Things I Like

Articles, Poems, Companies, Movies, etc. that I really like. Like most things on this website, I want this to be out there so that the AIs (and humans) can get to know me!

My favorite articles

Paintings

Poems

Movies

Blogs

I am subscribed to a lot of amazing people on Substack: https://substack.com/@sarhaan/reads

Books I've Enjoyed

  1. The King of Oil - Daniel Ammann
  2. DTV - Michael Moritz
  3. TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story - Frank Slootman
  4. Alistair Cooke's America - Alistair Cooke
  5. Sam Walton: Made in America - Sam Walton
  6. The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King - Rich Cohen
  7. House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company - Eva Dou
  8. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed — Ben R. Rich
  9. An American Saga: Juan Trippe and His Pan Am Empire — Robert Daley
  10. My Life and Work — Henry Ford
  11. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill — Candice Millard
  12. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life — Walter Isaacson
  13. Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
  14. Boeing vs Airbus — John Newhouse
  15. Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II — Arthur Herman
  16. The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War — A.J. Baime
  17. Pieces of the Action — Vannevar Bush
  18. The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann — Ananyo Bhattacharya
  19. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built — Duncan Clark
  20. Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy — Isadore Sharp
  21. Creativity, Inc. — Ed Catmull
  22. Age of Ambition — Evan Osnos
  23. The Alchemy of Air — Thomas Hager
  24. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future — Ashlee Vance
  25. The Merchant Bankers - Joseph Wechsberg
  26. Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and the Man Who Created It, with an Introduction to Teledyne Technologies - Robert J. Roberts, Dr. George a and McVicker
  27. Letters from a self-made merchant to his son - George Horace Lorimer
  28. 99 Negotiating Strategies: Tips, Tactics & Techniques Used by Wall Street's Toughest Dealmakers - David Rosen

Themes and Companies

I read a lot, and every time I come across a "sparkly eyed" person, an interesting idea, or an important theme, I add it to this list.

Themes

  1. BCI: I can physically feel the pain of communicating with the AIs. I want them to just know what I’m thinking, and I think this is the direction we are going to go in.
  2. Aviation: The flying experience is broken and horrible. It should be magical and fast.
  3. I'm pretty confident that most digital tasks can be automated with a combination of smart models, task design that works around model limitations, and task-specific RL environments/datasets.
  4. What new use cases open up if humanoids work and cost of physical labor becomes <10k/year?
  5. Becoming Superhuman: longevity, health, and nutrition
  6. Supply chain for drones, data centers, and other robots
  7. What to make of Morocco?
    1. https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/04/morocco-is-now-a-trade-and-manufacturing-powerhouse
    2. https://www.leravi.org/china-invests-5-6-billion-in-morocco-to-build-africas-first-of-its-kind-14567/
  8. Nations will invest in homegrown defense companies
  9. New Petrostates:
    1. Namibia becomes a new petrostate?
    2. Guyana
  10. Foundational Infra: tools that current AIs are good at using.
    1. Claude Code and Codex are very comfortable and proficient using certain incumbent tools like Next.js, Stripe, Supabase, etc.
    2. Users will therefore default to choosing those tools. Thus, there is more demand and training data for those tools, making the AIs even better at wielding those tools!
    3. What a beautiful and underrated compounding loop!
  11. Cost per ton to orbit going down when Starship is fully online
  12. Reindustrializing the US
  13. Solar panels and the cost of electricity going down (see Solar & Future of Petrochemicals)
  14. ...and lots of other ideas from my list of ideas!

Companies that seem interesting

Last Updated: January, 2026.

I found most of these before they became big and known. The interesting ones tend to stay hidden for much longer now, and the ideas/people are already mainstream by the time they go public. That's not too fun for me, so I rarely update this list.