playful work — meaning made through form itself."

Marshall McLuhan · 2016

"Essential essays 1952–1978 — the full range of McLuhan's thinking across two decades."

Harold A. Innis · 1951

"All media have temporal or spatial biases — Innis's framework is the bedrock of Canadian media theory."

Harold A. Innis · 1950

"How communication technologies shape the rise and fall of empires — a revolutionary argument."

Alexander John Watson · 2006

"The life and thought of Canada's greatest intellectual — shaped by the margins of empire."

Andrew Blum · 2012

"The internet has a physical body — Blum traveled the world to find it."

Matthew Ball · 2022

"What the metaverse actually is, why it matters, and who will build it — a rigorous forecast."

Daniel Susskind · 2020

"Technology is destroying more jobs than it creates — what do we do with our time and our meaning?"

Matt Harrison · 2021

"Patterns for idiomatic, efficient data manipulation in Python — the practitioner's pandas handbook."

Nancy Duarte · 2019

"Data doesn't persuade — stories do. The framework for making numbers move people."

Michael Friendly · 2021

"From William Playfair to Edward Tufte — the deep history of making data visible."

Giorgia Lupi · 2016

"Two designers mailed each other hand-drawn data postcards for a year — intimate and beautiful."

Danyel Fisher · 2018

"A practical guide to visual analytics — how to transform data into insight systematically."

Edward R. Tufte · 1983

"The canonical text on statistical graphics — data-ink ratio, chartjunk, and the excellence of clarity."

Pablos Holman · 2022

"Radical technology and the long view — what hacking the future actually looks like."

John Szarkowski · 1966

"How photographs mean — the five formal elements that define photographic seeing."

James Joyce · 1922

"One day in Dublin. The most ambitious novel ever written — and perhaps the most rewarding."

James Joyce · 1939

"Language itself dissolved into dream — the book that took seventeen years to write."

Franz Kafka · 1926

"K. arrives to take up a position that may not exist, at a castle he can never reach."

Franz Kafka · 1925

"Arrested for a crime never named. Kafka's nightmare of bureaucratic violence still chills."

Franz Kafka · 1927

"Kafka's unfinished, surprisingly comic New World — alienation with a sense of the absurd."

Franz Kafka · 1971

"The full range of Kafka's short work — including the metamorphosis, the penal colony, the burrow."

Benjamin Balint · 2018

"The legal battle over Kafka's manuscripts — Germany, Israel, and the ownership of memory."

Thomas Mann · 1901

"Three generations of a merchant family decline in Mann's first great novel — dense and magnificent."

Thomas Mann · 1924

"Seven years in a Swiss sanatorium — time, disease, and European civilization before the war."

Jorge Luis Borges · 1944

"Labyrinths, libraries, and infinite books — the universe as text, and text as universe."

Gabriel García Márquez · 1967

"Macondo is every place and no place — magical realism at its most total and humane."

Alejo Carpentier · 1949

"The Haitian revolution through the eyes of a slave — the origin of magical realism."

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis · 1881

"A Brazilian dead man narrates his life — mordant, modern, and astonishingly funny."

Albert Camus · 1947

"Plague in Oran as allegory for every collective catastrophe — duty, solidarity, and the absurd."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1973

"The Soviet camp system documented from the inside — literature as moral testimony."

Mikhail Zoshchenko · 1927

"Soviet life as dark comedy — the little man crushed by history, told with devastating irony."

Upton Sinclair · 1906

"Chicago's meatpacking yards exposed — Sinclair aimed for America's heart and hit its stomach."

Mo Yan · 2006

"A landlord reincarnates through five decades of Chinese history — savage, comic, Homeric."

Su Tong · 2009

"Su Tong's hypnotic prose and obsessive themes — desire, violence, and fate in Republican China."

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · 1958

"Everything must change so everything can stay the same — the most elegant political novel."

Antonio Di Benedetto · 1956

"A colonial bureaucrat waits indefinitely for a transfer — Kafka on the banks of the Paraná."

Antonio Di Benedetto · 1953

"Di Benedetto's early surrealist stories — strange, compressed, and quietly devastating."

