Disclosure: huge lifelong Michael Lewis fan -- Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short -- some of my favorite books while studying econ and finance in college! With that out of the way, Going Infinite made me question it all...Gell-Amnesia dissolving another hero (Lewis, not SBF to be clear). I'd leave it at that (and the 2/10 rating), but for posterity including below from an email I wrote to a friend who was getting ready to interview Michael Lewis in front of a live audience last week:

"Candidly, pretty bizarre/sad to see how spellbound Lewis remains by Sam. Lewis had full access and, even he, got taken for a ride. Owning that and writing a story about one of the biggest financial frauds in history, a story of total deception (fooling even the biographer)...wow, now that is such a more compelling, courageous, and true journalistic story. But in the book, Lewis remains either naively wowed or unwilling to acknowledge that he's been duped.  Just like with Madoff or Enron, the deception and greed (fwiw greed also by investors/partners), not the intellect, is the story.

Instead, Lewis implies Sam's gigabrain altruistic pursuits could have all worked out if only crypto hadn't collapsed, if only there hadn't been a bank run. FTX was an exchange not a bank -- how does a financial journalist keep calling it a bank run in the book and subsequent interviews? There is never a situation where an exchange should not have your money; an exchange is not supposed to be doing anything else with your money. Full stop. Not a bank. More important, focusing on the crypto collapse and calling the FTX downfall a bank run absolves Sam, instead blaming an exogenous shock and ensuing panic by customers...Do we say Madoff's strategy would have all worked out -- just too bad he got caught in that 2008/Lehman collapse and ensuing redemptions? Like, no Lewis, we definitely don't say that.

The confusing thing to me is that Lewis could have pretty easily saved the book and saved face since FTX collapsed before the book's release. The fraud was quickly apparent, even to non-crypto natives...and if Lewis had any doubts he could have waited another few months for these last few weeks of trial now, basically all of which has made Going Infinite look embarrassingly out of touch, like Lewis was yet another useful pawn in Sam's messy media puff strategy. "

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The sequel to Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion offers some resolve to the prior book but leaves some possiiblity of what's next with the rest of the Hyperion Cantos series. For me it was a tale of two stories...one that continues to explore the mysteries of Hyperion and another (which I found more compelling) that explores a war between humans, a post-human faction called the Ousters, and an AI assemblage called the TechnoCore. Not sure I'll continue the rest of the Cantos series but did enjoy this one more than the first book.

Honestly I only read this because it birthed the namesake for the decentralized social protocol, Farcaster but really enjoyed! Set in a far-future intergalactic society, Hyperion follows 7 characters as they embark on a pilgrimage to the edge world of...Hyperion, where mysterious forces (lame description but I don't want to spoil) are screwing with time and causing massive destruction. I'm still learning to love far-future stuff so this was a little tougher for me to get into, but was bought in by about 1/3 into the story. One unexpected perk of Hyperion is that Simmons (or rather one of his characters, a Keats-obsessed poet named Martin Silenus) is hilarious -- this is the first book in a while where I've laughed out loud at least once in each sitting. Be warned, Hyperion really does not resolve...so somewhere between annoyed and excited, I'm planning on book 2, The Fall of Hyperion, next! 

Similar camp to Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary in terms of near-future space-faring science fiction. Fun, fast, and just technical enough to make you think you understand orbital mechanics :) highly recommend if at all interested in space exploration, off-world economies, and Oceans Eleven-esque (team mission) stories.

Contemporary science fiction/fantasy shorts from Ken Liu (same author who translated Three Body Problem)! As much as I've loved chipping away at the SF canon, it was super fun to dive into a collection of more modern shorts. Across 15+ stories, Liu forces often-uncomfortable reflections about AI, digital immortality, legacy, time travel, family, love, identity, and more. I write uncomfortable in the most complimentary sense, since Liu never comes off as sensationalist, but still manages to poke at our humanity just enough to prompt awareness of (for me) new questions. Shout out to Neel for throwing this into the book club mix.

I came to The Variable Man after rewatching Minority Report, finding out that the film was based on Philip K. Dick's short story of the same name (10/10 read here), and wanting to see if more of his writing would hit for me. Success! Published in 1954, The Variable Man is more fast-paced novella than short story, exploring predictive determinism vs. the free will, specifically in a future society where everyone has learned to rely an all knowing forecast machine.

Beautiful, true, and helpful observations on the creative process from legendary producer / music industry entrepreneur Rick Rubin. Feels a bit like the Tao (Laozi) for artists, almost better consumed in small meditations in whatever order needed than as a linear whole. Effortlessly everything that Adam Grant's widely-praised "Originals" (2/10) tries to be.

Comprehensive history of the semiconductor industry and the best single resource I've seen for relevant technological, economic, and geopolitical context on the chip industry today. If you've read Gertner's "The Idea Factory" about Bell Labs, the first half of "Chip War" (covering the invention of the transistor, integrated circuit, and microprocessor) will be be review, but Miller goes way deeper on the geopolitical gamesmanship of chip manufacturing and how the current very complex / interdependent / combustible supply chain for chips came to be.

Good primer on the decline of physical money, shortfalls of the traditional monetary system/current global monetary order, and the pros/cons of impending CBDCs. But outside of the section on CBDCs, there's not too much new here that you can't find in a fraction of the time elsewhere. The book really only covers BTC and ETH in its survey of digital currencies, hardly touching on DeFi and leaving out more imaginative experiments of digitally native goods, trustless collaboration/exchange, and more generally how we think about "value" in a globally connected world.

