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Motivational Videos / Workout Jams

Consumer Goods

• AmazonBasics 8” Chef’s Knife (Kitchen workhorse at an unbeatable price.)
• ASUS ROG Strix 27” 4K Monitor (Gaming and web surfing as they were meant to be.)
• De’Longhi Portable Air Conditioner (Makes working in the summer bearable.)
• Element 26 Self-Locking Weight Lifting Belt (Belt: $35. A healthy back: Priceless.)
• Goshala Raw Milk (Pasteurization ruins milk. Get yours straight from the cow.)
• Kitchen Mama Auto Electric Can Opener (Opens up a whole world of canned goods.)
• iBUYPOWER Pre-Built Gaming PC (Wielding this in a world of smartphones is overkill.)
• Men’s Barefoot Zero Drop Shoes (Cheap shoes to maintain natural running/walking posture.)
• Mitchum Men’s Deodorant (Anti-perspirant to keep workouts focused and dry.)
• Motorola G Power (Cheap smartphone with two days of battery life.)
• Nature’s Bounty Fish Oil Softgels (Essential omega-3 fats for healthy gums and joints.)
• Nike Men’s Air Max Shoes (A 1.5” height boost to 5’11” makes life much nicer.)
• Optimum Nutrition Whey Protein Powder (Six scoops a day for optimal gains.)
• Redify Jump Rope (Who needs a treadmill? Free up a room in your house.)
• Rfiver Mobile TV Cart (Take your TV anywhere and adjust it to the optimal viewing height.)
• Rogue 5lb Technique Plates (Essential to safely warm up deadlifts.)
• Rogue 22lb Training Bar (Useful for learning overhead movements and Olympic lifts.)
• Rogue 37.5lb Change Plates (Enough of a weight range to increase resistance granularly.)
• Rogue 45lb Stainless Steel Ohio Bar (Gold standard barbell.)
• SABRE Pepper Gel (Self-defense you can actually use without being charged with murder.)
• Sensarte 12” Nonstick Skillet (Tacos, fried chicken, pasta sauce, pork burgers, and more!)
• Sony Bravia 65” 4K Mini-LED TV (Perfect blend of cinematic and portable.)
• Vive Wrist Brace (Theoretically type for ten hours a day. Don’t actually though.)
• ZNHIS Magnetic Bookmarks (Avoids the mess of disposable paper bookmarks.)

Lifestyle Books

• Deskbound by Kelly Starrett (You’re sitting, standing, and walking all wrong. Fix it fast!)
• Double Your Dating by David DeAngelo (She said yes to the date! Now what?)
• How to Cook Everything: The Basics by Mark Bittman (Most of my diet is recipes from this.)
• How to Make Love to a Woman by Michael Morgenstern (Love is downstream of sex.)
• Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe (Squat, press, bench, deadlift! Flex your back!)

(If you can only read one, pick Deskbound. Poor posture, which is the norm, ruins most people.)

Hobbyist Books

• The Age of Movies: Selected Writings by Pauline Kael (Will transform how you watch films.)
• The Great Movies by Roger Ebert (Pair with a Criterion subscription. Also read II, III, and IV.)
• Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (Physics! Read the full lectures and do the problems.)

Philosophy Books

• Certain to Win by Chet Richards (How to outmaneuver and defeat much larger enemies.)
• The Collected Works by Arthur Schopenhauer (Hindu wisdom distilled through German eyes.)
• The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti (Nobody actually exists.)
• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (Either exercise power or have it exercised on you.)
• Straw Dogs by John Gray (Giving up hope of “ultimate meaning” is the secret to happiness.)
• The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran (Resignation is only the beginning.)
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel (Push the boundaries of what’s possible, or don’t even start.)

Economics Books

(I loosely define economics as “the study of scarcity”. It’s a very broad field.)

• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (“Work” is more about societal control than actual work.)
• The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan (Demographics are destiny.)
• Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (Hierarchies deform every aspect of our lives.)
• The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao (Sheep led by sociopaths is a universal pattern.)
• How Civilizations Die by David Goldman (Birth rate collapse is leading us to war.)
• Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich (Giving the old chemo for slow-killing cancer is idiotic.)
• River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins (Suffering and scarcity are built into the system.)
• Screen Schooled by Joe Clement (Social media is Roald Dahl’s “Television” on steroids.)
• Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis (Big Tech is more powerful than most governments.)
• Untrue by Wednesday Martin (Monogamy is a recent invention in our evolutionary timeline.)

History Books

(I’m interested in the things they won’t teach you at school. There’s at least two sides to any story.)

