Thinkers · books · shape

The people I think with.

Reading shape: build > books > podcasts > tweets. I trust first-principles teachers over the transmission crowd. The names below are the ones that have stuck across years — if any of them are also yours, we'll probably get along.

Naval Ravikant — leverage and long-term games.

Specific knowledge × leverage (labor, capital, code, media, agents) × accountability under your real name × long-term games with long-term people. Most of the architecture I run on the public side is downstream of his framing — including the decision to write under my own name even when an alias would be easier.

Nassim Taleb — antifragile, barbell, via negativa.

The defensive half of the stack. What you remove matters more than what you add. The barbell — safe leg first, risk leg second. Skin in the game as the only credibility test that matters. Ergodicity, Lindy, pre-mortem. The reason I'm system-first on the body, on the family, on the company.

Charlie Munger — inversion and a latticework.

Invert, always invert. Build a latticework of mental models from many disciplines and use whichever one the problem actually wants. Currently re-reading Poor Charlie's Almanack; the older I get, the louder the chapter on incentives gets.

James Clear — every action is a vote.

The habit work most people quote, but the part I keep coming back to is identity-shaped: every action is a vote for the kind of person you are. The point of a system isn't the system; it's the identity it casts a vote for. The non-outsourceable leverage.

The ones who shaped how I teach.

Kailash K Nekhraj taught my tenth standard. He told stories. He made me curious about science, and the curiosity stayed. The UPSC teachers I learned from later were the ones who broke things down to first principles — that became my own teaching philosophy when I ended up at Insights IAS.

Beyond them: Paul Graham, mostly his essays — and a slow appreciation for what real founders actually sound like. Stanford's How to Start a Startup YouTube series, in pieces. One of the a16z founders — the bald one — whose name I keep forgetting; the talks are good even if I can't reliably attribute them. The pattern across all of them: first-principles teaching beats transmission, and good teachers tend to be people who built the thing first.

Currently on the desk.

Charlie Munger — Poor Charlie's Almanack. Slow re-read.

Last updated: 2026-05-06