This past November, I embarked upon what was one of the most unique experiences of my life — a 10-day Vipassana (silent meditation) retreat in Kelseyville, CA. It was difficult, there were no frills, and I stared at the limitations found at the outer reaches of my own psyche. And yet, I regard it as one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

The forest surrounding the Kelseyville center provided a welcoming container for the deep inner work of Vipassana. Over 10 days, I gained an understanding of Truth as it relates to the framework of my body. No cosmic or extrasensory revelations—just an understanding of change (aniccā in Pali) as a universal force. A tapestry woven of both tumultuous and transcendent moments, the retreat gifted me with the wisdom of non-attachment.

I now believe that spirituality is accessible to anyone and doesn’t need to (but certainly can) be found in either organized religion or entheogens. Genuine peace and spiritual growth stem from diligent practice, and Vipassana offers a1 lucid and effective pathway, fostering continuous development through a strong feedback loop.

What is a Vipassana Retreat?

Structure of a Retreat

Out of the many silent retreats out there, I did the one put on by Dhamma, an organization wholly devoted to teaching the Vipassana technique. It’s sustained solely by the generosity of past students paying it forward, with the food, housing, and teachings provided for free.

Many other articles on the internet do a great job of vividly exploring the on-the-ground experience so I’ll just link to some here and here. Though, I encourage those contemplating the journey to enter with an open heart, free of expectation, and to let your experience truly be your own.2

The retreat's disciplined schedule, though demanding, exudes a gentle grace. Continually waking up at 4am after a bad night of sleep is difficult, but the consistent rhythms of the day offer solace. With all earthly needs met and external stimuli silenced, you can fully devote yourself to developing your meditation practice.

Flowing with Reality

The technique of Vipassana is (deceptively) simple. You scan your body from head-to-toe and simply notice sensations as they come up, making sure to focus only on one part of the body at a time. This is a good introduction.

With the technique, you start to understand how deeply connected physical sensations in your body are to the thoughts and feelings of your mind. You also begin to understand the core idea undergirding eastern spirituality — that everything, including your sensations, thoughts, and feelings are impermanent. The technique teaches you this universal truth through the lens of the most visceral data source you have: your own lived experience.

I think the serenity and clarity gained during a 10-day sit stems from a deeper connection to this understanding. With the past immutable and the future yet to unfold, your true power lies in embracing the present moment's full attention.

The Struggles

Vipassana, despite its merits, isn’t without its drawbacks and dangers. From my research, an overwhelming majority of people who commit to a 10-day sit reap positive benefits. Though a few, either due to physical or mental instability, or adverse life circumstances, may have to deal with destabilizing experiences.

Additionally, the physical discomfort from sitting in a rigid and unfamiliar posture for 10-11 hours daily sucks. To this end, the centers are considerate, offering plenty of cushions and chairs if needed. Don’t be afraid to request these things — the purpose3 isn’t to subject yourself to physical pain.

Other Techniques vs. Vipassana

In the realm of self-discovery and spiritual growth, many techniques and modalities might vie for your attention. Yet, all paths converge towards a singular end goal: a profound connection to our innermost selves.

One particularly interesting framework that came to light during a conversation with someone after the retreat was an understanding of the cyclical nature of our interactions with the world. This cycle, typically initiated by (1) an environmental trigger, (2) leads to a response — an action, (3) and then a reaction in the environment.

In the realm of self-improvement, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) seeks to intervene in this cycle at the cognitive (2) and behavioral (3) levels. It helps us better interpret and respond to events in a systematic way, improving our interactions with the world around us.

Yet, Vipassana offers a different approach, one that is foundational and more base. Instead of actively attempting to alter our thoughts or behaviors, Vipassana encourages us to merely observe our reactions (1), experiencing them without becoming entangled in them. This mindful observation short-circuits this whole process paves a path towards self-awareness and self-improvement.

In the beginning, it’s important to begin with the simplest, base, and most pure teachings, such as Vipassana. These direct and effective methods lay a strong foundation, paving the way for a more nuanced exploration of other modalities in the future.

The most direct path to spiritual illumination is to enter and maintain the state of Samadhi, or deep meditative absorption. When this doesn’t just happen spontaneously (hint, it rarely will), meditation is a powerful ally. By combining concentration (initially calming the mind) with flow (a stable state where everything ebbs seamlessly), one establishes the conditions for Samadhi to arise.

The optimal practice begins with selecting a meditation object (such as the breath or body scan) that facilitates entering the flow. Once you’re in the state of flow, the real work begins. There’s no destination, you’re simply shedding layers of self that have accumulated over time.

Somatic practices, including breath-work, energetic exercises, hatha yoga, and heat and cold therapies have their place and are great supplements to your practice by way of physiological modulation. By traversing these stages with dedication and openness, we lay bare the truth dormant within us all.

Meditation as Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy is a therapeutic approach that addresses post-traumatic stress and other mental health conditions by connecting the mind and body, and integrating psychotherapy and physical therapies. From my experience, Vipassana meditation itself can be seen as a form of self-somatic therapy.

When practicing Vipassana, the absence of movement and external stimuli prompts the psyche to release buried memories. This is a bit unsettling a first, but can also be remarkably healing when approached with psychological preparedness. In spiritual terms, this process "purifies the mind" and releases samskaras (deep-rooted habitual patterns).

In my own practice, I revisited traumatic and painful experiences (during both my sits and my walks) and was able to observe them objectively, reframing them and finding peace. I discovered that the key to this self-somatic healing is to remain still for extended periods, allowing uncomfortable sensations to surface and be acknowledged. In the absence of emotional pressure valves, trauma surfaces, manifesting as physical and emotional discomforts like heat, nausea, and fear, after which it eventually loses its grip and dissipates.

Meditation vs. Psychedelics

Meditation and psychedelics can serve as both superficial tools (e.g. meditation for stress relief or psychedelics for party-enhancing sensory experiences) and profound spiritual sacraments.

In my piece on the perils of unearned wisdom, I wrote the following:

Above all, I think the most pernicious and understated peril of psychedelics is what I like to call the phenomena of “unearned wisdom”. For some time, you understand things that normally take years of committed spiritual practice and philosophical study to properly integrate. The half-life of these insights is short and you struggle to integrate them into your life, especially if it’s your first time encountering this kind of knowledge.

I believe that the “truths” you encounter during psychedelic experiences are the same as those you can come to through a life of contemplation, reflection, and practice. When you come to these truths from rigorous practice rather than being shot towards them in a rocket, you appreciate and understand them, and can more readily apply them to your life.

…

The truth is that you can use psychedelics as a tool to see what’s out there, but nothing will replace a regular practice of meditation, reflection, and contemplation. Be present with the mundane experience of your day-to-day life and you will find the answers you’re looking for.

I think my intuition was correct. The retreat's impact, though less intense in the moment, feels more enduring, easily integrated, and cultivable over time compared to fleeting psychedelic encounters. It’s given me something that I can work towards, not something that I grasp for a moment before it falls away like sand.

The important thing to note is the natural decay of neural connections in the brain if not regularly engaged. While psychedelics offer limited4 sustainable practices, meditation consists of regular mindfulness practice, ensuring the benefits are retained and nurtured in the long-term.