Joseph Heller · 1961

"The war novel where the logic itself is the enemy — Heller's masterpiece of absurdist comedy."

Benjamín Labatut · 2020

"The dark discoveries at the frontier of science — fiction and fact inseparably fused."

Laila Lalami · 2024

"A mind-bending novel about surveillance, dreams, and what we owe one another."

Adelle Waldman · 2023

"A cast of big-box retail workers — sharp, empathetic, and surprisingly funny."

Karl Ove Knausgård · 2017

"The massive conclusion to one of the most radical literary projects of the 21st century."

Thomas Pynchon · 1990

"California, surveillance, and sixties dreams gone wrong — Pynchon's most accessible novel."

Don DeLillo · 1991

"A reclusive novelist, a hostage crisis, and mass culture — crowds versus individuals."

Lee Maracle · 1993

"A Coast Salish community at the edge of a disease — Maracle's haunting story of two worlds."

Thomas King · 2012

"A wry, devastating account of Native life in North America told with King's signature wit."

Lee Maracle · 2015

"Maracle on Indigenous sovereignty, memory, and the oral tradition — direct and powerful."

Northrop Frye · 1947

"Frye's monumental study of Blake — and the foundations of his theory of myth and literature."

John T. Irwin · 1994

"Poe, Borges, and the detective story — how the analytical tale encodes literary theory."

John Milton · 1667

"The fall of man in blank verse — Satan remains the most compelling character in English literature."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808

"The pact with Mephistopheles — Goethe's masterwork and the defining myth of Western ambition."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832

"The stranger, more allegorical conclusion — Helen of Troy, the Holy Roman Empire, redemption."

Chester Brown · 2003

"The Métis leader who challenged Canadian expansion — biography as graphic art."

Arthur Conan Doyle · 1887

"The complete canon — logic, London fog, and the most iconic detective in all of fiction."

Salman Rushdie · 2024

"Rushdie's latest — a novel of crisis, creativity, and the thin line between art and survival."

Manuel de Lecuona · 1968

"A deep dive into the parish history of Lasarte — a personal genealogical and historical inquiry."

Isaac Asimov · 1951

"Psychohistory, the fall of empire, and the preservation of knowledge — a civilizational epic."

Isaac Asimov · 1952

"The Mule — the unpredictable individual who throws off the equations of history."

Isaac Asimov · 1953

"The hidden Foundation at the other end of the galaxy — the guardians of the plan."

Isaac Asimov · 1982

"Thirty years later, Asimov returns to the universe he built — with a deeper secret to reveal."

Isaac Asimov · 1986

"The search for Earth's origin leads to Gaia — and the ultimate choice for humanity's future."

Isaac Asimov · 1988

"How psychohistory was born — Hari Seldon's first day on Trantor and all that followed."

Isaac Asimov · 1993

"Asimov's final novel — Seldon's twilight years and the sacrifice that saves the galaxy."

Isaac Asimov · 1950

"The Three Laws of Robotics — and the subtle, beautiful ways they break down."

Isaac Asimov · 1952

"A short Asimov novel — two boys discover aliens, and nobody is who they appear to be."

Cixin Liu · 2008

"First contact set against the Cultural Revolution — hard science fiction with epic sweep."

Cixin Liu · 2008

"The dark forest theory of civilization — the most chilling strategic logic in science fiction."

Cixin Liu · 2010

"The conclusion of the trilogy — civilization across billions of years, and the ultimate loneliness."

Neal Stephenson · 1992

"Coined 'metaverse' and 'avatar' — cyberpunk at its most kinetic and linguistically alive."

Fred Hoyle · 1957

"A sentient cloud approaches Earth — Hoyle's rigorous and unsettling first-contact novel."

Karel Čapek · 1936

"Discovered newts are exploited, educated, and armed — satire of colonialism and fascism."

Karel Čapek · 1921

"The play that gave us 'robot' — and the first great meditation on artificial life and labor."

Greg Egan · 1992

"The quantum Zeno effect, neural mods, and a First Contact that explains why the universe is silent."

