james’s posthaven

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?