Reading

I try to read pieces that materially change my worldview across , , , and .

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Probably the best personal bullet list of advice I've ever read; reshaping the universe as a north star is the single line of writing that has inspired and influenced me the most.
“As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences.”
“You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently.”
“The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension.”
October 13, 2026 · link
Every great founder seems to have the laughable, starry-eyed vision for their work that they might not even disclose in a pitch, or to their employees. This is one of those, and it's available for anyone to read. Genuinely inspiring stuff.
“Most people never say what they want. It’s not because we don’t want. We want fiercely and constantly...But rarely do we get to even express these dreams, and even more rarely do they ever come true.”
“Every unrealized want is a quiet tragedy of human potential.”
“But we’ve never seen humanity with every single person’s agency fully switched on. Eight billion people who just need to write their dream down in order to get started making it happen.”
“So we built Muse to help people build the world they want. Here’s to wanting. Here’s to dreaming. Here’s to everyone.”
October 12, 2026 · link
This is nonconformism at its best: deeply thought out and driven by genuine curiosity. I loved Karamazov in high school because of how much the brothers' simple lives confused me. Collison puts that confusion in words. And the final paragraph is gold; yes we should investigate the national soul more!
“If inherited tradition is no longer an adequate basis for faith, why would we rationally cleave to an apparently irrational theology? All of this was in the air: it was only two years later that Nietzsche declared God to be dead.”
“Karamazov doesn’t show true evil, and Dostoyevsky’s solution, such as it is, involves a kind of denial, or at least evasion through metaphysics. Grossman saw it directly, and instead argues humanistically that we should be kind just because.”
“Most of all, I’m struck by how anachronistic it all feels today: a country’s writers investigating the national soul and the nation’s fate through the lens of foreign literature.”
October 11, 2026 · link
Fascinating, detailed look behind the curtain at the on-the-ground reality in China. Important to remember that there is certainly truth behind the idea that the world faces a choice between two very different ways of life.
“Every bush and tree seems like an enemy soldier,” he warned, using a Chinese idiom to describe the paranoia of a security apparatus that has also changed dramatically.”
“Now out of China, I often wonder: How can it be that a proud, nuclear-armed world power is scared of red ink?”
October 10, 2026 · link
Yes on entrepreneurialism as the key to the nation's long term prospects. Iffy on the rest. Performative projects may be an inherent harm, and not much is said on the counterproductive culture taking hold. I also share the sentiment of being more bullish than most on the state of college admissions.
“But the point is not whether students’ initial projects become successful: rather, entrepreneurialism becomes a learned, conditioned behavior...I believe this will usher in a period of renewed American exceptionalism.”
“In an era when AI threatens to wipe out entire industries, we need creators.”
“I am simply arguing that an accidental byproduct of this broken system may be the key to unlocking America’s future - through a culture of entrepreneurship.”
October 8, 2026 · link
To me, creating new financing structures is one of the most interesting problems associated with the current cycle. It's definitely true that this will require both an embrace of credit over venture and a level of extreme creativity.
“But it is obvious that the venture capital product alone is woefully insufficient to finance the next generation of technology companies, and that cementing American technological supremacy requires an entirely new, deeper, and more thoughtful capital markets apparatus.”
“Technology companies are not indivisible. They can be speculative at the aggregate, corporate level but contain hard assets and other investments whose returns are highly structured, range-bounded, and predictable in nature”
“The direction of travel in the private capital ecosystem for technology companies is overwhelmingly away from traditional venture alone and towards low-cost credit at scale.”
October 5, 2026 · link
The analysis is more of what I and others already know about Thrive's excellence. Laurie does a fantastic job, however, at distilling the analysis into portable advice.
“Conviction is what everyone else calls what Thrive does - the industry coined a word to describe their behaviour, then started applying it to themselves.”
“You might not hire a Head of Design. But deliberateness is free - and the gap between firms here is enormous, and much of this is just effort to treats these surfaces as marketing.”
“But every Thrive mechanism has a version… 1. Let the money talk first... 2. Find your witnesses... 3. Treat EVERYTHING as brand... … and finally… Use content where you are recognised but not understood.”
August 5, 2026 · link
New era. Don't care much about the reporting on firm politics, rather the mentality/values insights are very interesting.
