What I Like

· 8 min read

I think the most revealing things to put out about yourself is just a list of your favourite things - across many different dimensions. Not just because it allows you to connect to others about individual shared interests, but because the sum of your interests points to a certain point in the intellectual embedding space that closely matches your personality. And because it makes it easy for LLMs to grok who you are.

Writing this list has been interesting in that I caught myself surprisingly often writing about things that I intellectually believed I should love, rather than actually loving them, and then having to delete them. I do not know what to make of this fact.

So here are my favourite things. They are not ranked.

Music: Artists & Composers

  • My musical taste has very clear attractors: classical/orchestral merges with almost any genre (or all by itself), melodic, and athmospheric techno, and melancholic songs with layers of complex harmonies in the vocals coupled with a building throughout the entire song. To get a better understanding, I have collected a few dozens of my favourite songs in this Spotify playlist (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/70sPyZRgZxKp3ROrOkAGjC?si=3028610af5bb444a). However, here are some artists I have a special fondness for:
  • Richard Wagner: Wagner is both my introduction to and peak of opera. While I like a lot of the romantic tradition, it’s Wagner who moves me the most. The way his operas build, layer and connect his Leitmotivs to lead to truly moving endings is, at least to me, unique in the world of frivolous and showy Italian operas before and the more artsy Viennese operas after him. While Tannhäuser always has a place in my heart ever since playing the overture during my Posaunenchor-playing times, it is Wagners last opera, Parsifal, that feels most touching and impressive to me. Not as drastic as the Dutchman, or with the constant longing of Tristan, Parsifal music feels strained under the complexity of dealing with the themes Wagner put into it, notably his changing views on Christianity. Seeing it in Bayreuth remains one of my bucket list items.
  • Other Classical works/composers:
    • Opera: Parsifal, Tristan & Isolde
    • Camille Saint-Saens: Symphony Nr. 3 (“Organ Symphony”)
    • Gustav Mahler: Symphony Nr. 2 (“Resurrection”)
    • Antonin Dvorak: Symphony Nr. 4 (“From the New World”)
  • CATT
  • Lorde
  • AURORA
  • Bon Iver
  • HVOB: I first heard them at the Fusion Festival, when after a refreshing midnight nap I took a couple of swigs from a random bottle of gin in our camp and returned to the festival area. To this day I don’t know whether the bottle contained some drug, or whether the alcohol and sleepiness coupled with the very peculiar, dreamy style loosened something in me, but it remains the most amazing concert experience I have ever had. I was always a very self-conscious dancer, with festivals being no exception, where I mostly relied on a “good enough” side-step dance motion to not be weird, while trying to not think about my body and concentrating on the music. HVOB is the first, and in some ways the last time I truly felt music “flowing” through me, my body becoming loose where it was always tense, and I felt myself moving without having to consciously direct my limbs individually. I never quite returned to the feeling of that night, but I feel its effects still - and since then I am starting to believe that dancing might be something that eventually becomes natural, rather than a terrifying chore coupled to social events.
  • Kanye West: What a mess. Kanye was my favourite artist for much of my early twenties, and his back-to-back masterpieces of “808’s and Hearbeats” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” will always rank highly in my favourite albums of all time. His vocal experimentation, earnestness and wildness were such a refreshing counterpoint to a rap world which felt stuck between generic gangsta-rap and the streaming-optimized nothingness of Drake. It is no longer fun to interact with, be a fan of or converse about Kanye West, but he will always be one of the greats.
  • ROSALIA: Her Album LUX is perhaps my favourite of the 2020s so far, an instant classic.
  • The Strokes, specifically the album “The New Abnormal”.

