I don’t have a long list.
That usually surprises people. We’re expected to name mentors, heroes, guiding lights—faces we point to and say that’s who made me. I don’t really have that. I wasn’t shaped by teachers or saviors. I was shaped by friction, absence, and having to figure shit out the hard way.
But there are a few people I respect enough to keep in the room. Not as blueprints. More like landmarks.
Exurb1a is one of them.
Not because I agree with everything he says—I don’t—but because he asks the kinds of questions most people avoid. Mortality, meaning, cosmic indifference, the absurdity of consciousness. He doesn’t offer comfort. He offers clarity. That matters to me. Anyone can hand out hope. Fewer people are willing to stare into the void and still make something articulate out of it.
Ben Franklin is another.
Not the powdered-wig myth version—the actual man. Printer. Inventor. Writer. Diplomat. Self-experimenter. A deeply flawed human who treated life like a laboratory. He didn’t wait for permission to become useful. He built himself deliberately. That idea—that you can engineer a life through discipline, curiosity, and relentless self-honesty—still holds up.
Dave Brockie belongs on the list, whether that makes sense to people or not.
Most remember him as Oderus Urungus—pure chaos, filth, satire, noise. But underneath that was intelligence, commitment, and absolute ownership of the bit. He went all in. No half-measures. No apologizing for the ugliness or the humor or the spectacle. That kind of creative courage—I’m doing this my way, fully, even if you hate it—is rare.
Mike Patton, same deal.
Range like a weapon. Discipline disguised as madness. He never stayed where people were comfortable with him. Every time an audience thought they understood him, he burned the map. That refusal to calcify—to never become a parody of your own success—that’s something I respect deeply.
Here’s the common thread: none of these people tried to be role models.
They weren’t chasing influence. They were chasing expression, mastery, or truth—sometimes all three. They didn’t ask to be followed. They just did the work in a way that couldn’t be ignored.
And that’s the vein I care about.
I don’t want to copy anyone’s life. I don’t want to sound like someone else. I don’t want to borrow a worldview wholesale. I’m not interested in heroes.
I’m interested in standards.
Intellectual honesty.
Creative ownership.
Willingness to look stupid in pursuit of something real.
The courage to keep going when the reward isn’t guaranteed.
So no, I don’t have many influences.
I have a few examples of what it looks like to live deliberately, to commit to a lane, to take the risk of being misunderstood rather than the comfort of being forgettable.
That’s enough.
The rest I had to build myself.
