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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can keep using a company's product while disliking its politics; refusing everything you disagree with is not required.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  The world would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share all my politics.

  youtube.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There are only two levers on anybody's motivation: change what the reward means to them, or lower the effort of getting started.

  Their words

  You can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start you know just initiate the task and often starting can be a huge motivational pull.

  youtube.com

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  Planning a day or a week in advance works because it pays the brain's decision cost once rather than dozens of times.

  energy

  Their words

  Every decision has a cost in terms as we've seen the brain having to put in invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that.

  youtube.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  Humanity is not good enough at molecular biology to make drugs that restore vision or hearing or stop Parkinson's.

  Their words

  People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the like the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.

  youtube.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Coding is not just another application domain for AI; it is the meta-skill that lets AI generate its own training material and start the recursive self-improvement loop.

  Their words

  Coding isn't yet another application domain -- it's the meta-skill required for AI to automatically develop its own training material, via symbolic world models. That's how the RSI loop actually kicks off.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The common failure is picking the technology with the fastest early ramp and extrapolating it, when that curve plateaus below what the product needs.

  Their words

  common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.

  youtube.com

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A few senior individual contributors can be paid VP money and still cost less than the layered product org they replace.

  Their words

  go and take the comp required to have five L5s reporting to one L7 and then four L7s reporting to one VP and now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people?

  youtube.com

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

From one piece Printing tiny photos for paper journals 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Bluetooth technology is generally unreliable.

  Their words

  Virtually nothing that uses Bluetooth is reliable, and this is no exception.

  Printing tiny photos for paper journalsmacwright.com

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  AirPods' reliability comes from using a proprietary protocol rather than standard Bluetooth.

  Their words

  AirPods work flawlessly because they're cheating with a proprietary Apple-only protocol.

  Printing tiny photos for paper journalsmacwright.com

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

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  Flow is not required to perform at your best: a clutch state, in which you perform well and it still feels like hard work, is just as legitimate a peak state.

  Their words

  And both of those are perfectly reasonable states in which to perform. And assuming that you have to be in flow to perform just isn't true if you look at like how you know athletes perform in the moment.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is raising public expectations of government service at the same time it changes what government must deliver.

  government

  Their words

  Every state, and the federal government right along with them, is about to be asked to do a lot more than keep the lights on.

  North Carolina’s bold move on civil serviceeatingpolicy.com

AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The special reasoning-trace delimiter tokens used by reasoning models are cosmetic and not required for good reasoning performance.

  Their words

  These <think> and </think> tags are cosmetic with respect to reasoning ability. They do not make the model reason, and they are not required to achieve good reasoning performance.

  Controlling Reasoning Effort in LLMsmagazine.sebastianraschka.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ship for three to six months with nobody reading the code and the codebase gets so bad that starting over is easier than fixing it — we ran a lights-off software factory and shut it down.

  Their words

  We tried this. We built a lights off software factory in July of 2025 and by November we had shut it down. I think it takes about three to six months of you shipping all the time with nobody reading the code before you realize like, wow, this is getting way worse and it's easier to start over than it is to fix it.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  All you need to build a business today is free open source software, a VPS, an AI API and S3-style file hosting.

  open source

  Their words

  All you really need today to build a business is 100% free open source software that charges you $0/mo a VPS server an API to do some required AI stuff some R2/S3 file hosting

  levels.io

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Thunderbolt's official wake-from-sleep certification does not guarantee the feature works reliably in practice.

  Their words

  At this point, I had pretty much given up and filed Thunderbolt's "wake from sleep" promise in the "unreliable" folder, right next to Bluetooth Pairing.

  A dock that finally wakes up reliablyfabiensanglard.net

Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2 Light Bar

  Their words

  Using these BenQ light bars allows me to better illuminate my desk at night without having to keep my overhead lights on. What I really like about this light bar is that it can be configured to automatically turn off when I leave the desk.

  randallwilk.dev

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The job has always been to solve human problems, and software is not required for every human endeavour.

  Their words

  It's like maybe you don't understand what the job has always been. We are trying to solve human problems and we use whatever technology is required. In some cases, the technology happens to be software and software ain't required for every human endeavor.

  youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Directing a swarm of coding agents is a different, multi-threaded way of thinking that costs more cognitive load, and the engineers who make the switch have doubled their output.

  coding agents

  Their words

  it required a different way of thinking and the cognitive load might be a little higher but the output is dramatic and we have seen our best engineer double their output.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Chilean web engineer building web experiences since 2006; co-founder of Media Creators and writes at iolivares.com.