Whether you grew up playing id Software games like Doom and Quake or not, this was a fascinating story about id John Carmack and John Romero and how they shaped the gaming industry we know today. I'd go so far as to say, especially if you didn't grow up playing their games (I grew up on N64 -- goldeneye, mario 64, for instance..), this is an essential read for context on the essence of what makes great games, the power of community-driven game development (eg encouraging modding) and accessible software (eg "shareware" as precursor to free-to-play), and the creativity/innovation/scale that can be unlocked when the garden isn't so walled. H/T to Dan Romero (no relation to me or John Romero to my knoweldge) for recommending! 

Surprise: trees are (still) super cool! Wohlleben explores the science behind the different tree phenomena that he began seeing as a German forest ranger. Wild and humbling to get a better understanding of how trees can self-heal, communicate with each other (eg: release chemical signals via roots/air to alert of bug attacks), support each other (eg: transferring nutrients to lesser tree via roots and fungi networks), synchronize their growth patterns to support multi-generational forests, and more...Adding this to the progenic (not a word, should be a word) literary canon. Also made me want to go back and re-read Stolzenburg's "Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators"...so adding that to the list!  H/T to my future father-in-law Richard for the recommendation.

Klara & the Sun paints a melancholic future where the most privileged children are neurologically augmented and live accompanied by AFs (artificial friends), intelligent robots that blur the lines of caretaker, tutor, and companion. Nothing about that setup is particularly original, but something about Ishiguro's wistful telling of the story, the language used, and the details or moments that were noticed or left out -- all of these create a world that seems to have accidentally happened, a dystopia that emerged not from cataclysm but from lack of noticing. We're left meditating on our own humanity, our longing for connection, our motivations, our blindspots, and our relationship with hope or the unknowable. Thanks to Rishabh for recommending this to our newly-formed Discord bookclub!

Outdated science and wrong about enough (eg: whole chapter on why batteries/EVs/fusion will never work) that I ditched ~30% through.

Yes 6/10, sns. Great prose. Compelling stories. Glad people are excited to read about scientists and mathematicians -- cool to humanize past luminaries. But imho overhyped largely because people think (or want to think) it's all true, and the author welcomes this ambiguity. On the back of the book, the first quote from The Guardian calling this "Ingenious, intricate...a dystopian nonfiction novel", when this is very much historical fiction. No shade categorically on historical fiction, but this should be clear. Instead, Labatut begins with facts only, taking the reader's trusting hand, and then slowly, quietly, making up more and more of the important details  as the book progresses. Maybe this shouldn't bring the book down to a 6, but it feels like a symptom of a broader trend where we're loose truth in service of emotional resonance or cheap entertainment.

Never in my life did I think I'd be reading a book about golf, let alone putting. I grew up taking pride that we didn't live in the "country club" part of town; we didn't didn't belong to the club - my sister was a server at the club; I played disc golf, not ball golf....a longer post for a later date, but as it turns out, golf is a wonderfully beautiful craft of a sport that I've had an absolute blast learning over the past year. Like Inner Game of Tennis, Putting Out of Your Mind is less about the sport or the technique, and more about the mind and body finding their effortless flow through process and practice. For me the most helpful discovery coming out of this book was the importance of developing "a practice", as one would with yoga, meditation, morning sun salutations, whatever it may be...some process that lets go of micromanaging the outcome, and focuses instead on what can be controlled: the practice. In that way, golf becomes this physical exercise in mindfulness and discipline. Can I create a process that I trust will work over time, create better outcomes over time, without beating myself over where I might end up in the near-term? I can be a golfer (cough: live a life) where I beat myself up over each missed put. OR, whether I missed or made the put, I can ask, "how was my process?".

My bedside table companion for the last few weeks. A little juvenile, definitely dated, but quick enough to be worth reading. Like Amusing Ourselves to Death (written in 1984 and whose critiques of TV's role in the sullying of discourse match almost exactly the current concerns about social media), I, Robot is a humble reminder of both how much and little progress we've made w.r.t our relationship with technology. Each story plays with a different conflict arising from Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: "First Law - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law". Rather than recommending the full book, I'd start with Robbie (first story), The Evitable Conflict (last story), and The Last Question (not in I, Robot but, in Asimov's own opinion, his best short story ever).

Ten short stories written by Gibson in the '70s and '80s and first published as a collection 1986, this was an awesome flurry of cyberpunk thrillers. For me, the vignette format is really special for Gibson since allows him to go ultra-detailed and dense but only for that moment. For that reason, highly recommend this or Pattern Recognition (which, although a full novel, has the readability of the shorts) as better on-ramps to Gibson than Neuromancer.

I've heard Gibson in interviews mention a double-bind he often finds himself in when writing -- that he's tasked with making big future technology really exciting and magical to the reader, and yet at the same time depicting that same technology as banal for its users. Pattern Recognition is a rare chance to see Gibson use that frame to explore contemporary reality of 2002 (published in 2003). His choice of "banal" yet magical technology? Memes. Specifically, one meme that in the story cuts through the noise of a post-9/11, post-trust society and captures the hearts and minds of pseudonymous internet users across the globe. The book will make you think more about what makes "cool" cool, or really what makes anything take on any type of consensus cultural meaning at all, usually without us being aware of when the shift happens or from where its headwaters stem. From the POV of Gibson's protagonist, "The future is there...looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now." Thanks to my friend Noah for recommending.

