Earlier this year, a few of us visited a friend who recently moved to New Mexico. It was a whimsical trip. We mixed in some camping in Cloudcroft, wandering dunes in White Sands National Park, and lounging in the weirdly hip town of Albuquerque. Aside from eating a lot of hatch green chilies, we bounced around art galleries in downtown, taking in paintings, photography, and prints inspired by the southwestern desert sun. Inspired by the trip and feeling the urge to activate a side of my brain I had not touched for a long time, I joined a local art studio.  

As a kid, my mom enrolled me in drawing classes. I was one of those kids that hated being forced to do anything (turns out, I’m one of those adults as well). As a result, I didn’t enjoy the class. All I remember is this: sketching the shadows of an apple under an artificial lamp was boring as hell. 

However, I was decent at drawing. The only reason I knew was because of how bad my brother’s drawings were. My family and I sometimes pull up his drawings to get a kick out of it:

Good thing he’s a Data Engineer instead.

This is a sketch I did in middle school:

It’s my favorite character from the anime series Naruto. I remember it didn’t take me very long and I was very proud of it (proven by the fact that I still have this two decades later). Looking at it today, I have no idea how I managed to do this. So, into the art studio I went. 

6 months later, I’m writing this post to document my learnings and experience learning from foundational concepts.

Since I wasn’t forced into class, I skipped into my first drawing class. The class is a mix of very young high schoolers prepping their college application and mom’s & grandma’s working on paintings of their dogs, children, and grandchildren. Then there’s me. After a few sessions of “what the hell am I doing here” type of thoughts, I accepted my situation and decided to enjoy mixing with people I wouldn’t normally cross paths with. 

The teacher, José, is fantastic. He doesn’t beat around the bush and is constantly pushing students. He’s the exact type of teacher you want if you want to get better at anything: someone who won’t let you rest on your laurels, will call you out when you’re slacking or underperforming, and push you just beyond your ability without discouraging you. 

The first thing I learned is that drawing is extremely technical. This is probably obvious to most of you, but for some reason I thought artists just draw whatever they want in whichever style they want. José asked me a simple question in my first class: are you just trying to paint something or do you actually want to learn how to draw from the ground up. He was telling me that learning to draw from basics will build a foundation that makes everything else in the future easier—whether painting, pastels, watercolor, and so on. So, I opted to build a foundation.

Bargue: Sketching with Graphite

To start, José had me working out of a classical textbook: Bargue. I started out figuring out how to sketch simple detail, from a nose, to an eye, to the simple outline of a face. With sketching, the rules are to: stay loose, draw light lines that go out to infinity, spend more time observing your subject than your own drawing (true at all stages of drawing), work with the large bits of information first before moving onto the smaller detail, measure proportions of the large pieces of information, but remember that it’s a sketch, you’re not trying to perfect it on the first go. 

Dark vs. Light with Graphite

From there, we went into discerning dark and light. Here, I learned that contrast is what gives a drawing life. Blocking is the act of “coloring” or “shading” a particular area to denote a dark, typically done with consistent strokes that don’t seesaw like a seismograph. They should be consistent across size, space, and direction. Once again, look at the large details. What are the darkest areas on the subject? Start with the darks first, be consistent with your values across a piece. Find each value across the entire piece before moving onto the next value. The piece should look “completed” even if they are at different stages, for example 10 minutes vs 10 hours. Direction of blocking should follow the lengthwise of your object, but consideration should also be given to texture (for example, rounding or flatness). The Asario Head is a good reference for drawing faces. You need a light next to a dark to see the dark. The reverse is also true. Be suspicious of any places that have a line and lights on each side. Dark next to light, light next to dark, contrast is what creates the drawing. 

Values with Graphite, Charcoal

Dark and light naturally gives way to values. Because this isn’t black vs. white, dark and light implies that there is a degree to how dark or how light. Before moving onto colors, we spent a lot of time better understanding blocking in the context of values. If you block consistently in a single direction you can only add the density or increase the value of the shading so much. If you introduce crosshatching, you can add more texture and have more values that are more or less dark and light. You have a larger range of textures to play with. When cross-hatching, make sure not do do 90 degree crosshatching. Consistency in direction will take the life out of a drawing, most things in nature don’t only go in a single direction, for example, someone’s hair!

During this period, a lot of my drawings would look nothing like my subject. However, if I ignored that and pressed on, eventually it would look very much like the subject. My drawing looked completely messed up, kind of like a blob, less like a blob, and eventually, more like what I intended to draw. It’s a fun and infuriating process, kind of like writing a blog post about something you know nothing about. 

Pastel

After a solid 4 months of a couple sessions every week in black and white, we finally moved on to some color! I was itching to get to this stage because it’s what I imagined when I stepped into the studio. But we were building the foundation! 

We started with pastels, which conveniently have a similar feel to charcoal which we spent some time on at the end of the black and white era. At first, it was very weird sketching with pastel. Which color do you even use? Once again, you go with the dark and light. What are your darkest values on the drawing? Pick that color. For the hummingbird I started with was a bluish green. José purposely started me on a pastel set that did not have any range of whites or blacks. This forced me to understand the color wheel, which is something most 3^rd graders know more about than I do. RGB! 

Some basics to the color wheel include: Colors on the color wheel next to each other mix well, if they are across they go well together but they do not mix well, they are how they get your grays and browns (mostly brown), complements mean that they do great next to each other (think Red & Green for Christmas), but the moment you mix them, they get muddied out. In most cases, a muddy effect is done via layering complementary colors. Black is not a color, there’s always some color to black. For example, I used a lot of blue and purple to get the dark parts of Messi. 

Pastel is very forgiving, so stay loose with it, test out colors, and make adjustments as you progress. In most cases, the first color you pick won't be right. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. For transition areas, the dark of a light is usually the light of the next dark and vice versa, depending on which direction you are moving. Important to consider warm and cool colors as well. Colors that jump out are vibrant, high saturation colors, not necessarily white. Colors develop like a sketch: at first, your colors look completely off, but as you build layers, you slowly inch towards the result you’re targeting. Stay patient with it, experiment, make mistakes, and adjust. 

Tricks of the eyes: Our brain will blend colors to create a dark, hence, adding brown or blue to dark spots in hair makes it appear darker than just blue or black. The brain will draw lines, we just have to draw suggested lines to help the brain out. For example, drawing an iris doesn’t mean outlining the entire iris, just draw a portion of it and our eyes will connect them, same thing for space between teeth - don't draw the full line between teeth, otherwise it will appear like your subject has gaps between their teeth. Just a portion of the lines on the top and bottom of the teeth and the brain does the rest. Consider the texture of what you are drawing to determine which stroke you make. 

A Messi evolution below:

In an immigrant household, temperature records must be shattered before modern comforts can be considered at the cost of the electrical bill. California shattered temperature highs in early September, reaching 108 degrees in my neighborhood. The reward? I finally turned on our air conditioning.

After flipping on the A/C, I realized the 3 rooms on the far end of the home weren’t receiving any air. Upon inspecting my central air unit, I discovered it was from the Stone Age, pushing two decades of existence with minimal usage. 

While my office and bedroom came to equilibrium with the outside temperature, I hid on one end of the house, researching options to update our central heat and cool unit. 

I was excited by this exercise, not because I enjoy replacing old home systems, but because I spent a good chunk of time this year to better understand the often under appreciated world of energy. Turns out, a steady and secure supply of energy is critical for national stability. Energy is modern life. We depend on energy to power our lives: staying cool, getting to work, powering our factories, building our homes, and watching Netflix. The importance of energy sits idle in the background until talk of energy prices surge into every conversation. Nowhere is this more clear than in Europe, where natural gas prices are 5x American prices and we haven’t even reached peak winter yet:

During the pandemic, some called 2020 the peak of oil demand. In defiance, oil has bounced back dramatically since it bottomed in 2021:

J.P. Morgan releases an energy paper every year and it’s one of the most comprehensive reports for understanding the energy transition. The entire paper is worth a read. The first chart in the report is my favorite, demonstrating the slow pace of energy transitions:

As I researched different options to replace our central heating and cooling unit, it became clear that we’re not going to switch off fossil fuels anytime soon. From the Energy Information Administration’s own Annual Energy Outlook, which forecasts through 2050, sees continued growth of fossil fuel usage: 

So energy transitions take time. But this got me thinking: what can we learn from past transitions? What innovations will unlock more renewable adoption?

We return to my search for home heating options. Some quick history of home heating. We used to burn firewood for heat—large parts of the world still does and if you show up at an airbnb in the mountains, there will be a fireplace you can use to heat the home. 

Eventually, we discovered coal and the steam engine could generate electricity for our homes. Unfortunately, coal releases all kinds of toxic gases when burned, even if it is more efficient than wood. From there, we figured out how to liquefy natural gas and safely transport it for use. This brings us to the modern day, where most of the developed world uses natural gas to generate electricity, heat and cool homes, power stoves, and perform high energy industrial activity. While it is a fossil fuel, it is 60% less carbon intense than electricity from coal. Natural Gas went from an annoying and dangerous byproduct of oil production to something we know how to capture, liquefy, transport, and re-gasify for consumption. In short, we improved on the form factor of Natural Gas. 

If we place these energy sources side by side and compare their energy density, we can see that humanity has progressed up the energy density ladder. We’ve figured out how to harness more complex resources and efficiently extract the most energy possible from them: 

By looking at how we progressed from burning wood to utilizing coal, oil, then natural gas today, we find the adoption of a new energy source is highly dependent on two key components: (1) the energy source’s form factor, which includes variables such as volume, weight, energy density, power density, relative to other options and (2) the infrastructure required to support the distribution and consumption of the energy source. This is the basis of our energy form factor theory.

I left out one important factor on energy adoption: government policy. Europe’s decision to shut down nuclear reactors (France the exception) and rely solely on intermittent power and Russian natural gas is developing as we speak: people in Europe are burning all kinds of things to stay warm during their energy crisis — coal and wood, oil, and even trash. 

In the long run, as my favorite green chicken says: physics will win over platitudes every time. It’s through this lens that I dug into possibilities for our energy secure and carbon free future. 

Residential Geothermal Power

To my surprise, geothermal energy popped up as a residential heating option. Dandelion Energy drills a tiny hole below your home, roughly 10-20 feet down and uses the crusts consistent temperature to heat and cool your home, no reliance on fuels of any kind. The gist of geothermal is this: 10 feet below your home, the earth’s temperature stays at a consistent 55 degrees Fahrenheit, whether it’s snowing or a heat wave above. This gives you a consistent source to heat and cool your home. Adapting technology from oil drillers, the company changed the form factor of geothermal energy for residential adoption. Dandelion Energy is an interesting exception to our energy form factor theory — because it doesn’t require a massive infrastructure to implement. If you can drill below your home, you can get a limitless energy source! In some ways, this is like residential solar & battery, grid optional. If you’re interested to learn more, I found this article and this video as perfect companions to understanding geothermal energy.

