Hello, thanks for finding my corner of the internet. I've lived near the southwest Colorado mountains since early 2021.

I enjoy spending time with people, learning, and tinkering.

Professionally, I've done startup-y things. Previously, I co-founded and led engineering for Levels, a startup that helps people improve their metabolic health, and led engineering for Google Voice for Workspace.

My conversational preference is small groups and one-on-one conversations. I have regular long phone calls with my close friends. If you're reading this, I'd probably love meeting.

Evergreen

Some pages I keep up to date with evergreen content:

Interests and open questions

I'm primarily interested in systems and technologies that promote flourishing. If you have particular interest in any of these, I'd love to meet and chat.

Economics, incentives

  • How can we innovate economic systems to better capture all externalities, and maximize diffuse wealth creation?
  • Money and religion facilitated mass coordination at scale. What other technologies would promote more coordination, and how should we implement them?
  • What helps us solve collective action problems? (building value-positive public goods, climate change, long term impacts, etc)
  • How should science be funded and performed to optimize breakthroughs? Are we in a stagnation? How do we minimize scientific cargo culting?
  • How do we minimize rent seeking?
  • How do we avoid systemic local optimums? (institutional rot, inability to adapt to changing conditions)

Future, information

  • What should be done with digital censorship, centralization/decentralization, information ecology pollution, etc?
  • What would help the general population make sense of the complicated world better? Is distributed news any better? How should people know what experts to trust?
  • What common-good protocol-oriented infrastructure (such as email, HTTP, etc) should exist to promote non-centralized wealth?

Human flourishing

  • What cultural infrastructure should be built to facilitate meaning-making and human flourishing?
  • What are the best goals of education? How can we improve? How real is Bloom's 2 sigma problem? If it is, how do we leverage that at scale? Is there a way to formalize and teach analogy making and abstract cognition at scale?
  • Why did obesity rise in prevalence massively? What explains Japanese vs American health outcomes?
  • How does lasting behavior change happen? What causes someone to make big lifestyle decisions (lose weight, exercise regularly)?

Personal Influences

These books, videos, and people have influenced me the most into forming who I am. You and I are different, but you may find value here. I highly recommend everything listed. Multiple influences on the same line are similar or resonate together.

How humans and culture work

Self-flourishing, meaning

Life perspective

Intellectual curiosity

People

These are some of the people who have impacted my life the most. Perhaps over time I'll write more deeply about why, but until then, let this just be a note of gratitude. Explanations and links provided are just nods to their contributions, and likely don't capture everything they did for me.

David Chapman for introducing me to nebulousity and meaning, David Deutsch for philisophical and political ideas, Elizabeth Gilbert for showing how creativity is a spiritual experience, Christopher Alexander for how to think about our place in context, Karl Lew for demonstrating how to live with flow and equanimity, Scott Alexander for his years of writing, James Scott for introducing me to illegibility, John Vervaeke for his meaning crisis series, Michael Taft for his meditations and classes, Noah Maier for helping me be a better version of myself, Stephen West for explaining philosophy in a way I could understand, Derek Sivers for being a role model, Daniel Schmachtenberger for introducing me to risk and metamodern politics, Patrick Collison for challenging mediocracy, and Douglas Hofstadter for all of his analogies. And many others that have no internet presence.

Favorite Documentaries

In no particular order, documentaries that I enjoyed and recommend to others: Icarus, Minding the Gap, Sour Grapes, Man on Wire, The Overnighters, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Dear Zachary, Chicken People, My Octopus Teacher, 20 Feet from Stardom, Kedi, Project Nim, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Three Identical Strangers, Tickled, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, American Factory, Searching for Sugarman, Dealt, The Most Hated Family in America, Kumaré.

Climbing related: Meru, Valley Rising, Dawn Wall, Free Solo, 14 Peaks, all the Reel Rock annual movies

About this site

This is a custom theme, originally built on top of the Ghost theme Journal. I borrowed a lot of the minimalist design inspiration from personal sites of Manuel Moreale, Callum Flack, and Craig Mod. The logo was originally designed by Midjourney (prompt: line art simple minimalist mountain icon), then upscaled, vectorized, and manually tweaked.

Contact me

If you'd like to chat directly, feel free to email me at [email protected]. I'm also fairly active on Twitter, and am happy to meet in person if you're near southwest Colorado.

Stay connected

I send out occasional updates on posts, interesting finds, and projects I'm working on. I'd love to include you. No tracking, one-click unsubscribe.