The history of Bell Labs is the history of the transistor, radar, information theory, computers, satellites, silicon, photovoltaics, cellular networks, the "picture phone" and more....But it's also the story of curious nerds who were into science fiction, early electronic music, and asking "what if it weren't that way?". These guys were weird, non-stop tinkerers who were less concerned with riches than they were about the adventure of building. Some takeaways: focus less on looking for good ideas, more on looking for good problems; ideas that make an innovation often come at us out of order and at different times; the best innovations come when not worried about rendering the past obsolete (eg: transistor cannibalized Bell's vacuum tubes but they did it anyways); fundamentally tougher to keep top researchers in one collaborative place now than in Bell glory days; even the most optimistic of the Bell engineers still underestimated progress -- they never thought we'd get 1B transistors on a single chip of silicon, get glass so clear you shine light through it for hundreds of miles. Recommend for anyone who loved How the Internet Happened (McCullough, 2018) or Master Switch (Wu, 2011). Thanks to my friend Nathaniel for the recommendation.

Fascinating first chapter ("Ancient Metaverses") that traces humanity's pattern of worldbuilding -- from the 10,000 year old ruins of Göbekli Tepe, to the pyramids of Egypt, to the murals of domed cathedrals. Narula thoughtfully argues that all are examples of humans using the tools of their time to bridge (and often pass value between) our known physical world and our active "virtual world". Far out stuff, and I was so excited to keep going! Unfortunately what follows are 200 pages of hand wavey, weirdly non-specific declarations about what the metaverse is or should be. Beneath the grandiose language and self-referential arguments ("in chapter 4 I taught you that...next I will show you..."), though, there just doesn't seem to be much new substance here. Ironically, the examples that substantiate the arguments are often interesting....but what's being argued (after the sweet opening section!) for me really wasn't. Instead, I'd start with Matthew Ball's Metaverse Primer series or recent book.

Disclosure: I will buy whatever PioneerWorks puts out - delighted to support one of the coolest centers for culture/arts/sciences around. Also fun to support the editors & authors, all of whom are inspiring a much-needed dialogue about how we can shape the future of the internet to be less extractive and healthier for all of us. The collection itself is a mixed bag for me; the most constructive and helpful pieces have a thoughtful, sober, but still deeply optimistic take on how to avoid downfalls of crypto-capitalist incentives. These are most of the works, but I specifically appreciated the realism, proactivism, curiosity, and agency (ie: call to individual action) from Martinez, McFedries, and Rennekamp. The few less helpful pieces, imho, are those that frame web3 as a cooperative panacea, one that should avoid capitalism at all costs because "money ruins everything". I was a touring artist for years...I get it...we'd all love for artists to make more money, for us to be less slave to the desk job...for big corporations to be less extractive. I hope and want crypto to help figure that out. Capitalism is not perfect (and often actively terrible!), so while the inspiration for these takes is I think well-worth listening to closely, I'd ask them to go beyond unspecific language about money-bad, to move past resigned too-cool-for-school nihilism about current world-fucked. As Martinez writes, "The future will be built with or without our input, so as cringe as the "metaverse" or Bored Ape NFTs may be, I propose we take on the difficult task of looking past those (perhaps) misuses of the technology, towards greener networked pastures, and build the systems we want to see in the virtualized world" (Martinez - 25). 🤝

Some favorite passages here.

On page 1 we find out that the Moon has exploded. Incredible premise and wild adventure of a book! Part 1 & 2 were a total thrill, but sadly Part 3 lost steam, almost feeling like someone else had written it. Honestly a bit perplexing and did not finish, so most I can give is a 6. Wishing he had split it into two books with Pt 1&2 in this book and Pt 3 as a new, more fully developed effort. Still going to keep chipping away at Neal's catalogue though! 

Yeah, I know, not an original find...one of those books on everyone's must-read lists. But worth reading, especially if looking for something light, entertaining, and still inspiring. Feynman tells his life story through a series of vignettes, each of which showcase his general scrappiness, joie de vivre, and genius but also his humanity, his awkwardness, and his refusal to believe himself in a class any better than others. Most of the themes center around the insight that knowing the name of something isn't the same as knowing about something. Feynman approaches every problem as if he were "a martian", curiously asking why things are the way they are, and how the cause-effect relationships in the world around us are linked. He's fearless in this pursuit and, especially when stuck, seeks out unconventional ways of approaching problems...other ways in to finding the truth.  "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists”.

A comprehensive survey of all things metaverse. If you're actively in the crypto/gaming/media/web3 world, this feels like a must read. If you're purely curious, but professionally spending your time elsewhere, I'd probably start with Tyler Cowen's excellent interview with Ball about the book (55 min), then peruse Ball's various articles from 2021 (few hours); then if you're still wanting more, dive into the book. In addition to being the most helpful topographical map (ie vast + depth) of the metaverse I've encountered, one of the best things about Ball's take in the book, imho, is that he doesn't actually force crypto on the reader. BUT, he does i) tell the story of how most of the big tech incumbents got the emergent internet really wrong in the 90s, ii) detail the extractive and limiting patterns to social software/internet of the current walled-garden approach, iii) specifically point out the importance of interoperability, composability, immutability....wait a minute ;) Still, he's sober enough to also call out the real challenges of building an open or decentralized metaverse (namely infrastructure, maintenance, scalability costs and execution risks). Personally I'm optimistic that i) hardware, software, and compute cost will all trend low enough, quickly enough, to make the open metaverse possible, and ii) that the healthier approach is allowing readers to come to their own conclusion about crypto being better-suited financial rails to power that future, and iii) that if we play for that vision, we'll have those rails ready when all of the above collide. And yes, I went to the Barnes n Noble LA reading/signing for my copy (pictured). Super fun - thanks Matt! 