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  Philips HUE Lights

  Their words

  Since 2016, using this IoT amazing lights.

  iolivares.com

French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Sony MDR 1000X

  Their words

  Sony MDR 1000X. A noise-cancelling headphone with 2 modes: wired or wireless (bluetooth). I also have some Airpods.

  maxpou.fr

Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.

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  Philips Hue

  Their words

  Philips Hue lights and Noguchi lamps — pricey but I love them.

  jxnl.co

Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  f.lux

  Their words

  Use red and amber lights in the evening . Bluelight is bad for sleep. You can get blue light blocking apps (f.lux), glasses and also turn red mode on your phone.

  protocol.bryanjohnson.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Batteries will replace transmission as the cheapest way to keep the lights on, and the grid will shrink rather than grow.

  energy

  Their words, before

  we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.

  Their words now

  Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Batteries will replace transmission as the cheapest way to keep the lights on, and the grid will shrink rather than grow.

  energy

  Their words

  Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.

  Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Economic growth from AI waits on change management, not on model capability: the work artifact and the workflow have to change first.

  Their words

  even if the tech is diffusing fast uh this time around for true economic growth to appear it has to sort of diffuse to a point where the work the work artifact and the workflow has to change and so that's kind of one place where I think uh the change management required for a corporation to truly change I think is something we shouldn't discount

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West

  Their words

  Mind candy: A fun travelogue which does what it says in the title. It pretty much satisfies any impulses I might have to actually see any of the artworks in question. No familiarity with art-critical jargon required, though long passages are (more or less explicitly) art criticism.

  bactra.org

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Intuitive physics can be learned from passive observation alone, so an embodied robot is not required to understand the physical world.

  Their words

  But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates.

  youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The Rails doctrine's 'progress over stability' is the one point that dated: churn is not progress, and stability turned out to be worth more.

  JavaScript

  On changing their mind

  I used to think it required more churn to get progress to stay on the leading edge of new stuff. And I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community.

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Compiler mechanisms that force a required optimization to occur, rather than relying on incidental compiler behavior, are a more robust way to write performance-sensitive code.

  Their words

  I'm hopeful this framework will turn out to be a much more robust style for writing performance-sensitive code, especially over time and as compilers evolve.

  blog.nelhage.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

  No UFO or UAP data comes anywhere near the standard of evidence required to claim non-human technology.

  Their words

  I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there's any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence.

  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

  His case does not rest on the impact hypothesis: what is load-bearing is that the Younger Dryas happened at all, whatever triggered it.

  Their words

  In a sense, it’s not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I’m saying, it’s the Younger Dryas that’s central to what I’m saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger, something caused it.

  youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  NASA can still be reorganised into an agency that exploits cheap heavy lift, and the next administrator will decide whether it is.

  Their words, before

  The required organizational transition is equivalent in scope and difficulty to the Apollo program, and will be made or broken during the tenure of the next NASA administrator.

  Their words now

  At the time I was optimistic, now I am not.

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  Amy

  Their words

  Overall, required viewing for any Winehouse fan and of general psychiatric interest; possibly too painful to watch for others.

  gwern.net

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Controlling a scheming model needs no research breakthrough, which is what makes it the tractable half of the problem today.

  Their words

  We think no fundamental research breakthroughs are required for labs to implement safety measures that meet our standard for AI control for early transformatively useful AIs; we think that meeting our standard would substantially reduce the risks posed by intentional subversion.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

German web developer, writer and conference speaker. Publishes the Web Weekly newsletter and blogs about the web platform at stefanjudis.com.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Elgato Key Light

  Their words

  For proper lighting I use two Elgato Key Lights (they're pricey but absolute worth it) and the Sony ZV-1 as a fancy webcam. If you're aiming for a high quality in your recordings I can highly recommend this setup.

  stefanjudis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Sony ZV-1

  Their words

  For proper lighting I use two Elgato Key Lights (they're pricey but absolute worth it) and the Sony ZV-1 as a fancy webcam. If you're aiming for a high quality in your recordings I can highly recommend this setup.

  stefanjudis.com

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Making American farms more productive shrinks cropland in the rest of the world by more than it adds at home.

