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Co-founder and chief investment officer of Cambria Investment Management. He has written several books on quantitative asset allocation, blogs at Meb Faber Research and hosts The Meb Faber Show.

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  Over the last two centuries, the global stock market has never lost money in nominal terms across any 20-year period.

  Their words

  In the last 225 years, the global stock market has never experienced a 20-year period where stocks lost money in nominal terms.

  10 Stats from Investing in Americamebfaber.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Work produced by one frontier model should be reviewed by a different one, for the same reason a good programmer's work improves under a good peer's review.

  Their words

  Why are we surprised? Even if you're a good programmer, if you finish a job and you ask your also very good peer to review it, you're gonna end up with better code. Of course you're gonna end up with better code. So build that into your process.

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Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  The global fall in births over the past two centuries is mostly explained by falling child mortality, and that part of the question is settled.

  Their words

  The main cause of falling fertility globally over the last 200 years has been declining child mortality.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

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  Fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today; the only open question is whether that takes decades or centuries.

  energy

  Their words

  I know that nuclear fision will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. somebody will do that and it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's going to be in the future decades or the future centuries

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Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  A book of radically unusual ideas drifts unread for centuries until a decade's new questions happen to be answered inside it, and then everyone reads it at once.

  Their words

  It is often the case that a work which contains radically unusual ideas will drift along being not particularly zoomed in on by society and not widely read until it hits a moment that the new questions being asked in that century or that decade are answered by something in that text.

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Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

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  Shareholder primacy is about forty years old rather than a natural law, and for centuries before it a corporation existed to pursue a specific beneficial purpose.

  Their words

  this idea is old enough that we now have a generation of people who have been raised as if this was a natural law. This is how capitalism has always been. But that's wrong. For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea.

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Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  Dangerous Blues

  Their words

  Policoff has written three novels, including 2022's Dangerous Blues, a book I really enjoyed and reviewed positively here.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

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  Habits stick because every repetition casts a vote for an identity, not because of the outcome any single repetition produces.

  Their words

  So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So, when you show up at the gym today, you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. When you sit down and make one sales call, you are casting a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you are casting a vote for being a writer. And no, doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for that identity.

  The Silent Cost of Bad Habits | James Clearyoutube.com

Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

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  This Brutal Moon

  Their words

  The best book I read this year was also the last book I reviewed (and yes, I snuck the review under the wire for that reason): Bethany Jacobs's This Brutal Moon, the conclusion of the Kindom Trilogy that started with These Burning Stars. I thought the first two books of the series were interesting but flawed, but the conclusion blew me away and improved the entire trilogy in retrospect. Like all books I rate 10 out of 10, I'm sure a large part of my reaction is idiosyncratic, but two friends of mine also loved the conclusion so it's not just me.

  eyrie.org

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

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  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets — they were acts of terror against women and children, and Americans should say so before condemning the Mongols.

  America

  Their words

  We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children.

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Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  Physics will be unified again as it has been before; the obstacle is that relativity and quantum mechanics already explain almost everything we can measure.

  Their words

  But I have faith that we've been doing this for centuries and we've made progress before. There's no reason why we should stop.

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Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.

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  How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning

  Their words

  Recently I reviewed Adrian Kind’s 2025 book, “How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning,” on this substack. I had mentioned that Kind’s book is the first systematic, in-depth, book-length philosophical investigation into how psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions.

  psychiatrymargins.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  London did not lead England into coal: coal spread outwards from the Newcastle coalfield, and London was one of the last places to take it up.

  Their words

  Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries.

  Age of Invention: How Coal Really Wonageofinvention.xyz

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

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  Tools For Titans

  Their words

  Atomic Habits, Tools For Titans, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

  balajis.com

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  Atomic Habits

  Their words

  Atomic Habits, Tools For Titans, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

  balajis.com

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  The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

  Their words

  Atomic Habits, Tools For Titans, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

  balajis.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

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  A Mars base is not a backup plan for climate change or nuclear war, because self-sufficiency there is centuries away.

  Their words

  So, trying to establish a base on Mars it's going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it's not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  A semiconductor fab costs what it costs because it is a mass-production factory that has to hold atomic precision around the clock.

  Their words

  The second is that producing semiconductors requires almost unfathomable levels of precision.

  How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fabconstruction-physics.com

Investigative journalist; wrote Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain and Nuclear War: A Scenario, reconstructing what secret programmes actually did from interviews and declassified records.

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  Atomic weapons destroy cities and thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations, which makes the decision to build the thermonuclear bomb more confounding than the decision to drop the first two.

  Their words

  I mean even projects within the Manhattan Project defined thermonuclear weapon, the thermonuclear weapon as the evil thing. It was evil. It’s a weapon of genocide. Atomic weapons destroy cities, thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations.

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Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

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  Virtual-reality hangouts are the next step in humanity's long effort to close the gap of physical distance in communication.

  Their words

  It's the next step in a centuries-long human mission to conquer long-distance.

  All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  Cognitive Behavior Therapy

  Their words

  I recently reviewed Beck's book, which is written as a practical guide for therapists implementing CBT.

  scotthyoung.com

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

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  The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science

  Their words

  the poetic physicist Alan Lightman sets out to illuminate how these atomic constellations can be capable of such exultant spiritual experiences

  themarginalian.org

Theoretical computer scientist, Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. Writes the blog Shtetl-Optimized.

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  Human-level AI is most likely centuries or millennia away, so there is no reason to reorganise one's work around its arrival.

  Their words, before

  If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I'd say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia

  Their words now

  I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Human-level artificial intelligence is plausibly centuries or millennia away, and no trend supports a shorter estimate.

  Their words, before

  If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I’d say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia (with the obvious potential for black swans along the way).

  Their words now

  I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade.

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Intelligent liberal elites can badly mismanage the colonies they govern, in ways that persist for decades or centuries.

  Their words

  A simple understanding of coalitions, political competition, and limited resources will bring you rather quickly to the conclusion that intelligent liberal elites can screw up their colonies pretty badly and in ways that can persist for decades or centuries.

  tylercowen.com

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

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  The way we make things is out of tune with the time dimension of the natural world, and that has to change even if it means designing on the scale of centuries.

  Their words

  And the way of being in the physical world today is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all, and that needs to change.

  youtube.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  Historical myths are close to unkillable: once in print they keep being repeated for decades or centuries after being disproved.

  Their words

  Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.

  ageofinvention.xyz

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  Human-level AI will arrive in 5 to 20 years with 90% confidence, not in the decades-to-centuries range previously assumed.

  Their words

  Instead of decades to centuries, I now see it as 5 to 20 years with 90% confidence.

  yoshuabengio.org