Reading on Stephanie Rebecca

Atlas Shrugged

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Notes from the book I have most gifted to others, that solidified friendships, and that I am sometimes afraid to admit my admration of. Resentment often disguises itself as morality. This book is divisive. The criticism I received for liking this book most often came from those that hadn’t actually read it. Rand Worships Greed? It is perceived by critics as praise of selfishness and the pursuit of personal happiness as the highest moral purpose, placed above the collective good. I disagree with this take, and I further respect Rand for creating such controversial work.

Corpus Hermeticum

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of philosophical and spiritual texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretic figure that combines elements of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Written between the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, these writings form the core of Hermeticism, a religious, philosophical, and esoteric tradition that seeks the knowledge of divine truths through mysticism, alchemy, and theurgy. The texts discuss topics like the nature of the divine, the universe, the mind, and the relationship between humanity and the divine. They emphasise the process of spiritual ascent, where the soul rises through different layers of existence to reunite with the divine source. The Corpus Hermeticum teaches that through knowledge (gnosis) and self-transformation, individuals can experience a profound connection to the divine. This path of enlightenment encourages the understanding of the cosmos as an interconnected whole, where human beings play a crucial role in bridging the material and spiritual worlds. It emphasises the belief that divine wisdom is accessible through personal spiritual practice and introspection.

For Blood And Money

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug. I read this book while advising a fund on an activist takeover of Ziopharm Oncology (now TCRT) as a university student. My role was the science; I had no visibility into what was happening at the board level. Reading Blood and Money gave me the other camera angle on what I had been inside, and what I had been too junior to see. The book follows the development of Imbruvica and Calquence, two BTK inhibitors that transformed the treatment of mantle cell lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The compound that would become Imbruvica was initially deemed worthless and sold off at a rock-bottom price as part of a larger deal. It took Robert Duggan, a former cookie salesman, scientologist, and serial entrepreneur whose son had died of brain cancer, to become an activist investor in Pharmacyclics and force the company’s hand. What followed was a race between two startups that ended in AbbVie paying $21 billion for Pharmacyclics and AstraZeneca acquiring a majority stake in Acerta Pharma, in deals Vardi calls some of the greatest Wall Street trades ever made in any industry. Vardi documents a shift in how biotech gets funded. For the first time, stock traders were directly financing private biotech companies. Wayne Rothbaum had no scientific background yet inserted himself into daily operations, enforced stealth mode, monitored patient data, and eventually secured a byline on a New England Journal of Medicine paper. Vardi is a reporter and the book reads like a very long magazine feature: vivid drama, thin analysis. The scenes are good, an oncology society dinner in Chicago that devolved into arm-twisting, a BTK inhibitor startup run out of a California garage, Hamdy departing Pharmacyclics to co-found Acerta and race his former employer to market. But the book rarely steps back to ask what any of this means. The connection to my own experience is the most clarifying thing about reading it. Blood and Money is worth reading as a case study of that playbook in full, even if it stops short of a thesis.

Free Will

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You do not consciously create the thoughts that appear in your mind. They arise prior to conscious awareness. Because thoughts, impulses, desires, intentions, and decisions emerge from causes you did not choose, the traditional idea of free will collapses. His favourite move is to ask something like: “Think of a city.” Whatever city appears, you did not choose it before it appeared. The thought simply emerged into consciousness. You became aware of it after the fact. Genetics? Your upbringing? Neurochemistry? Your unconscious drives and moment to moment thoughts? Not consciously authored or chosen. Therefore: the self claiming ownership over decisions is more like a witness to processes than an independent causal commander. The book is really downstream of mindfulness practice and elucidative of his meditation background. If you observe consciousness carefully enough, thoughts begin to feel received rather than created. Importantly, Harris isn’t arguing nihilism. He still believes choices, consequences, and incentives exist, and that responsibility matters as a social framework. What dissolves is moral superiority, once you accept that people are expressions of prior causes. The book is stronger when read alongside neuroscience. Predictive processing models suggest cognition looks less like a sovereign self issuing commands and more like competing neural processes. Some experiments show neural activity predicting a decision before subjects consciously report making it. Harris leans on this heavily. Where it weakens is in collapsing distinctions between metaphysical free will and practical agency. Humans clearly possess varying degrees of self-awareness, inhibitory control, and the capacity to reshape habits and environments. The real question -what kind of constrained agency actually exists inside a causal system? And that is where thinkers diverge. The deeper impact of the book is existential rather than philosophical. Fully internalised, it destabilises pride, egoic identity, some may find this liberating while others, unsettling. The irony is that the feeling of being convinced by the argument would, in Harris’ framework, not be freely chosen either.

