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The Brains

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The Brains

The smartest brains on earth, in an MCP.

Founders, CEOs and investors, each turned into a searchable MCP server built from their talks, essays and posts. Add one to Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT or Codex. Every answer cites its source.

brains.ceo · Request a brain · How it works · Run your own

License: MIT Brains MCP

Use a brain in 30 seconds

Every brain is a public MCP URL: https://mcp.brains.ceo/<slug>/mcp. To get every brain behind one connector, use https://mcp.brains.ceo/mcp (tools: list_brains, search_brains, list_sources).

# Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport http levels-brain https://mcp.brains.ceo/pieter-levels/mcp
# then run /mcp and choose Authenticate
# Codex
codex mcp add levels-brain --url https://mcp.brains.ceo/pieter-levels/mcp
codex mcp login levels-brain

In Cursor, Claude.ai / Claude Desktop and ChatGPT, add it as a custom MCP server or connector with the same URL. Each brain page on brains.ceo has one-click buttons and step-by-step instructions for each client.

The first time you connect, your client opens a short sign-in: enter your email and the 6-digit code we send you. It's free, and there are no passwords.

Then just ask: "How would Levels price this?" or "What would Paul Graham say about my idea?"

Tools

Tool

What it does

search_brain(query, limit)

Searches the brain and returns passages, each with its source link and date

list_sources()

Lists every talk, interview, essay and post collection in the brain

Related MCP server: Ergora Specialists MCP

The brains

Brain

Who

Long-form

Posts

Transcript hours

Nevo David

Solo founder of Postiz, the agentic social media scheduler. His own brain, linked straight to mcp.nevo.md

101

458

n/a

Paul Graham

Y Combinator cofounder and essayist on startup ideas, growth and founders

45

370

11

Naval Ravikant

AngelList co-founder and angel investor; author of the How to Get Rich thread

29

266

36

Pieter Levels

Solo founder of Photo AI, Nomad List and Remote OK, bootstrapped with $0 funding

34

259

17

Alex Hormozi

Co-founder of Acquisition.com; built Gym Launch by licensing his gym playbook

28

248

34

Marc Lou

Solo founder of TrustMRR, DataFast and ShipFast; $3M from 36 startups

44

216

14

Sam Altman

CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator

45

119

19

Jack Friks

Solo founder of Post Bridge; grows apps with organic short-form video

20

142

11

Alexandr Wang

Chief AI Officer at Meta, founder of Scale AI and Meta Superintelligence Labs

27

96

23

Rob Walling

Runs MicroConf and TinySeed; built Drip, bought and sold HitTail

40

74

11

Elon Musk

CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; co-founder of PayPal, Neuralink and The Boring Co.

21

67

37

Rob Hallam

Co-founder of SuperX, building in public on X from $0 to $80K/month

20

101

8

Jason Calacanis

Angel investor backing 100 startups a year; host of TWiST and All-In

29

88

34

Yahia Bakour

Solo YC founder of Context.dev; sold Stock Alarm for $500K

7

157

2

Ryan Hoover

Founder of Product Hunt and investor at Weekend Fund

48

147

20

Romàn Czerny

Co-founder and CMO of Gojiberry AI (YC); sold his first SaaS for 7 figures

16

181

8

Blake Anderson

Co-founder of Cal AI, Umax and RizzGPT; now building 10x

21

137

17

Ruben Hassid

AI educator behind the How to AI newsletter. LinkedIn brain

37

265 LinkedIn

12

Justin Welsh

Built a one-person business to $10M+ with no employees or paid ads. LinkedIn brain

30

239 LinkedIn

14

Adam Robinson

Bootstrapped founder behind RB2B and Retention.com. LinkedIn brain

27

285 LinkedIn

21

Bryan Johnson

Founder of Blueprint and Kernel. Health brain: his sleep, diet, exercise, supplement and biomarker protocols

29

177

7

Shaan Puri

Co-host of My First Million; sold the Milk Road newsletter

28

195

8

Alex West

Solo founder of CyberLeads; wrote the 13-book "How I Made $1M From My Personal Projects"

33

172

9

Corey Haines

Cofounder of Conversion Factory; includes 42 playbooks from his open-source Marketing Skills

