Recommended

· Last edited November 25, 2025 · 3 min read · Send your thoughts via twitter or mail.

A waste of time and suppliers of bad memes:

  • Business, psychology and cogSci pop science books in general
  • HBR, Business Insider, Vox
  • Malcolm Gladwell books (huckster)
  • “Prompt engineering” as a discipline
  • “Founder mode” discourse and most non-LISP related Paul Graham blog posts
  • Almost all Substacks or people that write in regular cadence
  • AI wrapper
  • content mills
  • Yuval Harari
  • Thinking Fast and Slow
  • Cialdini
  • Ray Dalio’s Principles
  • All-In, Lex Friedman
  • Building a Second Brain and Zettelkasten midwits
  • Anybody that has ever been in a room with Ali Abdaal or is of his ilk
  • Blinkist, Shortform
  • Ryan Holiday’s Stoicism … guy pivoted his openly bugman marketing career into LinkedIn-ifying Seneca
  • Range by Epstein, The Alchemist
  • anything from pencil neck grifters Cal Newport, Adam Grant, Robert Greene, Seth Godin
  • people with nasal voices for some reason
  • Shane Parrish / Farnam Street. Aggregation isn’t insight. Localities and domains matter, there’s no free lunch in optimization.
  • Naval tweets
  • HPMOR
  • Grit, Mindset, Drive (single-factor psychology … replication crisis casualties)
  • the Huberman cinematic universe
  • Tim Ferriss post-2014? 4-Hour Chef was good tho
  • Anybody that shows up in your YT recs after accidentally clicking on a thumbnail of his

Actual recs:

Books

  • The Player of Games, Culture series
  • Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth. Get the audiobook. New agey – listen for the stories only.
  • Conversations with Goethe
  • The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
  • Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
  • The Peregrine
  • Antifragile / Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
  • The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin
  • The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Best audiobook performance ever produced. His Dark Materials would be as big as Harry Potter if they didn’t mess up the movie (and series)
  • Ted Chiang’s Understand and Story of Your Life (which the movie “Arrival” was based on)
  • The Artist’s Way
  • Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Essays

Podcasts

Video Games

  • Disco Elysium. An unexpected masterpiece
  • Conceptual/Artistic: Antichamber, GRIS, 4D Toys, Chroma Lab, Everything
  • Wurroom. In a class of its own. Free and takes 10 minutes to play.
  • 140. Amazing for how “simple” it is.
  • Strategy: CIV, Black and White I & II, Dungeon Keeper I & II
  • World of Warcraft. You had to be there…
  • Battlerite. Intense and balanced arena mechanics
  • Action: Dark Souls III, Star Wars Jedi Knight Series, Gonner, Ape Out, Plunge, Nex Machina
  • Edu-game: Immune Attack. Taught me the most molecular bio intuition in the least time

Curated by Others

Potentially recursive

Research & Non-fiction

  • TODO: flesh this out.
  • Markus Meister: The Slowness of thought
  • The Principles of Neural Design by Sterling. Most beautiful and well written.

Reading List

  • The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth by Eric Smith
  • Biological Physics by Philip Nelson
  • Random Walks in Biology
  • The Restless Cell (Hueschen/Phillips)
  • From Photon to Neuron (Nelson)
  • The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander
  • Essential Cell Biology DONE
  • States of Matter by David L. Goldstein
  • Marr’s Vision
  • Luo’s Principles of Neurobiology
  • Jaynes Probability Theory
  • Needham Visual Complex Analysis
  • Bialek Biophysics: Searching for Principles