Books Mentioned in This Podcast
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonAt its center is this idea of memes: a simple definition is a funny image that spreads virally, and the deeper definition was originally by Richard Dawkins, who introduced the idea of memes as concepts that spread in society in a way akin to genes.
Episode: Truth Terminal - The AI Bot That Became a Crypto Millionaire
Ab urbe condita
Buy on AmazonUm the problem with that is there's this you know universal phenomenon in our industry that has a you know 50-year history which is you know kind of extremely it's like probably the most clear thing that we know of in terms of how to predict the future in our industry which is called Moore's Law.
Episode: Trump Vs. Biden: Tech Policy
The Once and Future King
Buy on AmazonThere was a cult science fiction book retailer, a tiny little hole-in-the-wall bookstore on El Camino Real in Mountain View called Future Fantasy Books.
Episode: Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser
Much Ado About Nothing
Buy on AmazonYou remember in those days the books started to show up; before people had the internet, there were books about it.
Episode: Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser
Superforecasting
Buy on AmazonPhil Tetlock, a professor studying this topic, wrote a comprehensive study on political predictions, leading to the conclusion that the average credentialed expert is less than random likely to be correct.
Episode: Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser
Elon Musk
Buy on AmazonIf you’re unfamiliar with this, you can read the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which talks about the crises he encountered with both SpaceX and Tesla.
Public opinion
Buy on AmazonUm, and in particular there's, there's a book called Public Opinion written by a guy named Walter Lippmann that sort of defined this at the time. What I'm about to describe.
Episode: Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter
Their Jihad... Not My Jihad!
Buy on AmazonThe young man who wrote about it called his book 'My Jihad,' describing how he realized his true struggle was with himself.
MONEY Master the Game
Buy on AmazonThen I was writing 'Money: Master the Game,' you know, interviewing 50 of the smartest financial people in the world.
The Holy Grail of Investing
Buy on AmazonIt's my third in the financial area, one that I think you guys would appreciate; this one is called 'The Holy Grail of Investing.'
Leviathan
Buy on AmazonLike nature really has it out for you, um, and if you're unprotected in a state of nature like it, you know, the old, the old thing is you know life and state of nature is, is is is what is it nasty, brutish and short, poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short, Hobbes, yeah, exactly. And so so look technology, you know, it's of the flip side of the question is technology is now buffering us against, you know, sources of mass death, um, that used to be, you know, far far far more common.
Ὀδύσσεια
Buy on AmazonThere's actually this great book; there's an economist named Alexander Field who's done this; he's done a pair of great books in the 1930s and 1940s, but he talks in great detail about how the American military production machine basically spun up in 18 months.
The Man in the High Castle
Buy on AmazonAlso, there's this great book that Ben and I have read called The Man from the Future, the Von Neumann book, and it does a very good job of telling Norman's side of the story.
Tempest
Buy on AmazonWhitaker Chambers tells this amazing story in his book about how he tried to out himself to the U.S. government as a Soviet military intelligence recruiter and it took him six years to be taken seriously by the FBI and the Justice Department.