Notes on books I’ve read, and flashcards for episodes of the Dwarkesh Podcast.
Books
His Excellency
Founding Brothers
His Excellency & Founding Brothers · Joseph J. Ellis
Augustus
John Williams
Has a videoThe Power Broker
The Path to Power
Means of Ascent
Master of the Senate
The Passage of Power
Working
What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses · Robert A. Caro
The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
The Marginal Revolution
RLVR might be disproportionately bad at science · Imre Lakatos & Tyler Cowen
The Clockwork Universe
Edward Dolnick
The Vital Question
Nick Lane
Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928
Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941
Notes and questions on Kotkin’s two volumes
Uncivil Society
Stephen Kotkin
China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know
Trade Wars Are Class Wars
Two books on China’s economy · Arthur R. Kroeber; Matthew C. Klein & Michael Pettis
Energy and Civilization
Vaclav Smil
The Symbolic Species
Terrence W. Deacon
The Language Instinct
Steven Pinker
The Prize
Daniel Yergin
Flashcards
- Intel: How the world's most advanced chips are madeOct 2026 · 48 cards
- Reiner Pope: Chip design from the bottom upMay 2026 · 9 cards
- Eric Jang: Building AlphaGo from scratchMay 2026 · 15 cards
- Reiner Pope: The math behind how LLMs are trained and servedApr 2026 · 27 cards
- Pretraining parallelisms and failed runs18 cards