“It was Lin who eventually ended up arguing that the firm had to be comfortable playing for existential stakes. “Alfred reminded us that we have to risk the franchise all the time, or we don’t get to be Sequoia tomorrow,”
“Grady...earned a reputation for intensity and a sense of drive that helped him overcome his lack of experience; his former roommate remembers him getting shampoo all over the ceiling of their shower in his attempt to wash his hair as fast as possible.”
“One thing they do share is a thick skin. Lin was Sequoia’s lead investor on FTX, and when it collapsed...he showed up...and answered questions for hours...“We don’t mind the external criticism,” Grady says...“It’s nothing compared to what we do internally.”
“We’re only as good as our next investment,” Lin says. “We don’t talk about our legacy. The legacy is irrelevant.”
“Because we’re not going to do anything special if we’re not taking risk.”
August 4, 2026 · link
Sobering. Not sure enough people are thinking about the long-term societal and personal effects of outsourcing our most basic primitives of thinking.
“The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.”
“People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.”
“What takes you a few additional seconds is an act of resistance against an ever-dumber world.”
August 4, 2026 · link
Ties closely to Pat Collison's 'Fast'. This is probably the ultimate false dichotomy. Also is potentially one that people are becoming increasingly blind to (hustle without tracking the impact/preserving excellence).
“This is a false dichotomy meant to pigeon-hole you into mediocrity. Speed does not come at the cost of rigor.”
“Google Maps was slow, clunky, and an XML-driven monstrosity. @btaylor was pissed off, and re-built it from scratch in a 48 hour coding binge over the weekend. It became the infrastructure that still runs, 1/3rd of the size, and literally 10x faster load times.”
“Build and operate with strong edge-case detection, great testing frameworks, pre-mortems, and with intense heads down focus. Write down a plan, test it in your head, and sprint. Things are often possible in insanely fast timelines.”
July 28, 2026 · link
Zuck is right and frames his position in a smart way (e.g., we're not a monoculture, legal system metaphor); confused how exactly Meta is aligning with this in its public-facing development though
“I propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.”
“Most societal questions can’t be solved by attempting to align a single benevolent superintelligence. Humanity isn’t a monoculture.”
“The arc of human history has bent toward putting more power in people’s hands. If these values lead the way, then I am optimistic that we can build a positive future for everyone.”
July 20, 2026 · link
Be more like Seinfeld, not Orny. Can relate deeply with not only the content, but the approach to introspection.
“The idea that one of his friends making money on Wall Street could relate to Adams doing comedy is quite literally incoherent to Seinfeld. He sincerely cannot fathom how these things are related.”
“Seinfeld...talks about how to him there is only one criterion for success: "are you still working?". If you are, you've made it. If you have stopped, you're a failure. This was twenty years ago. You have never heard of Orny Adams.”
“I know I am rehashing this point over and over, but I think it is something of a fucking miracle that graspingness is not causative to greatness. It's somewhat incredible that the top 10% in the world have to completely white knuckle it at the cost of their well-being and sanity but the very best are totally effortless.”
“Orny Adams spent a life trying incredibly hard, grasping to something he was owed with all his might, got pretty good but not great, and ended up with nothing but misery and empty pockets. Meanwhile, the only thing Jerry's ever held with a tight grip is the wheel of his 911 as he races around Manhattan.”
July 16, 2026 · link
Sierra is cooking with AI in what I think of as the real economy. It's all well and good to serve high growth tech companies and make a lot of money doing it, but serving the Fortune 50 and the rest of corporate America is a bigger beast.
“What existing AI platforms are missing is the context engine to stitch together those interactions, and long-horizon planning to enable the agent to reason between engagements about what actions to take to maximize the odds of the appointment getting scheduled.”
“I speak to hundreds of business leaders every month about AI, and two topics have dominated recent discussions: Differentiation...Tokenomics. Horizon is Sierra’s opinionated answer to both of these questions.”
“With Horizon, your relationship with your customers becomes a durable, defensible moat for your business that deepens as AI improves...And with Horizon, you don’t pay for tokens, you pay for business outcomes delivered. We bear the burden of managing token spend.”
July 10, 2026 · link
These are the real guiding principles for work in the AI age. Not the doomer ngmi/15-hour workweek crap. Cognition is a great metric for this.
“I’d say that a guiding principle of the emerging AI age is this: When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. The people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who...passively use AI to work less. They are the ones who will...actively wrestle with AI to...accomplish more.”
