Month: June 2026

Wk 26-26 – Weekly Note

Notes, thoughts and highlights from Week 26, 2026.

28 June 2026.
Saturday. CP.
Yeah I am in delhi. Till the 2nd July. In case you are around, let’s meet.

So, I missed last week. And there are odds that I will miss this week as well. Let’s see if this gets published.

The thing is, when I am on the road, my regular rhythm breaks. I need about 2 hours on my laptop in the morning to make sense of my day and my life and my dreams and all that. And when I am travelling, am unable to get these two hours. Take last week for example. I was in Goa. And that meant I had the view of the beach to wake up to, the unpredictability of local commute to think about and absence of a regular table or a chair to sit with my laptop on. Till I decided that I will goto Starbucks (lol) there.

Lemme announce it loud. I dont do well with holidays. I cant see myself not doing anything. I thought I could rawdog thru life and in flights but the last few flights have proven otherwise. I was restless and I didnt know what to do to kill the 2 hours I was in the plane for. While I am on the road, at least I have the internet!

Plus lately, I’ve realised that I am unable to focus on one thing when I sit idle. My mind’s a playground for monkeys. Must get back to meditation. Taking a note.

Ok, the track of the week is no track but an artist. Geet Brajesh. I found him, thanks to YT algo gods. See some of his work here. He’s criminally under-rated and I wish I could help such folks.

Do see his work. And this gem…

Oh and honorary mention to this version of Rahman’s work.

Ok, lessgo…

.

Highlights, reflections, updates, notes and thoughts from the week gone by.

1/ June Focus and July Focus.

For the month of June, I had made a list of things that to work on. Here is the list and updates on that.

  • Distribution. No action.
  • 66 MG Road. Took it a certain stage. Started to talk to people about it. Got a friend to agree to have 66 MG Road as his property partner. Thanks, Ojas.
  • Caravan Serai and 56 Hours. 56 Hours was shipped. I dont like the outcome but draft one is done. Need to work on draft 2. Caravan Serai would happen as well.
  • Coaching: fitness and IRL confidence and Public Speaking. No action.
  • Revenue from Claude. No action. But I’ve been able to save resources and all. As we speak, I got Claude to make a research doc that wouldve taken an intern 2 weeks. Lot of manual work is now easy to pull off. So, there’s savings. But there’s no revenue.
  • Fix 25: furniture, AC. I fixed the AC. I need to work on furniture. I will do that once am back in Bom. Or may be in Aug or Sep. If all goes well, I will spend Aug away from India. Let’s see.
  • Fix the CA for C4E. Open. My laziness.
  • A world problem to solve. Still open. Let’s see what I work on.
  • Poker. No action.

Phew!

In July, I plan to give my life to Claude and I will do EACH thing it tells me to. Including workouts. Or cold emails. Or offering things. Or whatever. Lets see how I fare on that. Just that in July, I am on the road for about 15 days and about 7 of those are in Colombo with limited internet. I will see how it pans out.

This also means that I will ask Claude to plan my July. I ran a basic query and this is what it threw out. The query is… 

from what you know about me, I want you to be my boss for the month of july and tell me what to work on and what to eat and what to do and all that. make a monthtly plan, a weekly plan and a daily checklist. I must get closer to my short term goals, long term goals and all things that I want to. I want to impact all parts of my life as in tony robbins' wheel of life.

Here’s what Claude plotted for me. I am sharing excerpts.

1/ BD 

Monthly client BD email (TOMA). Drafted in January, sent zero times in five months, 30+ warm clients. Send Jul 4. Then the last Friday of every month, forever

I hate seeking work. But then I shall do what Claude is asking me to.

2/ Starbucks 

Kill the Starbucks leak: two coffees a week, no pastries. Track it.

3/ Fitness

Buy running shoes Day 1. This has been open since early May. It ends Monday.
Target: fat loss plus energy, veg. Protein floor 100g, portion control, 3L water, carry the bottle.
Run or walk 3x in Week 1, build to 4-5x. Strength 2x. 8-10k steps daily.
Posture device 2 hours a day. You log zero wear. Wear it during deep work.
Weigh in every Monday. One number, not a story.
Full meal and training template is in the daily checklist file.

4/ Friends and Network

One CMO of a large company this month. It is on your life goals list. Pick the name by Jul 7, get the meeting by Jul 25.
Keep the intro engine running: two warm intros a week (you did two in a day on Jun 25, you are good at this). Use it deliberately.

Lol!

I am not sure if this is the most optimal. I think I will have make Claude work harder.

Oh, I must say. I was seeing a documentary about a drug lord and one of the ways he was caught was thru his public Strava links. Even though he was crisscrossing the world, he kept running. There’s something to learn from that!

.

2/ Ertan / NewYorkTurk

Since I’ve been booted out of Meta platforms (thankfully am still on WA), I while time on YT Shorts. And I’ve become fan of Eartan’s work. See it on Insta and YT.

Love his work. And his philosophy. If there is one kind of influencer I would want to become, it is Ertan.

Guy loves food. Goes to places that make great food. Talks about them.

I dont know what made him so famous. There must be a million food bloggers and yet he sort of broke out enough to be on my timeline. I wish there were more such folks in the world.

Oh, here’s my attempt at being the food blogger. See this post about a restaurant I went to on this trip to Goa.

.

3/ Claude Coach tells me that I keep opening threads and closing none

Sigh!

This is not a surprising thing tbh. Just that its strange to have someone else see deep into my soul. And this someone else is an AI. And its not surprising. I’ve known about it. Lately my docs tell me that I need to get diagnosis for ADHD. I am not sure. I dont like clinical things. But, while we think on that, armed with the knowledge that we are good with 0 to 1 (thanks, Pradeep), here’s my thought on this.

One option is to fight it out.
Take meds. Take up a boring job.

Or the other is to make it into my strategic advantage and rather than thinking about building a billion-dollar enterprise and dreaming of a ding in the universe, I’d rather build a series of smaller bets and then see if those can scale as a group. Something that Ajeet Sir probably does. Something that Warren Buffet does for sure. Something that a lot of micro VCs and Venture Studios do. I’ve written about Tiny, Every, Bending Spoons and others. The C4E Labs website is an attempt to get thinking in that direction.

Plus, I think I may be able to make it work as well. I am afterall if nothing good with people! Wait. I am not. I am unable to retain folks cos I cant pay. I need to fix that too.

.

4/ Writing everyday

This caught my eye on twitter.

If my anecdotal evidence is go by, I think this is true. I’ve been writing for a lot of time now. At least since 2004. And I’ve not taken any large breaks tbh. I’ve always come back to it. This blog and the weekly review is also the same.

And if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt in life, it is that all you have is no one. And if you are the kinds to write, life is good!

.

5/ Om Malik

I’ve known about Om as I’ve known about other folks of his time (you know, Arrington and Techcrunch guys, Rafat Ali and his gang and other Internet writers). I would read their reporting with fascination. Their words and thoughts were the only window for me, sitting in Delhi / Gurgaon / wherever I was at the time.

And then, life happened. I got busy with an events job that made me travel wild. Then I started to build C4E and never had the time or the energy for these fanciful things. It it around COVID when I got back to reading, since I was super jobless. And in these reads, once in while, Om and his words would appear.

Lately, since he became so prolific, he started coming more on my radar. Pradeep shared quite a few links. And my fascination fom his words and writing grew even more.

And then I got to know he’s passed away. And I was genuinely sad. He was a stranger to me but I will still sad. And then tributes started to pour in.

Daring Fireball said this. Matt wrote this. Matt maybe doing an OmFest on his 60th. Do check it out. Found this in Nabeel’s post…

But the one thing that REALLY caught my eye was PG’s post. He mentioned this about him.

