My Influences

"If I see farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton

Two of my favorite sections on every intellectual’s Wikipedia page are “Influences” and “Influenced”—who influenced the thinker, and who the thinker influenced, respectively. 20th century English philosopher and polymath Bertrand Russell, for example, has influences from Euclid to Leibniz, and boasts a list of dozens in the “Influenced” section: from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to physicist Stephen Hawking to Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. While I don’t (yet) have anyone to put in my “Influenced” section, this led me to write down a list of my own greatest influences, and what I’ve learned from each of them.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth child of a candlemaker. His parents only had enough money to send him to school for two years, after which he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. At age 17, he ran away to Philadelphia to seek a new start. He worked in various print shops, founded the Junto, went to London, and worked as a clerk to a man named Thomas Denham until Denham’s death. In 1728, he started his own printing house. Publishing both The Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack eventually made him very wealthy. In the 1730s and 40s, Franklin rose rapidly in Philadelphia society: joining the Freemasons, starting his own militia, and founding the Library Company of Philadelphia, Union Fire Company, and American Philosophical Society. In 1748, Franklin retired from the day-to-day of printing to focus on his projects: he founded America’s first hospital and first university, and became the colonies’ Postmaster General and a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Franklin also was an accomplished scientist and inventor. He discovered multiple principles of electromagnetism and invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, Franklin stove, and flexible catheter. Later in life, he became an outspoken advocate for American independence. He co-wrote the Declaration of Independence and traveled throughout Europe to spread his ideals during the American Revolution. After the war, he served as President of Pennsylvania, hosted the Constitutional Convention, and died at age 84 in 1790. More than 20,000 people, over two-thirds the population of Philadelphia, attended his funeral.

Franklin has a serious claim to being the most prolific and accomplished person in history. He was a writer, printer, entrepreneur, editor and publisher, philosopher, politician, statesman, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and Founding Father. He did this through a combination of hard work and virtue. His surprisingly simple daily schedule shows this: he devoted lots of time every day for work, but also for reading, “Powerful Goodness” (i.e. gratitude), and both planning the day in the morning and debriefing on it in the evening. Other than his unfinished Autobiography, three pieces of his writing in particular stuck out to me as showing his wisdom and character.

First, at the age of 21, he founded his mutual improvement club called the Junto, which evolved from just five people to becoming the American Philosophical Society. In his own words:

The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

His “Standing Queries for the Junto” is a list of twenty-four thought-provoking questions for the club’s weekly meetings. Some of my favorites include:

1. Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? particularly in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge.

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?

11. Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?

15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?

20. In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?

A few years later, Franklin embarked on his “Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection”. He decided to act virtuously all the time, but found it to be more difficult than expected. To counteract this, he developed a method to develop the habit of virtue rather than always trying to be perfect: he wrote a “little book” containing a list of thirteen core virtues, a calendar to focus on one virtue a week and track his transgressions, quotes and prayers to remember, and a daily schedule to ensure he was spending his time wisely. None of this would be out of place in a self-help book today, but Franklin was far ahead of his time.

Finally, in 1757, Franklin (using his pseudonym of “Poor Richard”) published The Way to Wealth. It reads as a sermon given by the fictional Father Abraham, but is in reality a compilation of quotes and aphorisms by “Poor Richard”.

"If time be of all things the most precious, waisting time must be" as Poor Richard says, "the greatest prodigality;"

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy;”

“Drive thy business, let not that drive thee; and early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," as Poor Richard says.

If we are industrious, we shall never starve; for "at the working man's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter." Nor will the bailiff or the constable enter, for "industry pays debts, while despair increaseth them."

"Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour." Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never…

A man may if he knows not how to save as he gets, “keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a groat at last. A fat kitchen makes a lean will”

'And now to conclude, "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other," as Poor Richard says, and scarce in that; for it is true, "We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct." However, remember this, "They that will not be counselled cannot be helped;" and farther, that "If you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap your knuckles," as Poor Richard says.'