“Marathoners are going to want to produce work, by contrast, that feels personal, that reflects their unique self. They’re going to want to find ways to use AI to increase their agency, rather than diminish it.”
“...the future I’m describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less.”
“The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity...That’s complicated, because we don’t have direct control over our desires. You can’t will yourself to be more curious...But the good news is: We can indirectly influence our desires by putting ourselves in situations that either arouse or depress them.”
July 9, 2026 · link
Singular, proactive, context-rich, UI-based, intelligence is the future of the enterprise. I wish every business had this. Also very bullish on Sierra; the amount of tribal knowledge they're accumulating will have them emerge as the vets of enterprise AI.
“Instead of waiting to be asked, it can act when the next step is ready...It gathers context and takes a first pass, bringing people in when their judgment is needed. Prep notes are waiting before a meeting. Interview debriefs are drafted before you sit down...”
“Pinecone inherits each employee's access, enforces policy at every tool call, isolates customer data, and leaves an audit trail.”
“We've found it's best to work with your systems of record, not replace them. GitHub ...Salesforce...Linear...the agent is the layer across them. Replacing those systems means recreating decades of mature software...Our bet is that these products become more like backends over time, with the agent as the primary interface.”
“The goal isn't just to get more done. It's to give people more time for the work that only people can do: judgment, taste, creativity, and building relationships.”
July 8, 2026 · link
I'm watching this play out in real time at work right now, and it's fascinating. The clocks metaphor is a perfect way to describe what's happening in enterprise AI. Writing might be slop though.
“Two clocks are running, and they have fallen out of sync. The first measures the progress of the technology... The second tracks the institutions meant to use the technology...The distance between those clocks is the most important fact in business right now.”
“AI is at that stage now. The new motor is, at best, bolted into the old driveshaft, and the floor underneath it is still the one built for steam.”
“That is why change management, the least glamorous phrase in business, is about to become one of the most valuable kinds of work there is.”
July 4, 2026 · link
Everything resonates with my family's story. Patriotism is a scarce trait. This reads a little startup-y, though.
“That is a strange kind of courage: the courage to walk away from something you had already earned because you believed the US had much more to offer their children and that future generations could achieve even more.”
“... America's real exports are optimism and permission. The optimism to dare to dream big. The permission to reinvent yourself, to fail loudly and try again, to be from somewhere else and still be from here in every way that matters.”
“Happy 250th birthday, America. Thanks for taking a bet on my family.”
July 4, 2026 · link
The sentiment of taking care of each other to uplift the whole country is deeply important, and something I miss. But I still think the general go-getter American attitude trumps this model, even if it is fading. Ideally we'd have both.
“The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”
“That’s how we build the whole country,” she added. “Taking care of each other.”
“In that sense, learning from the Nordics is not as simple as raising minimum wages and seeing happiness soar. Rather, it’s the challenge of investing in human capital...pushing relentlessly to broaden opportunity at every level.”
July 1, 2026 · link
This type of analysis that looks at the undercurrents of history and identifies second/third-order sources of value will become increasingly important. Love the historicals and came away thinking that invisibility truly is a differentiated driver of returns.
“This all hinges on whether anyone has noticed the opportunity. If they don’t, potential competitors never get to step one. Competitive neglect is upstream of the entire economic and strategy machinery.”
“Invisibility has to be treated as a strategic asset to be managed. Firms must weigh the benefits of discretion against the demands of sales, hiring, financing, and reputation.”
“If AIs are all trained on the same datasets, case studies, and value frameworks, invisibility gets quietly hardcoded into the models. Of course, the harder it is to find the invisible opportunity, the more competitive neglect there will be. If some of the best opportunities are those few people think to look for, seeing the invisible may be the most valuable competitive advantage of all.”
June 26, 2026 · link
So so coherent, lol. Great POV on not just what matters in company-building post-AI, but why knowing what matters is important.
“No matter what you do, you are making a bet on what the future/the steady state of the technology looks like. Any company you build has to be a reflection of that bet on the future expressed through every choice you make: your product, business model, and team/culture/org chart. It’s all one choice.”
“And so the post-agent business counter-positions its product, go-to-market, and strategy around that which is still scarce and valuable: context, attention, trust and brand to produce sustainably differentiated outcomes via network effects”
“It’s necessary to have a sense of who the best people are for you, rather than merely trying to get the best people in some generic sense. Here, local > global optima.”