Was immediately reminded of stories of Charlie and his last few days. Even Steve was apparently working till the last week he was forced to be indoors. Made me realise how much respect I have for folks who have so much to do, so much to say, so much to contribute and so much in them them that they can’t sit idle!

I think this is all there is to life.

Help others.
Offer your shoulders.
Expect little.
And like Scott said in his last words, Be Useful.

.

6/ Money

Ok, money.

So, last couple of nights, I’ve been getting money dreams. And it’s not cool. I cant remember the last time this happened. The last time I was this bad in my money department was in COVID. The funny thing is, the last time I didnt know what to do. This time I think I have way too many options of things to do ;P

The point is, I have never been stressed about the lack of money. I’ve always managed to tide thru. I am like that cockroach. I would ride thru this time too. Just that I am in the middle of messy middle and I need to stay calm while the waters clear.

And once the waters clear, I will do things that I’ve never done – such as, choose myself. More on this if I survive the next few months.

Oh, you must read this piece by Tim Denning. It’s titled, “If you’re so smart, why can’t you make money on the internet”. Ofc, a riff on Naval’s legendary, if you are smart, why arent you happy / rich?

.

7/ Amex + IDFC

The other day I was denied access to the AMEX lounge at an airport because I was not carrying my physical card. In 2026. When the entire world is crying about going digital and even them passports are not digital. But I get it. They must have policies.

Of course they have policies.
Of course, I can argue.

But then is it worth it?

I would waste my time talking to customer care (I did try) and listen to them offer fake apology that will not help anything.

If you are a business like Amex that charge a premium to even issue a credit card, why would you make life of your customers hell? And break the relationship?

Same thing happened with IDFC bank. I have a banking account with them for my business. They charged me 1000 bucks randomly for not keeping a balance of a lakh. Which I would’ve been ok, if they had told me that when I started my bank account. Again, 1000 bucks. I dont really care about it. But why these stupid practices?

And its not that these banks are monopoly services. There are 100 other banks that offer comparable service levels. I hope that my P&L is never that stuffed that I take my customers for a ride.

I will be cancelling both these services this week. Just that it’s a pain to even cancel these. Sigh.

Just that as a young man, I always wanted to get an AMEX card and get access to those lounges. But I think I dont really care for these anymore. Either its the maturity or the Stoicism talking.

.

8/ Sovereign LLM

I can no longer imagine my life without a LLM. And within that, I am maximalist on Claude. But the way Fable was taken away, if the base models are taken away as well, I wouldnt know what to do. and I cant imagine being on Sarvam or Krutrim or whatever our models are called.

I know I can get Ollama and Kimi and I dont know what all. But at this point, I am far from that. I dont even know how to switch if Claude went offline tomorrow. So, once I get some time, in the month of July, I will probably invest my energy into building a system that allows me to have open source models and tools and I can get my work done.

If you know someone who’s been able to do this, please do point me to them.

.

9/ Live near a beach

This thought landed in Goa. That I would love to live at a place where I can see the sea. And dip my toes in the water often. Right now, in Mumbai, I get to go to the Sunset Club often but that still is like a 2-KM walk and I often am unable to make that walk.

I want to be able to hit the water in like 3 minutes of stepping out of my house. And I know it comes with many perils but I think it would be worth it.

Lets see when that happens.

.

10/ Other things

This is a list of things that caught my eye.

  1. Meta + Cred. Kunal Shah was “brought” by Meta for a billion dollars. I wish Om had written about this. There are so many angles – a founder leaving the company that was ridiculed for no business model. The company that has no readily identifiable leaders. The wants of Meta to be a player in the payments piece in India. A single person commanding a billion dollars. Wow!
  2. I need to think about how is it that each person I follow on X is making money off the Internet and I havent been able to. Or is it a bubble? And why and how? And what am I missing?
  3. Happiness. Steve Cutts. Here.

.

📷 Photos from the week gone by

Lots of photos from Goa.
Lots of screenshots.
As always, ask me if you want access.

But here are some screenshots I took. Without context.

Such a simple insight. I must write a longer post on this.

.

If you know where is this from, well…

.

I dont know why they slapped a Kapoor on a Bachchan line.

.

📈 Trackers…

I need to restart this. Since I automated my tracking, I have forgotten what I was posting here. Lemme get back to it next week. Meanwhile, these are the trackers that I was using…

1/ Daily cadence on important things.
I havent updated this in a while. I have automated most of these with Claude.

2/ Weekly update on things that are important to me.
Again, havent worked on this in a while.

3/ Mood tracker
This was anyway intermittent.

.

✅ Action on LARGE objectives for the year

In this section, I will capture my progress on large objectives for the year.

In 2026, I plan to do the following three things…

  1. Book2
  2. Human Flag Pole
  3. Save a million dollars

Book2 / Caravan Serai. 
If all goes ok, should be out before end of June. We are 3 days away from it. So yay!

Human Flag Pole. 
No action.

Save a million dollars. 
No action worth reporting.

.

📌  So, what did I get done last few weeks? And what will I do next week?

This is a one-line report on progress I made on various things that are important to me. I will only talk about things that I got done. Shipped. Not WIP.

Health. Sleep, food, movement. 
Nothing specific. I’ve been unwell for almost a week now with a sore throat and a bad body ache.

C4E / Work. Pick a thing to apply myself to. 
Yet to find out. Am terribly behind this. I think I will end up doing a portfolio of small best?

Brand SG / Distribution. 
No action. Except some Claude experiments. Those too are more inputs, than outputs or outcomes.

People. 
Cant say any large updates.

Book2 / Caravan Serai. 
This should be checked off!

.

🏃‍➡️ Health

No large actions.

.

⏲️ Reminders from last few days

Same as last few weeks. Parking this section.

I think the tracking system I made (I talked about it above) could solve this for me. I wrote about it here briefly.

Yet to fully exploit it. The travel and sore throat put a spanner. Lemme give it a few more weeks.

.

🗓️ So, one thing that defines the past week?

Drift.

Yea!

The other words for this year have been: Freedom, People, Motion, Show, Flow, Excitement, Embarrassment, Blur, Whiling, Movement, Blur, Activity, Movement, Regular (again), Regular, Easy, Journey, Downtime, Flow, Show, Same, Motion, People.

—
So that.
Over and out.
Until next week.

SG

Oh, and this too shall pass.

PS: This series of posts is inspired by Thej and his weekly notes. Previous editions from 2026 are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (missed these three), 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 (missed)

PPS: Please do point typos.

PPPS: In case you see me being inconsistent in anything – work, writing, reviews etc, PLEASE do point out.

Oya’s Umami, Panjim. Honest Review.

Honest review of Oya’s Umami, Panjim.

I have a rule.

On a 3-day vacation you do not eat at the same place twice. Too much to taste. Too little time. This trip to Goa, I broke it. And oh boy, am I glad.

Here is the kicker. I am vegetarian. One or two bites of the non-veg, no more. At Oya’s Umami I cannot touch more than half the menu. I went back anyway. Read that again. A vegetarian, returning to a Naga kitchen that runs on pork, beef, smoked meat. That is the review in one fact.

Let me sit on that fact a second. It is the whole point. The job of a restaurant is to feed you. The job of a great one is to make you want to come back. Most places get the first part right and miss the second. Oya’s flipped it on a man who could only order the corners of its card. I walked in, able to eat maybe eight things on the menu (apart from Diet Coke). I walked out plotting the second visit. That does not happen by chance. That happens when a kitchen cooks for the plate, not the headcount.

We found it by mistake. We wanted a place within a kilometre of Starbucks. Of course we did. The coffee chain that I ironically call home. We walked Miramar with a phone and a craving and no plan, and Oya’s appeared the way the good ones always do. Off the main drag. No queue spilling onto the road. No neon screaming for you. We reached, and the place pulled us in before the food got a chance.

