The Best Words I Found Last Month
optimized for "novel and interesting"
Ratings reminder (points for novel and interesting):
1-3: filtered out, bottom 90%. 4 and above was worth saving
4: read if intriguing, but you’re not missing too much
5: skippable if busy, but missing out if this is your thing
6: uncommon quality, worth a read if at all interested
7: pretty much everyone should read this
Disclaimers reminder:
summaries are haphazard and ratings are intentionally subjective
not necessarily an endorsement, just made me think
(Full explanation and complete history available 👉 here 👈)
note: omitting the 4s this time because it’s already too long without them. They’re in the full database still, and were all worth saving, so worth a look
5/7 - How Big Things Get Done — experience + careful planning + modularity
5/7 - MrBeast employee handbook — strategic clarity, demanding performance culture, extreme urgency, and lots of interesting YouTube production tidbits
7/7 - AI 2027 — really believable path superintelligence very soon; very important to be aware of
7/7 - Trust Me I'm Lying — this alarmingly reshaped my model of modern media, and what people end up seeing and believing
5/7 - How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps — this guy can engineer lightning strikes and it’s really helpful to hear how he thinks about it
5/7 - AGI is Still 30 Years Away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu — main claim is LLMs are still really narrow intelligence, like playing Go; missing a lot of critical stuff, creativity, long term planning, etc
6/7 - 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics — very dense and interesting
5/7 - The fewer the merrier — a bunch of examples of consolidated land ownership leading to privately-funded public goods
5/7 - People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people) — a good understanding of charisma, and well written; it’s about self-security
5/7 - How Hyman Rickover Built the Nuclear Navy — demanding management, high agency, and bureaucratic savvy
5/7 - Burrito Now, Pay Later — useful, actually: let banks sell risk to the entity most willing to own it
5/7 - Two 2018 Facebook Strategy Emails Released in Their FTC Case — really excellent social media dynamics/strategy discussion backed by unique data
5/7 - Your Book Review: How the War Was Won — resoundingly: economic production
5/7 - Resources on Progress Studies — excellent collection of writing, saving here for reference
5/7 - Primer on Universal Basic Income — best overview of UBI I’ve seen
6/7 - Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue: The Two Economies: The Top 40% and the Bottom 60% — totally different worlds: top 40% doing great, but income barely increasing and death rates rising for bottom 60%
5/7 - The Outsider CEO of Hong Kong — grounded guy, big on fundamentals and markets
6/7 - The Great Powers Index: 2024; How the Leading 24 Countries Are Doing and Their Prospects for the Next 10 Years — detailed breakdown of a highly predictive model of future growth
7/7 - Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail — extremely explanatory world model, significantly updated mine
5/7 - Personal and physical security for founders, operators, and investors — good personal security tips from a previous Secret Service agent
5/7 - Service costs aren't exploding anymore — also real median wages are going up again and have been for a while
6/7 - Matthew Dicks: The Storytelling Expert — really really excellent; general principles for what makes things engaging
5/7 - The Path to Energy Superabundance — great, dense discussion between solar and fission proponents
7/7 - 7 Powers — this is clearly the correct way to think about profit durability.
5/7 - Michael Levin - Non-neural intelligence: biological architecture problem-solving in diverse spaces — super fascinating talk that contradicts the simplified model of emergent behavior from purely genetics or neurons
6/7 - The Death and Life of Great American Cities — really excellent and insightful on urban planning, and cities are still making all the same mistakes they were 60 years ago
Ideas worth spreading?
(this post will be deleted next week — the full archive has all this and more)