“Even claiming that you don’t have a point of view is still a perspective. It carries with it that the most important thing is to maintain optionality.”
June 25, 2026 · link
The kind of journalism we need; didn't expect this from the Atlantic lol.
“What would it be like to drape myself in the sartorial expression of one of the most polarizing companies in the United States?”
“Younes is far from the first person in Silicon Valley who’s thought of turning software into soft wear.”
“Palantir is THE lifestyle brand. The most pro-west, meritocratic, winning obsessed, and based brand on the face of the earth.”
June 25, 2026 · link
Shows how plainly intellectual some of the calculus is in AI safety within the labs; hopefully this isn't the driving thought, but it does make sense as a complementary approach.
“Recall that we would face a flow probability of existential risk of 1% per year for 40 years, so the probability we survive this A.I. explosion is exp(−.01 × 40) ≈ 0.67.”
“In other words, with log utility it is optimal to take a 1 in 3 chance of ending human existence in exchange for a 2/3 chance of dramatically raising living standards by a factor of 55.”
“And we assume that it’s a calculation that Anthropic would prefer that we don’t dwell on. After all, as Amodei said....“There’s no end to the rainbow. There’s just the rainbow.”
June 22, 2026 · link
Lenny's life story is crazy, plain and simple. I wish I had anywhere close to that level of comfortability with being unorthodox. Velocity of intelligence is a pretty cool concept too.
“I've started thinking in terms of a "velocity of intelligence," or how quickly the distance between knowing something and acting on it collapses. AI compresses that distance, and as it does, the velocity of intelligence rises.”
June 21, 2026 · link
So early and so good. Coachability, confidence, and depth on repeat.
“Michael’s unique combination of calm confidence, kind energy, and absolute genius were unforgettable.”
“She spoke to him about how his parents, both journalists, shaped his worldview. He listened more than he spoke and exuded a maturity and wisdom beyond his years.”
“We ultimately settled on a valuation 10% lower than what they’d originally proposed. I’m pretty sure this was the last time any investor haggled with Cursor.”
June 16, 2026 · link
So completely relatable; the piece itself gets choppy/sloppy at times, but the underlying topic is so prescient and under-explored.
“watch yourself closely enough for long enough and you almost become a performance for yourself. the self you’re performing for is also you, which means you’re never fully off stage. the performance becomes the person.”
“now you’re not just experiencing. you’re watching yourself experience. analyzing the experience while it’s happening. and here’s where it gets strange. the observation changes the experience itself.”
“stuck in a recursive loop of awareness aware of itself. and it is genuinely exhausting.”
June 14, 2026 · link
Prescient is the word that best describes this one; the world is changing fast and some time soon we'll come back to this piece from June 2026 and see a reflection.
“If you wanted your nation to be at the frontier, I think you had three years to do it: February 2023 to February 2026. That was the window. And it is now closed.”
“We are now entering the period in which the compute required to reach that level will itself become a strategic resource.”
“The nuke analogy is overused, but soon the most advanced compute actually will be treated like uranium”
“Imagine a future nation whose economy, institutions, schools, military, hospitals, and infrastructure are all intertwined with a proud "national" AI model that is in fact a thin wrapper around one of the leading American or Chinese labs models. Then imagine that model being embargoed in an instant, as Fable was this week. The effect would look like an airstrike.”
“It is about the transformation of civilization, society, and humanity itself. It is a Wonder.”
June 13, 2026 · link
Rediscovered my old love for keyboards; also super cool to see deep thought regarding such a minor detail (satisfies my OCD well).
“The stagger is a fossil. We type on a fossil every day and never feel it.”
“The flat row is protecting a supply chain...it falls apart the moment a company makes its own keys, the way Apple does.”
“Nobody decided that. It just happened, and then it stayed. And that's the part that won't sit right once you've seen it.”
June 10, 2026 · link
Most of this piece is slop, but I like how it describes both outlier outcomes (via outlier behaviors) and compounding effort being indistinguishable from luck.
“if your information diet is the trending page of arxiv plus whatever survives the group chat filter, you will reliably reach the same conclusions as everyone else, at the same time, which makes those conclusions worth approximately nothing.”