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Writing in the wake of Orwell's "1984" prophecy *not* coming to fruition, Postman (1985) suggests that it might be Huxley who more accurately predicted the downfall society. That is, rather than man being oppressed by an external Big Brother (Orwellian view), man would instead ruin himself by drowning truth in a sea of irrelevance, by willfully giving up his ability to think (Huxleyan view). Building off McLuhan's "media is the message" framework, Postman specifically argues that media like telegraph, TV, and the business models they enable have turned public discourse into meaningless nonsense. He argues that by divorcing information from action, by embracing incoherence, and and by discouraging long-form nuanced argument...a medium built for entertainment is now shaping our information to BE entertainment. Way ahead of its time - fantastic read!

‍Click here for full notes.

Dreamy, vivid(!) stuff. Murakami has been coming at me from all angles the last couple years, so finally decided to dive in. I realized while reading that I'm not sure I've actually ever *read* any magical realism -- in films yes, but the experience of reading it was new for me and a fun reminder of how beautiful the gap between the page and the mind's eye can be. What I most loved was how normal it became for other dimensions, clairvoyants, non-linear experience - things like that - to be woven into the utterly mundane...to be skeptical of what seems real and allowing of what we'd usually dismiss. Read this with an openness to new structure, new form, new feeling, and allow it to bring up for you what it does. That's vague, I know. Less complete but maybe more helpful, I'd recommend this book if you enjoy long solitary walks, meditating, psychedelics, Steve Reich, David Lynch...really any of those more but you get the idea. Thanks to my love Rachel for recommending this originally, then to my dear friend Oliver for bumping back to top of mind during a late-night Glendale hang.

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Moɿɘ oʇ ɒ viƨυɒl ɘxqɘɿiɘnɔɘ tʜɒn ɒ dooʞ(!), but that's part of what's so effective about McLuhan (author) & Fiores' (graphic artist) 1967 collaboration. For most readers in 2022, the basic themes of "media is the message" will seem familiar since they've so successfully established themselves within both the academic and public discourse on media, but the ideas hit differently when text is mixed with collage, interspersed with image crops, or effected in presentation by size, mirrors, slants, or in-tensional re-spellings of words. Media is technology, and as technology changes (from spoken word, to cave paintings, to hand-written, to typed, to mailed, to emailed, to posted...) all of these, McLuhan argues, are under-considered in their impact on WHAT is being communicated. The medium shapes how the conversation is had, how the boundaries of "global village" are defined, and how members of the public perceive (via information) the world around them.

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Fascinating survey of the dynamics of innovation, specifically across what Perez coins as the 5 "surges" in technology (ie: tech revolutions): 1) Industrial Revolution (1771 - mechanized cotton, wrought iron); 2) Age of Steam & Railways (1829 - steam engine, coal mining, railways); 3) Age of Steal & Heavy Engineering (1875 - steel ships, heavy chemistry, canned foods); 4) Age of Oil, Autos, and Mass Production (1908 - synthetics, appliances, mass producing the same thing); 5) Age of Information & Telecom (1971 - cheap microprocessors, computers, etc...). Within each she examines the relationship between Financial Capital (behavior of existing money, making it grow) and Production Capital (new wealth creation by performing of services or creation of goods). She breaks up EACH surge in to a i) deployment period and ii) installation period, most often separated by some kind of bubble bursting, what she calls a "turning point". Most interesting to me was the similar patterns we see of how Financial Capital and Production Capital help each other, then outpace one another, then reset, then adapt to regulation, then move to their golden age. The constant question throughout is, "where are we now?". Incredibly worth reading, although I'd recommend starting with Part III (the summary) first, since much of the ideas are synthesized there. Thanks to Tushar Jain from Multicoin for the recommendation.

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Re-read this over the weekend after being unable to recall the ending at a wedding last month. Yes, I'll talk SF with you at a wedding. Find me! Not mind-blowing but worth keeping on the shelf for my nieces and nephews in a few years :) Thanks to Nicky, coincidentally one of only two friends I play VR with, for giving me a hard enough time ("Nolan, it's a classic! Come on!") to re-read it.

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I picked this up after having read Dalio's "The Changing World Order" since he cites "Lessons of History" as having shaped his thinking on history, cycles, and unchanging patterns of human nature. "Lessons of History" is the Durants' self-reflection (published in 1968) on the their much more complete 11 volume "The Story of Civilization" (volumes 1-10 of which were published prior to 1968). The Durants ambitiously limit themselves to 100 pages to pull out the most essential aspects of human behavior, biology, religion, morality, order, freedom, economics, evolution, decay....Why do wars happen? Why do nations rise and fall? Why is freedom the child of order and the mother of chaos? Are we actually evolving our aims, or just evolving our tools for aiming at the same things? Directionally the observations have held up remarkably well, not entirely surprising given the Durants based their claims on 5000 years of human history and it's been...less than 60 years since its writing!

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Dalio's jumping off point is the simple observation that "no system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail". For any reader today, the hook then is to at least consider when & how (not if) the current global power structures will shift. The extent that the reader would prefer the U.S. to remain the global super power (I for one would prefer this!), we're pushed to ask how does the U.S. avoid the downfall that history seemingly would be teeing up. This is *by far* the most effective tying together of big ideas that effect the changing world order -- the cycles of money, credit, economic activity...the cycles of internal order/disorder...and the cycles of external order/disorder. Dalio tracks these primarily via the rise and fall of the Dutch (1600s-1800s), the British (1700s -1900s), the US (1800s - present), and spotlights China's continued rise and relations with the U.S. The book is dense, but worth it, so much so that it's already on tap for a re-read in a few months.