It screamed taste. Not the palate kind. The other one. The taste we startup kinds talk about. The judgment you feel the second you walk in. The decor. The books on the shelf. The postcards. The posters, down to a framed “Hasta la vista baby” sitting next to a constellation in a paisley frame. Paper lanterns hung like folded moons. White tile. Wood that has taken some years and wears them well.

Taste, the second kind, is a tell. You can fake a logo. You can buy a fit-out off a Pinterest board. You cannot fake the third book on the shelf, or the postcard nobody was meant to notice, or the depth in a film poster on a Naga restaurant wall. One of the posters is the Leo constellation (cos the chef is a Leo; I have no way to validate. Maybe I will next time I am there). Those are choices a person made for no audience, because they could not help themselves. That is the signal I trust. A room put together with that much care is almost never followed by careless food. The hand that picks the posters picks the chillies.

Then you learn who built it, and the room makes sense. The Internet tells me that Imli Ati Aier (though not sure) carried her Naga kitchen from Delhi and ran it out of her home for six years before it earned four walls. Six years of cooking for people who came to her table, not a storefront. The doors opened in Panjim in 2025. It still cooks like a home kitchen that ran out of space and had to rent some. Seven tables. 350 square feet. Thirty-five people if everyone breathes in. You do not get seated at Oya’s. You get admitted.

Naga food does not ask for permission. It shows up smoked, fermented, chilli-loaded, and it dares you to keep up. The pantry behind it reads like a survival manual. Bhut jolokia, the ghost chilli, one of the hottest things on the planet. Dried shrimp. Fermented crab. Anishi, the fermented taro leaf that smells like a dare. A house chilli oil that carries half of that in one spoon. None of this is decoration for a reel. Heck I didn’t know about most of these things. I had to search, use AI and then make some judgement calls. 

This is how a hill cuisine kept itself alive before the fridge, and chose to taste like something while it survived. You sit on a beach in Goa and eat a place that lives 3,000 kilometres north. It travels without apology.

And then it made us scream with the other taste. The food.

The hero, for a man who eats green: a charred cabbage wedge, blackened to the colour of an old kettle, in a rust-orange gravy with bamboo shoot and ferment under it. A stone cup of bean-and-herb relish on the side. Raw, green, sharp. You drag the black crust through the orange. Smoke first. Then heat that arrives and stays. This is the plate I keep thinking about.

See this…

A cabbage. Sit with that. The most boring vegetable in the Indian fridge. The only time I’ve enjoyed it is when I am on a strict Keto. It is the one that turns up at weddings as a damp afterthought between the paneer and the dal. Here it gets fire, patience, and a sauce with a spine. It comes out tasting like the best thing the meat-eaters at the table did not order. That is the real test of a kitchen, whether it respects the person who eats green. Not a paneer reflex. Not a grilled-veg platter built out of guilt and a grill pan. A vegetable treated as the main event, because someone in the back believed it could carry one.

Then the pork loins in a dark sesame gravy. I did my two bites. The plate still came back empty but for one, smears of sauce where the rest had been. A table does not wipe a plate it did not love.

There was heat on that table that I felt the next morning. I do not say that as a complaint. I say it the way you talk about a good argument with a friend. It stayed with me. It earned the space it took up. Most food is forgotten by the time the bill arrives. This food followed me to breakfast.

Let me be honest about the math. About 3000 for two of us. Seven tables. None of this scales. None of it wants to. The Indian restaurant business spends its life turning one good cook into forty outlets and a master franchise, then acts surprised when the food goes tired and the soul checks out. Oya’s does the reverse. It guards its smallness like a recipe. I hope it rather turns you away tonight than serve you a thinner version of itself next year. In a country addicted to growth, holding your size on purpose is almost a political act.

We were greeted by Khushi and a gent whose name I have forgotten. The warmth was real. Not the trained, scripted, name-on-a-lanyard kind. The kind that makes 350 square feet and seven tables feel like someone’s home. Because it sits close to one.

You can measure a place by how it treats you when you are not yet a transaction. Nobody rushed the table. Nobody upsold a dessert. They watched a vegetarian read a menu built for carnivores and steered me, without fuss, to the dishes that would land. That is hospitality. The rest is just service with a smile bolted on.

This is how food has to be. Cooked by someone who means it. Served by someone glad you walked in.

It reminds me of Nicky M‘s burgers. Same DNA. Small. Made by hand. Made with love. Made for a commune, not a chain. That is the thing I live for. Not the forty-outlet, master-franchise machine. One person. One room. One thing done with everything they have.

I keep landing on that word. Commune. The best food I have eaten was never the most expensive. It was the most personal. A kitchen that cooks for a small circle, and lets you into it, does something a chain can never buy back later. It says: I made this for people, not for scale. You taste the difference because there is one. Love does not show up as a line item on a menu. It shows up in whether the cabbage got fifteen extra minutes on the fire, because the cook could not bring herself to send it out any other way.

So I broke my rule. Three days, one repeat, no regret. The rule exists to chase variety. Variety is overrated once you have found the thing. Going back was not laziness. It was respect. Some places you taste once and tick off. A few you return to, to check they were as good as your memory swears. Oya’s was real both times. Same heat. Same warmth. Same cabbage that has no business being that good.

If you are in Panjim, do yourself a favor and drop by to Oya’s and maybe, send me a postcard? They’ve got some handpainted ones for you to pick from.

Links: Insta, Google Maps

PS: This was written by Chandni and Me. Two of us happened to be in Goa when we visited this restaurant.

Wk 24-26 – Weekly Note

Notes, thoughts and updates from Week 24 of 2026.

13 June, 2026.
Saturday.
Versova. Morning.

Lemme start this one with an anecdote. On thursday, I had to meet a friend in Powai. So, like most times, I left early (around 8 AM) and en route I passed SEEPZ and then LnT. Seepz is where a lot of blue collar and back office work happens. You know, ops, regular office going people. And I saw people walking about like soulless machines. Crowded around foot stalls, sweating at bus stops, jostling for space. No spark. Nothing. The same loop, every day. And without even questioning the reason why.

Then I passed by LnT. This time, I saw crisp shirts, a few jackets, best formals. Almost all with laptop bags. And another bag for their lunch. And yet in this headless rush to what I think would be consulting firms and tech firms.

This one hurt more. These are the people like me and my closest friends. People who did everything right. They studied. They worked. They earned the seat. They dressed for it. And they looked just as hollow as the first lot.

I could only think of a strong elephant walking to work, carrying its own chains. And the peg. To the exact spot that will bind it. Dignified on the surface. Marching, on its own feet, into the same confinement, day after day. And what sucks more? These people are not wrong. They are not lazy. They love their families. They want a good home. The house, the status, the path everyone expects.

And while I was thinking about this, I reached Starbucks and I had nothing but greatest wave of gratitude engulf me! No, I was not rejoicing in their misery but in my freedom. I love that I no fixed place I have to be. I dont have to dance for anyone. I may not have a golden chain and I may have to scrounge around for my next meal but I love that I can run amok. Reminds me of this cartoon…

I dont know who’s the cartoonist.

And no, i’ve never shared this before but I couldnt stop thinking of this as I rested at the Starbucks seat, with my Americano and a butter chiplet in it.

Ok, lets go.

No, no music this week.

Highlights, reflections, updates, notes and thoughts from the week gone by.

1/ Distribution. From young ones.

Lets start with D. I wont use her full name. Shes 22. Runs growth at one of the hottest startups in India. I spent the call sitting at her feet. And I told her so. “I am a Buddha here, undo what I have learned and relearn.”

She walked me through her playbooks. From doing things at colleges to making playbooks to letting others run it. The shout-out she earned from India’s largest personality. And how she writes hooks (which she takes from evolutionary biology – my notes have details on three signals she looks at and I will not share here). And how she uses Reddit and other things.