The Way to Wealth explains Franklin’s practical advice: work hard and use your time well, avoid idleness and sloth, don’t entrust too much of your work to others, be frugal and prudent, but remain grateful, humble, and charitable. Nearly 300 years later, this advice has not changed.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. After graduating from UPenn in 1995, he founded two successful startups: Internet city guide company Zip2, acquired in 1999, and online banking and payment company X.com, which merged with PayPal and was acquired by eBay in 2002. Not one to retire, he founded rocket company SpaceX the same year, and became majority shareholder and later CEO of electric car company Tesla in 2004. Both Tesla and SpaceX nearly failed, but today are among the most valuable companies on Earth. SpaceX has since expanded into satellite Internet (Starlink) and Tesla has expanded into solar power and battery storage (Tesla Energy). Elon has co-founded many other ventures: AI research lab OpenAI in 2015, brain-computer interface startup Neuralink in 2016, and tunneling company The Boring Company in 2017. In 2022, he acquired Twitter in order to turn it into a free-speech platform and “everything app”. Today, he is the richest man in the world and one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history.

Elon has taught me the importance of setting grand goals and relentlessly executing to achieve them. While in college, Elon decided what to do with his life with the question “What will most affect the future of humanity?” He came up with five answers: “the Internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.” In one way or another, he has made significant progress towards each of these five goals: Zip2, X.com, and Twitter for the Internet, Tesla for sustainable energy, SpaceX for space exploration, OpenAI for AI, and Neuralink for human improvement.

Elon has not only taught me about the importance of capitalism and startups in creating a better future, but given me a blueprint for how to do so.

1. Think backwards from what you want to achieve: sustainable, clean energy, or spreading humanity to multiple planets, for example.

2. Think of an industry innovation that can help achieve that: popular and affordable electric cars like the Tesla Model 3, or cheap and powerful rockets like the SpaceX Starship.

3. Think of a smaller, sustainable business model to eventually fund that: more expensive cars like the Tesla Roadster or Model S, or smaller rockets like the Falcon 9.

Elon described this himself in his Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006), and his follow-ups in 2016 and 2023.

Tim Urban describes Elon Musk’s “secret sauce” as follows: realize you don’t know anything, that nobody else knows anything either, and that life is what you make of it. In order to seize the opportunity given to you, “be humbler about what [you] know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.” Think like a chef, who sees what’s possible and creates new recipes, rather than a cook, who only executes on recipes written by chefs. As Elon said himself, “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1930. As a child, he became deeply interested in business and investing, buying his first stock at 11 and making more money than his teachers through business ventures in high school. On the advice of his father, a Congressman, he enrolled at Wharton before transferring to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which he graduated from at 19. He then went to Columbia Business School, where he took classes from his idol Benjamin Graham, the author of his favorite investing book The Intelligent Investor. Buffett was the only person ever to receive an A+ in Graham’s Security Analysis course. After graduation, he briefly worked as an investment salesman for his father, then worked for Graham’s partnership until Graham retired in 1956. Buffett then founded the Buffett Partnership. Between 1956 and its closure in 1969, the partnership earned 2,795% compared to the market’s 153%, without a single down year. Towards the end of his partnership, he began buying stock in a struggling textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway, and assumed control of the company in 1970, becoming Chairman and CEO. Over the last fifty years, Berkshire has made dozens of legendary investments: GEICO, the Washington Post, the Buffalo Evening News, ABC, Salomon, Coca-Cola, Gen Re, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, BNSF Railroad, and Apple. Today, Berkshire is valued at nearly $750 billion, and Buffett’s net worth stands at $120 billion, nearly all of which he has pledged to charity.

Between 1964 and 2022, the S&P 500 gained 24,708%. Berkshire Hathaway gained 3,787,464%—so much that if Berkshire lost 99% of its value, it would still be beating the market. How did Buffett possibly achieve this?

The simple answer is he discovered a system and stuck with it for 70 years. Buffett’s approach to investing is not easy, but it is simple: buy businesses whose intrinsic value is higher than their market price by a substantial margin of safety. Only buy businesses that you can understand and analyze. Focus on buying businesses with excellent underlying economics and a durable, long-term competitive advantage. Hold stocks for the long term, and let your winners continue to win.

Like Buffett’s investing style, his management style is also an amazing case study. Despite employing nearly 400,000 people through its various subsidiaries, only around 20 people work at Berkshire’s headquarters. The company is remarkably decentralized, with Buffett and other top management essentially only doing capital allocation, and almost always getting out of the way to let subsidiary CEOs run their companies. Berkshire has tens of billions of dollars of cash on hand and generates tens of billions more per year, enough to weather even the most severe economic storms. Through its relentless shareholder orientation, stock buybacks, annual meetings, Chairman’s Letters, and shareholder shopping bonanzas, Berkshire has created a cult following unlike almost any other company.