“...knowledge and productivity compound like interest. the daily edges look trivial in isolation. what you read, what you record, how fast your loop runs, who you argue with. give them a few years and they produce careers that look like luck from the outside.”
June 10, 2026 · link
The bifurcation is real; seems like the first well-reasoned alternative take to "agent swarms + tokenmaxxing run everything".
“...they ration scarce capacity toward the areas where the marginal productivity of AI justifies the marginal cost of using it.”
“These are narrower, more disciplined, and more token-efficient applications than the vision of autonomous agents running everything everywhere all at once.”
“A more plausible path is uneven diffusion: frontier deployment concentrated where the returns justify the compute, broader adoption shaped by cost and capacity, and asset prices periodically forced to reconcile ambition with physical constraint.”
June 10, 2026 · link
I can feel her personal liberation in the words; great, grounded take on how 20-somethings like me should think about life in a changing world.
“The notion that teens can smoke weed and skim Hegel for four years and have a cushy office job waiting on the other side was always doomed.”
“The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next.”
“The AI tools are undifferentiated and everyone has them. Your comparative advantage has to be about you...Use AI to get smarter and don’t let it make you dumb. There’s a cognitive equivalent to lifting heavy. Do it three or four times a week.”
“...I hear depressing defeatism: What can anyone do in the shadow of the technocapital machine? Faced with such fatalism, self-help seems essential.”
June 2, 2026 · link
It's a stunning indictment of a culture around work that has propagated to an extent that truly having one's 'life work' is a rarity, which is a disgusting yet normalized trend.
“You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.”
“This is conspicuous consumption pointed at nothing, oriented around the act of consumption itself.”
“We are watching people who have more freedom than the Medicis use that freedom to pretend they have less freedom than the line worker in Shenzhen, and we applaud it.”
June 2, 2026 · link
Best example yet of the 'gratitude-via-scale' genre that never fails to make me think about how improbable and insignificant this existence is.
“Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.”
“Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe.”
“Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience.”
“Later, Schweitzer put it this way: “I am life that wills to live in the midst of other life that wills to live.”
June 2, 2026 · link
I've felt the importance of moments & chapters as I passed the halfway-mark of Stanford; increasingly, I'm thinking about the book too.
“Our current generation of students and builders must accomplish orders of magnitude more than previous generations in the same amount of time.”
“The opportunity cost of our attention has never been higher.”
“The moment is finite. The chapter is your choice. The book is your legacy. What are you building with your fixed amount of time?”
June 1, 2026 · link
Good clarifying piece that separates Dario from the 'doom-and-gloom' narrative often tied to him; the proposals are sound but I'm more interested in the "how" than the "what" in terms of AI regulation.
“Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.”
“If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation.”
“There is an aspirational but realistic future world in which a broad nonpartisan coalition, driven by direct recognition of the challenges posed by AI, leads to sane and forward-looking policies being adopted much faster than usual.”
May 26, 2026 · link
The emperor has no clothes, kinda? Scary but interesting perspective on geopol.
“The old thesis of sources of economic power has lost intellectual dominance. Now, economic power is instead largely conceptualized through the logic of weaponized interdependence.”
“The reality is that most countries do not depend on either U.S. financial markets or the U.S. government for funding.”
“But U.S. leverage is not unlimited. The United States faces a determined rival with many cards of its own to play. It isn’t in a position to use its economic leverage to impose any vision of a global economic order on China, let alone use its economic pull to integrate China into a strategic order.”
May 22, 2026 · link
Brilliant exploration between social connection over food and humans' uniquely individual drive; also love the rich cultural examples, it's an aspect of writing that I think will stand resilient in the face of AI slop.
“They had come for food but found what they really needed: reconciliation and renewed joy.”
“The important point for deeper reflection is that our hungers can sometimes tell us more about what we want than we register on a surface level.”
“When reflecting on the life choices we have made, do we feel driven by the same hungers as before? And, if not, what deep need are we still trying to satiate?”
May 22, 2026 · link
Feels prescient and is wonderfully written; I wonder how Figma will fare moving forward.
“AI will produce something that looks right at a glance, following patterns that are statistically likely to work but rarely deeply considered.”
“As the baseline improves, the average will look increasingly polished. Standing out won’t come from tools or speed, but from how much care you’re willing to put in.”
“Because when anything can be built, the only edge is in what you choose and how well you shape it.”