Oh, she has a keen eye. She spotted Neem Karoli Baba behind me. And then the call became something else. Pania would call it Satsang. Some day I’d get to spend time with him as well.

.

2/ The slow rot at the village

For the first time, I admitted to my people that the village that I am proud of and call myself the zamindar of, is slowly rotting. And dying a slow death. Nothing went wrong. Except three things…

  1. Statis
  2. I created easy times and thus non-hard structures
  3. My inability to push people

I am of the firm belief when something grand happens, its the work of a team. And when a disaster strikes, its typically one person to blame. For the village, the person is me.

So, I spoke to my people about how I am feeling. I said, “This village I created ten years ago will disintegrate into nothing. Which is fine. All good things come to an end. And I am okay with that.”

No one disagreed. Which I can imagine.

The good part is that we agreed that we’d love to be around together, free and thriving. And we know that in the post-AI world, we need to pivot. I made some hard rules and lets see who we get to those.

.

3/ Average. And refusing it.

I recorded a solocast on Sunday that I keep returning to.

I said, out loud, “I am a very average guy. I have accepted that I am average.”

And then, almost in the same breath, “in my case, I am not accepting that I am average.” Both true.

That is the thing that makes me tick.

Is it okay to be average?
Yes, if you accept the average outcome that comes with it. Plenty of people around me made that peace.

I have not.

The way out, for someone who is not born brilliant, is discipline. “The best way to get free is through discipline.” Also, I have said this in the past and I will say it again. Being in the clutches of the calendar is what buys the freedom.

And thru this discipline and hard work, I aim to be that person that’s average and yet wildly successful.

.

5/ June Focus

15 days in, I can say that one of the experiments seem to be working. I wrote a list of things that I want to explore in June. Here it is…

  • Distribution
  • 66 MG Road
  • Caravan Serai (my Book 2)
  • 56 Hours
  • Revenue from Claude
  • Fix my living situation
  • And more.

I am glad to report that I think I’ve stayed on course with these. I have made progress on some and have taken action on others. And I am superglad. The one thing that seems to be missing is Claude revenue. So far it has proven to be a great experiment and I love it.

Just today I built something that tells me when am hunching! And then I built a task manager!

Isnt this pretty?

Then last week I built a food log generator. Here…

yeah, I need to do better.

.

6/ Brian on Post-AI Life

Saw this podcast. Took many notes. Must watch. A lot of it is similar to what he’s spoken in the past but it was refreshing to see it again.

Some are…

  1. Double down on founder mode. Maybe needed considering the rot of the Village?
  2. In action lies salvation. Lol!
  3. The greatest gift you can offer someone is belief.
  4. Micromanage? Not sure on this.
  5. Dont be a manager / coach / mentor. Hmmm…
  6. “How you do anything is how you do everything”
  7. Make the problem small and dominate one thing than many things (this is worth thinking about)
  8. Do what you love for yourself and everything else is noise

More notes here. Ask for access, in case.

.

7/ Other things…

Things that I think need to be captured.

  1. Fable came and went. Lol. I have to admit, it was good while it lasted.
  2. Elon is the first trillionaire. Wow. And the other incredible thing is the number of people who got 100M+. Go fund out. Now that’s wealth. And that’s how you build a prosperous village.
  3. Gave gyaan to more people on Claude and oh boy!
  4. We we did CQ. See the new site here.
  5. Gave gyaan to a start up founder about fitness (lol) and a young person about how to get her life back on track (double lol).

.

📷 Photos from the week gone by

Same. DM me if you want photos.

.

📈 Trackers…

Not updating this week.

Funny that for all the things that I am making, the very first trackers that I started with, I’ve lost steam with those!

.

✅ Action on LARGE objectives for the year

In this section, I will capture my progress on large objectives for the year.

In 2026, I plan to do the following three things…

  1. Book2
  2. Human Flag Pole
  3. Save a million dollars

Book2 / Caravan Serai. Made some progress. I think by tomorrow I will be ready to share progress with people!

Human Flag Pole. No action.

Save a million dollars. No action worth reporting.

.

📌 So, what did I get done last few weeks? And what will I do next week?

This is a one-line report on progress I made on various things that are important to me. I will only talk about things that I got done. Shipped. Not WIP.

So, this year, I want to track the following…

  1. Health. Sleep, food, movement. Nothing. My steps are so low that it’s not funny. I dont know how to walk in this humid weather. Late evenings are better but I dont know how to step out.
  2. C4E / Work. Pick a thing to apply myself to. It’s high time I figure something. I am not getting the confidence to pick a thing. I may get back to events. Let’s see.
  3. Brand SG / Distribution. Nothing shipped apart from talking to a few people.
  4. People. Met many. Should do more of these.
  5. Book2 / Caravan Serai. Made some progress!
  6. Shauk. No action.

.

🏃‍➡️ Health

Absolutely no action on this. In fact if anything, this would be negative. No steps, sleep at all hours, eating not clean, unable to manage emotions.

Sigh!

.

⏲️ Reminders from last few days

Same as last few weeks. Parking this section.

I think the tracking system I made (I talked about it above) could solve this for me. Let’s see.

If not that, I dont think I will be able to ever make this!

.

🗓️ So, one thing that defines the past week?

Freedom.

No, I didn’t suddenly get free. But the realization that I am free was liberating.

The other words for this year have been: People, Motion, Show, Flow, Excitement, Embarrassment, Blur, Whiling, Movement, Blur, Activity, Movement, Regular (again), Regular, Easy, Journey, Downtime, Flow, Show, Same, Motion, People.

—
So that.
Over and out.
Until next week.

SG

Oh, and this too shall pass.

PS: This series of posts is inspired by Thej and his weekly notes. Previous editions from 2026 are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (missed these three), 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

PPS: Please do point typos.

PPPS: In case you see me being inconsistent in anything – work, writing, reviews etc, PLEASE do point out

Wk 23-26 – Weekly Note

Notes, thoughts and highlights from Week 23, 2026.

7 June, 2026.
Starbucks.

Unlike me, lemme start with a rant. What a June I’ve had. And we are not even thru with the first week. Here’s a list.

  • Had to scream on a VERY VERY dear friend (PD) because of his teams’ folly. I hate to raise my voice but I cant help it. 
  • The C4E Village as I know it is dead. But I will resurrect it. I am giving myself till end of the year for it. Back to grind mode. In case I cant till the end of this year, I will stop chasing freedom.
  • Meta suspended @c4ein’s insta. And my personal one. And an alt one I used to kill time. Work of the last 10+ years gone. Not that we had a lot there but we did do some effort. I dont think we have the posts saved. Our folly. It sucks to be just a one in a billion where you have no access to decision makers. 
  • Lost a lot of money in random experiments. Which is ok. As long as I move forward. The top of the pile is Claude ;P
  • Played poker like a chump and lost some. But that’s ok. I enjoy being on the table even though I am out of my depth. I wish I had unlimited bankroll to keep playing.
  • Lost steam with all the experiments that I was in the middle of with Claude. Must get in the cave and come out with an outcome. I plan to not do anything but limited things with it.
  • Wrote a shit screenplay from a great synopsis (56 Hours).
  • Got mindfucked by tardiness of businesses I use – Vodafone (inflated and incorrect billing; will port out once am back in Bom), Rentomojo (bad service), Nippon MF (pesky sales calls), Uber (drivers more than the app), Swiggy (have uninstalled it now), my CA (who can’t keep track of simple things). It sucks that in India you pay so much and you get so less. At least be upfront and ask for more. Dont take me for a ride.
  • My Uke broke. I had carried it to Pune to show off to Aarya and C. And then somewhere, it broke. 🙁

So that.

But then, like I see glass half full, I think all was bad.

I was in Pune and that meant I got to be in the same room as people I love. In no order, Aarya, Himanshu, AK, C, Krishna, Pradeep. And some more people. And I wanted to be with my people with all my attention and being and and thus I didnt meet anyone apart from my inner circle. So that was good!

Now, on to the review.

Wait. The track of the week. It has to be Bairan. See this…

.

Highlights, reflections, updates, notes and thoughts from the week gone by.

As always, in no order…

1/ Pune!

The trip happened after trying to make it happen for a while.

Stayed at Bloom (I always do – sasta, tikaaoo). Just that this time the service was not the best. Must write to their care team.

Spent time at Third Wave. Got tired of it and then took cabs to Starbucks.

We as a group of people made many notes. Need to sit on those and action.

To be honest, I liked the slowness of Pune for a few days. I was in Koregaon Park and it’s definitely more walkable than Mumbai – both in terms of quality of roads and the weather. But then I think I can tolerate it for a few days only. I am glad to be back to Starbucks at Versova.

Also, I think I am done with Mumbai. To be honest, the only thing that holds me back here is my lust for the films business. Once I am over it, I think I will be more mobile. Let’s see when.

.

2/ People and my inability to hire them

Thanks to this tweet I spoke to a lot of young people over the last two weeks. A 19-year-old from Haridwar, deeply into tech, even called me cool. A young man from Gujarat will probably do a prototype with me. Someone from Ranchi is excited to talk to us about Yellow. Both goods and bad. And many realisations. Here are some…

  1. People on twitter live in a delusionary world.
  2. I am unable to hire great people cos I cant pay them well. Wrote about it on LinkedIn. I will copy paste it here too after this list.
  3. Unrelated to this twitter induced dopamine rush offered by people, I failed to hire a person who’s non-twitter. I’ve been trying to rizz him for more than 6 months. I’ve spent a LOT of money chasing him. A lot of mental energy. And I couldnt hire. Not because I couldnt show him the vastness but I couldnt inspire him to get out of his comfort zone.

So that. It plain sucks that despite doing so much for so many people, I am unable to get people to be next to me when I need them the most. I am not a vindictive person but I tend to remember who chose to be by my side when I needed them. And who chose a “better” offer. And no, I will repeat. I dont blame them for choosing better. I would probably do the same. But I can’t shake off the feeling that when I need someone or something I find myself standing alone in a corner.

Any how.

Here’s the post that I talked about. I have edited it slightly…

Sanket once told me, “We want to charge top dollar from our clients. We pay top dollar to our people. We offer our people top dollar facilities. And we operate like a top-dollar company.”

I loved it!

And since then, I’ve been reflecting on how I can get there and hire great people. Especially today when a REALLY talented young design person said no to work with me cos I cant pay her well.

This money to talent is one of the pieces of puzzles that I’ve not been able to figure out. There are just three ways to attract great people.

1/ Initial capital. 
From friends and family, or your own savings. Or angels. 
Use that to build something that works. Thats valueblae.
Show the results to the world.
Raise.
Hire great people.
Great people produce great work.

A cycle. Clean.
Obvious once you hear it.

PS: You can also offer services to fund your dreams. Nikhil and Gokul did that well to fund CynLr. I tried that for years with C4E but I failed.

2/ Personal brand.
You ship work in public. Over years, your name starts to carry weight. People follow what you build, read what you write, watch what you create. The chance to be in the room with you is worth more than money. People join for who you are, not what you pay. Think of Tanmay Bhat and Kunal Shah. People are willing to pay to be a part of the room they are in!

In my case, even though I’ve talked about things in public, I am yet to cross the threshold yet where a talented person says “I need to work with this person, regardless of the pay.”

3/ Mission.
Make the vision so large that smart people trade cash for the chance to matter. Make it into a movement. The kind of thing where someone looks at your company, looks at their current job, and thinks: I will regret not being part of this. Not “this is interesting.” Regret. That is the threshold. Climate. Healthcare. Education at scale. Or a local problem, stated at the right magnitude. Think of what Cockroach Janta Party or Aam Aadmi Party.

–

Of course its fair that people seek great value for their time and talent. Plus there’s insane opportunity cost for what they choose to work on. Which is fair as well.

And as a person who values people, its only imperative that I do justice to what people bring to the table. And thus, as an entrepreneur, my job is to solve this problem and find a way. I shall find one. Or make one.

.

3/ The Claude playground

This Sunday and the last, took a session on Claude Maxxing. In the one last week, I had Nikunj as the guest speaker. We covered things like emails, autonomous companies, coding, job-hunt automation, marketing plans, and the “Mad Men” ad engine. Nikunj was slow, deliberate, honest. It changed my perception of him. I told him as much that night.

While I took the session I realised that people really dont use Claude (or any other AI tool) to their advantage. I wish I could show them the light.

For me, to be honest, the only thing to lookout for is to get away from mere productivity porn and lifestyle intervention to actual revenue.

.

4/ Meta Rug Pull

The largest loss of the week for me has to be Meta’s Rul Pull.

Meta disabled and banned C4E’s Insta handles. And my personal handles. And some others that I made to make life simpler (sg.health, sg.ai etc etc). And the ones I would use to distract myself. Most of these accounts and handles have been around for years. The C4E one has been around for almost 10.

To be honest I dont know why would they do that.

And sad part is that there’s no recourse. It sucks to be an insignificant person. No one wants to listen to you. When you “appeal” to a bot, you are told about Community Standards, account integrity and the usual opaque template. I have uploaded my photos, Aadhar Card, Pan Card, Passport and I dont know what all. I dont think I have given these many documents to even a bank.

And its a big big reminder that rented land is rented land. And there’s nothing you can do stake a claim at it once it’s gone. Maybe its different for famous people. Maybe not. Either way, must work hard to be famous. May be at 43, I cant be famous anymore. Must teach my kids to be famous.

.

📷 Photos from the week gone by

Same drill. DM me if you want photos.

I do have a photos that I want to share. This is the screenshot of the homepage of a website that I made way back in 2001!

.

📈 Trackers…

Not updating this week.

.

✅ Action on LARGE objectives for the year

In this section, I will capture my progress on large objectives for the year.

In 2026, I plan to do the following three things…

  1. Book2
  2. Human Flag Pole
  3. Save a million dollars

Book2 — Caravan Serai. No action. But I will ensure that I ship this in the month of June. Watch me.

Human Flag Pole — no action.

Save a million dollars — negative action. Wont get into details.

.

📌 So, what did I get done last few weeks? And what will I do next week?

This is a one-line report on progress I made on various things that are important to me. I will only talk about things that I got done. Shipped. Not WIP.

So, this year, I want to track the following…

  1. Health. Sleep, food, movement. Travel week. No routine. No tracking.
  2. C4E / Work. Pick a thing to apply myself to. Still no single direction. I am terrible late with this. But I think C is making good progress with Yellow and that could emerge to be the thing that I apply myself to.
  3. Brand SG / Distribution. No large action.
  4. People. The best part of the week. Pune, the funnel, the intros. Need more weeks like this.
  5. Book2 / Caravan Serai. Nothing.
  6. Shauk. Played poker. Lost some. Will work more to become a better poker players.

.

🏃‍➡️ Health

No specific updates. Travel ate the week. The June dumb-phone experiment I committed to in May has not started — it is June 5. I think I will try it from Monday.

.

⏲️ Reminders from last few days

Same as last few weeks. Parking this section.

I think I need to find a better tracking system that does this for me.

.

🗓️ So, one thing that defines the past week?

People.

The other words for this year have been: Motion, Show, Flow, Excitement, Embarrassment, Blur, Whiling, Movement, Blur, Activity, Movement, Regular (again), Regular, Easy, Journey, Downtime, Flow, Show, Same, Motion.