Aldous Huxley · 1962

"Huxley's utopian answer to Brave New World — a vision of what we could be."

Aldous Huxley · 1952

"Mass hysteria, religious frenzy, and the execution of a priest — Huxley's strangest nonfiction."

Sue Prideaux · 2023

"Gauguin unvarnished — genius and monstrosity inseparably entangled."

Stephen Brown · 2020

"Three hundred years of the HBC — fur, land, and the making of North America."

James Suzman · 2021

"From foragers to knowledge workers — a deep history of labor, meaning, and time."

David Stasavage · 2020

"Democracy is older than ancient Greece — and its history is far stranger than we think."

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones · 2020

"Hitler's agents in America, the FBI, and the case that altered U.S. intelligence forever."

John Hemming · 1970

"The definitive account of how Pizarro destroyed the greatest empire in the Americas."

Kim MacQuarrie · 2007

"The fall of Tawantinsuyu — adventure, tragedy, and the vanishing of a civilization."

Miguel La Serna & Orin Starn · 2019

"Peru's Maoist insurgency — ideology, atrocity, and the communities caught between."

Jason Roberts · 2022

"The race between Linnaeus and Buffon to classify all life on Earth — obsession and genius."

Santiago Ramón y Cajal · 1897

"The father of modern neuroscience offers timeless wisdom on curiosity, patience, and discovery."

Larry W. Swanson · 2017

"Cajal's extraordinary anatomical drawings — art and science inseparable."

Sean McFate · 2019

"War has changed — victory no longer goes to the strongest army but to the most adaptive."

Mark Olshaker & Michael T. Osterholm · 2017

"The epidemiologists who warned us about pandemic — written three years before COVID."

R. Buckminster Fuller · 1981

"Fuller's grand synthesis of technology, energy, and human possibility — visionary to the end."

Harold A. Innis · 1930

"The staples thesis applied to beaver pelts — how geography and trade shaped Canadian identity."

Alix Christie · 2022

"Rocky Mountain exploration in 1800 — a vivid novel at the edge of the known world."

Daniel Kahneman · 2011

"System 1 and System 2 — the architecture of human judgment and its systematic failures."

Richard H. Thaler · 2008

"Choice architecture — how the way options are presented shapes the choices people make."

Richard H. Thaler · 2015

"Thaler's memoir of behavioral economics — the field that proved humans are not rational actors."

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz · 2017

"What Google search data reveals about humanity's actual desires, fears, and prejudices."

David Epstein · 2019

"Generalists triumph in a specialized world — the counterintuitive case against early specialization."

David Spiegelhalter · 2024

"How to navigate chance, risk, and ignorance with clarity — from the statistician's statistician."

Erica Thompson · 2022

"When mathematical models lead us astray — and how to think more honestly about prediction."

Bobby Duffy · 2018

"We're wrong about nearly everything — crime, immigration, sex — and that ignorance has consequences."

Richard Shotton · 2018

"25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy — practical, fast, and genuinely useful."

David Bodanis · 2020

"Decency as strategy — why fair leadership consistently outperforms ruthless ambition."

Chris Voss & Tahl Raz · 2016

"FBI hostage negotiation tactics applied to everyday life — tactical empathy changes everything."

Andrew Leigh · 2022

"A short, sharp tour through the economic ideas that actually explain how the world works."

James Carse · 1986

"Finite games are played to win. Infinite games are played to keep playing — a profound distinction."

Jonathan Watts · 2023

"The scientist who proposed Gaia — a life as unconventional as the hypothesis."

James Lovelock · 1979

"Earth as a self-regulating living system — the hypothesis that changed how we see the biosphere."

James Lovelock · 2006

"Lovelock's most urgent warning — Gaia is fighting back, and nuclear power is our only hope."

James Lovelock · 2019

"The age of cyborgs — and why AI might be Gaia's next great invention."

Chris van Tulleken · 2023

"The food that isn't food — how ultra-processed products are engineered to override our biology."