Solar in our Materials

If geothermal is the new solar, then what’s solar doing today? The form factor continues to evolve beyond panels and roofs. The intermittency problem of solar and wind is well known and the solution is two fold: better battery storage or overbuild. A lot of the progress in solar allows us to overbuild and convert more surfaces to energy generating solar material. 

Some progress includes making solar more lightweight for applications in the sky and adapting to two commonly used materials: glass and plastics. The folks at Solar Window have even figured out a liquid spray to apply solar to existing surfaces. It’s not clear how efficient these will be and how they will distribute the technology, but I can imagine a world where this is included as an option for glass and plastics manufacturers. 

Iron Rust Batteries for Long Term Storage

In the world of battery storage, I’m excited about potential developments in iron-rust batteries. Why not lithium? Here’s one challenge with lithium batteries: 

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. In addition to cost, lithium batteries are best for short term shortage. Here’s a recent quote for a Tesla Powerwall: ~$26,000 for 13.5 kWh battery storage. That provides roughly 6-18 hours in backup power for roughly 3-5 household circuits under 30 amps in rating. Yeah, it’s expensive! Iron Ore is one of the most common elements available on earth and early tests at Form Energy show they will be able to provide multi-day storage. Nothing is a silver bullet of course. The iron rust battery is problematic because of it’s low lifetime. Since the battery is being oxidized on each cycle, the battery degrades quickly compared to a lithium ion battery, which typically have 10x the cycle count. This transcript gives a nicely balanced view on what iron rust batteries can and cannot do for us.

Smaller Nuclear Reactors

If there’s anything close to a silver bullet, it’s nuclear energy. I covered nuclear in-depth here, but if we continued down the energy density path that took human civilization from wood, to coal, to natural gas, then the next leap looks like this xkcd comic:

The big question for nuclear in our energy form factor theory is deployment and infrastructure. Nuclear projects are notoriously huge, expensive, and often with large cost overruns. The fourth generation nuclear reactors, also called Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are addressing this very issue. 

SMR’s have a footprint that is small enough to fit in a 20 foot shipping container and more importantly, a much smaller environmental footprint. The typical nuclear reactor requires an environmental clearance space of roughly 80 km radius. SMR’s only require 2 km of radius. This increases the range of places to situate nuclear reactors. In fact, a recent Department of Energy report performed this very analysis, finding that 80% of existing coal plants could be converted to a megawatt scaled nuclear power site.

As shown by the comic, nuclear is energy dense and a great candidate for reducing the form factor. By sizing down the nuclear reactors, we’re improving the form factor of nuclear for adoption. Fred Wilson, one of the top generalist and climate investors, is already looking at how we can make nuclear batteries small enough to fit in our homes or devices. 

I’m excited to watch these renewable energy sources evolve as the world pours more investment into the space (or is forced to look at other options by a dictator…) if you find anything that should be added to this list, let me know!

By confronting death, we highlight the shortness of life. This is a common tool to recognize and cherish the present. We never know where the road ends. In his post “The Tail End”, Tim Urban does this by drawing a 90 year human life in weeks, represented by boxes. He writes the post in the context of quality time with his aging parents and reminds us about the shortness of life. It’s a disturbingly compact visual of a human life: 

Yet in the flow of our busy lives, it is easy to forget about the shortness of life. We might read about how short life can be and then promptly forget about it until a major life event slaps us with the truth. Why are we so bad at savoring life?

Earlier this year, I planned to live at home with my family for a few months while undergoing jaw surgery and orthodontics. My parents are ecstatic to host me at home, simultaneously putting me to work as their gardener, rodent control, and contractor. My little sister, 9 years my junior, happens to be at home as well. We hadn’t lived together since I was in high school, but the pandemic brought us together again.

Expecting a short stay at home, I planned to make the most of my time by capturing my parents' life stories on video. A realization during dinner sparked this idea: I didn’t have a good grasp on how my parents lived. We would get tidbits of stories as kids, but nothing comprehensive. The project was simple: record a series of long form, podcast style conversations with my parents to capture the story of their lives. 

I drew out a rough plan for the conversations, but once we hit record, my plans and draft questions melted away. They talked and jumped into random rabbit holes, overturning stories even they forgot about.

My parents described their journey from early childhood in Taiwan to immigrating to the US and building their life in California. They landed without a penny in their name and were 45 days from running out of money before they had to return to Taiwan. Luckily, my Dad landed a job just in time and secured a small foothold in American life. They struggled through a few economic crashes, realized the American dream, and built a blissfully comfortable life for my siblings and me. 

In total, we recorded 4 conversations, roughly 2 hours each. Watching my parents piece together 120 years of living experience and stories, many of which directly involved or affected my life, was an awe inducing experience. Upon finishing the last conversation with my parents, I felt a sense of connectedness and completeness inside. The experience is hard to describe in words, bordering on psychedelic. 

I stumbled into research from a lab at Emory University that corroborated my experience. The Guardian summarized the research: “They found that the more the children knew [about their family history], the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. ‘Hearing these stories gave the children a sense of their history and a strong intergenerational self. Even if they were only nine, their identity stretched back 100 years, giving them connection, strength and resilience,’ he said.”

After backing up the video recordings to a USB stick and every corner of the internet, I marked my project complete. I recommend the project to anybody and I suspect your parents will appreciate the opportunity as much as mine did. The worst that happens is you spend quality time together.

The glow didn’t last long, though. A week after finishing my project, I got restless. A slight complication with the jaw surgery resulted in frequent trips to the orthodontist and a longer stay at home. Restricted from exercise and stuck on a liquid diet, I descended into a sour mood, like a teenager stuck at home. 

We are bad at savoring life because the negative events that remind us about the shortness of life are, by nature, rare occurrences. But why rely on these uncommon events? Can we draw on everyday moments, however simple or mundane, to keep us attached to the present moment? 

After a few rough weeks, my jaw and teeth were on the mend. Coming off my liquid diet, I naturally found myself in the drive-thru of an In-N-Out one night. I was working my way through a Tim Ferris podcast when one of his guests, Sam Harris, asked listeners to consider: “all of the things in this life that you will experience, you will experience for the last time…long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences.” 

It’s the perfect way to actively frame the shortness of life so that it stays top of mind. We do a lot of things for the last time without even realizing it. When your favorite coffee shop closes, did you savor the experience the last time you were there? You’re suddenly allergic to a new type of food. You hang up the skis, the snowboard, the bike, the basketball shoes. You stop somewhere for a layover, never to return again. You have a conversation with a coworker on your last day on the job, never to see them again. Some examples from the podcast: the last time you wake up in the middle of the night to take care of your small child, the last time you carried your child, or the last time your child pronounces animal as “aminal”. 

No matter how trivial an activity, there’s a last time. We probably didn’t notice when it happened. In the past month, what’s something you did for the last time? If you leave the planet today, what’s something you’ll wish you did for the last time? I reflected on my own situation: it’s unlikely I’ll get to live with my parents again, at least under circumstances where they are perfectly healthy. While I am close with my sister, I doubt she would voluntarily live with me through her 20s. It shifted my outlook immediately: I’m not in a rush to leave. There’s the last time my parents and I made ramen like college students because all three of us were hungry at 11:30pm. The last time I made silly faces at my sister while we’re working from home together. The last time we did our after dinner walk as a family. The irony? When we remember to savor the small moments, even under the threat that it could be the last time, we lengthen the experience of the moment.

Sitting in that In-N-Out parking lot, I munched my way through my burger—a transcendent experience after weeks on a liquid diet. I asked myself, is this the last time I’ll get to enjoy a burger after weeks on a liquid diet? I hope so.

Every year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes an energy consumption forecast through 2050. The chart below is from their 2022 forecast published in March this year: 

Even with an aggressive ramp of non-hydro renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, fossil fuel derivatives like petroleum and natural gas continue to grow and dominate the fuel source for the next few decades. 

If our goal is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from energy, how would we compare which sources to invest in? We might look at energy efficiency, availability, safety, and of course, greenhouse gas emissions between different fuel sources. Through this research, we would find that nuclear power must be a major component to our emission free future. 

Efficiency & Availability Comparison of Energy Sources

To successfully support modern life, electricity supply must be able to match electricity demand. When this fails, rolling blackouts occur, like the Texas polar freeze earlier this year. How do electricity grids fulfill this requirement?

There are 3 classifications of power sources when it comes to our electricity grid: base load, intermittent, and peak power. Wind and solar are intermittent power sources because no power is generated when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. As a result, all wind and solar sources are augmented with some sort of base load power, usually coal, natural gas, or nuclear power. They often come with expensive Lithium Ion battery systems, but any grid level deployment that takes power availability seriously will back up those batteries with base load sources. Peak power is rarely used, but critical to mitigate spikes in demand, say, during the depths of winter when we can’t feel our toes. This is usually with natural gas. A simpler description of the 3 types of power availability might be “always on”, “sometimes on”, and “rarely on”. 

How would we make an apples to apples comparison across different fuel sources? Based on the first law of thermodynamics, energy is neither created nor destroyed. Energy is converted from one form into another and in this sense, no energy source is truly “renewable”. To make solar panels, we use fossil fuels to make the polysilicon. We need energy in order to mine uranium, the key fuel source for nuclear energy. Wind turbines require enormous amounts of steel and that manufacturing process requires energy. The Energy Return on Invested (EROI) gives us the apples to apples comparison we want: it provides the energy output based on a single energy input from a particular fuel source. This metric factors in all energy inputs required to generate power: mining, fabrication, construction, installation, maintenance, and transmission. Let’s take a look at the results across different energy sources:

The buffered EROI metric incorporates storage capacity, which is required to make a “sometimes on” energy source like wind and solar serve our needs. Wind and solar are least energy efficient with an EROI of 3-9. Natural gas and coal hover around 30 and nuclear leaves everybody in the dust with an EROI of 75. Even if we compare the unbuffered metrics, nuclear wins by a long shot. 

As end users of energy, most of us prefer our electricity “always on”. To provide for residential and industrial needs, base load power (“always on”) is the most critical input, followed by peak power sources (“rarely on” except during demand spikes). While we know wind and solar offer us cleaner forms of energy, they cannot operate as base load or peak power with current battery technology at a reasonable cost. This leaves us vulnerable to power outages. In order to meet our functional consumption needs, we must take into account the power availability of an energy source. We rely heavily on coal and natural gas for our base load power today and as we’ll see in the next section, these sources emit the most. In order to replace these effectively, we must select a base load power that generates less emissions for the same or higher amount of energy output. Nuclear energy offers the most efficient base power source by a huge margin.