—
So that.
Over and out.
Until next week.

SG

Oh, and this too shall pass.

PS: This series of posts is inspired by Thej and his weekly notes. Previous editions from 2026 are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (missed these three), 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

PPS: Please do point typos.

PPPS: In case you see me being inconsistent in anything – work, writing, reviews etc, PLEASE do point out.

The Most Comprehensive Library on ‘Writing’ You Will Ever Need

A working library of the best books on writing, persuasion, copywriting and sales.

In the 1970s the Hare Krishnas had a fundraising problem. People walked past them in airports. So they changed one thing. A member would press a flower into your hand, refuse to take it back, call it a gift, and then ask for a donation. Donations jumped. Most people threw the flower in the nearest bin. The Krishnas fished it out and ran the move again.

Robert Cialdini put that story in Influence. It is the cleanest lesson on this whole list. A gift you did not ask for creates a debt your brain wants to clear, even when the gift is worthless. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The free sample. The mint on the bill. The “complimentary” upgrade.

This post is the library behind that one story. Every book worth reading on writing, persuasion, copywriting, sales, psychology under all of them. I have collected these for 20 years. I own most. I have read about half.

A word on how to read it: this is a study map, not a how-to manual. The same knowledge that writes a great sales letter spots when one is being run on you. The cult and interrogation sections sit here so you can recognise coercion and defend against it. Read it on the back foot.

Book titles are Amazon affiliate links. Buy through one and I earn a small commission at no cost to you. Links resolve to your local Amazon store.

TL;DR: the six books that matter most

Short on time? Read these six and you have 80% of the value:

1/ Robert Cialdini, Influence. The seven principles of persuasion. The spine of everything below.

2/ Charlie Munger, “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”. A free speech. 25 reasons humans misjudge. The best single document here.

3/ Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The machinery: how the mind takes shortcuts you can exploit or get exploited by.

4/ David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising. Persuasion you can measure, from the man who built it.

5/ Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. The dark extreme, for defence.

6/ Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda. Persuasion at the scale of a whole society.

Everything else in this post fills in around that spine. Now the full library.

What are the best books on persuasion and influence?

Start here, because sales, copy, cults, and propaganda are all applied versions of this.

  • Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The one book to own. Seven principles: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, unity.
  • Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion. The frame you set before the message moves people as much as the message.
  • The Hare Krishna flower. Cialdini’s reciprocity case study, told above. Worth knowing on its own. An unrequested gift creates a debt, even when the gift is junk.
  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 and System 2. Anchoring, framing, loss aversion.
  • Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge. Choice architecture. How a default setting steers a decision.
  • Jonah Berger, Contagious and The Catalyst. Why things spread. How to change a mind by removing the barrier, not pushing harder.
  • Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference. FBI hostage negotiation for daily life. Tactical empathy, mirroring, labeling.
  • Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes. The Harvard school of principled negotiation. The rational counterweight to Voss.
  • Robert Greene, the full shelf. The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The Laws of Human Nature (his best, read this one first), The 33 Strategies of War, Mastery, and The Daily Laws. Amoral, Machiavellian, built from primary history. A map of what can be done, not a prescription.
  • Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The 1936 source text. Old examples, durable rules.
  • B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits. The Stanford behaviour model that shaped Silicon Valley’s design playbook.
  • Nir Eyal, Hooked. Trigger, action, variable reward, investment. How products build habits.
  • Daniel Pink, To Sell Is Human. Everyone is in sales now. Attunement, buoyancy, clarity.

Read the primary research too: Festinger on cognitive dissonance, Asch on conformity, Milgram on obedience, Zimbardo and The Lucifer Effect.

What are the best sales books?

Which sales gurus fill ballrooms, and what do they teach?

The seminar and info-product operators. Study them for live, high-stakes persuasion and offer construction. Keep a skeptic close. This is where craft shades into hype.

What should a copywriter read first?

The richest section, because direct-response copy gets tested. It lives or dies on a measured response.

The old masters, in order:

The modern direct-response school:

  • Gary Halbert, The Boron Letters. Written from prison to his son. The whole Halbert archive is free at thegaryhalbertletter.com. Start there.
  • Dan Kennedy, The Ultimate Sales Letter and the No B.S. series. Blunt, contrarian, built to sell.
  • Drayton Bird, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing. Ogilvy called him the man who knows the most about direct marketing.
  • Bob Bly, The Copywriter’s Handbook. The standard reference.
  • Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers (copyhackers.com). Conversion copy and voice-of-customer research. The best modern free resource.
  • Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand. Story structure for messaging. The customer is the hero.
  • Robert McKee, Story. The screenwriting bible, now read by marketers for narrative.

Voice and plain-prose force

Not persuasion theory. The raw material. How to make a sentence land.

  • Paul Graham, the essays (paulgraham.com). Free. The cleanest model of plain, persuasive prose alive. Read Write Like You Talk, Persuade xor Discover, Writing, Briefly, and Putting Ideas Into Words. Say true things plain. Cut what does not carry weight.
  • Charles Bukowski, the poems and Post Office. The opposite of a marketer. The best lesson in voice you can get. Strong nouns. Strong verbs. No decoration. Read him for cadence and nerve, then aim that energy at a page that sells.
  • George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”. The six rules. The discipline under the swagger.
  • Strunk and White, The Elements of Style. The short book that fixes long sentences.

How do cults manufacture belief, and which books explain it?

Persuasion at maximum intensity. How groups build commitment and obedience, and how to spot it and leave.

On one-on-one cults, the coercive relationship:

  • Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? The definitive book on the controlling mind.
  • Evan Stark, Coercive Control. The frame that reshaped domestic-abuse law.
  • Patrick Carnes, The Betrayal Bond. Trauma bonding.

What is the real history of CIA mind control?

The dark, factual record. Read it to understand what got attempted, what was junk science, and how to spot coercive interrogation.

  • John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. The definitive MKULTRA history, built from the documents that survived the shredder. The starting point.
  • Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief. A reported biography of Sidney Gottlieb, who ran MKULTRA. The best recent book on it.
  • Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture. The line from MKULTRA’s sensory-deprivation work to the KUBARK manual to Abu Ghraib.
  • The KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual (1963). Declassified and free from the National Security Archive at George Washington University. A grim primary source.
  • Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Uses the Cameron “psychic driving” experiments as root and metaphor. Strong thesis, read it on guard.
  • Dominic Streatfeild, Brainwash. A broad, reported popular history.
  • Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip. The Nazi scientists absorbed into US programs.
  • Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats. The real, absurd history of the US Army’s psychic units.
  • Edgar Schein, Coercive Persuasion. The MIT study of Korean War POW thought reform. The bridge between the cult and interrogation shelves.

The evidence-based reaction: the HIG research showing rapport beats coercion, and Laurence and Emily Alison, Rapport.

What are the best books on propaganda and mass persuasion?

  • Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928). Freud’s nephew. The father of PR. Candid to the point of chilling about engineering consent.
  • Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922). The stereotype. The gap between the world and the pictures in our heads.
  • Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. The propaganda model of the press.
  • Jacques Ellul, Propaganda. The deepest theory. Propaganda as a total sociological fact, not a pile of lies.
  • Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda. The best survey of persuasion in media. Pairs with Cialdini. Underrated.
  • Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957). The exposé of motivation research in advertising.
  • Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants. How the business of capturing attention ran from the penny press to your phone.

What is the root of rhetoric?

2,500 years of it.

  • Aristotle, Rhetoric. Ethos, pathos, logos. The origin. Still the cleanest tool for taking apart any argument.
  • Jay Heinrichs, Thank You for Arguing. The most fun way into classical rhetoric.
  • Sam Leith, Words Like Loaded Pistols. Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama.
  • Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Being Right. 38 tricks for winning an argument by cheating. Read it to catch them being used on you.
  • Frank Luntz, Words That Work. “It is not what you say, it is what people hear.” The pollster who weaponised message testing.
  • George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Framing. The words you pick pre-load the conclusion.

