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20 September
President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.
At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities a… America Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
America: How dare trans athletes compete in women's sports?!! Japan: Hahahaha hold my beer Quoting @TrungTPhan Highlight package of a 52-year old Ichiro striking out Japan’s top high school girl baseball players wild. He legit does not give AF. Uses every pitch in his arsenal. America Related
19 September
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
It feels like mass culture died and was replaced with viral meme culture, but viral meme culture also died and was replaced with heavenbanning -- communal human culture is now just totally dead and everyone is consuming a personalized feed of algorithmic slop. Is that true? Related
18 September
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
17 September
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.
16 September
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Very interesting guy to follow @scottbrills #1 traveler on my site with 2,162,433 km traveled, 94 countries and 702 cities visited (!) Absolutely crazy and his timeline is full of crazy travel stories Quoting @scottbrills Looks like other people's claims that I've been one of the most traveled people they know are backed up, at least on one website. 😂 Related
Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
15 September
Writer of Lenny's Newsletter and host of Lenny's Podcast, covering product, growth and career in tech. Previously a product lead at Airbnb. Also an angel investor and advisor.
Growth tactic #13: "🎈Go anti-professional: One of the most viral LinkedIn posts of all time came from a manager who swapped her corporate headshot for a casual, no-makeup photo. Pick a norm of your own and break it in public. You might talk about how much roles actually pay or admit that a big launch didn’t actually meet internal expectations. People are tired of perfectly curated, glossy exteriors of the professional world, so a bit of human messiness will stand out." More here: lennysnewsletter.com
Quoting @lennysan 60+ creative growth ideas Everyone's running the same growth playbook: high-production launch videos, paid influencers, AEO, social, maybe some (poorly attended) events. Your competitors are in the same channels competing for the same eyeballs. But attention goes to what people don't see coming. Th… Related
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
immigration Europe
Their words
I think we should use this kinds of data to completely turn around Europe's immigration policy: - We should have super easy inflow for immigrants from countries whose previous immigrants have shown low crime rates You're from Japan? Just fly here and you can stay forever - We should then almost completely ban any inflow from countries whose previous immigrants have shown high crime rates with instant deportations
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@levelsio on X x.com
14 September
Professor of economics at George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair at the Mercatus Center. Co-writes the blog Marginal Revolution and co-authors the textbook Modern Principles of Economics with Tyler Cowen.
13 September
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.
12 September
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
9 September
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.
Inigo Fraser Jenkins (@AB_insights) on why the US track record isn't the whole story: Rank markets by market cap in 1899: the US and UK compounded beautifully. Japan, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France? Effectively wiped out. "There is this inherent survivorship bias in the way people think about long-run returns." Listen: https://t.co/mfnaUo1DNT Watch: youtube.com
Russia Related
8 September
Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.
"Flywheels: How Cities Are Creating Their Own Futures" was written by my friend Tom Alberg. We discussed how a flywheel effect is neutral since it compounds failure just as effectively as it compounds success. Failure can breed more failure [repeat]. discovery.org
Related
5 September
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
4 September
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
2 September
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
29 August
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Their words
In the 70s and 80s, Japanese companies could get cheap plentiful bank loans to develop new products and explore new markets. Today, they can't. Innovation is downstream of finance.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
23 August
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Europe government
Their words
I think most high skilled Europeans are happy to pay (even high) taxes That is, if the government does a great job like Singapore or Dubai or Korea or Japan and most things work well You pay the government for a service and you get safe cities, great public services and great healthcare back
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levels.io
20 August
Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.
19 August
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
11 August
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
Different states, counties, and cities trying different things. Beautiful and effective competition of policies. I doubt any tax bills are going down in NY State. Quoting @SaraEisen In Loudoun Virginia home to more than 200 data centers, tax revenue from data centers has exploded. As a result, over the past 10years, they lowered the real property tax rate every year from $1.145 in tax year 2016 to $0.805 cents per $100 in assessed value for 2026. Related
9 August
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
30 July
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
23 July
Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.
22 July
Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.
17 July
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.
28 June
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
25 June
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
21 June
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
18 June
Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.
government
Their words
Just I explained to President Trump, TSMC when they started they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, you look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support.
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youtube.com
16 June
Editor at Works in Progress writing on architecture, urbanism and housing policy, and a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies and Create Streets. Has worked in think tanks, academia and government in Britain.
From one piece
Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
Without densification restrictions, housing shortages will only ever be serious in cities where land is really intensely scarce, as in Hong Kong.
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worksinprogress.news
Europe
Their words
In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.
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worksinprogress.news
Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.
Their words
And everyone says, "Why are they liking this man? He is a cruel murdering tyrant." And the answer is for the first time in generations, they have had something close to fair justice.
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youtube.com
14 June
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.
Their words
I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real, there's, right, we've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right?
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youtube.com
9 June
Cyborg anthropologist and UX designer; author of Calm Technology and co-founder of the geolocation startup Geoloqi.