Safety & Greenhouse Gas Emissions Comparison of Energy Sources

Moving on from efficiency and availability, we ask the next logical question in the context of climate change: what are the safest and cleanest ways to make energy? 

Surprisingly, nuclear is the safest base load power by a long shot with less emissions than even wind or solar. Nuclear meltdowns are highly reported disasters magnified in the public sphere, but comparing accident data between energy sources paints a clear picture: nuclear is safe. Combine this with low emissions and high ERoEI means nuclear power is the closest we have to a safe, renewable energy source.

Innovation in Nuclear Power

What are the common concerns with nuclear power? Two key issues, one technical and one public perception: (1) long build times with high capital expenditures and environmental risk and (2) a natural association with nuclear weapons.

Innovation in the nuclear space helps us address the first concern around build timelines, cost, and overall risk: SMRs, small modular reactors, are compact nuclear reactors. SMRs cut down deployment time and cost dramatically because they are compact, standardized, and pre-fabricated in a factory instead of custom built on a specific site. SMRs can be completed in 3-5 years versus 6-12 years for traditional nuclear reactors. SMR cost estimates are $1 billion compared to $6 billion for a traditional reactor generating 1 GW of energy. Earlier this year, NuScale, a company specializing in building SMRs, announced agreements to build SMRs with energy providers in Romania and Poland.

On top of this, SMRs have a smaller environmental footprint and risk. Conventional reactors have a 16 kilometer radius for emergency planning along with an 80 kilometer exclusion zone for protecting food and water resources. U.S. regulators have decided that SMR designs only need a 2 kilometer emergency planning zone, giving SMRs the flexibility to integrate with the existing grid and provide us with base load electricity much faster than a conventional reactor. Additionally, SMRs have passive failure systems and don’t require operators or external power to shut down safely like traditional reactors. While they still require water for cooling, certain compact designs allow the nuclear reactor to sit far away from water sources, where meltdowns threaten drinking water.

Risks in Arms Proliferation?

A common association with nuclear power is nuclear weapons. I made the same assumption before researching this piece: inputs for nuclear energy are interchangeable with nuclear weapons. Combine this with highly reported nuclear meltdown incidents, political and public support for nuclear energy tends to be skittish. After diving into the literature, nuclear arms proliferation is more of a political challenge than technical. While arms proliferation deserves its own deep dive, I’ll cover the key takeaways below.

The technical requirements of uranium for nuclear power act as a natural barrier to arms proliferation. Mined uranium has 0.7% of the isotope U-235. In order to be used in energy reactors and weapons, uranium must be enriched via a complex and intensive process. Fuel reactors require uranium enriched to 3-5% of U-235 in order to generate electricity while weapons grade uranium is typically enriched to 85% U-235. An enrichment facility will not refine uranium above the required levels for reactors since it’s more expensive. It’s a natural economic disincentive. 

The World Nuclear Association documents existing safeguards, different agencies, protocols, and treaties involved today. The entire document is worth a read, but a few important points for our purposes: it only takes 5 tons of highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear warhead and current world trade for electricity production involves 70,000 tons of uranium. What does this mean for nuclear power? Uranium supply is plentiful across the globe today and that risk is managed by existing nuclear proliferation treaties and protocols. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and North Korea’s recent advances in nuclear capabilities, the international community must continue strengthening safeguards. At the same time, it also means we should not point to arms proliferation as a sole reason to stop investment in energy projects—the risk exists today and the international treaties are actively managing this risk. 

What does the nuclear landscape look like today?

2022 could be an interesting turning point for public support of nuclear power. I mentioned Romania and Poland previously, but the global winds of nuclear power shifted in a matter of months. Putin has made a laughingstock of Germany’s decision to shut down nuclear power plants in exchange for intermittent “sometimes on” wind and solar sources. Europe is learning how critical base load power is to energy independence, the hard way: natural gas prices in Europe have fluctuated between 7-10 times US natural gas prices this last year, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration launched a $6 billion program to revive existing nuclear power plants with further aid to states like Wyoming to drive innovation. The EU approved a major taxonomy update to include nuclear as clean energy. Gavin Newsome of California is walking back plans to shut down the Diablo Canyon plant, the only one of its kind in the state. France, already spearheading the European efforts in nuclear power, announced plans to build new power plants.

While the prospects for nuclear power look optimistic, political and public opinion change slowly and still tilts against the energy source due to its negative public perception. However, after examining the Energy Return on Invested metric, power availability, safety, and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear power along with innovations in newer reactors, it’s clear nuclear energy needs to be part of any serious plan to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Recommended further reading: 

• Should we call it Elemental Power instead?
• Energy Return on Energy Invested research paper  
• What are Small Modular Reactors?
• Safeguards to Nuclear Arms Proliferation

“Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.” - Nassim Taleb

“For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.” - also Nassim Taleb

Debbie Millman recently recounted the story of a drawing she made as a kid on the Tim Ferris podcast. In a drawing she created as an 8 year old, it correctly depicted and predicted what she would do when she grew up. The drawing described bustling life in a big city, like going to the bank, laundromat, and having an important career as a designer. She described how she eventually found her way to that life, but there were many detours along the way. Tim Ferris mentions a similar story in his interview with Chris Sacca, who as a kid, described in a journal what he would do at age 40. Chris, in his 40s, stumbled into his parents attic one day, rediscovered these journals, and realized it had depicted exactly what he would be doing at age 40 (start-up investor). He had completely forgotten about them.

As a kid, I loved two things: writing and investing. My crazy high school English teacher opened up the world of creative writing and poetry to me. Value investors like Warren Buffett and financial concepts fascinated me as a kid. If you asked the 15 year old version of me “what do you want to do when you grow up?”, without hesitation I would have said: “write and invest money”. I’m not sure there’s a more polarizing combination of professions, but hell, those were what I wanted to do. For most of my working adult career, I ignored this childhood desire.

I spent my early career eschewing money, spending time in nonprofit work and strongly considering time in the Peace Corps. I can only laugh at myself for how far off the mark I was at finding work that fit me. There’s nothing wrong with the nonprofit world, but the work was bureaucratic, slow, revolved around asking people for money, and most importantly, didn’t utilize my economic minded brain. The experience in nonprofits swung me into the other end: corporate. I did an internship at a private equity fund and eventually took a first job out of college in consulting. Working at a private equity fund was as impersonal as I imagined. While I enjoyed numbers, I didn’t like drowning in spreadsheet work in a cubicle. Consulting was high flying: accumulating free hotel and airline points, fancy dinners with partners, and a corporate card. I lasted 4 months. I took one look at the senior people in the firm and instantly knew their lives were not the ones I had aspired to create for myself. 

Eventually, I worked my way into the startup world. It felt like home. Work kept me close to operating businesses and early stage product iteration. It not only opened up opportunities to invest in early stage companies, but how to even think about the process. A startup has a single advantage: the people they attract. They were as interesting and rebellious as I aspired to be. These experiences gave me a rich foundation and the courage to write. 

Without realizing it, most of my career led me back to my childhood aspirations. It’s a winding journey and as Taleb says, we get corrupted by life. That corruption came in enticing forms: money, titles, prestige, status—name it and I’ve chased it. 

For me, it was difficult separating out what others told me I’m good at from what I wanted to pursue. It’s hard to ignore what you’re good at when they come with all kinds of tasty prizes. I’ve realized the dirty secret: when you line up what you’re good at with what you want to pursue, the tasty prizes naturally come. And if they don’t come? The act of finding and doing what you want to do is an achievement most people don’t realize in their lifetimes. You’ll be willing to go through hell or high water to stay on your path, because it’s hard to imagine an alternative.

I think we have a life crisis when we stray too far from what we wanted as a kid. We spend a lot of time either running away or ignoring the child in us. We justify this dismissal with the restraints of our social environment and the demands of our busy lives. A major life event or moment of clarity is needed to shake us awake. But before the sudden realization, there’s a slow build up, often unnoticeable. It’s something our analytical brain can’t comprehend: an internal, subconscious feeling, a tremor of a quiet child we’ve suppressed and ignored for so long that we don’t know what they sound like. Listen to that kid and listen without judgment. What are they telling you?

With my left toe hooked and a firm grip on my right, I lunged my left hand for the next hold. I reached, missed, and gravity threw me onto the cushioned floor, kicking up a cloud of chalk. On my back, I stared at the empty wall and groaned dramatically into the bouldering gym. 

I rolled over just as two kids, no older than 10, entered the bouldering area. I pulled myself up and moved to the spectator area to grab some water. They sized up the same climb I just struggled against. It included a long overhang section, a difficult climb by any measure, but especially hard for someone with less strength. One kid started to climb.

As the climber struggled in the same tricky section I failed, the friend suggested: “try a heel hook.” 

The climber swapped the toe to a heel hook with immediate results: “Oh, that’s much better.” 

I thought to myself: I should try the heel hook. 

After struggling on a difficult section and losing steam, the climber jumped down. Fist bumps and encouragement greeted the young climber. I signaled a small golf clap.

Watching the young climbers got me thinking: bouldering might be the best individual sport for teaching people how to handle failure. 

All sports teach some degree of perseverance, perspiration, practice, teamwork, and dedication, but if I had to pick a single skill to learn from sports, it’s the ability to deal with failure. It enables someone to get up and try again, because life will inevitably knock you over.

Each action in bouldering embodies a tight feedback loop. You either get past the current hold or you can’t and the consequences are apparent—you fall down. There’s a visceral feeling in the body when you face a hold that could lead to your tumble. Staying put does no good, either, as you’ll eventually run out of muscle endurance. Press forward or fall from the wall.

Despite being a solo sport, the community feels like a big family: friendly, open, and helpful. Climbs are even called "problems", so it creates a science-like collaboration in problem solving. Between climbs, the community is observing, encouraging, sharing, and discussing suggestions or improvements with complete strangers. Regardless of whether you want to work with others, your success and failures are broadcast publicly. There is a spotlight effect to bouldering: only one person can climb a section of wall. As a new entrant to the sport, it is daunting to be on the wall when a bunch of foreign eyeballs are on your back. Intimidating at first, over time, this builds comfort with learning and failing publicly. I felt self-conscious while climbing the first few times and now, I hardly think about it. I suspect this is where the supportive bouldering community derives: everyone knows how scary it is to get on that wall and fail in front of others, so we support each other since we all empathize with that sensation. Failure is an expected byproduct of progress in a bouldering gym. 

Compare these traits to other popular solo sports like running, cycling, and swimming. There is no feedback loop with each stride, pedal, or stroke. On any given day, an endurance athlete will always be able to perform these motions, so what constitutes failure? It's not always clear.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from these sports (I was an avid cyclist for years) and I know other individual sports contain great lessons. But, against the metrics of rapid feedback loops and openness to failure, bouldering scores high.