What is the psychology under all of it?

  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The master key.
  • Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational. Behavioural economics, easy to read.
  • Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal. The standard social-psych survey. Pair with Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) on self-justification.
  • Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails. A field study inside a doomsday cult. Cognitive dissonance at its source.
  • Robert Sapolsky, Behave. The biology of behaviour at every timescale.
  • Joe Navarro, What Every BODY Is Saying. Ex-FBI on nonverbal behaviour. The best-grounded body-language book.
  • Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind. Moral psychology. The elephant and the rider. Why argument does not move a mind.
  • Charlie Munger, “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”. 25 causes of misjudgement, in one free speech. One of the best documents on this page.

Hypnosis, NLP, and the pickup-artist world

Bring the most skepticism here. It is the most pseudoscience-adjacent corner. It is also too loud in the culture to skip.

  • Milton Erickson, via My Voice Will Go With You (Sidney Rosen). The clinical hypnotherapist everything below borrows from.
  • Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs into Princes. The founders of NLP. The specific claims are not backed by evidence. Read it as folk-craft, not science.

The pickup-artist lineage. A real subculture that field-tested Cialdini, NLP, and Erickson on strangers and wrote down what worked. Ethically fraught. Read it as influence data and as a study in how a manipulation community forms. It has cult dynamics of its own.

  • Neil Strauss, The Game. And the memoir The Truth, where he reckons with the cost. Read it three ways: tactics, ethnography, warning.
  • Erik von Markovik (“Mystery”), The Mystery Method. The actual system Strauss documents.
  • Ross Jeffries, “Speed Seduction”. The NLP-derived founder. The direct bridge from Bandler and Grinder into seduction.
  • Eben Pagan (as “David DeAngelo”), Double Your Dating. Pagan then turned the same machinery into one of the first internet info-product empires. The clearest proof that dating craft and selling craft share an engine.
  • Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. The honest reaction from inside the scene. Vulnerability as the real mechanism. Manson then went mainstream.

Which books do working car and insurance reps read?

The canon above is the theory. Walk into a dealership break room or an insurance office and a tighter, repeating set of titles shows up. This is the street list.

The five that show up in every trade: Carnegie’s How to Win Friends, Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale, Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Selling, Jeb Blount’s Fanatical Prospecting, and Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference. If a rep has read five books, it is these.

Car sales:

Insurance:

  • Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible. The book for selling an intangible: a policy, a promise. Near-universal in insurance.
  • Frank Bettger, How I Raised Myself…. Bettger sold insurance. This is the trade’s origin myth.
  • The agency networks push market-specific lists too, heavy on the senior, Medicare, and final-expense side. Think and Grow Rich and The Greatest Salesman in the World run deep in insurance and MLM culture as motivational scripture.

The pattern worth noticing: the street canon is all mindset, scripts, and activity. It is thin on the science (Cialdini, Kahneman) that explains why the scripts work. Read both halves. That is the edge most reps never get.

Who are the modern internet writing and course gurus?

The contemporary version of the old direct-mail crowd. They sell courses, cohorts, and newsletters on writing. Watch how they sell the course. That is the persuasion lesson, free.

The online-writing school:

  • David Perell, Write of Passage. The most influential “write online” educator. Strong on idea generation and writing as networking.
  • Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush, Ship 30 for 30. Plus Cole’s book The Art and Business of Online Writing. The atomic essay. Publish daily for 30 days. The biggest cohort program in the space.
  • Justin Welsh, The Content OS. The one-person-business, LinkedIn-first playbook. He built an eight-figure solo business teaching it. That is the proof.
  • Shaan Puri, Power Writing Masterclass. From My First Million. Grew The Milk Road newsletter past 250,000 readers. Strong on hooks and brevity.

The money-copy school:

  • Stefan Georgi, the RMBC Method. Research, Mechanism, Brief, Copy. The dominant modern direct-response copy framework.
  • Ben Settle, Email Players. The cult figure of daily-email marketing. Infotainment email as a system. Polarising, much copied.
  • Eddie Shleyner, VeryGoodCopy. Micro-lessons on copy and persuasion. A great free craft resource.
  • Harry Dry, Marketing Examples. Free, screenshot-driven teardowns of great copy. One of the best modern resources, full stop.
  • Copyblogger and AWAI. The course mills that trained much of this generation. Uneven, but foundational.

Newsletters worth a free subscription: The Copywriter Club (Kira Hug and Rob Marsh), VeryGoodCopy, and Marketing Examples. Highest signal, lowest noise.

The form keeps changing: sales letter, then seminar, then cohort course, then daily email, then the LinkedIn post. The engine never changes. Attention, desire, proof, urgency, reciprocity. Watch a modern guru sell a course and you are watching Hopkins, Schwartz, and Cialdini run in real time.

Where should you start? A reading order

If you want one path, read it like this:

1/ Cialdini’s Influence and Munger’s “Psychology of Human Misjudgment”. The two-document core.

2/ Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The machinery.

3/ Ogilvy, Hopkins, and Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising. Persuasion you can measure.

4/ Lifton and Hassan’s BITE model. The dark extreme, for defence.

5/ Marks’s Manchurian Candidate and the KUBARK manual. The historical floor of what got attempted.

6/ Pratkanis and Aronson’s Age of Propaganda and Ellul. The scale of a whole society.

Everything else fills in around that spine.

Lemme be honest about one thing. A list this size is a trap. It tempts you to collect instead of read. I own most of these and have read about half. The half I read changed how I work. The half on the shelf changed nothing. Pick the six. Finish them. Then come back for the other 140.

One habit is worth more than any single book. Each time a page here teaches you a move, ask: where is this being run on me, right now? The reading defends you more than it arms you. That is the right way round.

Sar jhukao aur kaam karo. Pick book one and start.

FAQ

What is the single best book on persuasion?
Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It names the seven principles (reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, unity) that every other book on this list applies. Read it before anything else.

What should a beginner copywriter read first?
Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising (1923) and David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. Then Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising. For free, read the Gary Halbert archive at thegaryhalbertletter.com.

What books do car salesmen and insurance agents actually read?
A shared five: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale, Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Selling, Jeb Blount’s Fanatical Prospecting, and Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference. Car sales adds Gitomer and Joe Girard. Insurance adds Harry Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible.

What is the Hare Krishna flower example in Cialdini?
A reciprocity tactic. A member gives you an unrequested flower, refuses to take it back, then asks for a donation. People gave more after receiving the flower, even though most discarded it. It shows that an unrequested gift creates a sense of debt the brain wants to clear.

Which books explain how cults and coercive control work?
Start with Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (the eight criteria) and Steven Hassan’s BITE model in Combating Cult Mind Control. Add Margaret Singer’s Cults in Our Midst and Janja Lalich’s Bounded Choice.

What are the best books on the history of CIA mind control?
John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate and Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief on MKULTRA. Alfred McCoy’s A Question of Torture on interrogation. The KUBARK manual is the declassified primary source.

Who are the best modern writing course creators?
David Perell (Write of Passage), Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush (Ship 30 for 30), and Justin Welsh for online writing. Stefan Georgi, Ben Settle, and Eddie Shleyner for copywriting. Harry Dry’s Marketing Examples is the best free resource.

Is this list for persuading people or defending against persuasion?
Both, and that is the point. The same knowledge that writes a sales letter spots one being run on you. Read the cult and interrogation sections as defence.

Credits: thoughts mine. Research and words via Claude, edited by me. The library is 20 years in the making.

What did I miss? Lemme know what you would add. Over to you.

PS: originally published at saurabhgarg.com. If you want the one-page version, read the TL;DR at the top and start with Cialdini.