May 22, 2026 · link
This touches on such a specific, important feeling I have when thinking about the world/life, but yet can't put into words; Avital comes really close however.
“Many people feel awe when looking at photos taken from space, when staring at great natural vistas...And we of the atom and the pixel, whose world is of physical laws and ancient natural origin, do seem to sense that missing element.”
“They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.”
“Something is doing the work religion does sociologically while failing to do the work religion does for a person.”
“People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it.”
“If there is a God, I hope he is watching San Francisco in the year of our Lord 2026.”
May 19, 2026 · link
Game theory is one of the most interesting and applicable economics concepts I've learned (s/o Chris Makler); applying it to thinking about business as simultaneously a present battle and long-term quest resonates with me.
“How each of us chooses to live and find meaning in our lives and human civilization are examples of infinite games.”
“At the same time, the enduring value of a business organization is not measured by those past successes, but by the business's ability to keep succeeding, not just during the time the current team is executing, but well beyond their tenure.”
“Those in business should have both finite and infinite mindsets held in tension.”
May 13, 2026 · link
Really deep clarity of thought and mission-focus on display; it's inspiring to see someone's internal thoughts on their new job assemble make it seem like a no-brainer.
“The window to get this right won't be open forever; at stake is the future of the internet, and as a result, intelligence itself.”
“It is how we tell the universe we are alive, and that we love being alive enough to fight for a more perfect future.”
“This idea–that the world is something we create for ourselves, not something we inherit—is one I think about often.”
May 8, 2026 · link
Makes it clear that building an institution today is what building a startup was at the turn of the century.
“The most important companies are actually organizational inventions. They create a new kind of institution around a new kind of work, and in doing so, they make a new kind of person possible.”
“The best companies today are operating at a higher altitude, they describe the change their existence makes possible: the industry that gets revived, the institution that gets rebuilt, the civilizational bet that gets won, the class of human effort that becomes possible for the first time.”
“AI will make many things easier to copy...but no matter how many pitches argue that AI will make it easier to build an institution, it will not make it easy to build a new institution.”
“The old talent market rewarded companies that made people feel chosen. The next one will reward companies built in shapes the old market could not have produced, and the people inside them will become something the old shapes could not have made possible.”
May 8, 2026 · link
Most inspiring career progression I've seen, not because of the names/roles, but the low-key importance and reputation of the man.
“His thesis adviser told the student newspaper that Rao managed to “accomplish an enormous amount without ever seeming to get out of balance.”
“Colleagues at the private-equity giant knew him as someone with a dry sense of humor and liked to call him “Chairman Rao.” He could win without fighting and push without seeming pushy, they said.”
“When Blackstone executive Martin Brand invited a team to his home in the West Village to play poker one evening in 2012, Rao beat his bosses in a winner-takes-all game.”
“You’re not going to strike a balance,” Fleming said he told Rao. “This is a historic time with a historic company. You’ve been pointing toward this your whole career,” Fleming added. “You’re in the room. Ride it.”
May 8, 2026 · link
Sen. Sasse is an inspiration and this piece contains the most thoughtful, down-to-earth advice for how we can prosper as a nation in a post-AGI world that I have read.
“The challenge is how to live with virtue and technology when technology tends to erode virtue and place and human texture.”
“This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility and daily striving.”
“To stave off Huxley’s dystopia, we must deliberately shape our children’s souls so that they can be creators, doers and thinkers embracing the next frontier.”
April 22, 2026 · link
Great example of showing, not telling, the unique brilliance of human thought; the shift in his AI statement felt sad, then positive all at once. It's also a critique of AI that only an English professor could write.
“AI offers us a way out of these gaps, empties, impasses, “new starts,” and “different kinds of failures.”
“Even as a scholar and teacher of English, I do not believe that I am uniquely equipped to detect impersonation of human writing by LLM and other forms of AI.”
“It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial.”
April 19, 2026 · link
Never have felt so seen in terms of my OCD for aesthetics/room-vibes; every piece of advice is spot-on.
“A well-designed office with some decent decor works to corral the unconscious “elephant” part of your mind, not the rider. While a few creative polymaths seem to thrive in messy offices, when I’m in a tidy space it feels like I’ve closed a bunch of tabs that were hogging mental processing power.”
