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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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  Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade

  Their words

  And there is Jeremy A. Simmons, Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade

  marginalrevolution.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

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  Playground

  Their words

  Playground by Richard Powers is a strange and wonderful novel set (mostly) on a remote atoll in French Polynesia that follows the tangled lives of an environmental advocate, a sculptor, a tech entrepreneur, and a brilliant bookworm trying to escape the grinding poverty of Chicago's South Side. The richly drawn characters drive the story, but what I love most about the book is that it's a love letter to the ocean with prose that comes closer than anything else I've read to capturing what it feels like to, for example, dive a thriving coral reef.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China's real weakness is not its economy but its geography: it imports almost all its oil across an ocean its navy cannot defend.

  China

  Their words

  China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every SETI search ever conducted adds up to sampling a hot tub's worth of an ocean, so finding nothing tells us nothing.

  Their words

  And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it

  youtube.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Science explains the Younger Dryas freeze by the Gulf Stream shutting down but never explains what shut it down, and a comet impact is the elegant answer.

  Their words

  But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.

  youtube.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem. Previously led rider growth teams at Uber; has blogged on growth, network effects and marketplaces since 2007.

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  Solaris

  Their words

  Classic scifi. Guy shows up on a research station above a planet with a strange (alive??) ocean

  andrewchen.com