Integration

Integration often poses the greatest challenge following any profound experience. I still struggle with this, so I’ll leave you with some advice from a friend who embarked on a 49-day retreat: Shift the integration paradigm from trying to blend spiritual values into everyday life to making spirituality your base, and allowing worldly concerns to flow in as space is available.

Striking a balance between worldly engagements and maintaining mental clarity is crucial. For my friend, a consistent meditation practice serves as an anchor, with two hours daily being the key to staying grounded. Habitually reconnecting with the transformative moments experienced during retreat can also help maintain that depth.

To sustain this practice, he initially attempted three days of solitude per month during the pandemic. As of 2023, he’s adapted it to a blend of either a 3-day monthly or a 10-day every 3-4 months. After his first ever retreat (a 10-day), he realized that he wasn’t ready to regularly spend 1-2 hours a day meditating. The 49-day retreat became his catalyst to establish this practice, considering it takes around 21 days to build a habit.

My Takeaways

The astounding level of clarity and peace I experienced during the retreat, and even months after, was transformative. It was as if everything just made sense, and I could perceive things for how they truly were, allowing me to act accordingly without being swayed by emotion or how I want things to be.

I’ve developed a deeper connection to my Indian heritage, as Vipassana was the original technique taught by the Buddha in India to reach enlightenment. As a result, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude and an earnest desire to give back. The purity of the experience, run entirely on donations and volunteers driven by the philosophy of serving others, moved me to tears on multiple occasions.

One key revelation was my lack of connection and understanding of bodily sensations as they relate to emotions—something I think many people struggle with, particularly men. Now, I feel a tighter connection, understanding, and acceptance of my own body, imperfections and all.

This introspective journey also fostered a stronger acceptance of my younger self via self-somatic therapy I unwittingly did during meditation. As I navigated past experiences and emotions, I found peace and understanding, reframing my perspective and creating a healthier relationship with my past.

The meta-process of mastery in anything became evident through this level of immersion. Like an athlete, I cut out distractions and maintained a singular focus. To achieve greatness and depth, a consistent dedication to this approach is essential, alongside a balance to prevent burnout. I now understand that one needs a ramp-up and some level of balance before and after diving into such things.

In terms of actionable takeaways, I am now placing greater intentionality on my inputs, striving to not compulsively be at "inbox zero", and working to be more present in the moment. I now recognize the pitfalls of being perpetually future-oriented, always planning, and not fully engaging with my present experience.

The retreat has gifted me a practice and a path that I am determined to follow for the rest of my life. While I am not yet ready to fully commit to it wholeheartedly, I have seen glimpses of its potential and trust that the right moment will come when I am prepared to dive deeper.

So there we have it. Since my first 10-day in November, I’ve done another retreat (a 3-day) which was a good reminder as to why I started down this journey in the first place. I’m happy to answer any questions about Vipassana or my experience! ✌🏽

Almost exactly a year ago, I made the decision to leave my cushy software job at WhatsApp to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my career. At the time, it felt indulgent and kind of reckless, but looking back, it was totally the right move. Burnt out and bored with big tech, the only thing I knew for sure was that cranking out widgets as a hired gun wasn't for me.1

Reflecting on my sabbatical a few months in I wrote:

“I’ll be the first to admit it. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea if I made a mistake by stepping off of the career path I was previously on. I have no idea if my current entrepreneurial endeavors will pan out. I have no idea if I’ll find myself at another job in 6-8 months.

One of my core ideals is to never make a decision (or not make one) out of fear. I’m certain that I have no regrets about leaving my job. No matter what comes of this chapter, I know that 90-year-old Nikhil will look back at 25-year-old Nikhil with pride. He’ll be proud that I had the courage to leap into the abyss without knowing the outcome, and proud that I didn’t let fear or comfort stop me from becoming who I have the potential to become.”

Now I can say with certainty that I truly do have no regrets about the decision to take a sabbatical. In fact, I think it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and am all-in on incorporating extended breaks between future career chapters.

Over the past year, I've plunged headfirst into a wild array of experiences that have stretched my beliefs and helped reveal my true passions. In this post, I'll take you through the highlights of my journey, which include attempting to start a startup, freelancing in a DAO, venturing into software consulting, making small bets on promising startups, and navigating the ever-evolving landscape of trends and industries — all of which have led me to an exciting new chapter.

Career Explorations

After bidding adieu to WhatsApp, I set my sights on starting a startup. I began by "co-founder dating" other free birds in my network and through YC’s platform. This process taught me a ton about myself and the founder marketplace (and, weirdly enough, mirrored actual dating — more for a future post).

Key takeaways: do a trial project ASAP, understand that uncertainty is the name of the game, and never underestimate the make-or-break nature of co-founder chemistry. My explorations led me through identity & community in Web3, cozier social networks, crypto-native CRMs, and personal search engines.

I soon found myself spinning my wheels, stymied by roadblocks and lacking conviction in my own ideas, and in the industries I was exploring. Despite my long-term entrepreneurial ambitions (which haven’t changed), I realized that San Francisco’s intoxicating and mimetic energy was leading me astray (I started dreaming about B2B SaaS). So, I hit pause on the startup journey and turned my focus towards joining a startup in an intriguing space that I could develop conviction for over time.

To reset and sustain myself during this period, I did contract work for a few interesting startups (Premise, Cheez, and Cent). These freelance gigs gave me the flexibility to pursue my interests while earning enough to sustain myself (while also living in a 30 bedroom co-living house).2

Then, seizing an opportunity, I shot my shot via Twitter DMs and found myself in a position to be one of the first hires at Texts.com, a seed-stage startup unifying all messaging apps. My Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp experience, coupled with Texts’ cyberpunk vision of reverse engineering private APIs to deliver superior user experience, seemed perfect. However, I soon realized I hadn't put enough thought into what to do this next chapter. I’d fallen into this “messaging infrastructure” niche and was driven by momentum — I needed to reassess my direction yet again.

Enter AI. After some meandering, I discovered the space, ignited by my fascination with Stable Diffusion and vector embeddings (while implementing semantic search over my personal data). Immediately after a transformative 10-day meditation retreat (post on this coming soon™️), ChatGPT launched and it was game over. From that moment on, I couldn't imagine working on anything else.

This timely alignment pushed me to go all-in on the AI space, and I spent the next three months learning as much as I could, hacking on interesting ideas, and eventually interviewing at cutting-edge startups. After a wild ride, I found a team and product that truly resonated with me, setting the stage for the next chapter of my career. More on that below 👀

Personal Growth

This was the longest time that I’ve been “unstructured” and able to focus on areas my life outside of the standard ones (school & work) more fully. When I wasn’t thrashing at the lack of clear objectives, I was able to connect more deeply with myself and the world around me.

A profound experience I had during this time was attending a Vipassana meditation retreat. This 10-day retreat bootcamp gave me an immeasurable amount of insight into my thoughts, emotions, and inner workings. It’s hard to understate the timing of this experience, and its powerful impact on my conviction still astounds me.

In San Francisco, I found a deeper connection with my city through its unique duality, nurtured by the spiritual sanctuary of The Center and the cerebral pulse of Genesis, my home. The Center, a haven of introspection soothed my soul, while Genesis, a hive of brilliant scientists & entrepreneurs sparked my mind.

I also rediscovered the true essence of quality time, devoting my attention to the people who matter most. Reconnecting with my family in Florida on multiple occasions, I played the role of their personal chauffeur, driving them through the windy streets of San Francisco. Between the comfortable energy of ski trips with old friends and the invigorating curiosity of coffee chats with new ones, I spent time rekindling and deepening friendships. Additionally, I was fortunate to share this transformative period with Mack, who had just moved to SF and recently embarked on her own thrilling journey into the unknown.

When I decided to commit to joining a startup in the AI space, the interview process itself became an odyssey of self-discovery and growth. Rejection, my old friend, tested my resilience and nearly pushed me to the brink (I often fantasized about applying to FAANG). Eventually, the journey of honing my interviewing and engineering skills and discovering my true aspirations evolved into its own reward. A fire was kindled within, and I found confidence in my own abilities.

Lessons Learned

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to be a bit pithy and share some concrete lessons that I’ve learned during this time and have (hopefully) internalized.

1. Embrace intentionality: Don't hesitate or linger in indecision—test theories, iterate, and dive headfirst into exploration. Fortune favors the bold.

2. Liminality is a double-edged sword: While it's comfortable (and advantageous for a certain while) to dwell in the realm of possibilities, you must eventually break free from this state and take action.

3. Beware of mimetic traps: It's easy to get swept up in the contagious ambitions of your surroundings, like the desire to be a founder in San Francisco. Always question if a path aligns with your current stage and aspirations.

4. Timing is unpredictable: I found myself interviewing in the worst possible market conditions in which, ironically, staying at WhatsApp and underperforming could have yielded a generous severance package. On the contrary, the timing and coinciding events around my pivot into AI couldn’t have been better. Life's twists and turns defy our best-laid plans.

5. Balance flexibility with purpose: While I value flexibility (being able to take an afternoon off to play tennis), I've discovered that my true satisfaction stems from a sense of purpose and growth in whatever I do.

6. Life oscillates between extremes: My ideal way to live life is as an ever-changing dance between work and leisure, where I’m at either 2 or 10 in terms of effort output, with nothing in between. Hell Yeah or No.

So, What's Next?

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined the team at Perplexity as a Member of the Technical Staff!

As I look back on this winding journey, I’m confident that AI is the right direction for me. The field offers a unique opportunity to explore the fundamental questions of intelligence and consciousness that captivate my curiosity, while also creating and delivering immense value to people. Perplexity's focus on search and user experience dovetails nicely with my passion for personal data and knowledge representation, making this a great match.

So there we go! Perhaps jobs aren’t a scam after all. I highly recommend taking a sabbatical, professional break, or whatever you’d like to call it, if circumstances permit. It likely definitely won’t be easy, but the personal and professional growth you'll experience is well worth it. If you’re considering a similar adventure and need a gentle nudge, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. ✌🏽

This question emerged from a discussion with a friend who challenged my statement that we lack sufficient information to unequivocally define “good”. Part of me was worried at my own take, as I could see myself using this perspective to justify inaction and disengagement with the world around me. Though, another part also couldn’t accept the idea that forward progress in the world has to come at the expense of internal peace. It just can’t be that binary.

Our understanding of the world is shaped by our local contexts — our day-to-day environments, interactions, and relationships. In these spheres, it’s often clear what feels right or wrong based on our values and intuition. Yet, when we zoom out to a cosmic level, our knowledge is dwarfed by the enormity of the unknown. How can we confidently pursue what is "right" when our perspective is so myopic

I think the path forward lies not in attempting to resolve this tension, but rather in learning to dance with it. Instead of clinging to an inflexible notion of right and wrong, we can actively choose to embrace the uncertainty inherent in our own existence. This doesn't mean abandoning our pursuit of goodness, but rather detaching ourselves from any specific outcome.

When letting go of our attachment to outcomes, we open ourselves to the serendipity of life's unfolding. It's no secret that negotiations and interpersonal relationships often thrive when we are less focused on controlling the end result. Similarly, a pursuit of goodness can be more authentic and impactful when we allow ourselves to be guided by intuition and values rather than desperately clinging to a particular outcome.

Even in the face of uncertainty, we can still make conscious choices that align with our values and intuition. By doing so, we acknowledge the limits of our knowledge while still striving to create a better world. This delicate dance allows us to maintain internal peace without succumbing to inaction or apathy.

Ultimately, the secret to navigating the tension between doing good and embracing uncertainty may lie in the simple yet profound act of being present. When we are fully engaged in the present moment, we can more clearly discern the right path in our local context, even if we can't see the full cosmic picture. By being present, we open ourselves to the beauty and wisdom of the world around us, allowing it to guide our actions and shape our destiny.

In the end, the dance of doing good and embracing uncertainty is an ongoing journey, one that invites us to continually reassess, recalibrate, and recommit to our values and intentions. It’s a delicate balance, but one that can lead to a life of depth, meaning, and ultimately, peace.

Welcome! This is the first post detailing what I hope will be a fun and interesting long-term project. My vision is to build a modern version of the Memex, imagined up by Vannevar Bush in 1945, but which sadly never saw the light of day.

The intention was to create a system that allows its user to sort and search through the massive amounts of data in one’s research library. In today’s world, our “research library” can be thought of as the boatload of data we have strewn across different services and apps, with no easy way of unifying everything.

But Why?

As I continue to build mine, I hope to share the process (and the code) of building this so that those who are so inclined can better think about creating their own. Over the months I’ve spent tinkering on this, I’ve realized just how difficult of an undertaking it is — it’s difficult to automate, a lot of data is inaccessible, and it just feels I’m not supposed to be doing this. Regardless, I’m having a blast with this so I’m going to continue building and sharing.

This first post was inspired by a talk given by Simon Willison, on the notion of Personal Data Warehouses in which he shows the value of porting all of your data across various services into local databases (he has written a bunch of importers that transform this data into SQLite tables).

To create my own data warehouse, I needed to figure out exactly what sources of data I want to collect and more importantly WHY I want to collect them. This informs how I structure the database, architect the systems, and the fundamental direction of the project itself.

When I first began, I wanted to create a personal search engine, inspired by Linus Lee’s Monocle. The goal at the time was to index ALL of my personal data, and be able to search over it efficiently. Eventually, I realized this wasn’t too valuable for me (full-text search on its own isn’t quite useful) and once Rewind launched, it was game over since I now have near perfect memory over everything that I’ve done on my computer.

There are still, however, four major problems that aren’t solved yet, and those are what I plan to tackle over the course of this project.

1. Lifelog: I want to see everything that I’ve done (texts sent, websites visited, pictures taken) in the same interface with context (my location, heart rate, how well I slept that night, etc.) to better inform what was actually going on. Google Timeline kind of does this, but only includes a tiny sliver of my data.

2. Semantic Search: Rewind lets me search for anything that I’ve seen while browsing the internet, but seems to be pretty rigid in its search criteria. Not to mention, it doesn’t work have access to 10+ years of historical data. Implementing semantic search will involve creating a separate infrastructure to index searchable text data into language embeddings so that eventually I’ll be able to search for concepts and vibes rather than exact words.1

3. Actionable Insights: Okay I have all this data, but so what? The magic comes in when I'm able to use this data to encourage positive behaviors, gain insight into myself2, or even automate certain parts of my life. I'm talking dashboards, weekly summaries, automated habit trackers, and more!

4. NikhilBot: This one’s a bit of a stretch, but I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine what I could eventually do with all of this data in an easily accessible and organized format (which is continually and automatically updating over time). I could fine-tune a large language model that will know everything about Historical Nikhil and help Present Nikhil become the ideal version of Future Nikhil. 🚀

Infrastructure

As a fun challenge to myself, I’m trying to keep this project as lightweight as possible in terms of expenses & footprint. I already pay $6 a month for a DigitalOcean droplet which is just a tiny cloud server to host all of my personal projects, so I’m going to shoehorn all of the services, data, and infrastructure for my Memex into this machine and really take efficiency to its limits.

There’s a certain magic and self-sufficiency3 to this approach, which matches the energy of creating my own Memex in the first place. It feels like I’m taking ownership of my data and doing it in a way that’s cheaper than my Netflix subscription. Since I’m literally the only person who will ever access this data, there are a lot of things I can simplify, and the only question of scale is that of the size of my data.

The services that I plan to build and put on this server include…

• PostgreSQL database to hold all of my data

• Read / Write endpoints to the database via a lightweight Flask API

• Pinecone (vector database) to hold embeddings for semantic search

• The frontend written in Next.js and hosted via an Nginx reverse proxy

• Cron jobs for the Python scripts that will do auto-import data

• Telegram bot written in Node, which will ping me at regular intervals to collect manual data

• Misc. services for handling analytics, alerting, dashboards, automated insights, and whatever else this project evolves into

Data, Data, Data

Here’s how I’m structuring my data for now. I was looking for a schema that’s not too complicated but is general enough to let me add more sources of data in the future, however they may be structured

lifelog

this is a way to see exactly what I did at or around any given time using timestamps

• FB Messenger

• iMessage / Texts

• YouTube watch history

• Chrome browsing history

• Spotify listening history

• Roam Research notes

• Historical journal (Sheets & Notion)

• Tweets

contextual

useful data overlays passively collected to better inform what I did within a range of time

• Location

• Activity (walking, on a bus, etc.)

• Sleep

• Calendar blocks

raw_data

for more demanding analytics / overlays

• Heart rate

• Individual latitude / longitude points

manual

anything entered manually for tracking — could possibly be merged with lifelog in the future

• Subjective feelings throughout the day (1-10 score)

• Weekly assessments (1-10 score) of different areas of life

• Qualitative answers to relevant questions

By collecting and organizing my personal data in this way, it allows my Memex to be more than just a search engine, lifelog, or whatever else I use it for. It’s a platform that leverages this data warehouse to do pretty much anything I want with it in the future.

That’s enough writing for now — it’s time to keep building. Currently I’m working on the read/write API that sits in front of my database, as well as some higher-level architectural designs. In addition, I’m trying to build the right habits and systems (via the Telegram bot) to semi-passively collect manual data (e.g. subjective wellbeing & questions to myself).

Next post might cover how to download / extract (and automate) all of the sources of data listed, the behavioral process of building manual data collection habits, or something else entirely. Stay tuned. ✌🏽

I’m writing to you as the year begins to thicken and the exciting commitments I’ve made over the holidays congeal into daily routine.

Do you remember 2022? It was the year that you shook free from the shackles of employment and found yourself staring into the fractally expanding abyss of possibility. It was the year that your relationship with Macc went to the next level as you began to build community and a life together in San Francisco. It was the year that you started to take your meditation practice and spirituality more seriously. It was the most pivotal year of your life thus far.

In 2022, your core struggle stemmed from a lack of focus. Even though that was kind of the point of your sabbatical, you never let yourself dive too much into anything, fearing that the next butterfly to land on your shoulder might fly away by the time you could attend to it. In this way, you spun your wheels and made lots of motion, but seemingly no progress, all at the same time.

I hope that you've instead leaned more into your obsessions and let them guide you. Your curiosity and intuition serve as your compass to take you where you want to go. Learn to embrace the joy of missing out and stay committed to the things that you've decided to spend time on — I don't think you'll have regret it.

A related pattern is that you spent a lot of 2022 concerned about outcomes. You fretted over the outcome of a project, the outcome of an application to a fellowship, the outcome of a collaboration — all while being anxious every step of the way. It’s like you so desperately wanted to prove that you could make it on your own and that your decisions were valid. The pursuit of external validation smothered your creativity.

This year, I hope you've learned to fall in love with the process of whatever it is doing. I fully believe that you can learn to love almost anything. If you're finding it difficult to enjoy (or at least stay present with) the process of something, take it as a sign that you might want to switch things up.

Take spontaneous roadtrips and don't be so logistically needy and plan out every single stop and detour. Let yourself follow the thread of your obsession and tug on it, while enjoying the experience of learning for its own sake. Don’t do something solely for the pot of gold that you may or may not find at the end.

The older I get, the more I understand the inherent power law nature of most things. Your information diet in 2022 was mostly mid-tier at best. Reading your third book on entrepreneurship isn't going to inspire you and give you the conviction you need to succeed — only depth, focus, and time can do that. Conversely, when you decided to read the Three Body Problem on a whim, it was nothing short of a spiritual experience.

I hope that this year, you've embraced the notion of just-in-time learning and read to learn relevant stuff as you're tugging on a thread rather than compulsively gathering “useful” information. And in your downtime, I hope you are able to fully embrace quality and transformational content set in fictional worlds through anime, science fiction, and truly well-written stories.

Money was a bit tight this year. You had savings, but convincing yourself to dig into them while you didn’t have stable income is a difficult proposition. By now you'll (hopefully) have a consistent source of income that is aligned with your goals. I hope that you prioritize investment in yourself more this year. Don't be shy about spending money on becoming a better version of yourself — the ROI on this is unlimited.

Above all, I hope you learn to trust that everything will work out and that the universe unfolds as it does — whether you like it or not. I use this wisdom from Micky Singer as a mantra when things go sideways, but I have no doubt that you'll continue to uncover the nuance in this truth.

This is our life. I hope you learn to love it.

With Love, Nikhil circa Jan 2023

I love Spotify Wrapped. It’s such a treat seeing numbers and visualizations attached to your hard-earned listening habits, and I wish I had this for every aspect of my life. This is my attempt at hand-rolling a “Nikhil’s 2022 Wrapped” to look back on in future years.

I’m firmly in my mid-20s and this year has been one of the most transformative of my life, while being deeply joyful at times and incomparably difficult at others.

This post will come to you in two major parts: a retrospective of a handful of different areas in my life worth sharing from this past year, and a forward-looking exploration of my ever changing goals and aspirations for the year to come.

Nikhil Wrapped

Media Consumption

Speaking of Spotify, I listened to 27,707 minutes of music in 2022 which is way less than my previous years of musical eclecticism. I don’t own a car, and my gym sessions are punctuated by podcasts & audiobooks rather than music. The times that I do want to listen to something to drown out the world while I’m working are aided by Brain.fm now rather than my trusty “focus” playlists. It also seems that my musical tastes are solidifying and I’m finding myself listening to a lot of the same artists and genres, with Tom Misch topping my charts for the fourth year in a row.

My podcast consumption this year has unironically been the technology brother starter pack. Monoculture? I barely know her!

A fun tool that I started using this year to manually track movies & TV shows and organize things that I want to watch later is Trakt — you can see my watch history for 2022 here which unsurprisingly is mostly anime.

Books

You can check out all the books that I’ve read in 2022 here. Interestingly enough, since 2020 my books read has ~halved each year. I attribute this to spending more time listening to podcasts and reading more technical papers & textbooks. Not to mention that in 2020 I still had a 2+ hour daily commute for a good portion of the year and then there was a pandemic or something.

Something else is that the books that I’ve “read” this year have been mostly audio. I’d be worried about my ability to actually read atrophying if I didn’t spend a significant part of my days reading dense technical content.

I definitely want to change this in the future. I’ve found that audiobooks work great for fiction and less intense books, but for the truly life-changing material out there I don’t think there is any way of getting around the necessity of wrestling with actual words in front of your face.

Travel

As usual, I’ve moved around quite a bit this year. Between pre-planned trips, spontaneous adventures, and living across the country from my family, here’s where I spent my time (only counting places that I spent at least one night in).

• 242 days in San Francisco

• 63 days in Wesley Chapel

• 19 days in Mexico

• 12 days in Salt Lake City

• 10 days in Kelseyville

• 6 days in Seattle

• 5 days in Austin

• 5 days on a boat

• 3 days in Denver

I enjoy both going on trips and spending extended time in SF so it’s tough to completely balance the two. It’s a good problem to have and I’ve spent about ⅔ of last year in SF and I’m honestly very happy with that.

Creation

My writing goal last year was to publish 10 full-length articles, and I wound up with 4. However, I am proud that the things that I did write felt authentic and were topics that I felt called to write about. The notion of being pregnant with an idea rings true here. I wrote about CGMs, saunas, leaving my job, and psychedelics.

I’ve also been Tweeting a lot more. Part of it is having more to say, part of it is having less of a filter, and part of it is using Typefully which allows me to draft & schedule tweets without ever having to unintentionally get sucked into the dunkfest rabbit holes of the Twitter-verse.

One insane stat is that I’ve typed over 300,000 words into my personal journal throughout the year. That’s like 3-4 full-length books! Granted a lot of that is bullet points, the same stuff repeated multiple times, and mostly stuff that I wouldn’t even re-read, let alone others.

On the programming side, this was a year of buidling for me. Between the Recurse Center, 8 side projects, and 5 contract & consulting projects I spent quite a bit of my year in my IDE.

Random Biometrics

In previous years, this would have been one of the most detailed sections, but I honestly have not been tracking my biometrics as much as I have tended to. With sleep for example, I do passively track it with my Oura ring but only look at my data once a week as a gut check. I think I’ve done a lot of the upfront work on optimizing my health and am now in maintenance mode, which is a great feeling and gives me lots of mental bandwidth to focus on other things.

Life Updates

Without a doubt, this year has involved some major life events that I know will be pivotal as I look back at them. Here are some highlights.

• Mack moved to SF! We were long-distance for the majority of our relationship, and for the first time since our Florida days we are both living in the same city.

• I quit my full-time job at WhatsApp and have spent my time figuring out my north star and searching for the next hill to climb.

• To reinvigorate my love for programming, I did the Recurse Center and spent 6 weeks working on passion projects & learning technologies I was interested in.

• After a great 2.5 year run with amazing roommates, I moved out of my apartment in Bernal Heights and am now living in Genesis, a 33 bedroom co-living house full of scientists and founders in the Lower Haight.

• On my 26th birthday, I went on a very profound fungi journey and wrote about it.

• I spent 10 days meditating in silence at a Vipassana retreat in Kelseyville, CA.

Career Updates

This section deserves its own post. I have learned more about technology, business, and my own strengths & weaknesses in these past 8 months than I have in over 3 years of full-time employment, which tells me that this was no doubt the right decision.

I know what direction to head in (hint, I’m interviewing at AI labs & startups right now) and once I am more certain as to where this will take me, I hope to write a full retrospective of my sabbatical and the fun adventures along the way. Stay tuned!

Favorites

This year was an insane year for technology, as AI productivity tools become better and more widespread. Here are some of my favorites, which have honestly doubled my overall productivity and have added immeasurable joy and delight to interacting with technology. I’m resisting the urge to sing specific praise to each one of these, but take it as a high compliment to anything at all that I include in this section.

• Readwise Reader

• Texts.com

• GitHub Copilot

• ChatGPT

• Rewind

As mentioned earlier, I read a lot fewer books this year but the ones that I did read certainly slapped. Here are my favorite reads.

• American Kingpin

• The Three Body Problem (3-part series)

• Algorithms to Live By

Beyond that, here are some of the miscellaneous things (people, articles, podcasts, links, places, whatever) that come to mind from the year that have deeply inspired me.

• Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

• Quit Your Job

• The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas

• Felix Krause

• 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything

• Alex Hormozi

• My First Million

• Bret Victor

• Andrej Karpathy

• Linus Lee

• George Hotz

• The Center

2023

I handled goal setting a little differently this year. Normally I create a list of everything that I can think of that feels reasonable to accomplish in the following year which I try to remember, but inevitably forget as life unfolds and my priorities change. When I encounter this list again halfway through the year, the items on there feel very outdated.

Instead, what I’m hoping to do this year is create a list of broader objectives that I hope to make headway on throughout the year, while also creating a tentative list of key results (someone should turn this into a corporate goal-setting framework!) that will evolve and naturally change over time. I plan to visit this list of personal OKRs during my weekly review and continue to prune and reshape it as I get more and more feedback from life.

Without further ado, here are my OKRs for the year (with a few omitted for personal reasons).

🛠️ Orient career towards entrepreneurship in the AI / ML space

• Commit to a job at a startup in the AI / ML space

• Learn ML engineering and ship one major project to production

• Get experience managing a team of people

• Understand the hiring process by interviewing & screening candidates

📚 Become a better programmer and engineer

• Read Crafting Interpreters and build your own toy programming language

• Read Designing Data-Intensive Applications

• Go through an algorithms course end-to-end

🎨 Build and scale side projects while working in public

• Complete your Memex and publish relevant technical blog posts

• Launch at least one major side project with potential for passive income

• Write one longer-form piece on your Substack or blog every 3 months

❤️ Deepen my connection with the people in my life

• Go on a weekend adventure (camping & road trips) with Macc every 3 months

• Spend around 6 weeks of the year with family in FL

• Have regular (at least every 2 month) catch-ups with close friends

• Spend 1-2 nights a week hanging in common areas at Genesis, and go to half of the sunday dinners

🧠 Continue to grow spiritually and face my fears

• Apply to and attend a 3-day Vipassana every 3-4 months

• Practice martial arts (BJJ) for 8 bi-weekly classes over a month

• Try one new thing (restaurant, activity, place) every week in SF

💪🏽 Feel fit and improve both cardiovascular and muscular performance

• Run to Golden Gate Park and back (5K) in 25 min

• Bench 150 and squat / deadlift 250 for 1-rep max

So there you have it! My time of exploratory maximalism is coming to an end as I zone in on the things that I actually want to spend my time doing. The theme for this upcoming year is focus (in terms of career, relationships, and creativity) on the things that matter most to me.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

To see the world in a grain of sand 
And heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand 
And eternity in an hour.

— William Blake

The morning after I turned 26, I downed a concoction of 2.5 grams of magic mushrooms brewed in tea with some lemon juice. What resulted over the next 6 hours was an experience so impactful, I can’t shake it. My core assumptions and sense of self were all on the cutting board as I stared deep into the psychedelic abyss.

In truth, I’m nervous about writing this. I worry about the social, legal, and reputational effects that can come from writing about “controversial” topics. I also struggle with sharing raw & personal experiences, especially when I haven’t “figured out” the answer yet. Maybe that’s why I always pepper my posts with quotes and citations.

But, has any meaningful thought ever come from splashing around in the shallows of the uncontroversial? Human knowledge is pushed forward by bold strides into the gray areas of epistemic uncertainty.

I want to keep it real. My experiences with psychedelics have been some of the most meaningful that I’ve ever had. Within the mushroom1 trip is the ability to feel connected to the vast depths of the universe, re-write your own narrative, and even undergo ego death.

However, decadent use of psychedelics rooted in pleasure-seeking is not what I’m talking about. Music, plant medicines, and ritual have been part of spiritual practices for millenia. With the right intention, a group setting like a music festival can be a transcendental dance, hand-in-hand with thousands of other humans united in their collective yearning for ecstasis. However, I fear that the majority of people in these environments are driven by escapism, wanting to tap into something bigger but lacking the spiritual lens to do so.

I think the key is to treat psychedelic use as a sacred ritual — imbued with reverence and intentionality. With respect for the magic in these substances, you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and start to appreciate the vast ocean of human experience right in front of you.

“Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.”

– Stan Grof (Czech psychiatrist who has guided thousands of LSD sessions)

The Other Side

It’s impossible to accurately portray the subjective experience2 of tripping because it’s very personal and varies for everyone. After the trip, your memories quickly decay and so do the lessons, unless you actively process and integrate what you’ve learned.

Aldous Huxley comes pretty close in The Doors of Perception, which details his first mescaline (peyote cactus) trip. With his remarkable gift for writing, he recalls a range of insights from the “purely aesthetic” to “sacramental visions”. Even so, he admits that his account falls short of capturing the significance of his actual experience.

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain.

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

While in the trenches, you understand the depth found in simplicity when corny phrases like “this too shall pass” finally mean something. Your interpretation of the world becomes a perceptual lens that’s as malleable as dough. You realize that you are merely an intelligent ape living in an allegorical cave, poking out to see that reality is nothing like you thought it was. 

“You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’

Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.”

— Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

I like to think that after taking psychedelics, we become kids3 again. Kids have minimal social conditioning and relate to the world with purity and awe. They see the world without a filter, and experience it through a lens of wonder and amazement with their focus squarely on the present moment.

As we get older, our brains become more “efficient” as adaptive patterns of neural activity get ingrained. Though this is useful for conserving time and energy, it confines us to a life of evolutionary determinism in which it becomes increasingly difficult to change ourselves. 

What if the path we’re on isn’t right? I think the answer lies in figuring out how to regain this sense of wonder and relate to the world with fresh eyes.

Powers

Above all else, psychedelics add a significance vector4 to your life, as if you are walking through a world full of meaning and purpose rather than one that’s empty and arbitrary. Maybe this is why it’s so effective against treatment-resistant depression — life starts to mean something again and the normally depressed mind finds hope. Even an individual who’s not depressed but nonetheless stuck in locally optimal thought patterns can meaningfully grow from all of the data passing through.

I’ve also found immense value in using these substances with small, intimate, and intentional groups of people. I’ve become way closer with everybody that I’ve tripped with in the past. How can you not? You push past the superficial and see others as fellow flawed yet beautiful humans. Here’s a friend’s thoughts on tripping with romantic partners, which I thought was apt and insightful:

“Especially (in regards to getting close with those we’ve tripped with) our romantic partners! We move past the minutia, the ego, the human bodies. When I grew up going to church, I always heard people say that it was good to put Jesus before your spouse. I was confused!

Now I believe that when two partners can put spirit as their guiding light, that they can transcend these stupid human things we do and unite with their partner as two beams of wonderful light.”

For myself, the “message” or lesson that I get from psychedelics generally follows the same contour. It’s simple, yet profound at the same time. There are multiple ways to approach this truth, so here are a few perspectives that I’ve internalized:

1. Life is fundamentally about letting go of fear, being in the present moment with as much depth as possible, and making the most out of this strange and beautiful experience that we get to have.

2. We spend our lives chasing money, status, and other material things to quench the thirst inside of us thinking it’ll make us happy, when there is an ocean of fresh water right in front of us. This water comes in the form of time spent with our loved ones, getting lost in doing what we love, and the wonder found in pondering the mystery of life itself. Just drink the water.

3. Pursuit of spirituality and living in the moment to the exclusion of the material world entirely isn’t the right path either. Those who have learned to appreciate the power of the infinite ought to come back to Earth and do something useful with their elevated consciousness for the betterment of the world. This is what’s meant by giving in service of the divine. 

4. Ultimately, our lives are what we make of them. We can literally author our own destiny, and every decision we make (conscious or otherwise) gets us closer to the person we eventually become.

If I had to boil it down to a simple statement, it would be… Be Present. Life is all around you. That’s it. That’s the secret to the universe.

Looking past all the compelling anecdotal data5 there are many promising benefits being studied clinically. Psychedelic medicine is experiencing a renaissance with regards to treating a whole host of modern psychological disorders including depression, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even anxiety around death.

Perils

There is, however, no such thing as a panacea. Psychedelics can do immense good in the right settings, but such powerful tools can also do great harm within the wrong context or with the wrong intentions. 

The psychedelic journey is a genuinely destabilizing experience. Your understanding of reality and consciousness will never be the same. For those that aren’t ready for such an experience, aren’t in the right environment when taking it, or don’t have the right brain chemistry6, a trip can lead to irreparable harm. 

Joscha Bach’s perspective on the downsides of psychedelics comes from the lens of artificial intelligence research. One of the main things to avoid when building AI systems is to prevent “overfitting” of certain patterns — when your model hugs too closely to its training data. A single psychedelic trip can be the most meaningful or significant experience of your life, so it’s easy to overfit offhand insights from your trip and extrapolate assumptions or assign disproportionate causality to patterns that aren’t grounded in reality.

This could be what happened with Timothy Leary in the 1960s. He had profoundly positive experiences with LSD, and started giving them to students at Harvard without regard for the consequences. Leary perceived the world as a psychedelic landscape and thought these substances were a panacea to bring forth utopia. Sadly, his actions only tarnished psychedelics in the eyes of the public and set back the medical progress on these substances for decades. 

Due to this and many other pivotal factors (the summer of love, Vietnam war opposition, “tune in, drop out” culture, etc.) most psychedelics were classified as Schedule I substances (drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse) by the US federal government. It’s no doubt that the government saw the societally destabilizing powers of these substances. Mystical states tend to have such a powerful sense of authority that their effects extend long afterwards. This innate authority is so compelling that traditional structures of power (governments, religious dogma, corporations) pale in comparison.

Only now are we seeing these draconian policies reversed — just recently, San Francisco (my home) decriminalized plant-based psychedelics, acknowledging their relative safety and medicinal potential. I feel that over the coming years we’ll see many other places do the same.

Above all, I think the most pernicious and understated peril of psychedelics is what I like to call the phenomena of “unearned wisdom”. For some time, you understand things that normally take years of committed spiritual practice and philosophical study to properly integrate. The half-life of these insights is short and you struggle to integrate them into your life, especially if it’s your first time encountering this kind of knowledge.

I believe that the “truths” you encounter during psychedelic experiences are the same as those you can come to through a life of contemplation, reflection, and practice. When you come to these truths from rigorous practice rather than being shot towards them in a rocket, you appreciate and understand them, and can more readily apply them to your life.

This is why many (my younger self included) falsely think that the purpose of psychedelics is to get the raw sensory experience, beatific visions, and information downloads again and again in the hopes that it’ll eventually stick after tripping enough.

“I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies...

What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.”

— Terrence McKenna

The truth is that you can use psychedelics as a tool to see what’s out there, but nothing will replace a regular practice of meditation, reflection, and contemplation. Be present with the mundane experience of your day-to-day life and you will find the answers you’re looking for.

"If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes and telephones.

The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen."

— Alan Watts

Thanks to Macc, Gonzi, and Weston for looking over drafts of this piece. ✌🏽

It’s now August and I still don’t have it all figured out, but that’s okay.

The thing is, there’s no roadmap for this kind of decision. Conventional advice tells us to stay on a path until you’ve built up enough “career capital” and the next step is in-your-face obvious. But what if the path you’re on has you climbing up the wrong hill?

In truth, I haven’t found the clarity that I was hoping to find after these months of unstructured exploration, and my life’s purpose hasn’t yet unfolded in front of me in some brilliant spark of insight.

I have, however, found some nuggets of wisdom during this time. In fact, I think this period has been the most accelerated period of personal growth in my entire life — and I don’t think this a coincidence.

So let’s reflect on the journey so far, shall we?

The North Star

One of the most jarring things about this whole process has been losing a steadfast source of direction and purpose. An understated benefit of full-time employment is that your main purpose is to just work. It’s simple.

When you’re on your own, it’s more complicated. It is freeing to be able to choose your purpose and be in control of your own destiny. The problem is that there are a lot of too many things to choose from.

A habit that I picked up over the years is finding something interesting, deciding that I didn’t have the time to pursue it, and committing myself to revisit it when I had “more” time.

Well now that I do have “more” time, which of these things should I do? Is it time to start making music, write a book, found a company, become a polyglot, do a surf camp in Morocco, build a farm, or reach enlightenment? You can’t pursue all of these goals at one, so you need to pick one to focus on at any given time.

You’ll never know what the “right” thing to pick is (hint, there isn’t one). It’s always a gamble but that’s okay. Trust the process and let your intuition guide you — it’ll let you know when you’re headed the wrong way. Once you acknowledge your missteps, just start moving in a different direction.

These past few months, I’ve found myself doing things like building partnerships within DAOs, architecting social graphs, exploring digital nomadism. None of these stuck, but each experience taught me about my preferences & talents, and showed me how malleable the world is. Who would’ve thought that I’d hate building social apps?

For now, I’ve oriented myself towards starting a startup. This has come after months of self reflection and conversations with brilliant people in San Francisco, the most entrepreneurial city in the world.

My assumptions might be wrong, and my motivations might change but that’s okay. I have a direction to head towards and am working every day on refining exactly what this vision for my life will look like.

Find your north star. It will guide you.

Creative Destruction

“A comfortable, certain, and tracked-out existence is necessarily one of little vitality and low growth. This is a key reason to quit especially “good” jobs where you have become comfortable.”

— Wolf Tivy in Quit Your Job

There’s something deeply human in the desire to shake things up in the hope of finding something better. To start climbing a new hill, you need to get off of your current hill by moving to a new city, quitting your job, or leaving a draining relationship. It’s as if the evolutionary process of natural selection permeates our very being and plants within us the seeds of change.

At its worst, this tendency can lead to a psychological prison of permanent dissatisfaction. At its best, it can lead to courageous strides into the unknown that move humanity forward.

“Life is not a straight line that goes from A to B. Life is a canvas of circles and waves, ups and downs, highs and lows. It’s a journey of self-discovery and creation. We paint it with a set of colors and then re-stroke it with another. It’s transformative. Ever-changing.”

— Omar Itani in Feeling Lost

I’ll be the first to admit it. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea if I made a mistake by stepping off of the career path I was previously on. I have no idea if my current entrepreneurial endeavors will pan out. I have no idea if I’ll find myself at another job in 6-8 months.

One of my core ideals is to never make a decision (or not make one) out of fear. I’m certain that I have no regrets about leaving my job. No matter what comes of this chapter, I know that 90-year-old Nikhil will look back at 25-year-old Nikhil with pride. He’ll be proud that I had the courage to leap into the abyss without knowing the outcome, and proud that I didn’t let fear or comfort stop me from becoming who I have the potential to become.

Links

Through my meanderings, I’ve discovered some gems that I’ve kept close and drawn strength from when times get tough.

• Quit Your Job by Wolf Tivy

• Feeling Lost by Omar Itani

• Optimism by Not Boring

That’s all for today, folks. Over the next few entries in this new publication, I’m going to unpack some more of the things I’ve unearthed during this chapter of my life. Stay tuned 👋🏽

Hey friends and happy Saturyay!

It’s been … quite a while since my last newsletter and a lot has happened in those more than five  months. When I first started writing, I forced myself to write daily no matter what. This burned me out and led to stale and uninspired work. I’ve since found a middle ground through an on and off approach in which I only write if truly compelled by something. This has made a huge difference and I’ve realized that my best writing comes after living life a little bit.

One structural change is that I’m migrating to Substack. The thot.substack.com subdomain shockingly wasn’t taken so I scooped it up and moved my subscribers and old posts over.

As I continue to evolve my writing over time, here’s how I’m segmenting my output:

• Substack for more personal writing, updates on my life and ideas I’ve been thinking about.

• Second Brain for workshopping and exploring interesting ideas in their incubation phase before they’re “ready” for the public eye.

• Main Website for showcasing the fruits of my labor with polished posts, projects I’ve worked on, and the assemblage that is my  online presence.

