Chamath Palihapitiya: "The Vital Question is incredible."

Matt Ridley: “In this, his third book about energy and life, [Lane] comes triumphantly close to cracking the secret of why life is the way it is, to a depth that would boggle any ancient philosopher’s mind.”

Bill Gates: "This biology book blew me away. A compelling case for how energy made us who we are."

David Friedberg: "It was a really good read"

Charlie Munger: "I had to read The Selfish Gene twice before I fully understood it"

Matt Ridley: "From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer."

Brian Armstrong: "It was interesting but I found I had already heard many of the ideas in this book, which speaks to how influential it is."

Nick Szabo: "A Crucial book on our origins and our natures"

Matt Ridley: "A fascinating, surprising and beautifully written history of technology, economics, and culture, told through the thread of textiles, humanity's most indispensable artefacts. I loved it."

Marc Andreessen: "The story of technology is a story of human ingenuity, and nowhere is this more clear than in the story of textiles: the original technology, going beyond what we commonly think of as 'tech.'

As with many technologies, we suffer an amnesia about them when we enjoy them in abundance, as Postrel observes; her book gives us back our memories about this technology that we use every day without even knowing it."

Brianne Kimmel recommended 'The Fabric of Civilization' for anyone interested in the creator economy.

Chris Sacca: "'The Martian' by Andy Weir is a fantastic read. The best."

Matt Ridley: "I loved the fact that the hero never once implies that it’s courage, spirit and faith that saves him — as so many modern books and films would do — just lots of practical tinkering and problem-solving"

Max Levchin shared 'The Martian' on his LinkedIn page.

Jack Dorsey: "Incredible book by Stewart Brand. Best I’ve read this year."

Marc Andreessen: "[A book on] why even environmentalists should be pro building, pro cities, pro nuclear, and pro genetic engineering."

Matt Ridley: "Stewart Brand is the god of the environmental movement."

Paul Graham: "It is a wonderful book"

One of Matt Ridley's all-time favorite books that he recommends to everybody.

Matt Ridley: "Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations.

Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' was one."

Paul Graham mentioned 'The Origin of Species' on Twitter.

Paul Graham: "The most impressive feature of The Double Helix is how much Watson admits he didn't know.

He's constantly talking about papers he couldn't understand and important concepts he didn't grasp."

Matt Ridley: "[This book] gave me the important message — which my teachers had somehow mostly missed telling me — that science is not a catalog of facts, but the search for new and bigger mysteries."

Matt Ridley: "Take almost any year in the 1600s and look up how bitter cold, or drought, or storms devastated human life far more than in 2023."

Matt Ridley: "It’s a great piece of detective work on a key scientific blunder, based around the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, and it forensically dismantles the mistakes that led to people believing they had at last found evidence that current climate change is unprecedented in rate or scale in this millennium."

Matt Ridley: "A delightful verse novel about philosophy"

Matt Ridley: "A charming account of the events of 1927 in America is told with [Bill Bryson's] usual dry wit."

Matt Ridley: "The account of the 1920s Everest expeditions, ending in Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance high on the mountain in 1924, is interwoven with the World War I back stories of each participant, in a truly original way."

One of Matt Ridley's favorite science books of 2015.

One of Matt Ridley's favorite science books of 2015.

Matt Ridley: "Outstanding"

Matt Ridley: "It’s fascinating on how, inch by inch, Augustus and his successors surreptitiously turned a republic into an autocracy."

One of Matt Ridley's recommended books on technology and optimism.

One of Matt Ridley's recommended books on technology and optimism.

Matt Ridley: "I think [this book] is very profound."

One of Matt Ridley's recommended books on technology and optimism.

Matt Ridley: “Witty popular science that you enjoy reading for the writing as well as for the science. No other science writer makes me laugh so much.”

Matt Ridley: "Gareth Williams has woven a truly superb narrative from short biographies of all the scientists who contributed to, and in some cases just missed out on, the epochal discovery that the secret of life is a digital linear code written on DNA."