Finally, unlike many other wealthy people, Buffett has managed to remain a happy person: he’s truly passionate about investing, and he’s created a loving family and a world-class company. As he says himself, “No CEO has it better; I truly do feel like tap dancing to work every day.”

Charlie Munger was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924. He dropped out of UMichigan to serve in the Army Air Corps, and studied meteorology at Caltech during World War II. After the war, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1948 and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a lawyer and later, a real estate developer. In 1962, he founded prestigious law firm Munger, Tolles, & Olson LLP and investment partnership Wheeler, Munger, and Company. Munger soon retired from law to focus on investing, and his firm earned a cumulative 1,157% to the Dow’s 97% until its closure in 1975. Around the same time, he began investing with Warren Buffett, with purchases such as Blue Chip Stamps and Wesco Financial. In 1978, Munger became Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and has been instrumental in many successful investments, such as Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, BNSF Railroad, and Apple. Outside of Berkshire, Munger has invested and been involved with Costco, Li Lu’s Himalaya Capital hedge fund in China, Daily Journal Corporation, and real estate developer Afton Properties. Today, even after donating most of it to charity, his net worth stands at over $2.5 billion.

Bill Gates once called Charlie “truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered.” You can see this for yourself in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, one of my favorite books of all time¹. The title is a nod to Charlie’s greatest inspiration (and mine), Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. The book itself is structured into two parts. The first is a biography and personal profile written by close friend and longtime business associate Peter D. Kaufman, and the second is a compilation of Charlie’s own talks and speeches. Charlie’s personality shines through in these speeches: dry wit, a fierce independence and desire to do things his own way, and an impressively well-calibrated sense of rationality, and virtue.

In one of his talks, A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, given at USC Business School in 1994, Charlie lays out perhaps his biggest contribution to the world: his “latticework of mental models” approach to thinking and investing. Essentially, good thinking consists of acquiring several dozen mental models from a variety of disciplines, and using them to solve real-world problems. Charlie is multidisciplinary by nature. Famously, he taught himself psychology by reading textbooks, and wrote The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a compilation of 25 human tendencies and biases and their real-world occurrences, with more practical insight than most psychology texts written by experts. His talk Practical Thought About Practical Thought?, also called Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion, is a brilliant case study explaining how he would use his mental-models approach to design Coca-Cola from the ground up to compound 1,000,000x over 200 years.

Charlie’s aphorisms, too, are short, pithy, and full of wisdom.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time — none, zero.

To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want…How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse.

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.

People calculate too much and think too little.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.

And my favorite one, enshrined in my Twitter bio, “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up”.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and grew up with adopted parents in the heart of Silicon Valley. As a child, he was a natural free spirit, and developed interests in both technology and liberal arts. After graduating high school in 1972, he spent time exploring: being homeless in Portland after dropping out of Reed College, working for Atari in Silicon Valley, and spending months at monasteries in India. In 1976, Jobs founded Apple Computer Company with his friend Steve Wozniak. After releasing the highly successful Apple II in 1977 and less successful Macintosh in 1984, Jobs was forced out by the board of directors in 1985. He founded NeXT Inc. right after, and was instrumental in Pixar’s early successes. NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1997, and Jobs returned as CEO. He consolidated the company’s operations, shut down unprofitable branches, and launched several highly successful products: the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, before tragically dying in 2011 at 56 from pancreatic cancer.

From Steve Jobs, especially from his posthumous book and legendary 2005 Stanford commencement address, I learned the importance of designing your own life. Jobs spent years wandering before founding the most valuable company in the world, and was better off for his experiences - famously, the typefaces on the Macintosh came from calligraphy classes he took for no credit at Reed College.

Jobs taught me some important lessons on business and management. Be relentless, most of all on yourself. Business is all about teamwork and leadership - so lead a team of the best people possible (“A players”) to make something not merely good, but insanely great. Jobs insisted that even the Macintosh’s circuit boards be beautiful and elegant, even though only engineers and repairmen would see them.

Jobs was always acutely aware of the brevity of life, and the importance of making something of yourself. His driving motivation was to “put something back” - he was grateful for the world and everything in it, and sought to return something to it. He did this by making things that were new, that the world needed, and that he would ultimately benefit from with not just billions of dollars, but a tremendously meaningful and impactful life.