“If you read my blog you likely have some altruistic goals or lofty projects that motivate you. Don’t leave value on the table by working on them in a crummy space. Stop trying to save the world under miserable fluorescent overhead lights.”
March 16, 2026 · link
Going from 1600s-era Dutch architecture and analysis of English traditions to Trump's Economic Warfare Unit and Soviet communism to explain the correct lens for our current political-economic state...works.
“The Dutch Republic did not recognize the distinction between the capacity to govern and the capacity to trade.”
“... the reserve currency of the American empire is its listed equities, not the dollar. Almost all of monetary policy only makes sense through this lens. This is fundamentally a Dutch idea. It's certainly not English.”
“The state and the market are fused in practice while maintaining the pretense of separation, and the gap between the pretense and reality is where the extraction and the scam happens. The line between national purpose and self-dealing is thin and requires constant attention.”
February 12, 2026 · link
LBJ and Jensen are not outlandish, but still unique examples to analyze; the overall theme of pathological ambition is so specific, yet feels simultaneously generic.
“It’s hard to figure out how to become more ambitious, but I think it’s possible. Ambition seems to be quite malleable.”
“I don’t know how to do it, but for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people — it’s formed out of people who suffered.”
“When the future finds us, it should see us fighting like hell. We should work hard in these pivotal years, leaving nothing on the table...I hope our ambitions rise to meet these last years of the human era.”
“If your cause is worth fighting for, you should fight like hell. How ambitious are you? What do you allow yourself to yearn for?”
January 17, 2026 · link
Quantitative metaphors that are both broadly applicable and accurate are invaluable and this piece explores one in a way that has directly transformed how I think about societal output.
“Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.”
“Price’s Law reveals that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity cannot coexist in complex systems.”
“Compounding happens in the margins, in the weird micro-connections between the stuff that didn’t work and the stuff that did.”
January 1, 2026 · link
Semantics can lead to important lessons; this piece is a great example.
“There’s a pattern of pervasive over-gripping that, once you start to look for it, you will find everywhere.”
“Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero.”
“When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it. Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong.”
“The way out of this is to experiment with feeling the unfamiliarity of trying less hard and seeing what it’s like... Notice the sweet spot as a surprising experience of ease and a kind of elegance: the less you grip, the smoother and more precise the movement.”
November 1, 2025 · link
Isolating the 'gap' as the biggest drain for willpower is really useful.
“That’s the gap. The moment between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. The dead space where your brain offers you options. Where you negotiate with yourself. Where you consider alternatives. Where you find reasons not to. This gap is what’s destroying you.”
“The problem is that every time you enter that gap, you’re burning energy. Every single negotiation drains you.”
“You can kill the gap immediately. You can make it impossible for it to exist in the first place. Not by strengthening your willpower. By removing the need for it entirely. You do this by eliminating the decision before your brain gets a chance to negotiate.”
“The gap is already there. It’s not going away on its own. You have to kill it.”
May 12, 2025 · link
Limiting WiFi usage to an exploration of one's value hierarchy is a wild progression.
“In moments of clarity, we can make contact with that value structure, and it will tell us, in no uncertain terms, that almost everything we do is irrelevant.”
“This now reminds me that what I’m looking for is not the truth about my soul; I’m just looking for the next iteration of the experiment that is my life.”
“What matters will rise up from the mess.”
April 1, 2025 · link
I generally dislike long-winded manifestos, but this one maintains a level of original conviction about the future that keeps you reading and feels genuinely defensible in all its details.
“The best world is one where people are not subjects, but players.”
“You do not get to utopian poetry writing by having faith that someone else will figure it out. You are not praying to God, you are praying to men more ignorant than you.”
“The direction of civilization is not fixed. History is yours to write. Get to work.”
March 8, 2025 · link
It's a mindset that's increasingly unconventional, but seems to offer far more satisfaction than the alternative(s).
“The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count, and what gives it weight.”
“A million views doesn’t make a pound of significance. Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.”
“We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.”
October 15, 2024 · link
Really reframed my view on the company; I think Nabeel understates the 'grey area', but does a great job of clarifying the rest.
“At the time the hot things were social networks...but very few companies were tackling what felt like the real, thorny parts of the economy. If you wanted to work on these ‘harder’ areas of the economy but also wanted a Silicon Valley work culture, Palantir was basically your only option for awhile.”
“These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun.”