• The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell (American cultural decay from 1964 to 2015.)
• A History of Hinduism by Gagan Deep Bakshi (Reblooming after a millennium suppressed.)
• Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (50 million forgotten murders.)
• Montaillou by Emmanuel Ladurie (Based on actual interviews with medieval peasants.)
• A Republic, Not an Empire by Pat Buchanan (U.S. history from a pre-WW1 point of view.)
• The Shadow of the Great Game by Narendra Sarila (Pakistan’s Cold War origins.)
• The Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan (Unredacted analysis of the world wars.)
• Varna, Jati, Caste by Rajiv Malhotra (The “caste system” is mostly a British invention.)

Novels

• The Long Walk by Stephen King (Metaphor for any competition where most participants lose.)
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (A highly-paid office drone is still an office drone.)
• Pet Sematary by Stephen King (Death makes a mockery of everything.)
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (Hypnotic in its intensity.)
• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Surreal reflections on Western imperialism.)
• The Witches by Roald Dahl (A boy and his grandmother against the bankers.)

Short Stories

• “American Gold Mine” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Any professional can relate.)
• “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (You can’t outsmart physics.)
• “Fleep” by Jason Shiga (If you lose your memories, are you still the same person?)
• “Frost and Fire” by Ray Bradbury (Man that is born of a woman is of few days.)
• “A Full Life” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Society peaked decades ago. It’s all downhill from here.)
• “Golden” by Nick Bostrom (Natural selection makes the world a horror.)
• “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (The best gifts find the fewest admirers.)
• “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (Allegory for Judeo-Christian God.)
• “To Build a Fire” by Jack London (One is always only a few mistakes from death.)
• “Yellow Card Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi (In the end, you’re alone.)

Comic Books

• Amar Chitra Katha by Anant Pai (Immortal wisdom from better times. Why I’m a Hindu.)
• Buddha by Osamu Tezuka (Trying and failing to make sense of life.)
• The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (You have free will. It’s never too late to be a hero.)
• Here by Richard McGuire (100 years from now, nobody will care that you existed.)
• Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy (Be born, mate, die. There’s nothing else to do.)
• The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (Refusing to grow can be fatal. Ironically, Gaiman is a rapist.)
• Swamp Thing by Alan Moore (It’s better to be a plant than an animal.)
• Watchmen by Alan Moore (Our leaders are even more misguided than we are.)

Click the pictures!

Movies

• Angel’s Egg by Mamoru Oshii (Borrowed time, borrowed eyes, borrowed world.)
• Aniara by Pella Kågerman (Viruses on a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.)
• Chhaava by Laxman Utekar (Heralds a Hindu revival a thousand years in the making.)
• Devi by Satyajit Ray (When men make war, it’s always women and children who suffer.)
• Don Juan DeMarco by Jeremy Leven (Living without illusions is a fast track to depression.)
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner by Stanley Kramer (Still radical 60 years later, sadly.)
• The Sound of Music by Robert Wise (Catnip for women. Every girl loves this film.)
• Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock (Perfectly embodies disorientation. San Francisco at its prettiest.)
• Watership Down by Martin Rosen (Moving depiction of the universal “will to live”.)

(Pro tip: You can use Steam Link to stream pirated movies from your desktop to your TV.)

Video Games

• Arctic Eggs (Masterclass in setting and mood. Captures the nihilism of today’s youth culture.)
• Braid (“Modernity” is mostly just ruining the world while proclaiming you’re making it better.)
• The Case of the Golden Idol (I’ve never seen whites treat Hinduism with such respect before.)
• Grand Theft Auto V (Easily the best open-world game ever made. Absurdly good story.)
• Hotline Miami (With proper visibility, one man can defeat a hundred. Killer soundtrack.)
• Little Inferno (Our lives are brief candles and every day we burn a little more. No going back.)
• Poker Night at the Inventory (All the fun of gambling without the addiction and shame!)
• The Roottrees are Dead (Reliving 1990s America and the joy of pre-social media Internet.)
• Sleeping Dogs (Grand Theft Auto meets Hong Kong cinema. The triad life is the life for me.)
• Spelunky 2 (Randomly generated 2D platformer – endless variety and perfect feel.)
• Super Mario Galaxy (Divinely inspired 3D platforming. It’s hard to believe humans made this.)

Background

Education

Click the pictures!

Political Views

I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area most of my life and got rich during the COVID tech boom. I’d like to move to a prettier place (Los Angeles? Miami? Lisbon?). I’m a U.S.-born Hindu.

The 2024 election was the last one that really mattered, as its result transferred all political power from the American voter to foreign lobbies. I don’t bother to vote any more.

We seem to be leaving an era of globalization and connectivity for one of war and atomization. Much suffering lies ahead. Lay low and avoid making unnecessary enemies.