David Deutsch

David Deutsch was born in 1953 in Haifa, Israel and grew up in London. He received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and his PhD, in quantum field theory, from Oxford. In 1985, he wrote a paper pioneering the field of quantum computing, and discovered some of the first quantum algorithms and error-correction schemes. He is perhaps better known for his two books: The Fabric of Reality (1997), and The Beginning of Infinity (2011). Today, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society, physics professor at Oxford, frequent TED talker, and is currently working on a new branch of physics called constructor theory and a new parenting method called Taking Children Seriously.

The Fabric of Reality is an attempt at a theory of everything that, instead of trying to reduce the universe to equations and particle physics, tries to unite different disciplines to form a cohesive theory. The four “strands” of the fabric of reality are:

1. Quantum mechanics - specifically Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation

2. Epistemology - specifically Karl Popper’s philosophy of science

3. Computation - specifically Alan Turing’s theory of universal computation, refined by Deutsch’s own work in quantum computation

4. Evolution - specifically Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, refined by Richard Dawkins’ theories of gene selection and memetics

The Beginning of Infinity is an even more profound book. It discusses the reach of good explanations and the role of humans in the universe. Humans are “universal explainers”: we can in principle understand and explain everything that can be understood or explained, within the laws of physics. We create explanations through conjecture, not simply extrapolating the past, and we improve them through criticism, something facilitated through dynamic societies like the West. Progress consists of improving our explanations of the universe, and with the right knowledge, we can solve any problem that humanity faces. The book’s coverage is remarkably broad: touching on philosophy, aesthetics, mathematics, physics, and so much more, and it’s a serious contender for my favorite book of all time.

Ayn Rand

Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born in Russia in 1905. After the Russian Revolution, where her family lost their wealth, she enrolled in college at age 16, studying history and screen arts, and adopting the pen name Ayn Rand. In 1925, Rand left Russia and moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. In the 1930s, she wrote her first novels, We the Living and Anthem. At the start of World War II, she became involved with libertarian political activism and published her first major success, The Fountainhead. In 1951, Rand moved to New York City. She gathered a circle of admirers, developed her philosophy of Objectivism, and released her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Later in life, she promoted Objectivism through talks and essays, dealt with personal and medical problems, and died at age 77 in 1982.

Rand was unique as both a philosopher and a writer. Her fiction displays heroic, hardworking, and productive people struggling against burdensome governments and parasitic “looters” who seek to exploit them and the fruits of their labor. Atlas Shrugged was not just extraordinarily well-written, but remarkably prescient: depicting a near-future United States where mediocre bureaucrats attempt to regulate productive private businesses out of existence to satisfy their own insecurity and desire for egalitarianism, causing the business leaders to go on strike.

Rand’s close associate and heir, Leonard Peikoff, compiled her ideas in the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Unlike nearly any other philosopher in history, Rand built her system essentially from scratch. Objectivist metaphysics starts with three axioms: reality, consciousness, and identity. Existence exists, we are conscious in it, and A is A. Her epistemology emphasizes reason as man’s tool for navigating the world, and that we should follow reason no matter what. Her ethics held three things: reason, purpose, and self-esteem, as the “supreme and ruling values” of man’s life, and seven virtues: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride as our tools to achieve these goals. Her political philosophy valued freedom—both personal and economic—as the chief goal of successful societies.

Socrates and Aristotle

Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy, was born near Athens to a fairly wealthy family around 470 BC. Little is known about his life and teachings, and the few sources we do have come from his students, Xenophon and Plato. After being educated in the customs of ancient Athens and serving with distinction during the Peloponnesian War, Socrates became a teacher. Socrates was well-known for his physical ugliness and disdain for material pleasures, as well as his lifelong integrity and devotion to philosophy. Eventually, he became notorious as the “gadfly of Athens”, and the Thirty Tyrants, the pro-Spartan oligarchy ruling the city, charged him with impiety and corrupting the youth. After a legendary trial recorded by Plato in his Apology, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death. He died in 399 BC, drinking poison hemlock as his sentence required.

While there were philosophers before Socrates, they mainly focused on what we would today call science and theology. Socrates was the first to focus mainly on ethics, believing all virtue originated from knowledge. He invented techniques that we still use thousands of years later. The Socratic method, for example, has two philosophers dialogue with one another. One will conjecture definitions, while the other will scrutinize and refine them. Eventually, they will approach the truth. Despite his assessment of knowledge as priceless, Socrates championed epistemic humility: famously saying “I know that I know nothing”. Perhaps most importantly, Socrates remained loyal to his philosophical ideals - even choosing the death sentence over renouncing them.

