Van der Kolk on how trauma gets stored in the body, and why traditional talk therapy often misses. If you've ever wondered why something decades old still pulls at you, this is the book.

Sam Zemurray bending the entire global banana trade from a handcart. My favorite business biography of all time. If you care about how a single operator can reshape an industry, read this one first.

Yes, the same Chernow who wrote Hamilton. The scale of what Rockefeller built is hard to hold in your head, and the methods are their own education in patience and leverage.

Another Chernow. The arc is wild: failed businessman, quiet drunk, accidental general, won the Civil War, underrated president. If you only know Grant from the fifty, you don't know Grant.

Written in 1997. Reads like a forecast that mostly came true: the decay of nation-state power, the rise of digital sovereignty, the whole conversation we're having right now. These guys saw it coming.

Where "paradigm shift" comes from. Short, dense, worth a slow read. Science doesn't march forward, it lurches, and Kuhn explains why.

A biography built around the questions Montaigne spent his life trying to answer. It's really a book about how to think.

Meadows teaches you to see the loops in things: stocks, flows, feedback, unintended consequences. Changes how you read the news, not always comfortably.

A book about a metal shipping container. Bear with me. It's really about how one boring piece of standardization reshaped global trade. I think about it constantly.

Almost nobody's read this and almost everybody should. ALDI is what happens when a business optimizes for simplicity, relentlessly, for forty years, without blinking.

Carse's original, not the Sinek. Short, strange, worth reading slowly. What you think you're competing at is usually not what you're actually playing for.

Why top-down planning keeps failing in the same ways. If you build physical things or deal with governments, Scott will save you trouble.

Eight CEOs who outperformed the S&P by wild margins, mostly by being weird about capital allocation. I re-read it before any meeting where money is actually moving.

Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road, told like a thriller. Unreal from start to finish. I devoured it.

Two amateur divers find a German U-boat off the New Jersey coast, and spend years trying to figure out which one. Kurson makes it feel like the most important mystery in the world. One of the best adventure books I've ever read.

Herman and Chomsky's framework for how the media shapes what you think you think. Written in '88. Aging well.

My friend Nick Gray wrote a book that can you make new friends and meet new people. Helpful if you are new in a town or want to build richer connections.

This entire series is captivating but I don't recommend it for bedtime, it's too suspenseful. Reaper forever!

Suarez was writing about autonomous AI and decentralized networks before either was a hashtag. Still holds up, still unsettling.

Pure fun. If you grew up on arcades, Atari, and '80s movies, it's a gift.

Ostensibly about trees. Actually about time, and what we owe to things that'll outlive us.

This is one of two books that has made me cry.

This is the other one.

I will never tire of reading about the incredible feat of science and cooperation that led to man's landing on the moon. Start with Apollo by Charles Murray if you read nothing else about it. Then go deeper with Digital Apollo, Flight (Chris Kraft's memoir), Rocket Men, and The Secret of Apollo. And watch Apollo 11 (remastered footage) -- try to watch it without crying.

Start with Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. Then pair it with The Corsican and Napoleon: In His Own Words. At some point you want to hear him speak for himself.

Start with Poor Charlie's Almanac, then listen to his Psychology of Human Misjudgment lecture (Audio / PDF). If you want the investing side, pair it with The Intelligent Investor.

Not the Gilded Age — I don't care about the society side of that era. I care about the people who drove industrialization and how wild the whole thing was. Start with Titan (Rockefeller). Then Meet You in Hell (Carnegie and Frick), The House of Morgan, The First Tycoon (Vanderbilt), and Dear Chairman (80 years of activist investors). I'll read anything in this lane — if you know one, send it.

Probably the writer I've learned the most from over the last few years. Essays on creativity, attention, and living well, written from a Swedish island.

Data-first social science. Changes my mind more often than I'm comfortable with.

Long essays on history, strategy, and how empires actually work. Slow reading. Worth it.

Reporting on the stories the legacy outlets won't touch. Uneven, but the hits are worth the misses.

Solana on tech, politics, and culture. You don't have to agree with him to benefit from the shape of the argument.

Lifetime body of work, especially: The Next Step, You Can Do Whatever You Want, Never Be Like Them, Comparison, and Ego Is The Enemy.

A 1985 Schelling paper on why we make rules for ourselves and what makes them actually hold. I think about this one constantly.

The cheapest business education that exists. Free, decades deep, primary source.

Read them in order. The consistency of the thinking across twenty years is the whole point.

Sam Altman.