These 5 Books Will Get You Ahead of 97% of People — Transcript

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1. 0:00Books have come to the point in 2026
2. 0:02where you can just read the title and
3. 0:04you don't need to read the book and you
4. 0:06you just get everything you need from
5. 0:07the cover page. But there are a few
6. 0:09exceptions.
7. 0:11There is an exceptional book that I
8. 0:14mentioned before called Americana, which
9. 0:17is a multi-hundred year anthology and
10. 0:20study of American capitalism. It is
11. 0:22exceptional. I've probably read it
12. 0:24three, four times.
13. 0:26And it's just an explainer of every
14. 0:28single era and the key players and how
15. 0:31they thought about this tension between
16. 0:33labor and capital and how they were able
17. 0:35to build value and create interesting
18. 0:37businesses. And what you start to see if
19. 0:38you read it a few times is just the
20. 0:40repetition and the how history rhymes
21. 0:42kind of a thing. I think that that is an
22. 0:44an exceptional, exceptional, exceptional
23. 0:46book. From an investing perspective,
24. 0:49I've said this, you know, also many
25. 0:50times, but there's a book from Michael
26. 0:52Acevedo called Modern Poker Theory. And
27. 0:54you would say, "Well, what the hell does
28. 0:55that have to do with investing?" I think
29. 0:57that Michael's book is
30. 0:59the best way of translating modern game
31. 1:03theory in a digestible way through the
32. 1:06format of a game, in this case poker.
33. 1:08But the way that he writes and the math
34. 1:11and the exercises are quite phenomenal.
35. 1:15It anchors
36. 1:16me a lot in how I think about portfolio
37. 1:19construction and game theory in
38. 1:20investing. Exceptional book. Anything by
39. 1:22Will Durant is something that you should
40. 1:24read. I think these books are very
41. 1:26dense, very complicated. Anything by
42. 1:29Nick Lane I would also say is worth
43. 1:30reading. Also very dense, a little bit
44. 1:33intractable at times to be quite honest
45. 1:35with you. These are not easy reads, but
46. 1:36they're worth it. Will Durant has a book
47. 1:38called The Greatest Ideas and Minds of
48. 1:39All Time. That's probably the best Will
49. 1:43Durant book in the sense that if you
50. 1:45don't want to read a thousand pages of
51. 1:46extremely dense prose and you just want
52. 1:49to get to the heart of it, he does a
53. 1:50really good job of summarizing the
54. 1:52punchline. That's a fabulous book. There
55. 1:54are few books that are allowed to stay
56. 1:57on my bedside table because I don't like
57. 2:00clutter. Things need to be extremely
58. 2:02clean and orderly.
59. 2:04Cuz otherwise it's a sign of an
60. 2:05unsettled mind in my opinion.
61. 2:07And it's just sloppy and ugly. But that
62. 2:09Wild at Heart book has been on there for
63. 2:11years. I respect that book a lot.
64. 2:16I have attempted to read all of the
65. 2:19major religious texts once. It's hard. I
66. 2:21think the Bible is the easiest of them.
67. 2:23The Quran is actually quite accessible
68. 2:25as well, but it just takes time and it
69. 2:27takes a level of commitment. I think
70. 2:28these are important because I think they
71. 2:30capture
72. 2:31the historical allegories that just
73. 2:33repeat over and over. Well, I was raised
74. 2:34Buddhist. Thought that Buddhism was like
75. 2:36a pretty
76. 2:38useful place to be, but I found it in my
77. 2:40late 30s not
78. 2:42quite fulfilling. You know, I came to
79. 2:44the realization that I believe in God. I
80. 2:46was looking for more of an explanation
81. 2:49to some of the lingering questions I
82. 2:50have. Like, why are we here? Like, how
83. 2:53did we come to be? Like, before the Big
84. 2:55Bang, what was that? Those things kind
85. 2:57of like knot me these kinds of
86. 2:58questions, but I think a belief in God
87. 3:01has kind of calmed a lot of that. And I
88. 3:02was like,
89. 3:03okay.
90. 3:04He's there.
91. 3:06I didn't develop it from reading the
92. 3:07text. I developed it because I had the
93. 3:09questions, and that was the only
94. 3:10explanation. Then I read [music] the
95. 3:11texts to make sure that I wasn't totally
96. 3:13off base. And I was like, yeah, this is
97. 3:14right.