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira in northern Greece. His father was the personal doctor of the King of Macedon, so he was well-connected in Macedonian palace life. At seventeen or eighteen, he moved to Athens to study philosophy at Plato’s Academy, where he remained for nearly twenty years. Aristotle traveled to Asia Minor and Lesbos, then returned to Macedon to become the personal tutor to the King’s son, Alexander, and the head of the state’s royal academy. After Alexander’s departure to conquer the Persian Empire, Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BC, and founded his own academy, the Lyceum. Over the next twelve years, Aristotle was remarkably prolific: writing dozens of dialogues spanning every known subject. When Alexander died in 323 BC, Athenians began to resent Macedonians. Aristotle was accused of impiety and forced to flee to Chalcis, where he died the following year.

Like many others on this list, Aristotle was a true polymath. He made advances in a staggering variety of fields: mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, psychology, economics, politics, linguistics, art, ethics, logic, and rhetoric. His ideas of empiricism, the Golden Mean, and the rules of logic continue to influence philosophy to this day. Even his politics hold up remarkably well: contrasting constitutional government to anarchic pure democracy was a direct inspiration for America’s Founding Fathers.

Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973 to a wealthy, educated, liberal, secular family and spent much of his childhood abroad, largely in Cyprus. He graduated from Brown University at the age of 19 and dropped out of grad school at UC Berkeley to join a tech company in San Francisco. He created decentralized personal server platform Urbit in 2002, and began reading old books soon after. In 2007, he launched his blog Unqualified Reservations and developed his neoreactionary philosophy, on which he wrote regularly until stopping in 2013 to launch Tlon Corporation and focus on Urbit. Yarvin left Urbit in 2019 to start a new blog, Gray Mirror, which he has written on ever since.

Yarvin has expanded my perspective on politics and government like almost no one else. He holds that the US government (“USG” for short) is a decaying institution, with true power held not by the President and elected officials but by a decentralized network of bureaucrats, journalists, and universities that influence culture - the Cathedral. In order to remedy these issues, we should not rely on democracy - an ineffective and dangerous form of government. Instead, we must turn to the form of government used by nearly every private institution - an accountable monarchy. Accountable monarchies, from the government of Singapore to the management of the New York Times, have a leader with both the natural ability and the legal authority to get things done, and body to check the leader’s power.

Yarvin’s writing, too, is a delight to read: sardonic, witty, and irreverent; loaded with references both historical and modern; and convincing enough to make even the most die-hard mainstream progressive say “hmm” and reflect on their beliefs. Yarvin is not just intelligent and well-read, but unique in a way few thinkers are. I recommend his Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations for an overview of his philosophy, How Dawkins Got Pwned to explore the interesting idea that modern progressivism is descended from Puritanism through mainline Protestantism, and Moldbug on Carlyle to learn about his favorite thinker, Thomas Carlyle.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 in Thal, a tiny village in British-occupied Austria right after the end of World War II. Despite the abuse of his father, young Arnold knew he wanted to become wealthy and important. As a teenager, he decided to become a bodybuilder and spent years intensively weight training. Despite speaking little English, Schwarzenegger moved to the US in 1968 and began training at Gold’s Gym in Venice, California. At the same time, he started his business career: launching a successful bricklaying business and later going into real estate. In 1970, he became the youngest Mr. Olympia winner in history and would go on to win the next five years in a row, and again in 1980. As his bodybuilding career waned, he pivoted to acting, where he became successful through films such as Conan the Barbarian (1982), The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991), Twins (1988), and Total Recall (1990). He wisely invested his earnings from bodybuilding and acting, making him a centimillionaire. Later on, he became involved in politics as a capitalist and a Republican. He served as Chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports under George H.W. Bush, and was Governor of California from 2003 to 2011. Today, he remains involved in bodybuilding, acting, and business.

It’s rare to be one of the greatest of all time in a sport. It’s even rarer to be one of the greatest of all time in a sport, then have a successful career in its own right in acting and business and politics. Arnold stands out even among successful people as exceedingly dedicated, persistent, and hungry. Famously, at the peak of his bodybuilding career, he would spend two and a half hours in the gym, twice a day, six days a week, with a smile on his face every rep because he knew he was putting in more work than anyone else to win. Arnold used to (and perhaps still does) write down his goals for the year on a piece of paper and make sure every one of them was accomplished. Even at 75, Arnold can still max out most machines in the gym, and is a fitness icon to people around the world.

Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew was born in 1923 in Singapore, then a backwater, British-colonized island with a population of under half a million. He earned a scholarship to Raffles College, but his education was cut short by the Japanese invasion of Singapore, where he was forced to work for the invaders. After the war, he briefly attended the London School of Economics and studied law at Cambridge, and returned to Singapore in 1950. He practiced law as a barrister and solicitor, and became involved in anti-British politics. In 1954, Lee founded the People’s Action Party, and was elected to Parliament as Leader of the Opposition in 1955. In 1959, the PAP won a landslide victory in Parliament, and Lee was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Singapore. In 1965, Singapore became fully independent from Britain and Malaysia. Lee served as Prime Minister for the next 25 years, presiding over one of the most profound positive transformations of any country in history. In 1990, he stepped down from active leadership but remained Senior Minister. In 2004, Lee’s son Lee Hsien Loong became Prime Minister, and Lee became Minister Mentor, a role which he held before retiring in 2011. After a long illness, Lee died in 2015 at the age of 91.

Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew was transformed, in his words, “from third world to first”. In 1960, Singapore had a GDP per capita of $428. By 1990, that was $11,862; and today it’s $72,794; one of the highest in the world. Lee’s role in statesmanship was active, but not tyrannical: acting more like a CEO than a president or a dictator. He maintained a free-market economy with free trade; low taxes; excellent public housing, education, and healthcare; and low crime and drug use rates. Singapore’s transformation inspired China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to liberalize China: an even bigger change that lifted over a billion people out of extreme poverty. In the words of Charlie Munger, “If you want one mantra, it comes from Lee Kuan Yew…figure out what works and do it.”

And many more!

Paul Graham (1964-) and Sam Altman (1985-): Paul Graham is a computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur, artist, and investor with a characteristically unique background: a BA in philosophy from Cornell, an MS and PhD in computer science from Harvard, and some formal training in painting from RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. He then co-founded Viaweb, one of the first online store platforms, selling it to Yahoo! in 1998 for nearly $50 million, where it became Yahoo Store. Now wealthy, he created his own dialect of the programming language Lisp called Arc, began writing his now-famous essays, and co-founded Y Combinator, one of the most successful startup accelerators and venture capital platforms of all time. Sam Altman, a Stanford dropout, joined the first batch of YC in 2005 with his startup Loopt, and quickly became a protégé of Graham. Despite Loopt never achieving traction, it was acquired for $43.4 million in 2012. Altman then went on to become extremely wealthy as an angel investor in many successful startups including Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, and Pinterest. He became a partner and then President of YC, succeeding Graham, where he would write much of his now-famous blog and Startup Playbook. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI along with Elon Musk and others, which began as a nonprofit research lab but became a massive AI corporation, with Altman as CEO. He is also heavily involved in Worldcoin, a crypto project, and Helion, a fusion research company. Both Graham and Altman are accomplished and full of great advice, like the Buffett and Munger of our generation.

Bill Gates (1955-) and Mark Zuckerberg (1984-): Bill Gates grew up in Seattle, Washington, where he became obsessed with computers at the private Lakeside Prep School. He briefly attended Harvard University before dropping out in 1975 to co-found Microsoft, which started off selling BASIC interpreters, made its first big break licensing the MS-DOS operating system to IBM, and eventually became the world’s biggest provider of operating systems (Windows), productivity software (Office), and web browsers (Internet Explorer). Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 and gradually transitioned away from Microsoft over the next 20 years in order to increasingly focus on other business ventures as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in the world. Mark Zuckerberg grew up in New York, where he became obsessed with computers at a young age. He briefly attended Harvard University before dropping out in 2004 to co-found Facebook (sound familiar?) In 2007, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, and in 2012, Facebook went public. Now known as Meta, the company owns social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads; and experimental ventures Quest and Meta AI. Zuckerberg remains CEO and majority voting shareholder of the company to this day. Today, both Gates and Zuckerberg are worth over $100 billion.

Stephen Wolfram (1959-): computer scientist, theoretical physicist, and entrepreneur. Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, chief designer of Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Wolfram Alpha, CS professor at UIUC, creator of the Wolfram Physics Project. I admire Wolfram’s curiosity about the world, and some of his favorite topics (cellular automata, computational irreducibility, and the Ruliad) are very interesting.

