First, read the Deep Future Book. Here’s more stuff I think is truly great to learn from:
Optimism about the Future
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Infinite Progress by Byron Reese (read our own review)
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
Whole Earth Discipline by Stuart Brand
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Best Things First by Bjorn Lomborg
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (but don’t read his other books. Super engaging historian but competing for my least favorite futurist.)
Hacking
Technology Entrepreneurship
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Why Startups Fail by Tom Eisenmann
Anticipate Failure by Lak Ananth
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber
Artificial Intelligence
I’m currently having a hard time endorsing any other blowhards on this topic.
The Fourth Age by Byron Reese
What is Intelligence Long Now talk by Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Nuclear Reactors
Rad Future by Isabelle Boemeke
Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop by Jack Devanney
Venture Capital
The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
The Future by Founders Fund
We believe that the shift away from backing transformational technologies and toward more cynical, incrementalist investments broke venture capital.
Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s by Jerry Neumann
You can have lots of plausible theories about what venture capitalists as a class can do to get good returns, until you take the 1980s into account. Then you can only have one: the only thing VCs can control that will improve their outcomes is having enough guts to bet on markets that don’t yet exist.
Chamath Palihapitiya explaining the basics you should know before taking money from VCs.
Computers
The Pattern on the Stone by Danny Hillis
What to do with Your Life
My PopTech 2025 talk is about choosing one thing to work on.