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For fear of spoiling, I won't share specific reflections or plot lines here, but 100% recommend this book for anyone who loves fast-paced hard SF. To give a sense, I started Project Hail Mary on a flight from LA -> NYC -> VT...managed to sneak a chapter or two in while at a wedding weekend...then finished on the return flight to LA. Fun and rare to be sucked in like that! Sampling of the topics explored (these feel silly to list so casually here but I promise, Weir fleshes them out in interesting ways): human coordination at scale, the origin of life, cultural relativism, an unusual apocalyptic threat, the science of amnesia/energy/light/sound/perception, and countless of really cool uses of molecular biology/mechanical engineering/astrophysics scrappiness to get out of tight spots! Favorite quote: "Math is not thinking. Math is procedure. Memory is not thinking. Memory is storage. Thinking is thinking. Problem, solution."

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I read this after being blown away by Martin Gurri’s Q&A with Antonio García Martínez. The book is the more fully fleshed out version of what you can find in podcasts/youtube interviews with Gurri (like this 10 min summary by the author) so I’d start there and see if it resonates. For me it did. He argues that 2001 marked the beginning of the Fifth Wave of our relationship with information, specifically a tidal wave of information availibility where public dissatisfaction with elites is more easily ignited and spread, where elites make more promises and keep fewer of them. He tracks how this empowered the public, especially as social media came into the fore ~2010/11 (Arab Spring, Anti-austerity movement in Spain, & more), but also how unlike past revolutions for specific causes, the revolt the public in the Fifth Wave is a more nihilistic one, looking more to take down than to create. Extremely relevant for how we think about information theory (info availability, fidelity, and sheer volume) and how that can lead to events that, through this lens, may be outliers but not altogether so surprising (like the election of Trump, defund the police movement, politicization of covid, etc… ). The biggest takeaway for me is that we wildly underestimate the socio-political and behavioral impacts of information flow -- specifically availability and volume (fidelity is obviously hugely important but already a pretty "rated" topic of concern imho).

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If you're a fan of Asimov's I, Robot shorts, you'll enjoy this. Explores the relationship between a humans and a pseudo-sentient robot when an off-planet geo exploration mission goes amuck. No particularly mind-blowing new themes but well-written, fun (and I mean that genuinely, not as a backhanded compliment). Especially great travel read as it's light! Only 150 pages.

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Humans have been forced to leave Earth in search of a new home. Various experiments on new planets ensue, including one where a scientist terraforms a new planet for the sole purpose of apes being able to re-evolve into humans (a fresh start she thinks!). But what if evolution happens differently this time? Strong start and thrilling finish but the kind of 600 page commitment that felt like it could have been told in 3/4 the time. That said, if you really love evo-bio-sci-fi, this will check all the boxes.

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Right up there with Master Switch for me in terms of providing historical context for the weird ways innovation and co-evolution of products/markets/behaviors happens. It's a quick read and doesn't try to do too much on each topic, but traces 6 innovations that *led* to the modern world as we know it. So rather than going for internet, he starts at our ability to manipulate glass -> lenses -> microscopes (molecular bio) & telescopes (space, physics) or with sound going from cave chanting rituals --> harnessing recorded sound --> telecom/radio/media... Something fascinating and unexpected in each section: Glass, Cold, Sound, Cleanliness, Time, Light. Most on my mind is what new behaviors/markets/products will seem like obvious co-evolutions enabled by the proliferation of blockchain technology & crypto...

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I will buy/support whatever Laura Shin does. She's one of the few crypto journalists who stayed unwaveringly committed to crypto journalism amidst the last bear and has been especially helpful for newbies to the space (including me in 2017!). I think, had a not read Camilla Russo's Infinite Machine first, I would have found this more worthwhile. But if you are a true Eth history geek, this definitely goes deeper than Infinite Machine. For me Infinite Machine was sufficient for major takeaways but grateful Laura captured this for posterity!

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Beautiful read for anyone interested in learning from nature, specifically lessons in gifting, reverence, reciprocity, humility, ecosystem health, slowness, consumption moderation, and more. RWK is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and relays these learnings via her own experience integrating that heritage and deep connection to Mother Nature into a modern life. A good reminder to go touch grass and a nice break away from heady sci fi tech stuff of late. Thanks to my friend Bhavik for the recommendation.

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Only my second graphic novel (see Akira Volumes 1-6 for first), but did not disappoint! I decided to pick up The Incal after Ben Mauro of Huxley Saga mentioned French artist Moebius as a major influence for him, along with Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira. Not only is that influence clear, but it feels like the world created by Jodorowsky and Moebius birthed much of the visual vernacular of modern sci-fi. Wild that this was released from 1980-88. Recommended watching if you like The Incal is Jodorowsky's Dune, a documentary about his and Moebius' failed attempt to make the most ambitious sci-fi movie ever in 1974.

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For me Neuromancer (1984) was a cyberpunk fever dream with an aesthetic world similar to Bladerunner (1982) -- dirty, gritty, hyper capitalist, where tech overlords and mobs run everything -- and ideas that foreshadowed most obviously The Matrix (1999) -- Gibson literally coins "jacking into the matrix"-- but also films like Upgrade (2018) and novels like Snow Crash (1992). The plot is a heist thriller and writing is B at best for me as Gibson has a habit of being overly dense not because of too much detail, but because of too many concepts(!) and not enough detail. Still it's staggering the number of prescient concepts, in particular around the tensions between humanity and technology, that Gibson presents in the book....especially considering it was pre-internet! Worth reading to see early explorations of cyberspace, AI-human relationships, free will, addiction, mind control, and so much more, but keeping it 8/10 only because the writing style made it challenging and, frankly, outright confusing at times.

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I picked this up after seeing it cited in a Nick Szabo footnote. Maybe I'll revisit but for now, Simon Singh's The Code Book was sufficiently detailed and way more accessible than Kahn's original history of crypto and codebreaking. To Kahn's (1967) credit, Singh (1999) cites him a *lot*. This was also obviously written before modern cryptography (DES cipher in 1975, Diffie Hellman in 1976, PGP in 1991) and...the internet! So not faulting Kahn that the tome didn't feel as relevant as it must have to the OG cypherpunks. Maybe my used copy even belonged to one of them!

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100% must-read for anyone interested in crypto. Excellent primer on the history of steganography (hiding of info), evolution of encryption, ciphers, codebreaking and just generally how important the safe-keeping of information has been in shaping the world as we know it. Also super fun to read the story of Diffie/Hellman developing public key cryptography, Zimmerman fighting the good PGP fight...all the OGs who laid the groundwork for not just "crypto" but much of modern information security.

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June '22 Update: after reading Dalio's Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order, I would highly recommend starting there. Best economic history context (including history of money) of any book I've read. Hits most of what Ferguson covers but money applied to power, trade, and innovation. Back to original Ascent of Money review: Tbh I thought this was just ok. Informative but dry and jumps around a lot. Good coverage of of first major inflation (Spain 1500s), origins of credit (Italian banking in 13th c.), stocks and bonds, risk diversification & insurance, property, and globalization.

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Life has two types of games. "Finite games" are games where the goal is to win, and in order for that to happen the other player(s) must lose. Here, uncertainty or new information is bad! "Infinite games" are games where the only objective is to keep playing the game, where new information and serendipity are a welcomed reason to keep playing the game. The book explores how we think about power, relationships, vulnerability, time spent, and other aspects of work, play, and life with this new framework and, for me, provided helpful language in articulating what I love about my favorite people, projects, and way of living. Thanks to my friend Bhavik for recommending.

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Stands up to Snow Crash! Neal is one of my favorite writers and this book contains one of my favorite passages of writing I've read in recent memory (5 pages detailing the protagonist's optimal way of eating Cap'n Crunch). The story is set in two time periods -- WWII and present day -- and is basically a super fun adventure involving code-breaking (like Enigma wartime Turing stuff), message encryption, and...gold! I'm not sure I'd even classify this as sci-fi...more like crypto Indiana Jones. Long but worth the commitment. Shocked it hasn't been adapted into a show yet.

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Required reading for any technology investor. Fascinating to revisit how many smart people were wrong about the Internet, and how many weirdo cowboys (also very smart) were so much more right.

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One of my favorite books of the past year -- Master Switch tells the story of innovation in media, specifically the number of times that truly innovative technology was sabotaged by incumbent players. He calls this the Kronos effect, after the Greek god of the same name who would eat his children out of fear that they might one day grow up and defeat him. Shout out to Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) who briefly mentioned the book on a podcast interview where he was asked why Coinbase would possibly want to make self-custodying easier for users. He explained they could treat it like RCA did with FM radio (shelving it for 30 years and delaying innovation for the users) or move forward and adapt.

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Excellent! 100% must-read for anyone in crypto, second only to the similarly thorough and gripping story of Bitcoin's origins in Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold. Hats off to Camilla Russo!

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My first manga! What an extraordinary piece of experiential art. I didn't grow up around graphic novels, comics, or manga (or sci-fi for that matter), so I'm grateful to fellow Ghxts community member 7ca who recommended Akira to me over late night halal truck at NFT NYC 2021. He spoke so passionately about it, like he was sharing such a sacred insight and I can see why. The sheer amount of detail Otomo puts into each frame is tremendous...I found myself stuck just staring at frames, allowing my curiosity to shape the cadence in such a more dynamic way than with text only. There's such permission to get lost in the details, to get swallowed by Otomo's world...now I'm starting to sound like my friend 7ca! Can't recommend enough, especially if you're new to graphic novels like I was.

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Inspiring read for entrepreneurs, especially those dealing with physical products. I'd say also a pretty fascinating read for anyone interested in the American retail landscape of today. I was shocked at how many times Wal-Mart almost didn't become what it is today, how much grit and creativity and scrappiness it took Sam Walton to WILL the business into existence against all odds. Thanks to Phil McKeating, COO of Cirkul who recommended this to me while on a hike in Big Sky, MT last summer.

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Not as good as book 2 of the series but still completely epic. Was sad for it to be done, but rumor is there's a Netlix series coming out??

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My favorite science-fiction book I've read to date. I actually picked up the series because of The Dark Forest, specifically because it was referenced in the blog post Ethereum is a Dark Forest, by Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos. One of the few fiction books I'm actively excited to re-read. Not summarizing anything for fear of spoiling!

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A friend had warned me that Book 1 of the series starts slow, but...I entirely agree, holy hell the first 70 pages have the narrative pace of a dirge. And then, it finds its rhythm! Fascinating premise and I've heard Book 2 is even better so can't wait to dive in.