68

110

12

Lenny Rachitsky

Writer of Lenny's Newsletter, ex-Airbnb product lead. Built from his own essays and talks, not his guests

31

161

14

Greg Isenberg

Host of The Startup Ideas Podcast and CEO of Late Checkout

30

298

12

Guillermo Rauch

Vercel CEO and creator of Next.js, building v0 and the AI Cloud

33

186

18

Zach Yadegari

Built Cal AI to $50M ARR and sold it to MyFitnessPal; now building Persona

25

103

17

Andrew Huberman

Stanford neurobiologist, host of Huberman Lab. Health brain: his sleep, light, focus, exercise, nutrition and stress protocols

39

300

38

Jason Cohen

Founder of two unicorns, Smart Bear and WP Engine. Includes all 202 of his A Smart Bear essays (2007 to 2026)

221

300

20

Socrates

Athenian philosopher. Thinker brain built from Plato's and Xenophon's dialogues (public-domain translations)

36

n/a

n/a

Iman Gadzhi

Started a social media agency at 16; now teaches agencies and personal brands

42

n/a

39

Tibo

Sold Tweet Hunter and Taplio; now runs a bootstrapped SaaS portfolio

30

250

12

Danny Postma

Founder of HeadshotPro; sold Headlime to Jasper for seven figures

11

187

6

Alex (@alexxgrowth)

CMO of Content Rewards; sold clipping agency Virality for 7 figures at 16

7

126

n/a

Priyam Raj

Bootstrapped founder of VidAI (~$70k/mo) with two SaaS exits

11

82

8

Damon Chen

Bootstrapped founder of Testimonial.to and PDF.ai, started solo after Cisco

10

225

3

Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway chairman. Every shareholder letter from 1977 to 2024, the partnership letters and 12 talks

65

n/a

23

Scott Wu

Cofounder and CEO of Cognition, maker of the Devin AI software engineer

27

41

12

Steve Jobs

Co-founder of Apple and NeXT, Pixar CEO. Only his own words: speeches, interviews and emails, including "Make Something Wonderful"

47

n/a

7

Pavel Durov

Founder of Telegram; his Telegram channel posts plus long interviews

36

111

11

Farza

Building Clicky; previously founded and shut down buildspace

26

160

12

Garry Tan

President and CEO of Y Combinator, creator of GStack and GBrain

34

260

16

Hubert Thieblot

Founders Inc investor who built Curse and sold it to Twitch

8

184

1

Dagobert Renouf

Logology founder turned Comp AI closer, now bootstrapping again in public

25

288

17

Hunter J. Isaacson

Designer and co-founder of NGL (300M+ downloads) and the crypto app Bags

10

228

10

Jake Castillo

Cal AI co-founder and COO; includes 15 issues of his Operator's Notebook newsletter

20

235

4

Alex Slater

Scaled QUITTR to $500K/month with influencers and Meta ads; now building Rift

15

82

9

Cris Pop

Founder of Thunder, a Cluj software company run on a people-first culture. Includes Thunder's leadership book and Substack

43

211 LinkedIn

6

Dalton Caldwell

Standard Capital founder, ex-YC partner, founded imeem and App.net

39

221

10

Paul Buchheit

Creator of Gmail, FriendFeed co-founder, early YC partner, Standard Capital co-founder

35

78

10

ThePrimeagen

Ex-Netflix engineer who streams and makes videos about programming

22

163

18

Peter Thiel

Co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, author of Zero to One. Includes his CS183 Stanford class notes

41

n/a

16

David Goggins

Retired Navy SEAL and ultra-runner. Mindset brain: callousing the mind, the 40% rule, the accountability mirror

24

151

30

Ross Jenkins

Founder of DigitalME, an ActiveCampaign-certified email marketing agency; top Upwork earner

18

41

2

Missing someone? Request a brain. The most-requested ones get built first.