From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Wars are fought and won or lost not on battlefields but in the minds of men.” Vietnam demonstrated that military superiority is irrelevant if public psychological resilience collapses. This paper is essentially an attempt to reconceptualize warfare itself as primarily psychological rather than kinetic. Written by Paul Vallely and Michael A. Aquino in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, it argues that future wars will be won less through physical destruction and more through information dominance, perception management, narrative control, and manipulation of collective belief systems. Key Ideas:

How to measure your life

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers.” Don’t let this happen to your life. A solution to this mentality is to maintain a strong core purpose that forces / drives short term decision-making for the long term. To have a clear purpose, you have to think long and hard about it. And then you have to keep it top-of-mind to guide your personal resource allocation. How you spend your personal TIME, ENERGY and TALENT. Key Ideas:

Immortality Key : The Secret History of the Religion With No Name

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ancient religions, including early Christianity, may have roots in psychedelic rituals that offered direct experiences of the divine. The search for immortality might not be about living forever but about discovering eternity within. Through ritual, altered states, and the timeless mystery of the divine.

The Secret Sacrament: Ancient Greeks, especially in Eleusis, consumed psychoactive potions (kukeon) to access mystical states and encounter the divine.

“What if the greatest stories ever told were fueled by mind-altering substances?”

Prometheus Rising

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A simple model for the brain: a computer that can run several different types of programs. Genetics determine the “operating system”, but at certain stages of our development, we are vulnerable to imprints; programs that modify the circuits in our brain and thus constrain the other programs (conditioning, learning) that we can run in later life. For example, the first experience a newborn has with their mother is a strong determinant of their future anxiety/self-confidence; an adolescent’s experiences during puberty shape their sexual preferences as an adult. Wilson explores these ideas through the lens of Timothy O’Leary’s Eight-circuit model of consciousness. The first four circuits are closely analogous to the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung: the bio-survival circuit that codes for “advance vs retreat”, the emotional-territorial circuit that codes for socially dominant/submissive behaviour, the time-binding semantic circuit represents the rational mind, and the socio-sexual circuit encodes our morality. Wilson also tugs on some interesting speculative threads about the role of these circuits in society, for example, how politicians tap into circuits I and II (e.g. Trump creating an “us vs them” emotional-territorial circuit II trigger) to subvert the rational circuit III. He playfully explores the links between these psychoanalytical ideas and various aspects of mysticism and religion; in particular, there is some lucid commentary of Finnegan’s Wake, which had previously been beyond incomprehensible to me. The subsequent chapters, discussing circuits V-VIII, become very weird: according to Wilson the neurogenetic circuit VI would allow our brain to read into our DNA to understand our genetic history and tap into “previous lives”; the non-local quantum circuit VIII can supposedly connect us with the quantum foam of the universe, allowing for extra-sensory perception, astral projections etc. Some of circuit V-VIII capabilities do seem plausible: there is growing evidence that breathing techniques and certain yoga practices can materially improve health outcomes (see the Huberman Lab podcast), supporting Wilson’s description of the neurosomatic circuit V. The chapter on metaprogramming (circuit VII) was especially interesting to me: the ultimate expression of neural plasticity and self-awareness should be our ability to actively change our circuits. Another thing: almost all of Ws predictions are very wrong: commercial life extension by 1998, widespread genetic editing in humans by 2004, large scale space colonisation by 2028. His criticisms of rationalism were thought-provoking and incisive: for instance, “rationalist” scientists historically have a very poor track record of accepting new paradigms (Kuhn). As Max Planck said, “science progresses funeral by funeral”.

Psycho Cybernetics

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reality Transurfing Steps I-V

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One Liner: This book is good, but many in the domain of self-development echo it’s ideas, and in itself an echo of the ideas echoed by spirituality/ the The Tao Te Ching / gnosticism/ religious mysticism (Kaballah etc.) I wish I read this as a teenager before the secret, some of it feels intuitive.

Key Ideas

The Alternatives Space (Infinite Realities Exist Simultaneously)
- Life is like a film strip with infinite frames. Every possibility already exists in the alternatives space a quantum field of potential realities.
- You don’t create reality; you choose it by aligning your thoughts and energy with the desired timeline.
“The reality you cling to is but one page in an infinite book. Every moment you spend identifying with this single story, you ignore the countless other possibilities that already exist, waiting to be chosen. You are not bound by the laws of this page. There is no fate, no linear progression. The universe holds infinite variations of your life, each vibrating in its own frequency. All you need to do is tune your thoughts, and the page will turn, revealing a world that mirrors your desire.”