“The world needs more companies like SpaceX, and Palantir, that differentiate on execution - achieving the outcome - not on playing political games or building narrow point solutions that don’t hit the goal.”
“But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d.”
“One of my favorite insights from Tyler Cowen’s book ‘Talent’ is that the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person.”
“It’s straightforward to trace this back to Peter’s Girardian beliefs: if you create titles, people start coveting them, and this ends up creating competitive politics inside the company that undermines internal unity.”
“The cost of this was that the company often felt like there was no clear strategy or direction, more like a Petri dish of smart people building little fiefdoms and going off in random directions. But it was incredibly generative.”
June 26, 2024 · link
Connects deeply to Dwarkesh's article on the miracle year; the list of late bloomers' traits is so usefully detailed and makes me introspect at a uniquely deep level.
“They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.”
“They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore.”
“Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.”
May 17, 2024 · link
Refreshing clarity on post-AGI work & life; there's a healthy mix of realistic prognosis & hopeful prediction.
“This suggests that how people fare psychologically with their post-AGI unemployment will depend heavily on how they use their time, not how much of it there is...”
“This is how we can prepare for our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best at them, but will still have to choose how to fill our days.d”
“This may sound self-serving or wishful, and will doubtless leave many unsatisfied. But, I believe that if we really think these systems will be able to replace us, there is no reason to believe they will not also be able to help us in our search for meaning.”
December 1, 2022 · link
I find myself starting into the abyss a lot recently, not intentionally, but as a side-effect; maybe, paradoxically, that means I need to be better at doing it more.
“Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate...”
“...becoming more willing to stare into the abyss is one of the most important things you can do to become a better thinker and make better decisions about how to spend your life.”
April 13, 2022 · link
The idea of annus mirabilis is sobering in that it both offers an exhilarating view of what's possible in a short timespan and an incriminating diagnosis of how we are actively subverting those possibilities.
“So across a range of creative professions, but especially in science, high achievers tend to experience a year of extraordinary, career-defining productivity.”
“Perhaps there’s a brief window in a person’s life where he has the intelligence, curiosity, and freedom of youth but also the skills and knowledge of age.”
“It’s depressing that I have just described the opposite of a modern PhD program.”
March 16, 2021 · link
Reading this 5 years later shows how early Sama was on everything (RSI, policy etc...); the AEF is also refreshingly progressive coming from him and seems like a good idea (also funny that the Amodeis & Jack Clark are listed as editors).
“Moore’s Law for everything” should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want.”
“The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund...All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts.”
“The changes coming are unstoppable. If we embrace them and plan for them, we can use them to create a much fairer, happier, and more prosperous society. The future can be almost unimaginably great.”
July 1, 2020 · link
Really thought-provoking and has some fantastic outside excerpts; also presents a great litmus test for measuring understanding.
“I concluded that what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect’.”
“You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a lot. You have the drive, the will to know.”
“If my father had met Bernie Madoff, he would never have invested money with him because he would have said, ‘I don’t understand’ a hundred times.”
“Do I really believe that this is true, deep down? Would I bet a large amount of money on it with a friend?”
“Prior to reading the essay I thought I understood the equals sign. Indeed, I would have been offended by the suggestion that I did not. But the essay showed convincingly that I could understand the equals sign much more deeply.”
“It is also good advice for understanding things. When in doubt, go closer.”
December 11, 2015 · link
So sobering. I miss my parents.
“When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.”
“It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.”
“Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.”
April 12, 1999 · link
Miss him a lot, read this as preparation before watching Tony. Do I want to know all these gross details about the back-of-house? No. Would I have it any other way? Definitely not.
“Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness.”
“You can dress brunch up with all the focaccia, smoked salmon, and caviar in the world, but it’s still breakfast.”
“In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit.”
February 1, 1962 · link
This sort of raw, mechanical advice on the mental activity of putting words on paper is increasingly important. After months of ingesting and working with primarily AI, the ideas can start to feel foreign.
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day.”
“Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”
“Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.”
January 1, 1910 · link
Companionship seems like the cure to an increasingly commoditized world; also I miss my dog.
“There are men and women in the world who, of their own free will, live a dogless life, not knowing what they miss...”
“No mere man can ever be so comfortable as a dog looks.”
“It may be so; and yet again it may be that the dog has his own rightful place in the universe, irrespective and independent of man...”

In terms of books, I'm currently reading The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby.