Raoul Pal

How people learned to measure risk, from early probability to portfolio theory.

How Jho Low diverted billions from Malaysia's 1MDB fund into parties and politics.

The history of finance by instrument: credit, bonds, stocks, insurance and property.

Eight centuries of defaults and banking crises show the same patterns recurring.

How a hedge fund's bond bets on borrowed money lost $4.6 billion in four months.

Diamond's central question — why did some civilizations come to dominate others over 10,000 years? — is precisely the kind of question that requires long-term thinking to even ask. The answer, rooted in geography and biology rather than culture or intelligence, is a model for how to reason about slow causes and fast effects.

Harari's concern — that humans may cede decision-making to opaque systems through preference rather than coercion — reframes the alignment problem as a cultural and political challenge, not only a technical one. Less rigorous than Bostrom or Russell, but more widely read, making it a useful lens for understanding public discourse.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

American history as a repeating cycle of four generational turnings, each 20 years.

The Good Judgment Project; the practices that measurably improve forecasts.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

Incentives and data applied to cheating teachers, sumo wrestlers and other puzzles.

Subtitled 'Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers'

Build, measure, learn: test what customers want with small experiments.

Flow, the state of full absorption in a hard task, and how to find it more often.

Michael Lewis's account of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration works as intellectual biography and as a second path through the research for readers who find academic writing slow. The friendship and its eventual fracture clarifies how two very different minds produced work that neither could have done alone.

Insider account of Facebook's ads business by a product manager.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee provide the economic context: AI as a general-purpose technology that decouples productivity from employment. The alignment problem doesn't exist in a vacuum — it plays out in economies where AI is already restructuring labor markets in ways that are hard to reverse.

The secretly funded litigation that destroyed Gawker.

Sound money must hold value over time, and Bitcoin's fixed supply makes it such.

The case that ageing is a disease that can be treated, and the theory behind it.