Excited to see @mui_labo highlighted by the Government of Japan! Quoting @nobi The Japanese government is lending its support to Calm Tech products from @mui_labo in Japan, helping bring a quieter and more thoughtful vision of technology to the world. government Related
4 June
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
Secondary Stops in Cities on Intercity Rail Intercity trains usually only call at the main cities, and only at their main stations. However, in some cases, they make more than one stop in the same city. Examples include the Northeast Corridor with its two Boston…
Related
30 May
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
28 May
Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.
26 May
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.
15 May
Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
14 May
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience. In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I wo… China Related
27 April
Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.
Bluesky My favorite LLM prompt: “List the top cities in {COUNTRY}, and anthropomorphize each one, listing the good-natured stereotypes and jokes that other people in {COUNTRY} say about people in this city.” LLMs Related
x.com My favorite LLM prompt: “List the top cities in {COUNTRY}, and anthropomorphize each one, listing the good-natured stereotypes and jokes that other people in {COUNTRY} say about people in this city.” LLMs Related
14 April
Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.
self-driving cars
Their words
Self-driving cars seem to be just more cars, and people who dislike cars don't love that. But the electric robotaxi offers much more potential
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ideas.4brad.com
10 April
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
9 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest roun… Quoting @staysaasy The degree to which you are awed by AI is perfectly correlated with how much you use AI to code. OpenAI Related
4 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Wow, this tweet went very viral! I wanted share a possibly slightly improved version of the tweet in an "idea file". The idea of the idea file is that in this era of LLM agents, there is less of a point/need of sharing the specific code/app, you just share the idea, then the other person's agent customizes & builds it for your specific needs. So here's the idea in a gist format: https://t.co/NlAfEJjtJV You can give this to your agent and it can build you your own LLM wiki and guide you on how to use it etc. It's intentionally kept a little bit abstract/vague because there are so many directio… Quoting @karpathy LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as mar… LLMs Related
10 March
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
27 February
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
24 February
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
12 February
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Their words
my criticism of MoltBook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted. Which, just look at the incentive of how the whole thing was used. It’s obvious to me at least that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post it on X in order to go viral.
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youtube.com
14 January
American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.
11 December 2025
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
Their words
Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.
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construction-physics.com
26 November 2025
Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.
Their words
In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Read this book about Japanese aesthetics while visiting Japan — it provided an interesting context. (B+)
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kottke.org
18 November 2025
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
22 October 2025
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
20 October 2025
Co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company behind Transmit, Coda, Nova and the Playdate handheld console.
Also at PRGE, I was greatly tempted to buy a CIB Yukawa-edition Dreamcast. For those not familiar, Mr. Yukawa was an actual Senior Managing Director at Sega who became an overnight celebrity in Japan for a series of hilarious self-deprecating commercials about the Dreamcast. When demand temporarily outpaced supply of the consoles, Yukawa was brought out again to make a series of equally funny "apology" commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_nK7j4G6fQ He was so well known, they literally put him on the box for a while. He even got his own game and a number of cameos in others. Related
15 August 2025
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
energy
Their words
the meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way you UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change.
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youtube.com
13 August 2025
Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.
China
Their words
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
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youtube.com
31 July 2025
Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.
From one piece
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
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youtube.com
Their words
But I think Japan had defeated the Mongols. I would say. Japanese deserve credit for that victory. And then the sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon.
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youtube.com
China
Their words
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
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youtube.com
28 May 2025
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
15 May 2025
Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.
Computational Public Space. A talk about a values-driven approach to integrating computation into cities. (40 min) youtube.com
Related
23 March 2025
Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.
Their words
what is it that creates true virality? It's not viral mechanics. It's word of mouth. It is brand that this is how you can kickstart a brand.
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youtube.com
28 February 2025
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
3 February 2025
Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.
energy
Their words
So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.
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youtube.com
29 January 2025
Economist, senior research fellow and director of the Urbanity project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, working on housing and land use.
America
Their words
The American cities with the highest housing prices have the worst homelessness problems.
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worksinprogress.news
1 January 2025
Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.
Their words, before
Such "taxi" services where the cars are also used with drivers at other times and with extended geography, in 10 major US cities NET 2025
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Their words now
This is unlikely to happen in the first half of this century.
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7 December 2024
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
1 November 2024
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
30 September 2024
Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.
From one piece
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
But then we have the interesting case of in the Postclassic, they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the Classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings.
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youtube.com
Their words
I think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses.
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youtube.com
5 September 2024
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
3 July 2024
Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.
Their words
You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Japan, 1955, CC) 3.5 Chishu Ryu is one of my favorite actors, but he has a fairly small role. Very nice cinematography. Recommended for fans of nostalgia.
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themoneyillusion.com
Their words
Evil Does Not Exist (Japan) 3.7 This is turning out to be an outstanding year for Japanese films. As is so often the case with films from Asia, it begs to be seen on the big screen. Hard to summarize—imagine if Apichatpong Weerasethakul had directed Local Hero. Warning—his films always start slow, and build to a strong second half.
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themoneyillusion.com
12 April 2024
Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
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Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
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article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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