Reading List (and Beyond)

📚 Books worth your time

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack — dense, rich, uncompressible. I’m reading it right now.
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — a modern classic of clarity.
• Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss — snackable wisdom.
• Practical UI — great if you're building software people actually use.
• Textbooks — seriously. If you want to understand something deeply, find a textbook.

🎙 Podcasts & Audio

If you're hunting for voices that make you smarter, stronger, or mildly more dangerous at dinner-table conversations, start here:

• Lex Fridman — long, thoughtful conversations that feel like two brains slow-dancing. I don't listen to all episodes, but the good ones are gold.
• Tim Ferriss — productivity experiments, world-class guests, and the occasional existential jiu-jitsu.
• My First Million — yes, the name is cringe; yes, it’s fun; yes, you’ll leave wanting to build something immediately. Also, it feels like hanging out with the bros.
• Hardcore History — the storytelling equivalent of a movie trailer voice-over guy narrating the end of the world.
• Founders — deep dives into the minds, methods, and misadventures of history’s boldest builders.
• How to Take Over the World — exactly what it sounds like, but legally safe. Probably.
• Naval Ravikant — distilled wisdom in tweet-sized atoms, expanded into podcast-sized molecules.
• Joe Rogan (selectively) — some episodes are genuinely great; others… let’s just say “curate responsibly.”
• Chris Williamson — Modern Wisdom — philosophy, psychology, and “I never thought of it that way” moments.
• Diary of a CEO — surprisingly introspective, surprisingly tactical, surprisingly good.
• Radiolab — audio storytelling that feels like science class taught by Pixar.

Pro tip: if you want ultra-dense, research-style podcast episodes, feed your reading material into NotebookLM and let it cook up a custom episode for you. It’s like having your own private radio station… but nerdier.

If you're searching for episodes that match your taste, write to me. I’ll point you to the good stuff.

📺 YouTube & Visual Learning

Well, this is a subset of the list of people I’m subscribed to. Don’t know if I’ve covered everything. I’ve had a bunch of interests.

• Technoblade — for the chaos, wit, and heart. Blood for the blood God.
• Casey Neistat — storytelling with motion and magic.
• Ted / TEDx Talks — always solid. Pick a topic and dive in.
• Steve Jobs talks — especially old keynotes and interviews.
• Richard Feynman — YouTube has a surprising amount of gold here.
• Etho — I love how his videos are simple and how much fun he has.
• The whole Hermitcraft crew — and a bunch of technical Minecrafters.
• LTT (Linus Tech Tips) — for all the tech tips and tutorials on dropping expensive GPUs.
• xkcd — well, his comics were fun, and his videos are even more fun.
• Vsauce — come on, you gotta love Vsauce.
• Pick Up Limes — wonderful channel. I like the philosophical videos more than the cooking content.
• Andrej Karpathy — love how freely he shares whatever he’s learned. I want to do that too.
• The School of Life — love Alain de Botton. Love their takes on things.
• Y Combinator — if you want to learn about starting and growing startups, look no further.
• GuitarZero2Hero — thank you for all the guitar playalongs.
• Dr. Rashi Mahajan — my favourite ❤️
• In Deep Geek — for all the LOTR nerdiness.
• Vlogbrothers — the OGs. And their personal channels.
• Not Just Bikes — for... not just bikes. Witty and sharp.
• A bunch of cubing channels — I used to watch them a lot during my cubing phase.
• Taran Van Hemert — AHK nerdiness and video editing wizardry.
• GothamChess — yes, I love chess. I’m not very good, but it’s fun to watch and pretend to understand.
• Casually Explained — the effort he puts into his videos is anything but casual.
• Ultimate Frisbee Association | Hive Ultimate — I don’t only play frisbee, I watch it too.
• Talks at Google and similar ones at top colleges — thank you Google for paying smart people to talk, recording it, and putting it online.
• HealthyGamerGG — mental health stuff explained by a gamer who also happens to be a Harvard-trained psychiatrist.
• Numberphile and Stand-up Maths — love them 3000.
• A bunch of airsoft channels — yes, I had that phase too.
• TierZoo — because who doesn’t need to know about animals’ stats.
• Stuff Made Here — I wish I were as good an engineer as he is.
• A bunch of stand-up comics — from Zakir Khan and Vir Das to James Veitch.
• Colin and Samir — YouTuber’s YouTubers.
• CGP Grey — be gone, penny. Hexagons are the bestagons.
• A bunch of productivity YouTubers — from Matt D’Avella to Ali Abdaal.
• Renaissance Periodization — for all the science based workout advice.
• Kurzgesagt — no, I didn’t need to look that spelling up.
• A bunch of animated funny video makers.
• A bunch of people who make stuff — like “I Like to Make Stuff.”
• Oversimplified — because history is better animated.
• A bunch of skateboarding-related channels.
• Nerf channels — I used to watch Nerf Socom, Nerf Boy Productions, Coop772 (haven’t watched in years though, still love Nerf).
• Mark Rober — I told you, I like watching people make things.
• A bunch of Clash Royale videos — not sponsored by GFuel.
• A lot of music production channels — I used to watch them.
• Also, I love commencement speeches.

💡 People & Essays

• Paul Graham — read his essays. Some are sticky for life.
• Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Derek Sivers — wise people who write well.
• Cal Newport — if you’re a student (and we all are), read and listen to him.

🧠 A Few Ideas

• Stoicism — start anywhere. Meditations. Seneca. Ryan Holiday. It’ll find you.
• Use GPT — not just for answers, but for curated learning paths, explanations, summaries.
• Smart people compress their learnings into books. Or talks. Or posts. Seek those out.