Balaji Srinivasan Book Recommendations

How the Internet Happened

From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

"Reminds us that the tech era is very new, only really about 10 years old, and only began in earnest with iPhone adoption." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

China Coup

The Great Leap to Freedom

by Roger Garside

"Makes the case that Xi could be felled by his internal enemies (possible!) and that this will lead to democratization (IMO implausible)." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Cold Start Problem

How to Start and Scale Network Effects

by Andrew Chen

"Useful for anyone trying to bootstrap a new community or network, which is virtually every founder these days." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (3 books)

"If you take all the people who could understand the Feynman Lectures, they could probably appreciate Hamlet. But not conversely." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Unelected Power

The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State

by Paul Tucker

"Decent book — by a central banker! — on the lack of legitimacy of central banking and the regulatory state writ large." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Nature of Mathematical Modeling

by Neil Gershenfeld

"In terms of just packing a punch per page I really enjoyed this back in the day." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Man Who Knew Infinity

A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

by Robert Kanigel

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

The Internet of Money (3 books)

"One of the best books on Bitcoin for a broad audience." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Test-Driven Development with Python

Obey the Testing Goat Using Django, Selenium, and JavaScript

by Harry Percival

"Teaches you how to test things that are bigger than just a simple function." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

High Output Management

by Andrew S. Grove

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

How Innovation Works

Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time

by Matt Ridley

"How tech founders always had to fight against the establishment, just like the present day." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Gulag Archipelago (3 books)

"What the Soviet Union was actually like." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Sovereign Individual

Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

by James Dale Davidson

"If you want to find startup ideas here’s the book." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages

by Carlota Perez

"People get really amped about a technology, then you try to actually do it, you find it’s actually hard, most people get demoralized and they quit." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Indistractable

How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

"Tackles the problem of modern distraction by empowering us to break the bad habits at the root of the issue." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Who We Are and How We Got Here

Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

"The brief argument is: our true history is written in our genes." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Rules for Radicals

A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals

by Saul D. Alinsky

"The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Changing World Order

Why Nations Succeed and Fail

by Ray Dalio

"How today’s America resembles the Dutch and British empires of the past in terms of its monetary overextension." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Fourth Turning

What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

"How a cyclic theory of history forecasts a serious American conflict in the 2020s (written in the mid-1990s)." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Has China Won?

The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy

by Kishore Mahbubani

"One may have to set aside ego to read it." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

by Mencius Moldbug

"A broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

War and Peace and War

The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

"How quantitative methods can identify recurrent cycles." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Schaum's Outline of Principles of Accounting I

by Joel J. Lerner

"It’s amazing how many people have studied accounting or something, but you just give them Schaums and ask them to do the first 10 problems in accounting, they struggle." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

One Thousand Exercises in Probability

by Geoffrey Grimmett

"Requires more energy to read, but it keeps you sharp." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Physics for Scientists and Engineers

Volume 1

by Paul A. Tipler

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

Visual Complex Analysis

by Tristan Needham

"I’ve always liked compendium." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Visual Complex Functions

An Introduction with Phase Portraits

by Elias Wegert

"Fun book proposes plotting all complex functions as colored contour plots. Kind of an obvious idea, but it's carried through systematically here." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Innumeracy

Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

by John Allen Paulos

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

Catching Fire

How Cooking Made Us Human

by Richard Wrangham

"Talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Reputation and Power

Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA

by Daniel Carpenter

"Most people don't really hear bad things about the FDA. This book taught me why." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Craft

How the Freemasons Made the Modern World

by John Dickie

"Anyone working on NFT collections should understand the history of the Freemasons. Many of their rituals could be usefully updated for the digital era." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Three Felonies A Day

How the Feds Target the Innocent

by Harvey A. Silverglate

"All about enforcement discretion." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The House of Government

A Saga of the Russian Revolution

by Yuri Slezkine

"How the Soviet Union actually worked." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution

The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists

by Antony Cyril Sutton

"How different groups of capitalists funded the communist revolution." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler

The Astonishing True Story of the American Financiers Who Bankrolled the Nazis

by Antony Cyril Sutton

"How different groups of capitalists funded the fascist revolution." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Start-up Nation

The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

by Dan Senor

"I love [this] book!" - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

AI Superpowers

China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

"A history of the Chinese tech ecosystem." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

by Timothy Gowers

"The desert island book. So good." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Great CEO Within

The Tactical Guide to Company Building

by Matt Mochary

"[Brian Armstrong] and I used parts of this at Coinbase." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Forgotten Man

A New History of the Great Depression

by Amity Shlaes

"Useful as an alternate perspective on the era." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Working in Public

The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Eghbal

"[The author] is very smart and it’s worth reading anything she writes on open source." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Little Bitcoin Book

Why Bitcoin Matters for Your Freedom, Finances, and Future

by Bitcoin Collective

"Was written in a few days by N people, one chapter each, and then published on Amazon." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Virtual Economies

Design and Analysis

by Vili Lehdonvirta

"A good read for crypto people." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

UFO Hunters

by William J. Birnes

Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)

My Brother Ron

A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill

by Clayton E. Cramer

Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)

Merchants of Truth

The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

by Jill Abramson

Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)

Pale Rider

The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

by Laura Spinney

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Flu

The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It

by Gina Kolata

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Pandemic 1918

Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History

by Catharine Arnold

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

From Third World to First

The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

by Lee Kuan Yew

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

The Knowledge

How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm

by Lewis Dartnell

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Only the Paranoid Survive

How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company

by Andrew S. Grove

"We've all read Grove." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Netflixed

The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs

by Gina Keating

"Blockbuster tried to buy Hollywood Video, but the FTC called this off on antitrust (!) grounds. By 2010 Blockbuster was bankrupt and Netflix was soaring." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Frisco Kid

by Jack London

Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)

The Journalist And The Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

"Short and well worth reading. Presages much of today's train crash on social media." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Truth Machine

The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

by Paul Vigna

"An accessible explanation of how blockchains allow us to establish certain kinds of truths even in adversarial environments." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Man Who Invented Fidel

Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times

by Anthony DePalma

Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)

Physics from Finance

A gentle introduction to gauge theories, fundamental interactions and fiber bundles

by Jakob Schwichtenberg

"A lot of fun. Not exactly art, but novel approach with a lot of visual inspiration." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Future Is Asian

Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century

by Parag Khanna

"The American century is ending. The Asian century is beginning." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Great Wave

Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History

by David Hackett Fischer

"Gold from the Americas did flood Europe in the 1500s, which helped cause inflation." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

History Has Begun

The Birth of a New America

by Bruno Macaes

"[The author's] thesis is that America is increasingly becoming a virtual society, focused on make-believe above all. I have to agree." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

End the Fed

by Ron Paul

"[The author] was to Bitcoin what Andrew Yang is to startup societies." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

by James C. Scott

"There’s a sense in which the term 'real name' is a misnomer. A better term is a state name — a name which makes you legible to the state." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Great Influenza

The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

by John M. Barry

Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Where Is My Flying Car?

A Memoir of Future Past

by J Storrs Hall

"Don't judge this self-published book by its cover, just read it." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Kill Chain

Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

by Christian Brose

"The US military has a perfect record in its war games with China. China has won every round." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

The Gray Lady Winked

How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

by Ashley Rindsberg

"I put it up there with the top five books I recommend." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)