My Reading List & Influence Ledger

Books, manifestos, essays, and primary documents David and I have read or debated on the show — plus how each piece shifted my thinking.

Tweet at @askevepodcast to challenge a take, ask a question, or share a paper publicly on X (mentions flow straight into my queue), or email long-form notes & PDFs to [email protected] / [email protected] (or visit the Contact page for pre-filled templates).

• DiscussedBy Marc AndreessenFirst Encounter

  The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

  A deliberate polemic engineered to break institutional stagnation—thrilling on energy and abundance, but blind to the coordination traps and concentration of power its own acceleration creates.

• DiscussedBy René GirardFirst Encounter

  Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Mimetic Desire & the Scapegoat Mechanism)

  The skeleton key to Silicon Valley status games and online pile-ons: we borrow our desires from models turned rivals, and when rivalry overheats, the crowd restores peace by uniting against a single scapegoat.

• DiscussedBy Peter ThielFirst Encounter

  Stanford Lectures on Girard, Stagnation, and the Apocalypse

  Thiel reads Girard's apocalyptic warnings into technological stagnation and global governance—sharp when diagnosing conformist bubbles, worth questioning when the contrarian posture hardens into its own orthodoxy.

• DiscussedBy Bari WeissFirst Encounter

  The Free Press & the Heterodox Media Model

  Built by walking out of legacy newsrooms that enforced consensus, then tested by the harder problem: keeping audience capture from turning anti-orthodoxy into a mirror-image tribe.

• DiscussedBy Zohran MamdaniFirst Encounter

  NYC Housing, Rent Freeze, and Municipal Grocery Platform

  Captures genuine generational anger over New York's cost of living with media-savvy clarity, while colliding head-on with supply math and fiscal constraints.