In 2024, I began reading a book every week. I wanted to share what I’d read, so I posted a recap of my 2024 reading stats and lessons learned (see here). I was frustrated by how hard it was to share a list of all the book titles (see here), so I created a page about each book I read in 2024 (see here). I wanted to replace the Google Sheet I use to track all my reading, so I created a searchable library of all the books I’ve read (see here). I update it weekly.

Last year, 2025, was year two of consistently reading a book every week, and I want to share a recap of my stats and lessons learned. Sorry it’s late (the goal was January).

High-level stat for 2025:

• Books read: 51

2025 breakdown by month:

• January: 4
• February: 4
• March: 4
• April: 4
• May: 4
• June: 5
• July: 4
• August: 5
• September: 4
• October: 4
• November: 5
• December: 4

If you’d like to know what those 51 books were, see my 2025 reading list here.

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Reading for general information is critical if I want to generate new ideas—and I do. A Technique for Producing Ideas reinforced this. I have to learn about ideas so I can borrow from them when I’m trying to come up with a new one myself.
• Rereading high-quality books is sometimes better than reading new books. I reread a few books last year, and that helped me a ton. I’m now trying to reread at least one book every month.
• Synoptical reading is key to leveraging books to solve hard problems or deeply understand something. See more here.
• Framework books are a good fit for my personality, and they’re helpful. They give you the framework or process to use when you’re trying to accomplish something. They don’t give you the answer, but they show you how to get to the right answer.
• I get the most out of books when I read with intention; that is, with a clearly defined purpose for reading that book. That purpose should be a problem I’m actively trying to solve or a topic I want to understand better. This year, I’ve started writing down the problem I need to solve or the topic I want to understand before I choose a book. That’s helped me do more synoptical reading and get more from my reading that I can quickly put to use.
• There are no hacks with reading. I have to not only read but also do the work to understand what I’m reading. The best way to do that (that I’ve found so far) is to synthesize a book and share what I learned with others. But I haven’t found a way to be consistent with that.
• Learning through reading doesn’t feel like a chore anymore. It’s something I enjoy doing in my downtime. The personal-growth aspect of it appeals to my curious nature, and I feel like I can sustain it for a long time.
• Application of knowledge is the key to getting better outcomes. A priority of mine in 2025 is to apply what I’ve learned from reading, specifically around decision-making with imperfect information and probabilistic thinking.

Those are my takeaways and reading stats for 2025!

I’m a huge fan of podcasts. Watching them is one of the main methods I use to learn. Whenever I’m trying to learn about a topic, I find the most knowledgeable and credible people (i.e., they’ve had outsize success) in that field and listen to them being interviewed on podcasts. Like many, I started off on Apple Podcasts, but over the last few years I’ve been consuming podcasts via YouTube. I don’t watch the videos, really; I just listen. But YouTube’s search and discovery algorithm makes it many times easier to find relevant podcasts. Combine that with the fact that most podcasts (even audio-only ones) can be found on YouTube, and it became hard to stick with Apple Podcasts.

Today, the battle for podcast dominance heated up a bit. Apple announced that its Podcasts app will start supporting video in addition to audio podcasts (see here). This likely isn’t enough to get me to switch back to Apple for podcasts, but it signals the importance of podcasts to Apple and how video is becoming a dominant part of the podcasting landscape.

I’m curious to see what other changes (if any) Apple makes to its Podcasts app. YouTube has shown how lucrative placing ads in videos can be, and I imagine Apple wants in on this revenue source—especially when you consider that they pretty much invented the podcast space.

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Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 102
• Total blog posts published: 679

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 2/15/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread Limping on Water, the memoir of Philip Beuth about his time building Capital Cities Broadcasting and ABC along with Tom Murphy

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred seven was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles related to this project this week.

What I learned:

• No material learning related to this project this week.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.

We’ve heard from lots of headlines and chatter that public software companies have seen their valuations dive. The stock market has seen more sellers than buyers for shares of these companies. Many narratives exist (a common one is that AI will disrupt these companies), but I’m not sure what the root cause of this multi-month sell-off is.