To take this a step further, bouldering also teaches the vital concept of fallibilism. In David Deutsch’s book “The Beginning of Infinity” he states: "fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors." He argues this funny sounding word along with creativity, are the keys to human progress. 

The overlap between the ability to deal with failure and fallibilism is large, minus one specific detail: authoritative knowledge. Fallibilists don’t look to authorities for knowledge, resulting in a willingness to disregard the status of a source in exchange for the truth.

Bouldering exemplifies fallibilism in a physical way. We improve through a simple cycle of falling down and getting up because we believe the errors can be corrected. You learn from the climbers in the gym regardless of their physical appearance: younger, older, man, woman, or child as I learned at the start of this essay. There’s a lesson to be learned from observing another climber, regardless of their background. 

This culture of open feedback welcomes public failure to teach an important life lesson: climbing up a wall will result in failure, but it’s worth the challenge. Like any sport, it helps when it’s a ton of fun and you’re surrounded by supportive people.

I just finished one year at Terraformation. I learned a lot about reforestation, carbon credit markets, and native ecosystems. There is one non-obvious topic I learned about: how to build an off-grid home. 

Build is a strong word. This post is not focused on doing-it-yourself, rather on assembly from multiple partners. I got to work with key pieces of an off grid project: Shelter, Power, Water, and Waste. I'll cover these areas. I’ve yet to purchase and develop land myself, so I won’t cover land acquisition, permitting, and preparation. 

I didn’t build an off-grid home at Terraformation, but their products are off-grid seed labs. There's good overlap and I’m sharing what I’ve learned with future James, who will one day build his own off-grid retreat. 

Shelter

This is the biggest cost for any project. Conventionally, we’d think of hiring an architect to draw up a plan, engineers to scope the land, and builders to bring materials on-site. I think it’s easier to compress a few of those steps and work with a prefabricated home builder. What does prefab mean? This means most construction is completed off-site in a centralized manufacturing facility. The partially completed structure is delivered to the property and installed. Usually, the last 10% of a prefab build is completed on-site (i.e. completing electrical wiring, foundation, and fitting pieces together).

Building a new home in the Bay Area or Los Angeles runs in the $400-600 per square foot range for a perfectly flat lot. In more remote places, costs don’t actually get cheaper because labor often needs to travel to the build site. In South Lake Tahoe, quotes for interior remodeling run around $300 per square foot. Imagine what it would cost to build from scratch! On top of this, build cost is a moving target due to contractor or material delays. Prefab comes with natural advantages in cost and time due to how the homes are built. Two modernized prefab home builders (Connect Homes and Cover) run in the range of $200-400 per square foot, with much faster build times. In the case of Cover, they promise a fixed price, which is unheard of in the construction world. 

How should we compare prefab home builders? Both Connect Homes and Cover are based in Los Angeles—no surprise as housing is a major issue in California. Both companies use similar models: they do 90% of a home build in their factories in LA and then ship to site for installation and configuration. Each takes a “lego block” approach to building. They choose the size of the smallest piece and use that as the building block for the rest of the structure. 

The key difference between the two companies is the size of lego blocks. Connect Homes uses the structure of a shipping container, roughly 8x40’ as their smallest lego block. Cover uses a panelized wall to create even smaller lego blocks, compact enough to fit inside a shipping container or in a truck. Their pieces don’t need a crane to lift on-site. The difference between the two comes down to installation, customizability, and shipping cost. 

The nature of shipping cost means Connect Homes will cost more to ship. Their lego blocks are large, similar to customized shipping containers and as a result, shippers charge extra for having to deal with containers that are slightly customized and different from the majority of the containers that they own. As an example, we were quoted nearly $20,000 to ship a Connect Home module from San Bernardino, California to Kona, Hawaii. Cover has an advantage in shipping cost: the products can be placed on a truck or inside shipping containers–so they don’t look different from other eCommerce goods and come with better shipping rates. 

In terms of customizability, Connect Homes allows for two story buildings (even higher if they wanted to), because of their steel beam structure. At the time being, Cover only builds a single story, but I suspect this is a limitation of resources and engineering effort. Both companies will allow for customization at the design level, but since Cover uses smaller lego blocks, more customizations are possible.

Hopefully this gives you some idea on how to think about tradeoffs between different structure types and prefabricated home builders. There are many more out there, but these considerations will allow you to compare providers. I’m excited to see how the prefab space develops. We’ll see building costs come down even further as some of these companies grow (Connect and Cover are early stage startups), but if I were doing a project today, I would go with a prefab as it’s already a 10x improvement over the incumbent. 

Power

To power our seed banks, we used solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and a backup generator. Coincidentally, our seed banks used what an average home in California consumes in electricity per day (roughly 20 kWh). Our system came with 24 solar panels rated 365W each (REC), 16 kWh battery capacity (Blue Ion), and a 5.5 kWh gasoline powered generator (Honda). This was built for a region with tons of sun, but if you’re in an area with less sun, you’ll need a larger solar array. Solar and battery installers are ubiquitous enough at this point that providers will scope the exact system you need based on your location.

What’s the right way to think about trade-offs within the power system? We'll start with the largest cost component, the battery.

The range of battery cost is as wide as the quality. Given cost of maintenance or replacing a battery in a remote area, I think it makes sense to invest in a high quality battery that will last 10+ years. An important battery terminology to understand is cycle count. Cycle count is the number of times a battery can be discharged in its lifetime. A cycle count of 1,000 means a battery can be used and recharged 1,000 times before end of life. A threshold always accompanies a cycle count, for example: 2000 cycles to 50%. This means it can be drained to 50% battery level and recharged fully for 2000 cycles. When it drops below the threshold level, the cycle count also goes down. So, you want batteries with high cycle counts and an ability to discharge to a low percentage (batteries cannot go to 0%, since you need to leave some juice to turn on the system). Most residential home batteries have low cycle count and high thresholds. The reason is simple: residential homes tied to the grid only drain the battery in blackout situations and therefore batteries are not often cycled. It’s important to specify to your solar and battery partner that you are building off-grid, because that changes which models to pick.

Solar panel technology is straightforward and the contractors will size the system for you. You may want self-cleaning panels if you are in an area that doesn’t get too much wind to blow off the debris and dust, but 3xx Watt panels are recommended at this point in time. 

With any solar panel and battery system, you will need a back-up generator. The sun doesn’t always shine and you don’t want to be left to the whims of the weather. Always be prepared. A generator running off diesel or some other carbon fuel is a requirement for any solar panel system, preferably one with an autostart function, detecting when your batteries are about to fall below a dangerous threshold (i.e. 20%) and automatically kick start the generator to either charge the battery up to a certain level (i.e. 35%) so that you can survive the night until the panels are pulling energy again to power the home and charge the battery.

Water & Waste

Water for human use comes in a few ways: pumping from a source, water catchment, or water storage. The location, rainfall, and proximity to water determines the most efficient water solution. In all cases, there will be some type of filtration, usually through reverse osmosis. Regardless of how you source water, storage is the most cost effective way to have more water on hand. This also provides water redundancy (always be prepared). 

An interesting company called Source happens to have the perfect solution for off-grid situations: Hydropanels. Their panels use solar to create a differential in the humidity to condense water from air, which is then filtered. They literally pull water out of thin air. The best part? These solutions are standalone and don’t need to plug into a water source, which makes them a perfect fit for off-grid needs. Based on my discussion with them: each hydro panel costs $2,000 and 2 Hydropanels produce 6 Liters of water per day (equivalent to a 12 case of 500mL water bottles). It’s less efficient in colder climates (where you have less of a water concern), but the variance between dry and humid places is only 10%, provided there is enough sun (the company is based in Phoenix). 

Since you won’t be ordering from Amazon Prime too much, most waste will be compostable. The 7 foot compostable toilets from Phoenix are the favorites we used: easy setup, low maintenance to the tune of once a year, and works with or without water. Since requirements in waste can drive water needs, water and waste considerations should be handled in tandem.

I did not spend much time around water systems for other uses: washing hands and dishes, showers, and flushing the toilet, so I’ll refrain from commenting. There are a ton of people detailing their off-grid systems on YouTube, such as this grey water system that reuses water from laundry to landscaping. This is a critical rabbit hole for any off-grid home.

Upon writing this, I realize how little I know about off-grid. Recycling water systems, land preparation, and permitting process are just a few things that I have huge gaps in. This is a starting point and I hope to follow-up this post in the not-too-distant future with further learnings!

I’ve written a little bit about my crazy little brother—how he set a goal of running a marathon once a week for a year while working as an Engineering Manager at Strava (a mobile app for runners & cyclists). He failed, running only 21 marathons in 21 weeks.

He ran his first marathon in 2018 and has amassed 52 marathons in a span of 4 years. So, it’s safe to say that he likes running. But if you ask him about how he got started, he did not set out to be this ambitious.

As a kid, my brother was allergic to the outdoors. One time, the family was going on a camping trip. The car was fully loaded, packed to the brim for a weekend getaway. Just as we were filing into the car, Daniel declared that he would not be joining us on our trip. A fight ensued between him and my Dad. Next thing you know, Daniel escaped on his bike to hide at his friend’s place. He later told me he went to Mountain Mike’s to eat a medium pizza first. We canceled that camping trip because Daniel literally ran away from the outdoors.

This is how my family knows Daniel. Someone who loves the computer, playing video games, building things online, and hanging out on IRC. So it’s confusing to see Daniel as an accomplished ultra-runner. Last year, he completed his first 100k and plans to run his first 100 miler this year.

During a recent trail run with Daniel (yes, he still runs with mere mortals like myself), I asked him how he got into running and whether Strava was the impetus. Turns out, it was a complete accident. He had already signed up for a marathon prior to landing the job at Strava. He started running because a persistent co-worker at a prior company kept asking him to run. Daniel begrudgingly caved one day and he’s continued the activity ever since. He tells me running is “fun”. 

I suspect we have different definitions of fun. Anytime I visit home, my dad and I play catch. We hurl the baseball back and forth, sometimes accompanying a conversation and other times in meditative silence with only the intermittent thump of a ball smashing into the glove. Now, this is fun. My Dad and I are giddy whenever we have time to play toss, often at the utter bewilderment of my mom. She doesn’t understand why it’s so fun for us. I suppose she has another definition of fun.

As we were huffing and puffing our way during an uphill segment of our run, I asked him why he ran so much. He struggled to find words, until drawing an analogy: “it’s like playing MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). They follow a simple formula. You kill monsters, do quests, strengthen your character, and level up. Monsters and quests get harder and you level your character. The cycle repeats until you reach the max level. Then the game developers raise the max level and release harder monsters and new gear and you continue onwards. What’s the point? There is no point. The point is that there is no point.” 

The ramp from casual runner to ultra-marathoner is a steep one. Fun might be the reason to start an activity, but it’s not the reason to push against bigger and bigger challenges. Fun eventually becomes challenging, if pushed far enough. It’s a fine line between fun, self-indulgence, and dangerous addiction, often crossed without recognition. Sometimes, crossing the line is the only way to truly understand the boundaries. 

There’s a sinister interpretation of his analogy: video games perpetuate themselves with extrinsic rewards, a never ending ladder. For runners, one mile becomes a 10k, which turns into a marathon, and eventually becomes an ultra-marathon. 200 mile races are a thing. Where does it stop? How does one stop if there’s no clearly defined boundary and the external prizes only get bigger?  

As a concerned sibling, I pressed Daniel further to understand what ensures he doesn’t go overboard. He broke it down into three components: understanding risks, removing comparisons, and a pulse on enjoyment. 

Exercise addiction is real, but Daniel’s answer on risks relieved some of my fears. In his own words: “I think in terms of going overboard / safety with trail running, there are like two parts: The body (injury, fatigue, dehydration) and nature (weather, getting lost, running out of light). I’ve pushed different things a tiny bit overboard, enough to learn the lesson.” The clarity on risks and recognition that the line was crossed is a sign of mature awareness. It doesn’t mean I don’t get spooked when Daniel tells me he will be running for at least 24 hours later this year.

Extrinsic rewards only have power if they’re viewed as the goal. This is where I think Daniel’s analogy to MMORPGs is actually a healthy sign. He doesn’t give the running game’s levels too much importance and doesn't compete against his peers, instead, he focuses on whether he enjoys his runs. 

There’s an added benefit to focusing on enjoyment: if you truly enjoy an activity, it’s easier to struggle when it gets hard. For example, Daniel was never an early bird (do you know any early bird gamers?). But, he’ll wake up at 4am to get a head start on a long run. We might consider waking up at 4am to do anything as insanity, but for someone who enjoys an activity, it’s simply required to get to the fun stuff. 

When we enjoy an activity for the sake of the activity, we will go through hell or high water to make it happen. Obstacles and setbacks don’t appear difficult while challenging goals seem inevitable. Even when we fail, we know we will be better for it. Plus, we think it’s fun.

I won’t be joining Daniel on a marathon run anytime soon, but my Dad and I will attempt to play catch in the 10 minutes between meetings today. I’m not sure what I set out to write, but this post started out as I’ve described above: writing for the sake of writing. Here we are. 

Freshman year of high school, I stepped into Mrs. Sutton’s 9th grade English class. At late middle age, Mrs. Sutton fully embraced the eccentric hippie vibe: adorned with rattling bracelets, beads, and necklaces, she wore long kaleidoscope shawl dresses and worn leather sandals. A legendary figure at school: she taught high school English to one of the other English teachers. I heard hallway whisperings about her classroom antics and streaks of madness and wow, did she live up to them.

On a normal day, you might have found Mrs. Sutton at the front of the class with her eyes closed in bliss and hands held towards the sky, as if she were being carried by heavenly light. In a few moments, you’d find her announcing Shakespeare lines from the depths of her soul like a possessed artist: "O! for a MUSE of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention." 

On other days, the sight of poor legibility from one of her students would trigger her: “What is this CHICKEN SCRATCH?! Why are you writing in chicken scratch!!”. For some reason my memory remembers it as “chickenshit”, but I think she used that for other kinds of misbehavior.

While Mrs. Sutton was verifiably crazy, she understood creativity at a deep level and knew how to impart this skill onto her students.

Her creativity methodology came in the form of “freewrites” written with pen and paper, always in cursive. The rules of a freewrite were simple: (1) 30 minutes of writing (2) your pen cannot leave the paper and you cannot stop writing. Mrs. Sutton didn’t care if you wrote the same word over and over for 30 straight minutes. Write whatever you want, just don’t stop writing. During freewrites, Mrs. Sutton resembled an angry drill sergeant, pacing up and down the front of class with hawkish eyes scanning for pauses in movement.

As a chickenshit high school student, freewrites seemed like a useless waste of time. Begrudgingly and out of fear for Mrs. Sutton’s outbursts, you would write and write and write. Sometimes, the same word or phrase is repeated for 20 lines – until a Muse throws a magic brick at your face and you latch onto something and start writing substance. Even on the worst days, no student ever wrote the same thing for 30 whole minutes.

So, imagine my delight when browsing Twitter and stumbling onto a collection of tweets explaining how the most successful artists of our time manage creativity:

• Billie Eilish talking about using constraints in her creative process.
• Ed Sheeran using the faucet analogy for creativity, how you need to empty the crap before you get to the good stuff.
  
• John Mayer demonstrates in real-time how he clears out the junk.
  

All of them followed Mrs. Sutton’s exact process: use constraints to unclog or clear the creative pipes by letting all of the crap flow out first, then you’ll eventually get to the good stuff. 

Thank you Mrs. Sutton.

By now, NFTs are mainstream jargon so I’ll focus on why the generative art space is a constructive long-term investment. If you are looking for a primer on NFTs, I would start here, here, here, and for the video inclined, here.

What is generative art? This overview of generative art history provides a concise definition: "It is the practice of creating systems that then autonomously create art". 

Modern generative art is generated by computer algorithms, but generative art existed well before the invention of the computer. Natural language rules or procedural steps without any technology is also capable of creating generative art. We'll focus on modern generative art, which grew with the arrival of computational power in the 1960s. Artists used computers the size of your living room to run algorithms that generated art. Today, a simple laptop will enable a curious generative artist.

A unique feature to generative art is that the artist does not have full control over the outputs. They’ve combined orderly code that executes repetitively, the serendipity of random chance, and the possibility of beautiful errors to generate the scariest type of art for any type of creator: one in which they cannot control the end result.

The generative artist is tweaking, adjusting, and cajoling an algorithm into satisfying outputs. Generative art started out as a way to create many outputs, from which, the artist would cherry pick the best. The recent wave of generative art has been dubbed “long form”, where an artist must build an algorithm good enough to generate 1,000 outputs that are aesthetically pleasing and unique while fitting under a unified project title. Tyler Hobbs of Fidenza fame wrote about the art form and why it’s so challenging (a fantastic read).  

5 key themes behind on-chain generative art as an investment:

• Selective pool of artists compared to other digital art 

• Transparent and reliable provenance 

• Digital art will create a larger market than the traditional art market

• Limited storage requirements compared to traditional art

• Native art form to the digital art medium

1. Constrained pool of artists

Generative art is naturally constrained to a self-selecting pool of artists, gated by skills and interest. The skillset is an unnatural cross between someone who is both design oriented and code competent. Finding a single good designer or a single good programmer is challenging on its own, let alone someone who is capable of doing both well. Not only do they have to write clean, efficient, and objective code, but they must march to the tune of their own drum to impress upon subjective senses and deliver mind-bending art. Mix all of that together and the population of generative artists creates a natural scarcity for the art form. As a result, the cornerstone projects in generative art stay relevant longer since it’s difficult to replicate the mix of skills required to create these masterpieces. 

2. Transparent and reliable provenance

Provenance is defined as the validity of the artwork along with the transaction history. Provenance is so critical to the validity and trust of a particular piece of artwork, that it might be the most important thing, more so than the artwork itself. The criticality of provenance is highlighted in the must watch documentary on Netflix, Made You Look. It follows a major art scandal where expert art analysts and historians were duped by some Rothko fakes painted by a trained Chinese artist. Watching this made it click in my head: the digital world is so conducive to tracking transaction history that it’s easy to overlook the importance of such a simple feature. In the traditional art world, tracking provenance requires humans who are prone to mistakes. For on-chain generative art, this is stored directly on the blockchain, as the transaction occurs. There’s a single source of truth and a quick search will reveal whether a piece of digital art is fake, whether it passed through a set of famous owners, and what price was paid. 

3. Digital art market will be larger than the traditional art market

If I had told you in 2010 that the traditional advertising business (TV, Newspapers, and Radio) would be eclipsed by their digital counterparts, you’d probably laugh at me. In a decade, online advertising has nearly doubled the size of offline advertising.

From Benedict Evan's 2021 presentation "The Great Unbundling"

If we look at early numbers for the offline and online art worlds, we see something similar: The traditional art market is roughly a $1.5T dollar asset class with $50B in transaction volume in 2020. In 2021, a year where NFTs exploded onto the scene, $20B in transactions exchanged hands. Not bad for a young industry. 

When communities go online they create infinite permutations of audiences and advertisers, creating a world larger than what we could have imagined in the traditional offline world. NFTs connect and enable a larger population of collectors and creators in ways not possible through the traditional art world. Anybody with an internet connection can get involved and I'm a perfect example: If you had asked me 5 years ago if I’d ever become an art collector, I’d call you crazy. Yet here I am writing about the art industry. 

4. Limited storage requirements compared to traditional art

Storing an expensive piece of art in the traditional world is not a trivial process. This makes sense. The store of value is a piece of art created decades or hundreds of years ago – it is a physical object and liable to water, fire, UV rays, or forgetful misplacement. Global freeports are dedicated to storing expensive goods of the ultra-rich, like a military grade Amazon warehouse for the most secretive and valuable items in the world. It’s impossible to place a dollar value on this cost, since it’s such a secretive industry, but an investment susceptible to accidental loss can only be collected safely by those able to pay the high costs associated with protecting the art. Compare this to the requirements for securely storing a valuable piece of digital art: high security storage can be performed without a 3rd party and just a few pieces of hardware available for less than $100 (multisig cold storage). The storage requirements of a digital good are infinitely smaller than a physical good, exponentially expanding the collector base and increasing demand for generative art and digital art.

5. Generative Art is Native to Digital Art

While the market growth of digital art is not specific to generative art, the tailwinds for the entire industry amplify the native art forms. Generative art is native to digital art. Modern generative art is created with an algorithm written with computer code. It is shared with the world through a digital medium: minted online, tracked on-chain, transacted with internet currency, and showcased with web tools. The moment digital art reliably maintained provenance was the moment a new medium of investable art was created. If you are to believe the digital world will grow into a vibrant ecosystem, then generative art is the beautiful centerpiece worth showcasing in an office (physical or online!). 

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While these reasons drive my own investment thesis behind generative art, I recommend anybody looking into this to join the community, interact with artists, collectors, and read up on the history of the space. 

Generative art will become an asset class larger than traditional art is today, but it doesn’t mean all generative art will hold value over time. Just like in the art world, there are periods where certain types of art are appreciated and fads come and go, while the best artists retain their value. Within generative art, one will still need to be able to pick projects that will hold value over a very long period of time. Even as a staunch believer in generative art as an investment, the best advice is to buy art that pleases the senses. The worst case is enjoying a beloved piece of art while supporting an artist on a cutting edge medium.

A few moments ago I had taken a big bite out of the steamed egg, covered in green onions and well, steaming. I was mid-chew on some beef short rib as my mind already wandered over to the grilled brisket when Kim chimed in: “Whoa, that steamed egg is really sweet”.

Without even thinking about it, I knew what she was talking about. If she hadn’t mentioned it, it would have been a passing moment in my mouth, barely worth a thought.

We were eating Korean BBQ only 4 days after we started Whole 30. I had flung us into Whole 30 without even looking at what the diet entailed. No added sugars (natural sugars from fruit are fine), no grains, no legumes, no alcohol, no dairy, no soy, no processed foods — just meat, seafood, and vegetables. Needless to say, it was a restrictive diet.

The justification for going to Korean BBQ on Whole 30 went as follows: only eat the non-marinated meats, wrap with lettuce, dip in the sesame oil with salt — avoid anything else that looks suspect. 

Only a few minutes after we discussed the sweet steamed egg, we noticed a strong tingling sensation on our tongues. Numbness is the closest description, but inadequate in capturing the feeling.

Upon further research, we discovered that processed sugar comes with a genius biological mechanism: it turns off the ability to taste the processed sugar itself, creating a positive feedback loop to eat more sugar. This compels us to consume more refined sugar without our awareness.

Barely a week into our Whole 30 diet and we experienced a revelation. How had we not noticed this effect? Have our taste buds been numbed into oblivion? Did our meals turn into a dopamine ladder, requiring each bite to trump the previous?

As someone who eats like a ravenous bear, just noticing the sensation on my tongue was a step towards enlightened consumption. This sounds hyperbolic, but my eating habits earned me a nickname amongst friends: “Taiwanese Panda”. I mindlessly gorge on food, battling my last meal on earth like there’s a shortage of food resources.

18 days into the Whole 30 diet, we failed, succumbing to alcohol and pasta at a good friend’s wedding. As it relates to completing the diet successfully, I can only recommend attempting the constrained diet outside the holidays. 

Like any diet, it forced a higher level of awareness of the ingredients in our food. For me, the sugary steamed egg mistake resulting in the tingling tongue sensation revealed the critical takeaways:

• as processed and refined sugars permeate everything in the grocery store, stay alert to how hidden ingredients affect our bodies
• at a time of food abundance and easy meals, stay conscious of foods that cause overeating

Now, off to learn how to perfect a steamed egg without using any refined sugar.

In the midst of a competitive San Francisco rental market in 2018, I signed a lease on a tiny studio unit. The location was perfect: carless commute, plenty of delicious restaurants, and proximity to Golden Gate Park. One small thing: I needed to learn how to live in 196 square feet. Though friends describe me as a minimalist, this would be a challenge.

There’s a sticker shock response you get when you tell someone you live in 196 square feet of space. Not as large as when you tell them you live without a refrigerator, but an emphatic response nonetheless. I’m not here to tell you how to live: you are entitled to live how you want. I’m here to share what I learned in 4 years bounded by 196 square feet.

My favorite effect of a small space is the mental calculation required before purchasing and accumulating anything. In a larger home, you can buy something and determine where it will fit later. In a small space, there’s no room to accumulate extra things by accident. With square footage at a premium, you cannot buy something without explicitly wondering where am I going to put this? The default fallback cannot be let’s throw it in the garage for 3 months before we decide.

In fact, the calculation is reversed from let’s buy it and figure out where to put it to how much space will this take up and do I need it? The end result is a home equipped only with what’s necessary, items with high utility-to-space ratios, and an allergy to accumulating waste.

Floor plan of 196 square foot studio drawn by child.

Rearranging large items in a small space presented a puzzle-like challenge. Certain large items can’t be avoided — the bed is an obvious one, but there was only one place in the studio for the bed. My bicycle, on the other hand, took up an enormous percentage of space in my studio but I needed it. Non-negotiable. It sat against a wall until I realized it was eating up extra space, so I ordered a vertical bike stand and it instantly saved me enough space to add a bookshelf and other storage. With enough iterations over time, a small space grinds towards peak efficiency.

It took several configurations before I found the layout that worked for me, but there is a clear bedroom (full sized bed), living room (mini sofa, ottoman, and coffee table), kitchen, and office (equipped with standing desk). There’s even a space for yoga, stretching, meditation, and indoor workouts.

The downside to a small space is the inability to host friends or family. While I’m not trying to throw massive gatherings, being able to comfortably host a small group of friends for a night is impossible. Luckily, there are public spaces to combat this issue. The small space encouraged me into long walks with a friend or placed me in the backyard for long bouts of reading. But, hosting the occasional poker night to take money from my friends (and see them!) would be nice.

I’ve come to the realization that I don’t need tons of space to live happily. A small space necessitates creativity around furniture arrangement. Live simply, then lavishness becomes a nuisance. These 4 years in 196 square feet remind me of my minimum requirements: healthy sleep, access to social networks, the outdoors, and a comfortable space.

Why is there a market for carbon credits? What is it looking to solve? Carbon credit markets is humanity’s first attempt at putting a financial value on nature.

Two concepts before we jump into credits:

1. “Tragedy of the Commons”. A group of people live by a small lake filled with fish, the lake is shared by the people. Each person has an incentive to take what they can from the lake. If you don’t take fish from the lake, then someone else will take it. The end result is that everyone frantically harvests the lake for fish and all of the fish disappear — hence the “tragedy of the commons”.
2. “Negative externalities”. A negative externality is a negative impact generated out of a specific process (making toys, food, cars, sending electricity or mail) that does not impact the original parties. The negative externality directly affects a 3rd party. For example, a chemical plant upstream of your house might be dumping waste into the river at the end of their chemical creation process. The waste is a negative externality, directly affecting a party not involved in the creation of the original product. Earth is often the 3rd party affected by negative externalities, but it could also be people or animals living in a particular area where waste or dangerous chemicals are dumped or tested.

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Emissions are a negative externality. Our planet suffers from the tragedy of the commons. Human processes pollute planet Earth and drives climate change. By pricing CO2 emissions in the form of carbon credits, emissions become a business variable creating an incentive for people and businesses notice and mitigate their emissions. 

You can make the arguments that there is no such thing as a negative externality — if you are producing corn with mass use of pesticides and herbicides, you’re really poisoning your own land (not to mention aquifers, waterbeds, rivers, food supply etc.) and that it isn’t good for you long term. But as we’ve seen, if businesses can get by without short term consequences, harmful practices will continue.

So, we created the carbon credit market. It’s our first attempt to price nature, resulting in a cost for polluting Earth.

There are two carbon credit markets: compliance and voluntary.

The compliance market is regulated by a central governing body. The centralized registry says specific businesses have a budget of how much emissions they may emit. Going over those budgets results in fines, so companies are incentivized to optimize their processes to reduce emissions. When a company has done everything possible to reduce emissions, they are allowed to purchase carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are 3rd party programs or projects that sequester carbon and often have nothing to do with the company itself. Carbon offsets act as a funding mechanism for forest protection, reforestation, renewable energy, and other projects that otherwise wouldn’t receive funding. For example: Project A needs funding to protect a tropical forest. Company B needs to offset emissions from their business, so they fund Project A in exchange for the offsets. The compliance market size is well over $200B annually.

The voluntary market is not regulated by any central governing body, but there are multiple Carbon registries that evaluate, certify, and price carbon credits. Nobody is required to take part in the voluntary market, but there’s good traction — the voluntary market will reach $1B in size in 2021 and growing rapidly (up from ~$400m last year). Companies do this because they believe it will mitigate some kind of risk to their business, whether regulatory, supply chain, or consumer perception. 

Growing voluntary carbon market from 2005 to 2021. Source.

Water is a hot commodity in the Western states of America, with the two largest reservoirs fed by the Colorado River at record lows. This is causing panic for everyone downstream, leading to water cuts this year: 

“Lake Mead provides water to roughly 25 million people in Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico, according to the National Park Service. Under the complex priority system…Arizona will see an 18% reduction…Nevada will need to adhere to a 7% reduction in its Colorado River water supply in 2022”

In the backdrop of the world’s shrinking freshwater supply, this post explores the dominant water desalination technique for “making” clean water for humans and irrigating crops: reverse osmosis. The goal of this is to provide an overview of the process and the corresponding environmental impact.

Water desalination falls into two classes of technologies: membrane filtration processes and thermal filtration processes. Thermal filtration uses thermal energy to heat and evaporate, then subsequently condense water. We’ll spend our time on reverse osmosis, which is the dominant membrane filtration process. 

Osmosis was documented in the 1700s, but it wasn’t until 1950 when two researchers from UCLA and the University of Toronto discovered a commercially viable membrane for a large reverse osmosis system. Since then, we’ve steadily grown the capacity of reverse osmosis desalination plants across the world. Today, reverse osmosis accounts for 70% of all water desalination plants in the world, with over 16,000 desalination plants with a capacity to generate 120 million cubic meters of water per day. Based on New York City’s 2020 water usage, the current capacity of worldwide water desalination could support 32 cities with similar water consumption.

Membrane filtration works like a coffee filter, but on different scales. In a coffee filter, you have ground beans and hot water on one side and you push all of that through a coffee filter of your choosing. The beans stay on one side, but the extracted caffeine goodness (or the decaf for you savages) along with water move to the other side.

Water molecules are tiny, the smallest non-gas molecule known to humans. Everything else, is a tad bigger — salt molecules, microbes, viruses, you name it. So, we created a membrane that is just a bit bigger than water molecules, but smaller than everything else. Then we apply a ton of force (paying in energy, more on this in a moment) and we force the saltwater through the membrane and only water molecules remain on the other end.

Energy is a critical input for both water desalination processes and while both utilize mountains of energy, reverse osmosis is a bit more energy efficient and one reason it owns market share in water desalination.

Reverse Osmosis comes with 3 major environmental impacts: energy use, water intake and outfall of brine water.

On the energy front, it costs about 10,000 gallons of oil per year to desalinate 1,000 cubic meters of water per day (source). How much is 1,000 cubic meters of water? For context, Palm Springs, home to over 100 golf courses, averages 3,800 cubic meters of water per day, per course.

This is a staggering amount of energy consumption via fossil fuels. However, there’s a clear path to making water desalination more sustainable and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Ever decreasing costs for solar power systems and technological improvements in battery technology will aid this transition to more sustainable energy.

We impact the environment in another key way: water used for desalination is imported from the ocean. The biggest environmental concern is sucking in marine organisms from fish to larva and creating an uninhabitable zone for marine life.

