Episode · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-05-17
Lenny Rachitsky & Caitlin Kalinowski: books mentioned on Lenny's Podcast
Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple)
Caitlin Kalinowski was most recently at OpenAI helping build their robotics and hardware teams from scratch. Prior to that, she was head of AR glasses and VR hardware at Meta, where she led the teams building every generation of the Quest, Rift, and Orion, and was Meta’s first consumer electronics hire.
Caitlin Kalinowski recommended The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Histories.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Book of the New Sun
Recommended“Book of the New Sun is a great fiction book, which I really recommend. I think that's what it's called.”
Where to get it
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Mrs. Dalloway
Recommended“I love Mrs. Dalloway, actually. I think it's a very interesting book about transitions, and it was a post-war book by Virginia Wolf.”
Where to get it
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Histories
Recommended“I think Herodotus histories is pretty incredible. He's wrong a lot but he's also it's the first history book and in many cases he's going and finding you know firsthand or secondhand accounts of what happens.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (2) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Passing The Epic of Gilgamesh
“It's like the Old Testament, Gilgamesh, and then all the way down through. But what I found is it's a pretty good distillation of what we used to call the western cannon.”
Passing Understanding the Old Testament
“It's like the Old Testament, Gilgamesh, and then all the way down through. But what I found is it's a pretty good distillation of what we used to call the western cannon.”