John von Neumann (1903-1957): Hungarian-American STEM polymath, and likely the smartest human in history. Made huge contributions to the Manhattan project and later the hydrogen bomb and nuclear power; computer science, especially self-replication; game theory. One of the most prolific mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists who ever lived. I admire von Neumann’s fearsome intelligence, and his ability to apply it to make lasting contributions to the world.

Richard Feynman (1918-1988): Theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate, Caltech professor, winner of millions of hearts and minds. Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and for the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster, pioneered the field of nanotechnology, and made strides in quantum electrodynamics. Feynman is well known for his interests outside physics (such as bongo drums and cracking safes), his lucid and memorable teaching style, and his magnetic personality.

Naval Ravikant (1974-): An entrepreneur and venture capitalist known as the “angel philosopher”. Born in India and moved to the US, he graduated from both Stuyvesant High School and Dartmouth College. He co-founded product review site Epinions, fundraising platform AngelList, and social media platform Airchat. He’s also invested early-stage in 200 companies. His wisdom on health, wealth, and happiness is compiled in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, one of my favorite books of all time.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): Born middle-class in Corsica, he became a military officer, distinguished himself in campaigns in Italy and Egypt, overthrew the French government to become “First Consul” and later Emperor, and singlehandedly nearly conquered Europe until his defeat and exile in 1815. I admire Napoleon’s ambition, charisma, and competence in both military and political affairs.

Alexander the Great (356-321 BC): Born heir to the throne of Macedon and personally tutored by Aristotle. With his father, he consolidated control over Greece. After his father’s death, he conquered the entire Persian Empire, created one of the largest empires in history, and never lost a single battle before his untimely death at age 32. I admire Alexander’s military prowess, leadership ability, and erudition.

Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) and Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD): Gaius Julius Caesar was born to a noble family and rose through the ranks of the Roman Republic’s military and politics, eventually being made consul. He conquered both Gaul and Britain, making him incredibly wealthy, then won a civil war against the Roman Senate and his rival Pompey, becoming dictator. He made many reforms before his assassination just five years later. His adoptive son Gaius Octavius then fought another civil war against Marc Antony, winning and being granted the title Augustus Caesar. He ruled for forty years, dramatically expanded the empire, built roads, established a standing army and police, and rebuilt the city of Rome. Julius and Augustus complement each other well: Julius was the military commander who did what had to be done to save the dying Roman Republic, while Augustus was the peacetime statesman who ushered in a golden age for the next two centuries. At the end of his reign, he said, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble”.

Epictetus (50-135 AD) and Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD): Epictetus was born into slavery and became disabled as a child. He was bought by a wealthy man in Rome, studied philosophy, and later gained his freedom, becoming a teacher of philosophy. After Emperor Domitian banned the teaching of philosophy, he moved to Epirus to found his own school, and died at 85. In contrast, Marcus Aurelius was born into great wealth, training to become emperor under his adoptive father, Emperor Antoninus Pius. Marcus waged successful wars as Emperor, but the Empire was struck by the Antonine Plague, killing millions. Though their lives were very different, both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius were foundational Stoic thinkers². Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Marcus’ Meditations remain classic philosophy texts to this day, explaining principles like emotional resilience towards things one can’t control, hard work, virtue, and the goal of eudaimonia: a life well lived.

Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997): Born in Qing China, he became a Marxist and joined the Communist Party. He rose through the ranks of the CCP and became an important politician after the Communists established the People’s Republic of China. After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng won the power struggle and became the paramount leader of China. He embarked on a series of major reforms, the most important of which was economic liberalization that made China one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. I admire Deng’s pragmatism and ability to create lasting change.

Maimonides (1138-1204): Moses ben Maimon was a Jewish theologian, philosopher, and polymath who lived in the Almoravid Empire (Muslim Spain), Morocco, and Egypt during the Islamic Golden Age. He’s known primarily for his fourteen-volume compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, and his work reconciling Judaism with Aristotelianism, the Guide to the Perplexed. He worked as an astronomer, a personal physician to Saladin, and a Torah scholar. I admire Maimonides’ intellectual breadth and depth, and his lasting influence on the West’s oldest religion.

1. New Stripe Press edition comes out this November!

2. Other notable Stoic philosophers include Zeno of Citium (c. 334 - c. 262 BC) and Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC - AD 65).