How it works

A brain is a small, curated, cited knowledge base, not an archive of everything someone ever said. Each one holds 15–45 long-form sources and a few hundred hand-picked posts, all filtered to the person's principles on growth, distribution, pricing and building a business.

discover ──▶ curate ──▶ fetch ──▶ cards ──▶ notes ──▶ index ──▶ manifest ──▶ MCP + site
 (cheap       (Claude     (only the  (one per   (sectioned,  (BM25)    (brain.json)
 metadata)    picks)      shortlist) source)    third person)

Step

Command

Output

1. Discover

node pipeline/discover.mjs <slug>

candidates.json: top X posts, YouTube interviews and talks, essays

1b. Deep X pull

node pipeline/x-deep.mjs <slug> [minFaves] [maxItems]

Business-keyword and high-engagement posts (Apify, ~$0.40 per 1,000)

1c. LinkedIn pull

node pipeline/linkedin.mjs <slug> [maxPosts]

Recent LinkedIn posts and profile for LinkedIn-first people (Apify, ~$2 per 1,000 posts)

1d. Full post text

node pipeline/x-refresh.mjs <slug>

Re-fetches the full text of long X posts already in a brain (~$0.0004 per post)

2. Curate

a Claude agent following docs/brain-runbook.md

shortlist.json: 12–30 long-form sources, 60–300 posts

3. Fetch

node pipeline/fetch.mjs <slug>

Transcripts and essay text for the shortlist only (not committed)

4. Cards

node pipeline/summarize.mjs <slug>

cards/: title, summary, verbatim quotes, topics, quality score

5. Notes

node pipeline/notes.mjs <slug>

notes/: sectioned third-person notes, the passages search returns

6. Index

node pipeline/build.mjs <slug>

index.json, which the MCP server loads

7. Manifest

node pipeline/brain.mjs <slug>

brain.json: tagline, topics, principles and sample Q&A, every line cited

Steps 2, 4, 5 and 7 run on headless Claude Code (claude -p), so they use a Claude subscription instead of API credits. The first 10 brains cost about $3.50 in total in scraping fees.

Architecture

  • server/ is one Express app (TypeScript, run with tsx) that serves:

    • the website (web/)

    • every brain as a stateless Streamable HTTP MCP endpoint at /<slug>/mcp

    • OAuth 2.1 with dynamic client registration, where sign-in is email plus a 6-digit code (server/oauth.ts)

    • usage tracking and a password-protected /admin with an email CSV export

  • web/ is a no-build vanilla HTML/CSS/JS site: a search-first directory, brain pages with cited principles and sources, and per-client install instructions.

  • pipeline/ has the scripts above. They're idempotent: re-running a step skips finished work.

  • data/brains/<slug>/ holds each brain's curated, derived content: brain.json, index.json, cards/, notes/ and shortlist.json.

  • External brains are ones people already run themselves, like Nevo David's mcp.nevo.md. They're listed with node pipeline/external.mjs <slug> from pipeline/external/<slug>.json, and installs go straight to their URL.

Run it yourself

git clone https://github.com/VicPitic/the-brains.git
cd the-brains
npm install
npm start            # http://localhost:8790

That's enough to browse and use all the brains locally. Without DATABASE_URL, the MCP endpoints are open and nothing is tracked. Add one locally:

claude mcp add --transport http levels-brain http://localhost:8790/pieter-levels/mcp

To build new brains or turn on sign-in and tracking, copy .env.example to .env.local and fill in what you need. Deployment is a single service plus Postgres. We run the website on Railway and the same service on Manufact for the MCP host (mcp.brains.ceo), with BEHIND_MCP_GATEWAY=true and CLIENT_IP_HEADER=cf-connecting-ip.

Content and takedowns

  • Brains are unofficial. They're built only from public talks, interviews, essays and posts, and they're not affiliated with or endorsed by the people they're about unless marked "claimed".

  • Every passage cites its original source. The repo contains only our derived summaries and short quotes. Raw transcripts and scraped articles are never committed.

  • Are you one of these people? Email hello@brains.ceo to claim your brain, correct it, add sources, or have it removed.

Contributing

Brain requests, new brains, fixes and design improvements are all welcome. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.

If The Brains is useful to you, give it a star. It helps more people find it.

License

The code is MIT. Brain content belongs to its original authors; see Content and takedowns.

This server cannot be deployed

One endpoint for every MCP toolRayrun runs every MCP server behind one URL and holds the credentials. Each call is decided per client, tool, and argument, then recorded.ray.runAd

Maintenance

ActivityMaintained
ResponsivenessWithin a week

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