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Pop sci-fi at its best (I don't use Pop disparagingly here, in music - the Beatles were Pop; Pop is beautiful because it's easy and accessible to the masses; if you want more people to get into the thing, let them do the Pop version of the thing and stop being so grouchy). RPO won't hold a candle to Snowcrash or Neuromancer, but it does give something like Ender's Game a run. Especially relevant as experiential, persistant, mmo rpg is becoming more ubiquitous to be considering the centralization/governance/lifestyle themes here!

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Excellent hard sci-fi exploration of privacy via the mirror of full transparency. Written by Stephen Baxter based on a premise by Arthur C. Clarke. Originally recommended by David Friedberg in passing on the All-In Podcast during a conversation around social media and how we're not actually so far off from full surveillance/transparency into the previously private life. Super fun and relevant read!

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Engaging for the first few chapters, even inspiring at points. The idea is to live a life where you're welcoming in green lights (moments that create momentum) rather than getting hung up on the red lights. For a very different story with similar and better articulated themes, I'd recommend Michael Singer's The Surrender Experiment or any of the stoicism books below.

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A mixed bag but mostly good! If nothing else, it's a great book of sci-fi short stories to have on the nightstand. Also a great recommendation for anyone just starting to explore sci-fi since i) they can start with the short that the movie Arrival is based on...and ii) in general I've found short stories like this or I, Robot are a more approachable on-ramp for new folks. Thanks to my friend Bhavik who gifted this to me after he and his partner spent the week at our place.

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This book helped me decide to go all in on crypto. If you're going through any kind of transition I can't recommend this enough. For me, a question that this book inspired (although not asked directly in the book) was "in the year 20xx, what will I have wished I done more of in the year [present year]"...the exercise of looking back at life as already having been lived, mistakes and victories already having been made...rather than "what do i want to do more of this next year". For me, the question became, "In the year 2030, what will I have wished i had spent more time on in the year 2021?" At the time I had been piloting out a wine business (which I still think is a billion dollar brand idea!), but I realized the answer for me was no longer ecommerce. That was and will for a longtime be my bread and butter, but what I wanted was to be on the edge, be helping SHAPE the edge of innovation -- so was energy, biotech, or crypto. I started with crypto since I at least had some foundation from being in the space since 2017 (first BTC/ETH, then ICO mania, then as an LP in various crypto funds) and never looked back.

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I only made it through half of Originals before shelving it. To me it was a pretty uninspiring how-to guide for pretending that you're more creative, more of a visionary than you actually are. I'm not surprised the book has rave reviews, but would be curious if any of the superfans actually end up being non-conformist thinkers...imho I cannot imagine a non-conformist thinker having the patience to make it through this entire book.

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Nice overview of history of money, history of Bitcoin, how BTC works, intro to PoW consensus, how the current banking systems functions, forks, ICOs and more. It really does do a nice job providing substance on each area without feeling like a textbook. For me it was a nice refresher course as I started to give back deeper into crypto at the end of 2019 after a few years entirely heads down on Thrive Market.

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Singer encourages us to live a life that invites serendipity and opportunity, that surrenders to what the winds of living bring rather than living in fear and tense need to control all variables. The Surrender Experiment is Mickey Singer (founder of Medical Manager corporation, acquired by WebMD in a multibillion dollar deal in 2000) shares the story of building his business and undergoing a spiritual awakening all at the same time, all while based out of his yogie commune in Florida! Inspiring for anyone trying to carve their own path.

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The best book I have ever read on product market fit, not only in gaming, but for consumer products more generally. Chou outlines 8 core drivers of user engagement, ranging from short-term, reactive drivers (scarcity, avoidance, unpredictability) to long-term, deeper drives (meaning, accomplishment, empowerment), and a few in between (ownership, social influence). What I find most helpful about this framework is it doesn't make a value judgement about which of these drivers are good or bad, to be used or not to be used. Instead he helps understand what drivers cause what type of behaviours. This has been wildly helpful in looking back at which of my investments have worked, and where I had blindspots because I *mistook* a short-term growth driver for a long-term health metric. This will be among my top consumer books I'll recommend for anyone building or investing in the space. Bonus points if you do the Octalysis Prime online course, which helped me hammer home the concepts. 10/10 easy.

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By Volume Three, I was pretty committed to buy whatever Andreas was putting out. What's interesting here is the year is now 2019 when he's writing it, so he gets into market cycles, Facebook Libra, the blockchain trilemma, even some discussion of other chains. Start with Volume 1 & 2 and if those resonate, this will too...for me this is like maintenance reading...and of course just a nice way to say thank you to Andreas for his contributions to the space.

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Seemingly endless learnings from this text. The Tao te Ching (pronounced more like "the DAO de Jing") is a series of about 80 poem-like vignettes, each ranging from a few lines long to a few pages but rarely any longer. I'd recommend not reading this in one sitting but devoting one sitting to each passage, sometimes multiple sittings to the same passage. No need to read it in order. The reading experience is more like meditation where you learn to trust that whatever needs to come out will come out, to go in with little to no expectation. Thanks to my brother Nick and our friend Mike Zhang, both of whom are true disciples of this book and have been a great inspiration to spend regular time with it. If you're at all interested in Stoicism or Buddhism, this will be a nice addition to the canon.

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Grateful to see Andreas exploring not only Bitcoin but also Ethereum, ICOs, and DAOs. Read Volume 1 and if that resonates, this will too. He also does a great job addressing hype cycles head on and theorizing how deteriorating trust in the current traditional money system will lead the public to exit the system for crypto. Decent amount of overlap with Volume 1 on the Bitcoin content but, again, great to see coverage of the space more generally as well. Grateful to Andreas for the work he's done. These are an excellent starting point for anyone new to crypto.