The lowest environmental impact way to take water from the ocean is to do it from a seabed aquifer. These are locations close to open ocean, but often segmented by sand and rocks. By drilling underneath the seabed or drilling a beach well — called galleries — the system takes seawater filtered by rocks and sand instead of directly from the open ocean.

Unfortunately, this method does not meet the capacity needs of the largest systems. The largest desalination plants must take water from the open ocean. This creates a current that brings seawater and all marine life in proximity, such as fish and larvae, into the system. Mitigation techniques include: speed limiters, mechanical exit gates, and screens.

Lastly, there’s the outfall. After we desalinate water, we are left with a brine water solution. Two concerns about this brine water: it’s higher salinity and temperature than ambient seawater, creating an unnatural zone for sea life. It can also have chemicals from cleaning and treatment of the reverse osmosis membrane and corrosive materials from pipes.

Salt is heavier so it will tend to fall to the seafloor — the concern is salt aggregating on the seafloor at an unnatural level. Desalination plants address the issue by directing exit pipes upwards, shooting the water upwards and using diffusers to speed the mixture of salt into the ambient ocean water.

The higher temperature creates an unnatural temperature zone, affecting sea life. A common mitigation technique includes releasing the water at deeper depths where there is less marine life or using diffusers to increase mixing with the colder ocean water.

While impossible to remove the environmental impacts of reverse osmosis, this critical process for humanity has a number of methods for lessening the impact on our environment while ensuring our own livelihood.

As water has floated to the top of critical items facing humanity, more innovations have occurred in smaller scale water desalination, utilizing renewable energy and nature inspired processes to desalinate water, targeted at smaller consumers. These solutions are interesting because they are decentralized with lower power draw. We’ll explore these in a future post.

A dear friend and I watched Yo-Yo Ma perform the solo cello a few weeks ago at the Hollywood Bowl. He walked onto stage alone, armed only with his 300 year old cello on a balmy Los Angeles evening.

He greeted an eager crowd and smiled a smile that only someone who knew the deep secrets of what he was about to play could smile. Then he played. He played, alright. He played 150 minutes straight with no intermission: 6 suites for Violoncello solo by Bach from memory.

My friend is classically trained, master on the violin and drums. I am a mere mortal with no serious musical training, only my two ears. Bach, I learned, is highly technical, common for anybody learning music to train on. Technical, meaning it requires mastery, dexterity, and coordination of fingers and timing. Difficult, to say the least.

Yo-Yo Ma played blindfolded, rarely looking down on his cello during the entire duration of his performance.

It was the most impressive display of musical mastery I have ever witnessed.

That same week, I went to Porter Robinson’s Second Sky festival at the Oakland Arena grounds. It was a curated musical event filled with Porter’s favorite artists and style.

Madeon’s 90 minute performance stood out that day amongst a lineup of 9 artists. More accurately, he blew my mind. I haven’t been able to stop listening to his music, even stalking his website for the next concert in the days following. Madeon is dubbed a child prodigy in the space. There’s a YouTube video of him playing an impressive mash-up, released when he was only 17 years old, amassing 60 million views.

Two artists in fine juxtaposition. One could have played the same instrument 200 years ago, the other could not even exist 20 years ago. One with gray hair, having grown up without regular access to the internet. The other grew up on the internet, becoming famous before he could drink legally.

From the extremists on either side, one might elicit a derisive response of “old school” or “boomer”, the other might hear “that’s computer music” or a snarky “he’s great at pressing buttons”.

Yo-Yo Ma’s technical expertise is easy to appreciate. There are only a handful of people in the world that can repeat what he did on that stage. But technology has lowered the barrier to entry, allowing geniuses like Madeon to blossom and share their creativity from a young age.

Whatever your response, it’s hard to deny the amount of hard work and genius required to generate the following that these two have, even if they seem a world apart. I am sure there are many others, but both elicited a strong emotional response from me in the span of a week.

What a wonderful time to witness the full range of human creativity in music.

Exploration, Wandering, Searching

• Wandering inevitably leads to some dead ends. That’s kind of the point. It may turn out a particular subject is not what you thought or you’re just not that into it. It’s a free signal from your soul. Just turn around and explore something else.
• But, before you drop it entirely, ask yourself “Why were you drawn to it?” and “What pushed you away?” For example, I’ve wanted to learn a musical instrument for a long time. I picked up the guitar to chase girls in college (failed miserably) and recently tried my hand at the harmonica. It’s compact and easy to bring on backpacking trips. I failed to build momentum once again. When I dug into it, I realized I had too many things on my plate.
• Life has a funny way of returning you to things that warrant a second look. This can take years, decades, or you might just need some more time next week. One day, I’ll spend more time with you, harmonica. 
• I know a few people who pick some subject area to explore per month. I thought this was a clever and structured way to do it. Time boxing yourself as a forcing function.
• The social programming is strong. It took me the first few months to get away from the idea that I had to be working on something or getting my next project lined up. We don’t and it’s okay to do some unadulterated wandering.
• Deadlines are great forcing functions. I went from frantically trying to do too much, to doing close to nothing, and finally to reasonably setting guidelines for myself. Deadlines, even if it’s an offhand comment to a close friend who will check up on you goes a long way.

Looking Inwards

• Find out what is applying the pressure and don’t rule yourself out. It’s easy to look at external factors as our sources of stress: jobs, boss, situation, etc. For me, I realized I had imposed ridiculous standards on myself. This is not entirely negative or positive in itself, but if left unchecked or unexamined can lead to some real unhappiness. We are, as they say, our harshest critics.
• Be nice to yourself. I’ve found it helpful to think of yourself as your own good friend. Treat yourself as you would treat a good friend.
• When judging others or introspecting your own actions, the spots that give us the biggest source of agitation or anxiety are the ones that need to be examined deeper. These uncomfortable areas are the growth opportunities. Nobody said it’d be fun, though.

Relationships

• Long term relationships are not projects with a start and end date. There is no autopilot button.
• People love it when you call them out of the blue. Even better, show up with food and drink.
• Everyone is struggling with something. This is not an exaggeration. The easiest way to find out is to ask.
• A better version of ourselves is the best gift to the world. Start there instead of saving the world.

How a gap period concludes: you stumble into something that you are so excited by that even your soul knows. It’s a hell yes. This usually takes years or decades, so don’t forget to enjoy the scenery. But when you stumble into it, what are you waiting for?

There’s still much to learn and I can’t wait to pull on each of these threads further. Hope this helps you.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Phd of Neuroscience and Professor at Stanford, started his own podcast video lecture series last year (he also has a great Instagram). This post covers the first 8 podcasts, roughly 12 hours of lectures, into bullet points of actionable learnings. I hope you find it helpful:

1. Sunlight sets our circadian rhythm, but only specific types of light. The type of light that sets our circadian rhythm is only available around sunrise and sunset. Between roughly 9:30am to a few hours before sunset, the light we need to set our circadian rhythm is unavailable. This is where late risers fall into a rhythm of a misaligned schedule, often leading to a cascading effect of negative health consequences. So, take a sunrise and sunset walk!
2. Our phones and overhead lights are a source of light at night, potentially disturbing our circadian rhythm. Rule of thumb: avoid any source of light between 11pm and 4am. If you're using lights after sunset, floor lighting is optimal. Overhead lights mimic the location of the sun (above us!)
3. The earlier you get light, the more you phase advance (wake up earlier the next day) and the later you get light at night the more you phase delay (wake up later the next day). 
   
4. Schedule shifts are adapted about an hour at a time, keep this in mind when adapting to jet lag and consider shifting your schedule before you travel if you are moving multiple timezones to reduce disruption.
5. It’s very hard to control the mind with the mind. Use the body to control the mind, such as breathing protocols and NSDR protocols. See bullets #6, #7, and #9 for specific tools.
6. Sleep anxiety is a real thing — sometimes, we just don’t sleep well. It’s not the end of the world: get up, avoid bright overhead lights, read a book or do a non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) session to fall back asleep.
7. 20–30 minute naps are optimal as a refresher, but if you’re not a nap person, try NSDR protocols like Yoga Nidra or Hypnosis from Reverie Health. These protocols help recover sleep, refresh you, and improve learning. You’ll finish sessions with lasers in your eyes, ready to focus.
8. What you eat dictates how you feel after the meal. Eating too much will result in a food coma, regardless of what you eat. Rules that work well for me: low carb or carb free lunch, whatever-you-want for dinner.
9. Physiological sigh offsets real-time stressors. Two inhales through the nose followed by a long exhale from the mouth. Try it next time you’re in a stressful situation.
10. The amount of sleep and the consistency of it is more important than the total hours of sleep, assuming you’re getting the minimum necessary for you to function. A good rule is to have set hours when you get into bed and when you get out of bed.
11. Take a hot shower at night and it will help you sleep better. The hot shower leads to a cooling of body temperature, which is needed for you to fall asleep and have a good night’s rest. A cold shower gives you increased alertness from the release of epinephrine (and because it's cold!) It also builds stress tolerance.
12. Wait two hours before having caffeine. This prevents the caffeine crash. We have a natural mechanism that suppresses adenosine, which induces sleepiness. By introducing caffeine before this mechanism has a chance to work, our body begins to depend on the adenosine from the caffeine, creating a dependency cycle.
13. Optimal learning states occur when our bodies experiences anxiety and low level stress. That’s how our body and brain recognizes there’s something to take note of and “learn”. You can put yourself in this type of state by throwing your body off balance, i.e. attempting to balance on one foot with your eyes closed for 10 seconds.
14. Another way to put yourself in this “optimal learning state” is pushing into areas of learning that make you a little uncomfortable. Train yourself to go deeper when you feel some discomfort in your learning because this is where growth happens. This will require finding a happy medium: if something is too easy, we won’t learn and if something is far too hard for us to comprehend, then we’ll likely give up entirely.
15. There are only two 90 minute deep focus and work sessions in a day (maybe 3 absolute max). Are you using them and are you using them wisely?

If you want deeper dives, I wrote a few long form posts summarizing learnings into four separate posts: part 1, part 2, and I will eventually get part 3 and part 4.

I joined cross country running for the sole purpose of finishing my Physical Education requirements to graduate high school.

Friday workouts were simple: run for an hour with a few teammates, any route you like. Coach called it the “free run”. The group of athletes I ran with jogged 5 blocks down the street, just out of sight and into a friend’s home to play Super Smash Brothers and eat Popeyes fried chicken. Free indeed. 

Despite slacking, I remember one thing from my cross country coach: how to breathe and especially how to breathe when you have a big cramp but need to keep going (somehow my athletic prowess led to frequent cramping). Running cramps tend to be the side cramp or “stitch”, a signal to the body indicating insufficient deep breathing.

Coach’s tip was simple: two small breaths in through the nose and a larger breath out. It always worked, superior to whatever my face was attempting to do while desperately sucking down air. It turns out my high school coach also gave us a real-time tool to combat stress.

