Naval Ravikant

Nine science-fiction stories, each working through one idea with care.

A novel: a mathematician foresees an empire's fall and plans to shorten the dark age.

A comic about Elijah Snow, a 100-year-old man among archaeologists of the impossible.

A novel of a Brahmin's son in ancient India who seeks understanding his own way.

A novel of a hacker in a corporate-run America and its virtual world, the Metaverse.

Eight science-fiction stories, each working out one premise with rigour.

A novel of a nanotech future and a stolen copy of an interactive teaching book.

A novel of the quest to destroy a ring of power that corrupts all who use it.

The first book of a heroic fantasy trilogy, the Kingkiller Chronicle.

A novel in which a scientist answers an alien warning and invites first contact.

Twenty-three chapters, one per chromosome, each using a gene to open a subject.

Innovation is gradual, collective and bottom-up, not the work of lone inventors.

How genes and experience interact, each shaping how the other acts.

Species change over time as natural selection favours heritable variations.

The nature of space, time and the quantum world, on the road to quantum gravity.

Six physics lectures with little maths: atoms, energy, gravity and quantum behaviour.

How genes and experience interact, each shaping how the other acts.

Knowledge can grow without limit through good explanations that are hard to vary.

The history of molecular biology from the 1930s to the 1970s, told by its makers.

Big changes in human affairs emerge from the bottom up rather than by design.

Reality through four strands: many-worlds physics, computation, evolution, Popper.

Lectures on physics, mainly mechanics, radiation and heat.

Lectures on physics, mainly electromagnetism and matter.

Lectures on quantum mechanics.

How cooperation and morality evolved from self-interest, via the prisoner's dilemma.

Sex evolved as a defence against parasites, and that shapes human mating.

Selection acts on genes; bodies are vehicles that genes build to copy themselves.

Science moves through long stretches of normal work broken by paradigm shifts.

How ancient DNA has rewritten the story of human prehistory and migration.

Campbell on the recurring stories cultures tell themselves

Suffering comes from identifying with the mind's chatter; freedom from living now.

You are the awareness watching your thoughts and feelings, not those thoughts.

Twelve rules for living, each drawn from clinical practice, biology and myth.

Incerto volume 4

Letters on how to live, a course in Stoic philosophy written to a friend.

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

A Roman emperor's private notes reminding himself to live by Stoic principles.

Incerto volume 5

825 aphorisms on 72 topics, from spirituality to personal liberation and family.

Naval Ravikant's ideas on building wealth and being happy, gathered from his talks.

Aphorisms stating Taleb's ideas on randomness, knowledge and modern life.

How a mind could arise from parts, traced through Godel, Escher and Bach.

How calculus works and how it made modern technology possible.

A condensed course in the fundamentals of mathematics, physics and calculus.

How the science of cause and effect moved past 'correlation is not causation'.

A primer on the theory of games of strategy, written for non-specialists.

Computer tournaments of the prisoner's dilemma show why tit-for-tat wins.

Expert entries on applied maths: concepts, modelling, simulation and applications.

Francis Crick's life, from a lacklustre education to discovering DNA's structure.

Stories of a physicist's first marriage and his inquiry into the Challenger disaster.

Six principles of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, and how sellers use them.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

Hanson and Simler make the most provocative claim in this list: that self-deception is not a flaw but an adaptive strategy — we hide our real motives from ourselves so we can more convincingly hide them from others. If true, the entire bias-correction project has a ceiling. This book belongs at the end so it reframes everything before it.

The theory that consciousness is learned, arising from a once two-chambered mind.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Hazlitt's 1946 distillation of Bastiat's 'broken window' insight: good economic reasoning requires seeing both what is visible and what is made invisible by a policy. A short book that teaches a single analytical habit, and that habit is genuinely useful regardless of your politics.

Prosperity grows as trade and specialisation let ideas meet and combine.

Price theory in daily life: coffee near stations, supermarket tiers and used cars.

How the division of labour and free markets make a nation rich.

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

Harari's concern — that humans may cede decision-making to opaque systems through preference rather than coercion — reframes the alignment problem as a cultural and political challenge, not only a technical one. Less rigorous than Bostrom or Russell, but more widely read, making it a useful lens for understanding public discourse.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Evidence that violence of nearly every kind has declined over history, and why.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

Why the advice that fat is bad and carbohydrates better may be wrong about health.

The Dilbert creator's many failures and what they taught him about success.

The habit loop of cue, routine and reward, and how to change a habit by its routine.

Routines, tools and advice from over 200 podcast guests on health, wealth and wisdom.

253 patterns for building, from the layout of towns down to a window seat.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

Conflict as bargaining: commitment, credible threats and focal points.

Eighty-one short chapters on the Tao, the founding text of Taoism.

Where you direct attention just before a message shapes how it is received.

Argument that online communities can become sovereign; crypto-native politics

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

Why machines smarter than humans pose a control problem to solve before they arrive.

Decision rules from building Bridgewater: radical truth and radical transparency.

Behavioural training methods for animals and people, explained with examples.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.