Disclosure: book links are Amazon affiliate links. I earn a commission on purchases at no cost to you. I link books I rate, not books that pay the most.

Wk 22-26 – Weekly Note

Notes, thoughts and highlights from Week 22, 2026.

31 May, 2026.
Sunday evening.
Starbucks. Versova.

20:35. Opene this draft. It was here when I opened my wordpress backend. Claude had saved it.

So like last week, this week too, I was a demo-walla again. A few new sit-downs, a couple of strategy calls, a book chapter plan locked for somebody else’s book. The last week also saw me a lot of things. I finished 56 Hours. I hate the way it has shaped. I attended a screenwriters meetup. I almost took a session where Nikunj and Chandni saved the day. And of there are misses. I will talk about those.

I had told myself that if I can get Caracan Seari done by end of May, I will reward myself with a trip to Singapore. That’s not happening clearly. More on it in a bit.

Oh, here’s the track of the week. Take Five. Read more about it here.

.

Ok, lets go!

.

Highlights, reflections, updates, notes and thoughts from the week gone by.

As always, in no order…

1/ The Ghostwriting Book. Edit 1 done.

The book am ghostwriting, I finished the first round of edits this week. Now we need to do the second round. Sat with my mentor on Thurday and finally pinned down the editorial spine of the book. His workspace is the central character. Adn around it, a distributed cast. The structural problem we’ve been chewing on for weeks dissolved in one sitting.

The next thing — chapter asks going out to all of these folks. I am guessing that by the end of June we would be talking to publishers.

.

2/ 56 Hours. Done.

I had to submit to Satyanshu Singh’s Prayogshala. I managed to. Against all odds. You know, distractions and all. Also when I went to register it, my SWA didnt work. Luckily Copyright office did.

The thing is, I hate the shape it is in. It’s so raw that I am cringing at it. But as they say, if you are not embarrassed about your first output, you are too late. Now I will have to find the energy to sit though the next rounds.

A pattern has emerged. When I mark small steps to a deadline, things move. When I make it for the entire project, nothing moves. So that’s a good thing to know.

I have to mention that even if this doesnt get made into a film, I am eternally grateful to Boman sir, Harshit, Viraff, Shital and more. Gratitude.

.

3/ Divya — after a long while

Divya dropped a weekly update on Tuesday and then I met her for dinner on Friday. Love her. I hope she’s reading this:D

While we talked, took a lot of notes. Here are some…

  • Must use Claude for outreach and mailbox automation. Need to find a way to warm up multiple mailboxes and then run. The only thing is, I dont know what business.
  • Divya told me that I must learn to sell something on Amazon. I will talk to Krishna and see what could that be.
  • While talking to her, I realised that I could hire some young people to be EIRs and help me build businesses around all the things that am cooking with Claude.
  • Must run SEO for C4E via Claude — separate workstream.
  • Must also stop the temptation of replying each time someone asks me for marketing / communication things.
  • Side note: I’ve written a piece on Death of C4E Village. Must find the courage to post it. Let’s see when.

Wow. A lot.

.

4/ The Claude playground

Here’s what I used Claude for in the last week.

  • A – built an Excel sheet for a friends pickleball brand. Took help from Sreemita. Took me an afternoon. Otherwise would’ve taken weeks.
  • B – build an analyst report to show the prowess. Was unable to impress my friend with it. A fail.
  • C – made this VC action tracker. Not sure what would I do about it.
  • Shonit talked to me about the agency tool he’s building. Interesting use case of AI. Not sure what’s the underlying LLM there.
  • Met Rohit. Loved seeing how young people are building things. He’s asked me to apply to South Park Commons. I’ve done that in the past and got rejected Lets’s see if he can get me in.

So that.

.

5/ Pune!

Pune is on for next week. I am gonna meet AB (yay). And Krishna after a while (yay). And Himanshu for the first time (yay).

If you are in Pune between 2nd and 5th, please lemme know.

Have a tight agenda.

I like that travel is happening with a real reason and not as a way to escape Mumbai. Last few months I’ve done a couple of trips that were more “get out” than “go to”. This one’s a “go to”.

.

6/ The capture system gave up on me. Or may I say, I gave up on!

An ugly admission. My capture system broke this week.

I realized that over the last month, I had hyper optimized Claude to capture and process every morsel of information. I had even installed gBrain and Karpathy’s system. But then I realised that I am wasting token with all these pulls. I want to now build a more robust and efficient system.

I could do today if I had to. But I want to leverage it more and discover more powers first. Especially in terms of actual business impact. Right now, the outcome is more from personal productivity gains. So, lets see when.

.

7/ Update on the Caravan Serai

End of May was the deadline I gave myself for the first draft of Caravan Serai. Today is May 31. There’s no draft. The reward I’d promised myself — a trip to Singapore to meet M&m — is forfeit by my own rule.

I dont have too many excuses but I couldnt do it cos I had overestimated my ability to do things.

Maybe I will pick it in the month of June?

.

8/ Other things worth noting

  • Talked to a few more people about their job hunts. So far no solid conversion.
  • Updated my Linkedin
  • Chandni’s post talk about Ready Fire Aim
  • Attended Screenwriting Corner‘s meetup and participated in a discussion around Death in the Gunj.
  • Spoke to Viraff Patel on Harshit‘s recommendation. Quick chat. Will share more if it goes somewhere.
  • This tweet saw some 10 inbounds and I realised that there are a lot of interesting people if you know where to find them. Thanks to Vatsal.
  • I had decided to take a session on Claude and invited Nikunj by mistake. And oh man, did he save the day! Do yourself a favor. Become friends with him.

.

📷 Photos from the week gone by

Same drill. DM me if you want photos.

Here’s one that I wanted to show off to the world.

.

📈 Trackers…

Not updating this week.

.

✅ Action on LARGE objectives for the year

In this section, I will capture my progress on large objectives for the year.

In 2026, I plan to do the following three things…

  1. Book2
  2. Human Flag Pole
  3. Save a million dollars

Book2 — Caravan Serai. End-of-May target — missed.

Human Flag Pole — no action.

Save a million dollars — no action.

.

📌 So, what did I get done last few weeks? And what will I do next week?

This is a one-line report on progress I made on various things that are important to me. I will only talk about things that I got done. Shipped. Not WIP.

So, this year, I want to track the following…

  1. Health. Sleep, food, movement. Worse than the past week.
  2. C4E / Work. Pick a thing to apply myself to. Still no direction.
  3. Brand SG / Distribution. I was hoping that Claude session will help me. It did not.
  4. People. Met a few. Helped a few. I think I did ok on this. Need to build more.
  5. Book2 / Caravan Serai. Negative progress — missed the target.
  6. Shauk. Nothing tbh.

.

🏃‍➡️ Health

No specific updates.

.

⏲️ Reminders from last few days

Same as last week. Parking this section.

.

🗓️ So, one thing that defines the past week?

Motion. No progress.

The other words for this year have been: Show, Flow, Excitement, Embarrassment, Blur, Whiling, Movement, Blur, Activity, Movement, Regular (again), Regular, Easy, Journey, Downtime, Flow, Show, Same.

The week that two consecutive words are Show and Same, it’s either the start of a trend or the end of a year. Lemme find out.

—
So that.
Over and out.
Until next Friday.

Oh, and this too shall pass.

PS: This series of posts is inspired by Thej and his weekly notes. Previous editions from 2026 are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (missed these three), 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

PPS: Please do point typos.

PPPS: In case you see me being inconsistent in anything – work, writing, reviews etc, PLEASE do point out.

PPPPS: Drafted by Claude on top of the week’s data — Roam dailies, Gmail, Calendar, Apple Notes — and edited by me. Tell me what reads true and what doesn’t.