Most advice for combating stress doesn’t help with in the moment stress. You can’t freeze time during an interview, a fit of road rage, or before a big presentation to go take a 20 minute power nap, get a better night of rest, or meditate for 15 minutes.

You need a real-time tool: the physiological sigh.

Discovered in the 1930s with further research by Feldman and Krasnow, it’s something we do unconsciously: prior to falling asleep, during sleep when carbon dioxide levels are too high, or when we’re feeling claustrophobic.

Since we can control our breathing, we can use this mechanism to combat real-time stressors. The technique is simple: One inhale through the nose, followed by a second inhale through the nose and then a long exhale from the mouth. It’s okay if the second inhale is a small one. 

Double inhale followed by a deep exhale.

How does the physiological sigh work? When we are stressed, carbon dioxide builds up in our bloodstream. The second inhale expands the alveoli, the air sacs in our lungs, and allows it to discharge even more carbon dioxide on the exhale. This process of expelling carbon dioxide relaxes us. 

Do the physiological sigh a few times in succession and our heart rate slows down. A useful tool to have in the moment. When life stresses you out: sigh.

My brother’s goal for 2021 is to run one marathon every week for a total of 52 marathons in a year. When he told me, my first thought was what the hell is wrong with you? 

My second thought made me chuckle, bringing back some memories of teenage drama. 

Daniel and I grew up doing WWE moves on each other and fighting over the Gameboy and Nintendo 64. While I grew up with a need for outdoor activity, he loved the computer. The computer lived in Daniel’s room. Daniel also lived in Daniel’s room, quite literally holed up for days at a time.

He ran some cool projects: an anime upload site that generated income from Google (eventually shut down by a cease and desist order) and hosting / administrating his own private Ragnarok Online server, a massive online role playing game.

One weekend, the family planned a nice camping trip. Daniel didn’t want to go outside, given computer related commitments. My dad locked up Daniel’s computer in a fit of rage. Daniel matched Dad’s rage in the only way a high school kid can: he escaped the house on his Target bicycle. We cancelled the camping trip.

My brother now works as a Senior Data Engineer at Strava, the number 1 mobile app for tracking physical activity, from bike rides and ski runs to runs and stand-up paddle boarding.

Daniel went from literally running away from the outdoors to running outdoors at a rate most people would consider crazy. 

At Strava, he’s surrounded by a bunch of other people with extreme fitness goals, bordering addiction (this is actually a thing). Every Wednesday, they do interval runs from their San Francisco office, 20+ Strava people doing a highly intensive workout together. 

Most things look crazy until you find a peer group or a few people that normalize it. This can be making music while juggling a full-time job, training to bike across the lower 48 states, working towards the 1000 pound power lift club, surgeons training for a full ironman, or people who juggle operating and leading two companies.

So, what looks insane but might be something you want to work towards? Find those crazy peers and surround yourself with them. It eventually looks normal to you. 

Daniel is finally rubbing off on me, so I’m attempting my first marathon this year with him. I still think he’s crazy.

You can follow him here, he’s working on number 14 this week.

Note: Unfortunately, this effect works in the negative direction–surrounding yourself with people who have normalized drinking a bottle of whiskey every Thursday might make it seem normal to you.

I wrote about light’s role in setting our circadian rhythm in the first post of this series. This post will focus on body temperature, an effector of our sleep and wake cycle. Much of the content comes from episode 4 of the Huberman podcast, some from the first 3 episodes. This background will give us ways to optimize our schedules and adapt to jet lag.

An uncle of mine, a neurosurgeon in Taiwan, took ice baths in the winter to train mental endurance and resilience. He also told me that based on teachings in Eastern medicine, there are certain times that are best for different activity types. Those dots connected as I wrapped up the 4th podcast in the Huberman lectures.

Our body temperature, even in the absence of light, food or exercise, follows a predictable cycle: temperature rises from a 24 hour low before waking, increases as we start the day, peaking in the afternoon before falling as we wind down the day. Our bodies warm up when we need to be awake and alert for work and cools down as we wind down the day.

The temperature minimum is the lowest body temperature during our 24 hour circadian rhythm. The actual temperature is not important: what’s important is when you hit your temperature minimum. When it occurs is more important for the purpose of tinkering with our schedules.

How do you find the temperature minimum? Average your wake-up times for a week. Wake-up is defined by when you get out of bed, so if you get up at 3am, but fall back asleep and emerge at 9am, then 9am is the wake-up time. The 2 hours before your average wake-up time is your temperature minimum. If your average wake-up time is 7am, your temperature minimum falls around 5am.

With temperature minimum as a reference point, two simple rules in regards to light:

1. If you get light into your eyes within 4 hours after your temperature minimum (described in part 1 of this series), you phase advance your circadian rhythm, resulting in earlier wake-up the next day
2. If you get light into your eyes within the 4 to 6 hours before your temperature minimum, you phase delay your circadian rhythm, resulting in later wake-up the next day

If your temperature minimum is 5am and you watch Netflix until 1am, it will push your schedule back. If you’re on vacation in Hawaii and your hotel room catches sunrise light, it’s likely you wake up earlier the following days.

Understanding temperature minimum also allows you to maneuver and adjust your schedule by shifting eat, exercise, and shower routines. Our bodies warm up when we need to be awake and alert for the day and cools down as we wind down into the night. With this mechanism, we can phase advance or phase delay our schedules. This is helpful if you want to improve productivity, fight jet lag or sleep better. 

Showers

A hot shower results in your body cooling down. This is why showering at night allows you to sleep better as your body cools down into sleep. Matt Walker describes how most of us are sleeping too warm in his book Why We Sleep and amongst many sleep tips, he suggests doing the hot shower at night to cool the body for sleep.

Cold showers do the reverse, which results in rising body temperature, and aside from the shock of having taken a cold shower, it wakes you up and helps you focus thanks to the release of norepinephrine (adrenaline). Regular use of cold showers, provided it is medically safe for you, is a great stress inoculation tool. I’ll cover the stress remediation tools in the next post in the series.

Exercise

Exercising results in a rise in body temperature. I’ve seen co-workers use the afternoon or lunchtime workout as a way to grab a second wind in the afternoon. Exercise has all kinds of obvious benefits, so I won’t cover that here. Keep in mind that working out too close to bedtime results in some trouble falling asleep since you are spiking your body temperature at a time it needs to be falling to induce sleep (of course, it’s not the only reason as an elevated heart rate also prevents us from being able to fall asleep). If you workout at night, this might be something to keep an eye on. 

Food

Meals are another way to regulate schedule. If you’re traveling to a different timezone, it helps to eat on the local meal schedule. Our gut also runs on the circadian rhythm, so meals are a helpful marker to adapt when traveling. Of course, eating too much results in literally a food coma, but changing what you eat can help with an after lunch crash. High carbs typically results in sleepiness while low or no carb won’t put you to sleep. My simple rule of low carb lunch, whatever-the-hell-you-want for dinner, has been a game changer. Diet is a giant wormhole for another time, but it’s worth considering how you respond to certain type of meals.

Ultimately, timing of light intake and body temperature are the key drivers for the sleep and wakefulness cycle. Exercise, eating, and shower can nudge temperature in certain directions if you want to make tweak your schedule for better focus at certain times of the day or fight jet lag. Understanding this mechanism allows you to adjust and experiment for the schedule that works best for you and because life sometimes feels like a sudden cold shower, it gives you a way to stay flexible.

*Note: I have a question out to Dr. Huberman on how our eyes treat sunrise and sunset light differently. I will update this section when I learn more.

[1] World Health Organization’s study of pollution on children’s health.

Edit: The World Health Organization revised their air quality guidelines on September 22, 2021, the first time in 15 years based on new evidence. The threshold for "good" air quality were halved.

Ash fell onto the balcony of our apartment as smoke lowered onto the field in front of our dorms. It was 2007, my first year of college and the sky was burning over the campus of UC San Diego. We escaped up interstate highway 5, ironically headed to Alhambra, CA in Los Angeles, for cleaner air as wildfires licked the hills along the freeway. 

Fast forward 13 years to 2020 in California. Amidst a global pandemic, wildfires made headlines in California. This time, the entire state was covered in smoke for several weeks. Nowhere to escape. 

I was curious to know–will there be more fires? How much worse? Have we seen the worst after 2020 topped megafire records? Or is this the tip of the iceberg?

Some history: California is fire country. Fires are endemic to California and part of the natural landscape. 100 years of fire data shows us this much:

Most of the state burned at one point or another. According to research about prehistoric California, at least 4.4 million acres burned annually: “Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.”

Wildfires burned 4.4 million acres of our sunny state last year. Was this an outlier event? In the context of California fire history, 2020 turns out to be an exactly average year.

While 2020 was an average year in terms of acres burned, 6 of the 20 largest wildfires in California history burned last year. Average year in terms of acreage, outlier in terms of intensity, destruction, and disruption to the highest number of lives.

Sobering thought.

You might wonder, as I did, if last year’s fires means we’ve burned most of what could burn, lessening the threat of future fires. My optimism was extinguished when I learned California is sitting on a backlog of megafires waiting to happen:

“Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.”

We halted nature from running it’s natural course of burning firewood, creating a pile. of fuel prone to blow-ups like we saw in 2018 and 2020.

Assuming our backlog is static, we are left with roughly 15.6 million acres of dry powder after last year’s fire season. Of course, the backlog is not static. Trees and brush don’t suddenly take a break from turning into firewood.

Climate change has intensified California’s persistent drought situation, turning native bark beetles into the mortal enemy of California pines. The result? An estimated 129 million trees have died since 2010, much of it attributed to the drought and beetles. These dead trees were implicated for fueling last year’s fires, along with climate change driving increases in lightning storms. Regardless, the dry powder stash grows.

Extreme weather systems from climate change combined with California’s “sequester all fires” policy has one result: a powder keg of wildfires waiting to blow up. Simple math and respect for nature means another major wildfire, even bigger than the 2020 wildfires that lit the entire state on fire, is inevitable.

The San Diego fire that burned during our first year in college was the 14th largest in California history, burning just shy of 200,000 acres. A large fire. Over a decade later, we experienced a fire 5 times the size with larger ones to come. Well, that’s a scary thought.

The California Governor stated: “fires in California are caused by climate change”. A former President blamed California’s poor forestry management. Neither is wrong. But holding onto their party lines while ignoring the other side is how we’ll get into more trouble. If we can get away from the polarizing politics and combine the two statements, it would give us the exact platform to progress California in this domain.  

Note: ProPublica’s deep dive on the entire wildfire topic is worth a read as it covers the politics, federal budgets, mis-incentives, and the use of prison labor. 

General

Bonus