98. 3:17I've really transformed my reading
99. 3:19patterns. I used to read a lot of books.
100. 3:21I now read an enormous number of
101. 3:23articles. I read a lot on X obviously,
102. 3:25but the number of articles I read,
103. 3:27scientific and otherwise, dwarfs my book
104. 3:30reading. If you were to peer into my
105. 3:32room at, you know, from 9:00 to 10:00
106. 3:34every night, which is my kind of
107. 3:36personal downtime, I am reading, but I'm
108. 3:39rarely reading books anymore. I think
109. 3:40that most scientific articles are good
110. 3:43not great, but I also think that for me
111. 3:47the key is the repetition
112. 3:49and the skill of just reading these
113. 3:51things over and over. My first thing
114. 3:53that I would have read, I probably
115. 3:55understood 1%. And now maybe I'm at 9 or
116. 3:5710%. It's been probably 5 years. Most of
117. 3:59it I still don't understand, but I'm
118. 4:01committed to it. I learn a lot and I'm
119. 4:03absorbing a lot. It spans like I read
120. 4:05economic theory, I read game theory, I
121. 4:08read science, I read physics, whatever I
122. 4:11think is interesting. I just kind of
123. 4:13read it. Now if I don't understand it, I
124. 4:14can also feed it into, you know, chat
125. 4:16GPT or Claude and Grok and get a
126. 4:18summary.
127. 4:21I really believe in this idea of the
128. 4:23prepared mind, which is that it's sort
129. 4:25of where luck meets opportunity. And so
130. 4:27the luck you cannot control, but the
131. 4:29opportunity you can control, which is
132. 4:31how you frame what that moment is to
133. 4:33you. And the way that you frame that is
134. 4:35by being prepared and having a prepared
135. 4:37mind. And so being studied in the things
136. 4:39that you think are important to you,
137. 4:40that you're fascinated by, that you have
138. 4:41the energy to to learn about. It's just
139. 4:43very easy to just stop. And it's
140. 4:45actually quite hard and it's demanding
141. 4:46to not. 9:00 to 10:00 at night is not a
142. 4:49great time to actually try to digest and
143. 4:51read
144. 4:53technical things, of which I only
145. 4:54understand 8%.
146. 4:56But I do it.
147. 4:58And I do it because I will connect the
148. 5:00dots in a random email that I get and
149. 5:04that will lead to a breakthrough. I'll
150. 5:06give you an example. In my investing
151. 5:08career, I spent many iterations trying
152. 5:10to build these machines that can take
153. 5:12small quantities of blood and analyze
154. 5:15what's going inside in your body. It was
155. 5:17like the tricorder that you saw in Star
156. 5:19Trek. It was like I always thought like
157. 5:21that must be possible. Like why isn't
158. 5:22somebody building that? The first few
159. 5:24iterations of that
160. 5:26failed.
161. 5:27And even though I had all these other
162. 5:28failures leading up to that, I kept
163. 5:31reading, I kept trying to understand
164. 5:32like what were these things that were
165. 5:35broken or wrong technically in our
166. 5:37assumptions. And then somewhere in 2021
167. 5:40or so, I got a random inbound email
168. 5:43from this incredible scientist. She
169. 5:45talked about how she developed this
170. 5:48nanoparticle and that it can do this
171. 5:51incredible level of sensing that was
172. 5:53impossible before. I think I just posted
173. 5:55about this, but she has this bladder
174. 5:57test now, which is just a urine-based
175. 6:00bladder test. Her sensitivity and
176. 6:02specificity are completely off the
177. 6:03charts. I understood enough of what she
178. 6:05was saying where I was like, "We got to
179. 6:07figure this out." And so, I remember
180. 6:09jumping into it. And what I found was
181. 6:10something absolutely incredible. And we
182. 6:12partnered
183. 6:13together, and it's been 5 years. My hope
184. 6:16is that she and I will be able to
185. 6:18build a business that makes early
186. 6:20detection cancer tests for every kind of
187. 6:22cancer. And so, I feel very lucky that I
188. 6:24met Dakshi. But,
189. 6:26I also feel like I had a reasonably
190. 6:28prepared mind
191. 6:30so that when that door opened, I was
192. 6:31able to walk through it with my own two
193. 6:33feet. That's how I think about it.