Simulacra and Simulation

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I first encountered Baudrillard from a friend in Brooklyn. He was embarrassed by his interest in the author - “I love him, I’m weird, it’s crazy”. and so decided to read his books myself. Later, I reconnected with an old friend, she was much cooler than me and loved literature, when I mentioned Baudrillard she became animated and we reconeccted stronger. She told me no one she knows get’s this. The feeling I got from each of these encounters, was that anyone reading Baudrillard felt they stumbled across something secret, and they felt connected to his writing, even alienated. I first heard about Baudrillard from a friend in Brooklyn, he was embarrassed by how much he loved his writing labelling it (and himself) as weird, crazy, disgustingly grandiose. This made me read it immediately. Later, I mentioned Baudrillard to a friend I had grown apart from. She was a literature major, and though we had shared interest in philosophy in the past, became animated in a way I hadn’t seen before. She said no one she knows gets this. We became closer again. Baudrillard’s readership feels like people who noticed something, and then feel alienated in holding of that knowledge. That feeling is probably intentional, or at minimum fitting. The book’s argument is that we live in hyperreality, a condition in which the simulation precedes and eventually replaces the thing it was meant to represent. The map comes before the territory. The price comes before the value. The model comes before the phenomenon. Once this has happened far enough, pointing it out sounds slightly mad, because the simulation is now the shared ground everyone is standing on. Of course the map is the territory. What else would it be? Baudrillard moves through four stages of this displacement. An image begins as a reflection of reality. It then masks and distorts reality. Then it masks the absence of reality. Finally it bears no relation to reality at all and becomes a pure simulacrum… a copy with no original. Disneyland (staged as fiction so that the surrounding Los Angeles feels real, even though it isn’t), Watergate (a manufactured scandal whose function was to prove that scandal is still possible, therefore that power is still accountable), and the Borges fable of the map so detailed it covered the territory exactly, now inverted: it is the territory rotting beneath the map, not the map that fades. The limitation is Baudrillard himself. He writes in cascading assertion rather than argument, and at several points the opacity feels load-bearing, as though certain claims would not survive being stated plainly. The style does real damage. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, written fifteen years earlier, makes most of the same points with more rigour and less performance. Read Debord if you want the argument. Read Baudrillard if you want to feel the argument, which is a different and sometimes more useful thing. This is for people who have already sensed the thing the book describes and want a vocabulary for it. Key ideas

Tao Te Ching

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I came to this book in my first year of university, hearing it referenced many times in Jim O’Shaughnessy’s Infinite Loops podcast, cited as foundational to his worldview, treating it not only as an interesting historical artefact but as working infrastructure for how he thinks about probability, and navigating complex systems. Coming to a 2,500-year-old Taoist classic through a quantitative investor is a strange entry point, but it turned out to be a revealing one.

The art of learning

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Waitzkin describes a transition from force into immersion. Less egoic striving, more total absorption.

My fascination with consciousness, study of chess and Tal Chi, love for literature and the ocean, for meditation and philosophy, all coalesced around the theme of tapping into the mind’s potential via complete immersion into one and all activities. My growth My growth became defined by barrierlessness. Pure concentration didn’t allow thoughts or false constructions to impede my awareness, and I observed clear connections between different life experiences through the common mode of consciousness by which they were perceived . . Great literature inspired chess growth, shooting jump shots on a New York City blacktop gave me insight about fluidity that applied to Tai Chi, becoming at peace holding my breath seventy feet underwater as a free-diver helped me in the time pressure of world championship chess or martial arts competitions. Training in the ability to quickly lower my heart rate after intense physical strain helped me recover between periods of exhausting concentration in chess tournaments. After several years of cloudiness, I was flying free, devouring information, completely in love with learning . Key Takeaway:

The Master and Margarita

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Picking up The Count of Monte Cristo in a bookshop, someone recommended this alongside it. Both books are about a figure who arrives from outside the normal order, Dantès also turns a corrupt system’s logic against itself. Dumas believes in justice as a recoverable state. Bulgakov isn’t sure? A metaphysical study of power, truth, repression, and psychological freedom under systems that demand ideological conformity. Woland functions more like a force of metaphysical revelation. He exposes vanity, greed, cowardice, performative morality, ideological conformity, and the fragility of supposedly rational systems. Consistently punishes people for what they actually are rather than what they claim to be.