Literature & Inspiration
The arena, and what I read in it.
The words at the top of my LinkedIn, the builders I think alongside, the books I hand people, and the one blog I trust most.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The words at the top of my LinkedIn, and the reason I keep entering arenas. Preferably ones nobody has walked into yet.
The point
Technology is a tool for utopia.
The only point of technology is authenticity, people together, and building the world you actually want. Humans made these tools because humans want to reach utopia. Every project on this site answers to that. The credentials are receipts; the discoveries are the point.
Builders I think alongside
Same question, different answers.
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, and the Huberman Lab built their work around the same question I ask every day: what can be done that hasn't been, and how many people does it reach? They're my inspirations because we think along these lines.
Steve Jobs
Insisted the computer, then the phone, could belong to everyone, and made tools that hadn't existed feel inevitable.
Mark Zuckerberg
Took a dorm-room build and connected billions of people to each other. His own words for the core: give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
Huberman Lab
Reads the peer-reviewed literature so anyone can act on it: zero-cost protocols for sleep, light, and focus, given away free. Rigor, translated for millions.
Dario Amodei
Building AI as if what matters most is how many people it helps, and how carefully.
And I'm not any of them. That's the whole point. Something no one's ever done before can't be a retrace of someone else's steps. I'm me.
Books I hand people
Eight I keep coming back to.
Revised around the creed: the cosmic view, the science of people together, the evidence that better is measurable, and the systems, breath, and honesty it takes to build toward it.
Pale Blue Dot
Carl Sagan
Sagan turned one photograph into the whole argument: every life ever lived happened on one small world, so build for all of it. The cosmic case for helping as many people as possible.
Connected
Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler
How the people three degrees away quietly shape who you become. The science under everything I'm building around networks and proof.
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Steven Pinker
Zuckerberg picked it for his Year of Books, and it earns the spot: hundreds of pages of evidence that the utopia direction is real and measurable.
Atomic Habits
James Clear
You don't rise to your goals; you fall to your systems. This is my operating manual for compounding small reps into real skill.
Breath
James Nestor
Ten years on alto sax is ten years of breath control. Nestor shows the same instrument runs everything else: focus, sleep, nerves. Huberman Lab canon.
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
The economics of wanting, from the psychiatrist Huberman keeps inviting back. Anyone building products people crave owes it to them to understand this.
Ikigai
Héctor García & Francesc Miralles
A reason to get out of bed in the morning. Purpose treated as a daily practice, not a grand reveal.
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
A clear-eyed history of the twentieth century, including what happens when utopia is imposed instead of built by people using their own tools.