One thing I’m curious about is whether, and if so how, this tech sell-off will impact 2026 IPOs of tech companies. So far this year, we’ve seen 58 total IPOs (not just tech). This is about 31% above 2025, which had 44 by this time. So far, that’s strong.

With talk about SpaceX and other technology companies aiming for 2026 IPOs, I’m curious about whether the current turmoil will subside or persist, which likely will determine whether these IPOs will happen as planned or be shelved.

This is something I’ll be watching closely.

At the beginning of 2025, I shared a post that included the number of books I read in 2024 and what I learned while establishing my reading habit. It also links to a page where you can see every book I read in 2024. Writing that post led to my creating a book list page (see here) populated with all the books I’ve read over the last decade or so. Every week, I update that book list with my latest read.

I read consistently in 2025, but I haven’t created a dedicated page for each book I read, posted my reading stats, or shared what I learned during my second year of consistent reading. So that’s my project for this weekend. I’m going to knock those three things out and pin that new post as the first one on my blog.

Next week, everyone will be able to see a bunch of info about the books I read in 2025.

For several months, a close friend has been seeking to understand how to calculate a company's intrinsic value. I shared several books with him, but that didn’t do the trick. So, I told myself that the next time I was analyzing a company and calculating its intrinsic value, I’d loop him in.

Publicly traded software companies have been crashing for several weeks. They’ve reached levels where I suspected they might be priced below their intrinsic value. As I analyzed one company, I fired off a text message to my buddy asking if he wanted to go through it alongside me. Yes, he said.

An hour later, we’d walked through the financials of Snap Inc. (i.e., Snapchat) and he’d calculated an estimate of the company’s intrinsic value.

I learned a few things from the exercise. First, all the books in the world can’t replicate learning through doing. Working through a live example is the best way to learn, in my opinion. Second, it helps tremendously to have someone who understands the area help you learn something new. They can push you, explain nuances, and drastically accelerate learning (but they can’t do the work for you!). Last, the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Explaining this process to my buddy forced me to identify gaps in my understanding and figure out simple ways to communicate complex things.

Overall, this was a fun exercise, and I’m glad I did it. I think this skill will help my buddy a ton, and I learned new ways to explain this topic simply.

Yesterday, I shared that Alphabet (Google’s parent company) was planning to issue some 100-year bonds. According to a Bloomberg article (see here), they were planning to raise around $20 billion. But they ended up raising almost $32 billion in debt in less than 24 hours. It looks like they sold $20 billion in debt Monday. And then raised another almost $12 billion in pounds sterling and Swiss francs. I don’t know why they’d raise in those denominations, and I’m curious to learn more about bonds and why they chose this strategy in particular.

I’m eager to learn more about the world of bonds, and this seems like the perfect time.

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In November, I read a book that’s stuck with me. Dangerous Dreamers was a historical recounting of the events that set the stage for the junk-bond and LBO explosion in the 1980s. I was intrigued by how an obscure book and an insight that fast-growing companies couldn’t borrow money in the bond markets at the time sparked Michael Milken’s idea to create (and control) the market for high-yield—junk—bonds.

Ever since then, I’ve been interested in learning more about bonds of publicly traded companies (and governments) and the public market for them. I’ve bought several books and started tracking down people who work in these markets to talk with. Lots to learn, but I think it’ll be a fun multiyear project. I suspect it will complement what I’ve learned from analyzing and investing in public stocks.

Today I read an article (see here) that made me want to begin this project sooner rather than later. It was reported that Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is thinking about issuing a 100-year bond. From what I can gather, a bond with a 100-year duration is very rare and hasn’t been issued by a technology company since 1997 or so.

Reading that article highlighted that I don’t know what I don’t know about the bond market, and it made me more curious and more eager to fill my knowledge gaps. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out time soon to start reading my new bond books.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 101
• Total blog posts published: 672

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 2/8/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread A Man for All Markets, the autobiography of mathematician, card-counting pioneer, author, and hedge fund manager Ed Thorp

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred six was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!