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I feel like Andreas Antonopoulous really doesn't get enough credit for having been one of the early educators in crypto. When I was first exploring the space in 2017, I think I watched every youtube video of his I could find, so much of this first volume of The Internet of Money was repetition on those themes, but helpful nonetheless. These have been the books I've recommended most to anyone dipping their toes in. In volume 1 he covers the basics of Bitcoin, txn privacy in Bitcoin vs legacy systems, how infrastructure systems innovate (or don't), the history of money, and more. Only 130 pages, but pulled from a series of live talks on each topic so the content is concise and punchy.

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The definitive history of Bitcoin. Must-read for anyone interested in the origin story. And thankfully, it's actually really well-written and entertaining throughout!

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My first attempt at diving back into science fiction after 15 years, and I'm wishing so badly someone had put this book in my hands back in high school. Still, reading it just over one year into Los Angeles (where the non-metaverse portion of the story is set) was pretty special too. I came away mostly wondering whether SF predicts or incepts the future (VR, digital cash, post-economic meltdown mob rule) and excited to read more Stephenson when I have more time. I also really want some smartwheels!

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One of the books I've gifted most to young entrepreneurs. Thiel builds with a fearless belief in his vision, a willingness to think differently -- truly differently, an anti-fragile attitude and ego. His basic premise is that most of the world spends time tinkering on paths well-trodden, but that real progress happens when builders take something from 0 to 1; in other words go from something not EXISTING to creating a market and owning that market. I think an underrated aspect of this book is that the best founders have a clear sense of vision, even if, maybe especially if that vision is pretty weird! The way I think about this is that if someone is working on something that is clearly NOT popular or what everyone else is thinking, and they have high conviction on that thing, that's probably someone worth backing or partnering with. In that case, they're in it for the right reasons, rather than for the signaling. Must-read for any builder or investor.

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Read when first starting in Private Equity and was extremely helpful in training my nose for bullshit, or more generously put, being cautiously thorough when getting to know a company. The book covers ways in which companies can manipulate earnings (by defining revenue in weird ways, by overcapitlizing opex, depreciating assets slowly, not doing write-downs, treat all AR as collectible even when its not, etc), how revenue recognition schedules can obfuscate problems, how companies sandbag current quarters when they know future quarters will get hit....and more. This book is pretty dry but so many important concepts if you're actively diligencing or advising companies...so often these "shenanigans" are made in good faith accidentally because first time founders have never done it before! So this book helps build that muscle of scrupulous underwriting.

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June 2022 Update: an especially important book for crypto friends to read re: the dangers of leverage and assuming the market will continue acting rationally.... Original review: When Genius Failed is the story of the downfall of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a highly-academic quant hedge fund that used complex models in heavily levered arbitrage trades. These were some of the smartest traders and mathematicians of the 90s, so when they launched in 1994, it was easy for them to raise capital and they actually did really well! Several years of not losing money from 1994-1997. But everything was reliant on markets acting rationally and, because most of the trades were small margin arb trades, the team took on more and more leverage to increase their position sizes. At one point they had $5B of equity capital and were trading close to $125B of assets. The downfall started with the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (mostly a panic of South Korea and Taiwan markets) but was exacerbated by the Russian debt default the next summer as well. This triggered a death spiral as banks who had loaned to LTCM raised rates (given market risk had increased), rates that LTCM couldn't service. As the value of the assets declined LTCM had to take on risker positions to try to cover the difference....This was a 1/10^24 event according to LTCM's models and a good reminder as the saying goes "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

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Story of the 3rd largest LBO in history but arguably the most famous: the takeover RJR Nabsico. Nabisco, once an American cookie empire, by the late 1970s had fallen from its olympian heights and brought on a new CEO Ross Johnson. LBOs had originally been thought up by lawyer Jerry Kohlberg, who architected them to help founders/CEOs get liquidity without having massive tax hits. But eventually they also started being used by PE funds to acquire companies for much less cash by levering against the target company's assets. The net result is the departing executive or shareholders get a high price, the PE fund puts way less money down than they otherwise would (juicing the IRR dramatically) and then the company is left having to service the interest on the debt. This works fine unless (as often is the case), too much leverage is put on the acquired company, they can't service the interest, and then have to rationalize expenses to service debt that they previously didn't even have to be burdened with. The book is definitely a great primer on that, and tracks a particularly greedy case where Ross Johnson (CEO of RJR Nabsico) architects a deal that does *very* well for him but leaves the company saddled with an unnatural amount of debt. Also an amazing window into the brilliance and early Henry Kravis, seeing the opportunity, leaving to carve his own path with his cousin to form arguably the most iconic PE fund ever KKR. I loved this book but not sure how widely relevant it is for others so leaving at 7/10.

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June 2022 update: adding this one, though it's been over a decade since I read it while taking Shiller's class my first year at Yale. He wrote it just ahead of the *height* of the dot-com boom, outlining his views on why the market was so wildly over-valued at the time. By the time I read the book in 2008, the book had also been updated to cover the housing bubble - again, published ahead of the housing bubble bursting in 2007/08. In reviewing the recent 2022 crash (in crypto & more broadly), I was reflecting on this book, realizing how formative it was to me taking some risk off the table in Fall of 2021, and wanted to include it as a recommendation here. Humbling to see how consistently vulnerable all of us (myself included -- in retrospect, should have taken more off in 2021!) are to pushing returns just a little higher when times are riding high.

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