Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-05-27

Gergely Orosz & Dax Raad: books mentioned on The Pragmatic Engineer

Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

2 books · With Dax Raad · Listen · Watch on YouTube

Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

Dax Raad recommended Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Books mentioned, in the order they came up

We earn a commission if you buy through the store links below, at no cost to you.

  1. Skin in the Game

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb · at 1:18:45

    Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an insightful nonfiction book that explores how personal accountability, risk-sharing, and asymmetry are fundamental to understanding human society and decision-making.

    Recommended
    “I'm a big fan, these are like boring recommendations, but I'm a big fan of uh a bunch of TB's work. I think he's basically got like a couple good ideas and it's maybe hard to read a whole book cuz a book is just one good idea inflated into a book, but these are just fundamental true things about”
    Where to get it
  2. The Black Swan

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb · at 1:19:07

    The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a influential philosophical and economic text that examines the profound impact of highly improbable and unpredictable events on history and human affairs.

    Recommended
    “Uh, obviously Black Swan is super popular. A lot of the stuff that I found to be very influential on myself is the idea of uh emergent properties.”
    Where to get it