  America

  Their words

  Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

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.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard

  Their words

  Keyboard: Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard

  lennysnewsletter.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most projects fail before they even begin because the activation energy required to start is too high.

  energy

  Their words

  Most projects fail before they start. They fail because the activation energy is too high.

  jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkeringcrawshaw.io

Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  A Personal Odyssey

  Their words

  A Personal Odyssey by Thomas Sowell My review here . Insights into the mindset required to climb out of poverty and remake one’s fortunes. A countervailing perspective from the above Orwell work.

  robkhenderson.com

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Be careful wishing for a world with no war at all, because what would be required to enforce it might be worse than a little war.

  Their words

  What I’m saying is that there is an argument that if you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for because what’s required in order for there to be no war might be worse than a little war.

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Palm Beach Finland

  Their words

  Mind candy: black comedy crime fiction / murder mystery, in rural Finland. I enjoyed both the comic darkness and the convincing happy endings all around. (At least, happy by the characters' own lights...) My first Tuomainen, but I'd read more if they crossed my path and I was in the right mood.

  bactra.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Historians should be required to publish photographs or transcriptions of the archival sources they cite, the way scientists are expected to publish their data.

  Their words

  Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online.

  ageofinvention.xyz

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scaling up GPT will never produce AGI, because a model trained on cross-entropy loss cannot get there; reinforcement learning in rich environments is required.

  AGI

  Their words

  When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.

  youtube.com

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?

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Expecting parents should be required to take a mandatory course before caring for a newborn.

  Their words

  There should obviously be like a mandatory four-hour course every expecting parent has to take before they're actually in charge of a newborn.

  10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A dependency you would need engineer-months to replace or fork is a critical one, and retaining its maintainer is straightforward business sense.

  Their words

  This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.

  words.filippo.io

Economist writing on why technological progress slowed and what would restart it — energy, supersonic flight, housing and the regulations around them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Certification, not engineering, is what gates revenue for a new aircraft company.

  Their words

  FAA certification is required before you transport anything for money.

  Cargo airships could be bigelidourado.com

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Drama Bookshop

  Their words

  Recently though, I went to The Drama Bookshop, which was a delightful surprise. It is the closest I have come to the experience of a Manhattan bookshop as a third place in the kind of Prairie Lights mode.

  blgtylr.substack.com

Economist at the University of Houston; wrote Fully Grown, on why a slow-growing economy is a sign of success, and blogs at Growth Economics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sustained growth in living standards required productivity to accelerate and population growth to fall at the same time.

  Their words

  It was an acceleration in productivity combined with a decline in population growth that put us on a slow trudge towards utopia.

  Review of DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia"growthecon.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Klamper disc calipers

  Their words

  The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas the hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of the last eighteen months.

  craigmod.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

From one piece Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An invention only matters when the principle, a workable design and an economically viable use for it all arrive together; the idea on its own changes nothing.

  Their words

  The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.

  Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Industrial Revolution was not inevitable: it needed a set of very specific preconditions that only Britain, at that moment, actually had.

  Their words

  In my view the key takeaway here is just how contingent the industrial revolution was: the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period.

  Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fast capability gains are likely, and they can break many of the assumptions alignment depends on at the same moment.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Fast capability gains seem likely, and may break lots of previous alignment-required invariants simultaneously.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

Indonesian software engineer, educator and engineering manager at Zero One Group; open-source enthusiast writing at ripandis.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Keychron K3

  Their words

  Mechanical keyboard with Gateron Brown switches that are comfortable for long coding sessions. Long battery life and bluetooth connectivity make it highly flexible.

  ripandis.com

Product leadership coach and writer of the “Ask Gib” newsletter. Former VP of Product at Netflix and Chief Product Officer at Chegg; speaks and runs workshops on product strategy.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  7 Powers

  Their words

  This book describes the foundation required for building a “hard to copy” advantage.

  askgib.substack.com

German developer; founder and lead developer of Mastodon, the decentralized open-source social network.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Razer Huntsman Elite

  Their words

  Peripheral-wise, I have a mechanical Razer Huntsman Elite keyboard, a Razer Mamba Elite mouse on a Razer Goliathus Chroma mousepad, and Razer Nommo Chroma loudspeakers. The lights cheer me up.

  usesthis.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Capitalism without Capital

  Their words

  Capitalism Without Capital is the first book I’ve seen that tackles them in depth, and I think it should be required reading for policymakers.

  gatesnotes.com

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Messy Middle

  Their words

  I was up very late last night reading a great book that will appear in stores soon written by Scott Belsky entitled The Messy Middle that explains why this passion is required.

  25iq.com