Vinod Khosla

Twenty-one essays on today's challenges, from technology and politics to truth.

Three false beliefs taught to young Americans, and how they harm their minds.

Network science on how success and reputation compound unequally

How the global elite's efforts to change the world keep the status quo in place.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

The scientists racing to make the immune system fight cancer: immunotherapy's story.

Incerto volume 4

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

Why organisms, cities and companies follow power laws set by their supply networks.

How prices are set in the contemporary art market, from dealers to auction houses.

The foundational science for any serious musician. Levitin explains what the auditory cortex actually does with rhythm, timbre, and expectation — why a note landing slightly behind the beat feels groovy rather than wrong, and why tension-resolution in harmony triggers the same neurochemistry as certain drugs. Knowing the mechanics does not kill the magic; it deepens it.

The textbook on deep learning: how machines learn layered concepts from data.

The five schools of machine learning, and the search for one algorithm to unite them.

Why organisations kill breakthrough projects, and how structure can protect them.

Venture capital from Arthur Rock to SoftBank, and why a few big bets pay for all.

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.

Challenger-brand economics against a dominant incumbent.

How Google and others turn behaviour into data to predict and steer what people do.

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

A 20-year test of 28,000 expert forecasts: foxes with many models beat hedgehogs.

Wallace-Wells's inventory of worst-case climate projections is included here not as a climate book but as a case study in what happens when institutions consistently discount long-term risk. The scenarios he describes are already visible in the data; they were predictable decades ago. This is what the failure of long-term thinking looks like from inside it.

The Stuyvesant Town deal and the largest real estate loss on record.

Background on how the obesity market got as large as it is.

Culture is how people behave when the leader is absent, and must be designed.

Early specialisation works only where rules are stable; elsewhere breadth wins.

Build habits by making them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

When and how to put speed before efficiency to capture a market before rivals.

Incerto volume 5