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

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  Ambition does not equate with happiness: in the Harvard aging cohort it was the people who lived average lives who reported being happiest.

  ambition

  Their words

  But when they looked at the happiness levels of these people, it was the average person who actually would self-report the highest levels of happiness. So ambition doesn't necessarily equate with happiness, which I think many people would agree with with that.

  youtube.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

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  Benchmade Mini Bugout in S90V

  Their words

  In the end, the MBO in S90V is probably the best EDC knife Benchmade has ever made and it is a jewel in my collection (the Valet and the Aphid were pretty good too; Benchmade can we get a re-issue of the Aphid with upgraded materials?). The exposed rear tang is an irksome but ultimately minor issue. The size, refinement, steel, and weight make this one of the very best knives on the market right now.

  everydaycommentary.com

Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.

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  Once mining is automated end to end, a mining company is nothing but the owner of some real estate.

  Their words

  Will mining get automated? And if it does, not just the movement of the materials, but every part of mining. Then what is a mining company? It just owns real estate.

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Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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  A narrow, highly accurate model can beat a general one inside its own domain, as AlphaFold did, and materials science and chip design are next.

  Their words

  I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

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  Other engineering fields compile deep reference books about their materials and software has nothing of the kind, not even a five-hundred-page book on how to version an API.

  Their words

  And that kind of compiling of information about the materials is something other fields do that we don't do. An analogy that I would think of in software would be something like a 500-page book on how to version an API.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

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  Learning from input does not mean refusing grammar books; the point is to notice patterns, not to master the rules.

  Their words

  Some people think CI means you reject grammar books. I disagree. I often reference grammar materials and find these explanations useful. However, the focus of my learning is not to “master the rules”. Grammar resources simply help me notice and make sense of patterns in the language.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

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  Efficiency is the wrong measure of a food system; what matters is what it costs at a level of energy and materials that can be sustained.

  energy

  Their words

  a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.

  chrissmaje.com

Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.

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  Performance can still double, but cost and area will no longer come down with it unless new materials or new design methods arrive.

  Their words

  and then the power and the cost and then you can double the performance but you cannot double down on the cost and and area. So those are the thing you have to give give way unless you find some new way of material new way of design.

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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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  Only a fifth of venture-backed founders are still CEO three years after going public, and the standard documents their lawyers gave them are why.

  startups

  Their words

  According to Harvard Law School, among venturebacked companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, okay, only 20% of founders are still the CEO 3 years after going public.

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Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

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  The moral debt for AI's capabilities is owed to the authors of the public data used to train it, not to the AI companies.

  AnthropicOpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  We owe a debt, not to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, but to the authors of the free public raw materials that were used to train AI.

  Reflections on AI-assisted Programmingyihui.org

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.

From one piece Back To The Garden 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age framework names historical eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive, not what those societies actually valued.

  Their words

  That now ubiquitous timeline names eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive in the dirt.

  Back To The Gardenadjacentpossible.substack.com

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  Archaeological interpretations of human history are biased toward artifacts made of durable materials that survived, not what mattered most to the people who made them.

  Their words

  archeologists naturally build their interpretations of human history out of artifacts that survive the passage of deep time.

  Back To The Gardenadjacentpossible.substack.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  For small strategic materials markets like rare earths the right policy is a stockpile, not domestic production.

  Their words

  Stockpiles provide insurance while conserving our valuable labor.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

  Their words

  Product managers must learn to give and receive feedback with candor and kindness, and without withholding. This book, also from the Harvard Negotiation Project, will teach you how.

  bringthedonuts.com

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  Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

  Their words

  from the Harvard Negotiation Project. A helpful book to have on-hand.

  bringthedonuts.com

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

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  The United States could localise the entire solar supply chain, from dirt to finished module, in two years or less if it started today.

  solarAmerica

  Their words

  And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.

  youtube.com

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

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  Chinese industrial policy worked, and the evidence is that the cities which pushed hardest on a sector ended up best at both production and patents.

  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.

  youtube.com

Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide, Spectre and Kino; formerly a designer at Apple.

From one piece Physicality: the new age of UI 2 beliefs · lux.camera

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  Interfaces are returning to skeuomorphism, but as behaviour rather than lacquer: clear, graphic elements that act like materials from the real world.

  Their words

  We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.

  Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

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  Opaque, inert, obstructive interface elements will become as niche as the full-screen command line once interfaces are infused with dynamic materials.

  Their words

  Opaque, inert and obstructive elements might occupy the same place as full-screen command line interfaces — a powerful niche UI that was a marker in history, passed on by the windowed environment of the multi-tasking, graphical user interface revolution.

  Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  HBR IdeaCast

  Their words

  an episode per week on a management topic featured in Harvard Business Review.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.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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  Building materials are already about as cheap as civilisation knows how to make them, so cheaper materials are not where housing savings will come from.

  Their words

  Bulk building materials are already mass-produced in factories, and are among the cheapest materials civilization is capable of producing.

  What Makes Housing So Expensive?construction-physics.com

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

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  Harvard's governance is broken because its self-perpetuating board can never be rebalanced from outside.

  Their words

  It's really a self-perpetuating board that effectively elects its own members. Once the balance tips, politically, one way or another, it can be kept that way forever. There's no kind of rebalancing system.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

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  Technology is a lever on the world -- the way to make more with less -- and productivity growth is the main driver of wages, industries and jobs.

  economists

  Their words

  We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less. Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past.

  The Techno-Optimist Manifestoa16z.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 runaway emergence we are trying to prevent in AGI is exactly what we should be trying to cause in synthetic biology and bio-based materials.

  AGI

  Their words

  What we don't want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology. What we don't want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to happen with bio-based materials.

  youtube.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

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  Software's real advantage over physical engineering is consistency: a component does what it is specified to do every time, while physical materials only fall within a tolerance.

  Their words

  Software is far more consistent than any other kind of engineering.

  We Are Not Specialhillelwayne.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

  Their words

  In today's world of massive consumer choice, it's easy to end up locked in competitive battles where no one stands out. Harvard professor Youngme Moon makes a great series of cases for how you can still stand out. What I particularly liked about this book was it's not like your average marketing book; instead it's like an extended conversation with Moon exploring key concepts on differentiation without the heavy-handedness of specific rules.

  jasonevanish.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  The cognitive costs of air pollution are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasised -- most EPA materials do not mention them at all.

  Their words

  Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented. However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in most EPA materials.

  Pollutionpatrickcollison.com