I started with one.
It was a Nelson Mandela simulator. You make the same 8 decisions he made — before you see what he actually did. Should he advocate armed resistance? Should he accept the conditional release offer after 21 years in prison? Should he negotiate with the apartheid government at all?
The point wasn’t to test historical knowledge. The point was that you can’t un-make a choice once you see the consequences. You have to commit first. Then find out if you were right.
I built that first simulator in a weekend. Then I built 99 more.
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What “100 Historical Figures” Means in Practice
The full list covers more ground than I expected:
Scientists and mathematicians: Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Curie, Tesla, Edison, Hawking, Faraday, Turing, Ramanujan, Galois, Gödel, Feynman, Archimedes, Galileo, Copernicus, Pascal, Babbage, Meitner, Fleming, Nobel, Semmelweis, Cantor, Kepler, Lovelace
Artists and musicians: Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Gauguin, Munch, Rothko, Hokusai, O’Keeffe, Claudel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Schubert, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Satie, Isadora Duncan
Writers and thinkers: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Tolstoy, Twain, Hugo, Woolf, Plath, Austen, Keats, Wilde, Dickens, Fitzgerald, Christie, Doyle, Melville, Mary Shelley, Chesterton, Saint-Exupéry, Tagore, Dickinson
Philosophers and psychologists: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Confucius, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Marcus Aurelius
Business and innovation: Jobs, Musk, Buffett, Oprah, Disney, Honda, Carnegie, Ford, Chanel
Pioneers and underdogs: Mandela, Earhart, Nightingale, Hypatia, Shackleton, Rosalind Franklin, Buckminster Fuller, Cousteau, Zhang Xue
100 people. 8 decisions each. Roughly 800 historical reveals total — each one explaining not just what they did, but why, and what happened afterward.
All free. No login. Browse all 100 →
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The Pattern That Appeared Across All 99
I didn’t expect to find a pattern. I was just trying to build interesting tools.
But it showed up everywhere.
The people who made the most consequential decisions were almost always acting without the information that would have made the decision obvious in retrospect.
Newton had the theory of universal gravitation in 1666. He didn’t publish it for 20 years. He didn’t know yet that his work would outlast everything. He just thought it was incomplete.
Darwin had the theory of natural selection in 1838. He spent 20 more years accumulating evidence. He still wasn’t ready when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a letter with the same idea in 1858. He had 90 days to decide whether to publish jointly or let Wallace take priority.
Galois wrote out the foundations of group theory the night before a duel he knew he was likely to lose. He was 20 years old. He didn’t know these pages would be considered some of the most important mathematics of the 19th century. He was just trying to write down what he’d figured out before it disappeared.
In every case, the person was operating in the dark. The consequences we now consider obvious were invisible to them.
That’s the thing that makes these simulators useful: they force you to make the choice under the same uncertainty. You don’t get to know what happens next before you decide.
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Three Decisions That Surprised Me Most
1. Semmelweis and handwashing (1847)
Ignaz Semmelweis proved in 1847 that doctors were killing patients by not washing their hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies. He had the data. The evidence was clear.
The medical establishment rejected him completely. He was institutionalized at 47. He died of the same infection he had spent his career trying to prevent.
The decision in his simulator isn’t whether to keep pushing handwashing. It’s whether to present the data differently, to work through official channels instead of direct confrontation, to accept a slower path. Most people, playing it blind, choose the pragmatic option. Then they learn what Semmelweis actually chose — and what happened.
The lesson isn’t about stubbornness. It’s about the cost of being right too early.
2. Gödel’s final years
Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems — proved at 25 — are considered among the most significant results in the history of mathematics. He escaped Nazi Austria, settled in Princeton, became Einstein’s closest friend.
He also developed a severe paranoia about being poisoned. His wife Adele cooked all his food. When Adele was hospitalized in 1977, he stopped eating. He died weighing 65 pounds.
The decisions in his simulator aren’t primarily about mathematics. They’re about the relationship between the most rigorous mind of the century and the inability to trust his own perceptions.
3. Claudel’s 30 years
Camille Claudel was Rodin’s most gifted student and his lover for 15 years. She created sculptures that historians now believe rival his. In 1913, her family had her committed to a psychiatric institution. Multiple doctors declared her sane. She stayed for 30 years anyway and died inside.
Her simulator ends in 1913. The reveal shows what the last 30 years looked like. It’s the hardest reveal in any of the 100 simulators to read.
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What I Use These For (That I Didn’t Expect)
I built them as educational tools. They’ve become something else for me personally.
When I’m facing a decision where I can’t see the outcome, I ask myself: which historical figure’s situation does this most resemble? Not for a template — the details are always wrong — but for the structure of the uncertainty.
If it resembles Newton sitting on calculus for 20 years, maybe the timeline is longer than I think. If it resembles Darwin in 1858 — 20 years of evidence, and then suddenly 90 days to act — maybe I’ve been preparing long enough and the external pressure to decide is real. If it resembles Semmelweis, maybe the question isn’t whether I’m right but how I can make being right legible to the people who need to act on it.
None of this is literal. But the pattern library turns out to be useful.
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The One That’s Been Played Most
I don’t have user data (no login, no tracking). But based on how the simulators are shared, Einstein and Darwin get the most attention. Galois — 20 years old, writing mathematics the night before a fatal duel — gets shared with a specific note: “I didn’t know this story.”
Gödel is the one that generates the most DMs. People find something in the gap between mathematical certainty and personal terror that they recognize.
Zhang Xue — the broke Chinese motorcycle repairman who beat Ducati at the World Superbike Championship on a Chinese-made bike, and whom almost nobody outside China has heard of — gets shared within Chinese communities in a way that’s different from how the Western figures get shared. It’s the only simulator where the person is still alive.
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The Decision I Made About the Simulators Themselves
While building these, I ran the same question through two different AIs: should this cost money?
One AI (Gemini) gave a detailed 3-option monetization plan: a global password lock, Apache `.htpasswd` authentication, or Cloudflare Zero Trust. Lock 80/20 Rule;buy now” bar that follows users as they scroll. It was a thorough, well-reasoned plan. The argument was: 800 decisions’ worth of research has real value; make people pay for it.
The other AI (Claude) said: not yet. The SEO value of 100 individually indexed pages disappears the moment you lock them. Every paywalled page is a page Google can’t read and a reader who bounces before they decide to pay. Build the traffic first. The simulators are the product, not the paywall.
I went with the second argument. Not because the first was wrong — it’s a real plan for a real stage of a project — but because the right question at this stage is how many people find these, not how many people pay. You can always add a paywall. You can’t un-lose the years of traffic you would have foregone while figuring out whether the product was any good.
So: all free. No login. No paywall.
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How to Play
Each simulator takes 5–10 minutes.
You read a short narrative. You face a decision with 3–4 options. You choose — blind. Then the historical reveal shows what actually happened and why. You do this 8 times, accumulating a score.
At the end, a 4-tier result tells you whether you think like the person, whether you have their instinct without their follow-through, whether you made the cautious call they refused to make, or whether you consistently chose the option they specifically rejected.
The score isn’t the point. The reveal is.
Browse all 100 Life Simulators →
Or start with one of these:
- Einstein → — The Manhattan Project letter. The most dramatic single decision in the collection.
- Galois → — The night before the duel. 20 years old. Most people don’t know this story.
- Semmelweis → — Discovered handwashing saves lives. Was mocked into a mental institution. Died of the same infection he could have prevented.
- Gödel → — Proved mathematics can’t prove everything. Starved to death because he wouldn’t eat.
- Claudel → — The hardest reveal to read. 30 years inside.
All free. No login. No paywall.
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