Steven Rinella · 2022

"Getting children outside and engaged with the natural world — urgent, practical, beautifully written."

Michael Pollan · 2024

"Pollan's meditation on plants, perception, and what other organisms can teach us."

Belisa Vranich & Brian Sabin · 2020

"Breathing mechanics for performance — the physiological case for breathing better."

Bill Gates · 2021

"The technologies and policies needed to reach net zero — Gates at his most systems-focused."

Ervin Laszlo Ph.D · 2016

"The new map of cosmos — Laszlo's unified account of consciousness, matter, and information."

Rudolf Steiner · 1894

"Steiner's epistemological foundation — how thinking itself can become a path to freedom."

Rudolf Steiner · 1919

"Spirit, rights, and economy — Steiner's structural vision for social renewal after the First World War."

Abraham Rotstein · 2003

"Rotstein's exploration of the intersection between economic theory and mythological thinking."

Richard Seddon · 2018

"The Persian prophet who sought to transform evil — and founded the most widespread religion of antiquity."

Christine Gruwez · 2014

"Manichaeism and anthroposophy — their unexpected encounter in the future of spiritual history."

Thomas Moore · 1989

"Marsilio Ficino's astrological psychology — the planets as inner realities, not outer determinism."

Thomas Moore · 1992

"Depth and meaning against the modern demand for happiness — soul, not self-help."

Ray Riegert & Thomas Moore · 2003

"The Jesus sutras of Tang Dynasty China — Christianity encountering Taoism and Buddhism."

Thomas Moore · 2021

"Writing as a soulful practice — Moore on the imagination, care, and the life of language."

Jordan B. Peterson · 2024

"Peterson's engagement with the Biblical narratives of struggle — deeper and more personal than his earlier work."

Douglas Murray · 2019

"Identity politics examined skeptically — Murray at his most polemical and provocative."

Douglas Murray · 2024

"The West's failure to defend its own values — Murray's urgent, uncomfortable argument."

Søren Kierkegaard · 1849

"Despair as the failure to become oneself — Kierkegaard's most demanding psychological work."

Joel Bakan · 2003

"The corporation as legal psychopath — a disturbing institutional analysis with sharp teeth."

Mircea Eliade · 1957

"Sacred space, sacred time, and the structure of religious experience across cultures."

Cal Newport · 2016

"The ability to focus without distraction is the superpower of our age — and it can be trained."

David Goggins · 2018

"Mind over everything — Goggins' brutally honest account of becoming the hardest man alive."

David Goggins · 2022

"The sequel — going further beyond the 40% rule when there's nothing left."

Ryan Holiday · 2016

"The stories we tell about ourselves are often the biggest obstacle in our path."

Matthew McConaughey · 2020

"Journals, photographs, and philosophy from 40 years of hard-won living — surprising and alive."

David Heinemeier Hansson & Jason Fried · 2018

"Calm is a competitive advantage — the case against overwork, hustle culture, and meeting culture."

Jocko Willink · 2020

"Field manual from a Navy SEAL commander — practical, direct, and rigorously tested."

Brad Stulberg · 2023

"Rugged flexibility — how to thrive in chaos while remaining grounded in your values."

Peter Drucker · 1967

"Effectiveness is a habit — Drucker's essential practices remain as sharp as ever."

Tim Ferriss (ed.) · 2016

"Seneca's letters on life — curated by Ferriss as a daily Stoic practice."

Tim Ferriss (ed.) · 2016

"More letters on time, friendship, and the art of dying well."

Tim Ferriss (ed.) · 2016

"The final volume — on virtue, grief, and what philosophy demands of us."

John McPhee · 2017

"On the writing process from a master — structure, research, and the hard business of revision."

Barbara Minto · 1987

"Logic in writing and thinking — the McKinsey approach to structuring any argument."

Lane Greene · 2021

"Clarity, precision, and wit — the principles behind The Economist's distinctive voice."

Steven Pressfield · 2002

"Resistance is the enemy of every creative act — and here's how to fight it."

Nir Eyal · 2019

"Control your attention and choose your life — Eyal on the internal triggers we rarely examine."