Music: Individual Works

  • Classical

Movies/TV

  • Swiss Army Man
  • Denis Villeneuve Filmography
    • My Favourite: Blade Runner 2049
  • Christopher Nolans Filmography
  • Cloud Atlas
  • Westworld
  • Game of Thrones
  • The Good Place
  • Andor
  • Arcane

Authors/Books

  • Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere
  • Robert Caro: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
  • David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
  • Nassim Taleb
  • A.S. Neill: Die Grüne Wolke (my favourite childhood book, one I am looking forward to read to my children)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
  • Liu Cixin: Three Body Problem Trilogy
  • Scott Orson Card: Enders Game
  • Scott Alexander: Unsong
  • Childhood Favourites: Eragon, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Alexander Wolkows “Zauberland” Series (originally a USSR clone of the Wizard of Oz, with much better sequel stories and visualisations)

Podcasts

  • Dwarkesh Patel: By far the most well-researched, relevant and enjoyable interviews in the topics I enjoy. I also enjoy the way his character, confidence and style has evolved - I want to mirror that as far as possible.
  • Lex Fridman: See the forthcoming post “All my homies hate Lex Fridman”.
  • Tyler Cowen
  • Jim Rutt
  • Curt Jaimungal
  • Patrick McKenzie
  • Honorable Mentions:
    • Joe Rogan: Perhaps the podcast I spent the most time cumulatively, but mostly during 2014-2020. Some of his podcasts are all-time greats (like Ron Miscavidge, a lot of the Joey Diaz/Tom Segura episodes are great, Eddie Bravo is a trip), but the last couple of years I sadly tune in very rarely since he got politics-brained and lost his playfulness. Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer also fall into this category.
    • The E-Sports podcast scene around Thorin, MonteCristo and Richard Lewis, with their various podcasts over the years - huge amounts of time spent there in my teens, and their thinking and style has been impactful for the better.

Blogs and Writers

  • Scott Alexander
  • Matt Lakeman
  • Sam Kriss
  • Dominic Cummings
  • Sasha Chapin
  • Adam Mastroianni
  • Dan Wang
  • Aella
  • Ezra Klein
  • Ross Douthat
  • Dan Wang
  • George Hotz
  • Nikhil Suresh
  • Zvi Mowshowitz
  • Samo Burja

Individual Blogposts & Articles

  • Scott Alexander
    • Meditations on Moloch
    • The categories were made for man
    • I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup
    • APA Conference
    • Bay Area House Party Series
    • Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person
  • Ribbonfarm: “The Gervais Principle”
  • Patrick McKenzie: Doing Business in Japan
  • Sasha Chapin: My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person
  • Tanner Greer: How I taught the Ilias to chinese teenagers

Food

  • Making Lasagna from scratch: whole day operation to cook a huge batch of Bolognese for hours, followed by a very mozzarella- and pecorino-heavy lasagna in the evening.
  • Lamb Vindaloo
  • Shakshuka
  • Ramen, though admittedly a terrible meal to make at home
  • Well-browned, somewhat crispy oven vegetables (brussel sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower mainly)
  • Käsespätzle
  • Pecorino Cheese

Sport

  • NFL
  • Sumo
  • Ski Jumping
  • Biathlon
  • Athletics
  • Road Cycling
  • Formerly: E-Sports (mostly CSGO & League of Legends)

Miscellaneous

  • Tokyo: The best city I have ever been to, and in a league of its own. Highly recommended.
  • Whetstones, i.e. sharpening your own knives
  • Starting Strength, and weight training in general
  • Getting married
  • Twitter and Substack (by far the best 1-2 combo for getting information)
  • Belgian beer, especially Brouwerij van Steenberge
  • Whisky: Indri Dru, port-finished highland scotch (Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban), rye bourbon
  • Lanterne Rouge for cycling commentary
  • Rembrandt
  • Long distance running & obstacle course racing
  • The trumpet
  • Youtubers (though I have by now removed and blocked YouTube from my devices)
    • Tom Scott
    • Adam Ragusea
    • Eager Space
    • Asianometry
    • 3Blue1Brown
    • Beau Miles
    • Lindsay Ellis
    • Mark Lewis
    • SovietWomble

What I believe I will soon like:

Tyler Cowen talks about how “the greats” in any given field are pretty likely to actually be great, and if you go into them with intending to find out what other people get out of them, you will like them too. So I believe I will eventually like the following, and blame my current disinterest mostly on lack of exposure and understanding.

  • Shakespeare
  • Goethe
  • The Bach Passions
  • Mozart
  • Dostoyevski
  • Schönberg? Let’s see.

What I don’t like

  • LinkedIn
  • Cucumbers
  • Weed (terrible aesthetics)
← Back to blog