🗺 Personal Updates

In the past few months…

• Mack moved to SF!

• I spent a few weeks in Salt Lake City on the slopes, modeled for a stock photo at an Ethereum conference in Denver, and won a snowboard at a Solana hacker house (???)

• My sister turned eleven so I spent a few weeks with the fam in Florida.

• Saw Tom Misch in concert.

I also left my job at WhatsApp.

It’s been a long time coming, but still feels unreal. I have a lot of reasons, but they all revolve around wanting to do something more meaningful and higher-leverage with my life. Some ideas I eventually  want to explore include tools for mental wellbeing and knowledge augmentation. In due time.

In the interim I’m taking a little sabbatical while I figure out my next steps and am spending my time catching up on sleep, learning interesting things, exercising, and reconnecting with friends. Highly recommend it.

✍🏽 Artifacts

• Monitoring my Blood Sugar as a Non-Diabetic: I used a continuous glucose monitor for a month and wrote what I learned about metabolic health.

• Why I’m Addicted to Saunas: Self explanatory — an exploration of the history and science of sauna usage and my personal protocol of using heat for wellbeing.

• My Second Brain: A platform for me to workshop, prototype, and think about various ideas publicly before they’re complete.

• My Favorite Podcasts: I’ve been keeping a running list of the podcasts that have had the most impact on me over the years and figured I’d share it publicly.

• Smoov: If you like music that makes you feel like you’re spreading creamy peanut butter over a warm piece of crunchy toast, this playlist is for you. 

🍯 Best Finds

A few of the coolest things that I’ve found in the past few months (actually past few weeks because I barely remember what I did yesterday, let alone last month):

• 🎥 Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: A video summary of Ray Dalio’s new book, which condenses and interprets 500 years of history and its economic implications in an entertaining 43 minute video.

  • If you enjoy this, you’ll also love his previous video from 2013 in the same format, which explains how the economic machine works.

• 🤖 How to prevent the coming inhuman future: Erik Hoel masterfully portrays four possible futures for humanity that take the philosophies of Nietzsche, Turing, Chardin, and Shakespeare to the extreme, as if they all got involved in a scuffle at the pub.

• 🏁 How to Start a Startup: This is no doubt the best resource for someone looking to start a startup (which is a defined as a company seeking growth above all else).

• 💞 The Polyamory Post: I didn’t understand what polyamory was before reading this, but now I do. Turns out that some people (myself not included) are just naturally more inclined towards polyamory.

• 📝 Foster: I’ve been looking for a better way to find people to read my writing before I publish it, and that’s what Foster aims to do with a Google Docs integration, a great community, and interesting incentive mechanisms.

• 🧠 Programmable Notes: What if our note-taking tools were creative collaborators rather than blank canvases? This post explores a few interesting techniques for getting out of your own head while writing.

• 🎤 jeen-yuhs (A Kanye Trilogy): Before Kanye became famous, his old friend Coodie recognized his talent and recorded his rise in an ongoing documentary for decades. The result of this long-standing and intimate access is this gripping trilogy that chronicles the rise and fall  of Kanye West.

👋🏽 Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of any of the links mentioned, and if you have any thoughts on the ever-evolving structure of this newsletter. 

You can either tweet at me or reply to this email — replies go straight to my inbox 💌

బై (see ya)
— Thot

• exploring the contours around one’s life & career

• health / lifestyle experimentation

• insights from my experience as an engineer & aspiring founder in the SF tech scene

• looser and more stylistic pieces on the human experience

… and much more. My writing and newsletter are continually evolving so I invite you to join me as I figure out this whole life thing. Check out my website here.

Hit reply anytime you want to give me any feedback or just say hey :)

— Nikhil

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Hello friends and happy Thursday!

It's been ~1.5 months since the last installment of Thot's Thoughts and it felt like the right time for a new one, as I enter a new "life chapter".

These past weeks, I've been moving around a lot and writing about my experiences. Creating the affordance on my site to write shorter-form posts as "notes" has been game-changing, as I feel more comfortable expanding on certain ideas without the pressure to make them perfect or evergreen.

Though, there's still a long way to go before I find what I'm looking for, which is a direct connection from my brain to a public page with minimal friction. Twitter has too much noise, and us creators do not have ownership of our audiences, — thus it doesn't feel like the right platform for "microblogging" in its truest sense. Web3 promises a direct creator-consumer relationship, but until the plumbing is fully built out I think I'll need to build something else this purpose. I like the notion of a stream and would like to build a system that can transfer my thoughts to a public page with just a text message.

Thoughts on https://streamofthots.com anyone?
 

🗺 Personal Updates

I started off September in Madrid, where I ate lots of tapas, drank lots of sangria, and enjoyed a proper dose of lad culture. Afterwards, I spent a few weeks in the most manic city in the entire world, New York City, and then decompressed in my cozy San Francisco apartment. Finally, I spent a week exploring Montréal and embraced the Web2 bf x Web3 gf meme during Mack's company offsite.

Now, I'm in Florida where I'll be for the rest of the year. I plan on driving around the state to re-acquaint myself with the place that I spent most of my childhood, and to catch up with some friends that are scattered around the state. After that, I'll be with my family for the holidays before gearing up for what I'm sure will be a wild 2022.
 

✍🏽 Artifacts

• While in Madrid, I wrote a few notes about lad culture and my experience of being able to speak Spanish again, as if it were like riding a bike.

• Also, while I was in New York, I write about what I considered to be an unsustainable level of energy that pervades the incredibly dynamic city.

• A product that I led & built during my time on Facebook Marketplace got some PR exposure both in and out of Facebook Meta! Here's an official newsroom post and a couple of other links about the project.

• I've extracted some of my more popular newsletter posts into their own notes, like my thoughts on career goals and my self experimentation protocol.

• Finally, the infinitely talented Carl has created some new assets for my site including a new avatar (with more accurate hair) and a surprise on the bottom of posts. Check it out!

My time spent in Florida for the holidays has tended to be prolific, in terms of writing. Time off of work, coupled with the focus of my childhood bedroom enables some amazing output. Look forward to some longer-form posts on using continuous glucose monitors (CGM) for improving metabolic health, and a confessional on my sauna addiction. 👀
 

🍯 Best Finds

In previous newsletters, I've limited the links I've shared to just 5, but that'll be more difficult over the course of multiple months. I'm trying something new now, and will instead share everything I found to be dope, with a short description rather than personal commentary. Let me know what you think of this!

• Aftershokz Xtrainerz — Bone conducting, internal-memory only headphones you can wear while swimming.

• Gatheround — The best platform I've found for having virtual socials.

• Futurists have their heads in the clouds by Erik Hoel — A more "realistic" set of predictions for life by 2050.

• The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App — A blog post from Readwise about their upcoming read-it-later app that makes me unreasonably excited.

• An Interview with Maggie Baird (Billie Eilish's mom) on The Rich Roll Podcast — Maggie's approach to creativity, parenting, activism, and living an intentional life is truly inspiring.

• If You Want to Learn, Ignore the Details — On why high-level thinking might be better for learning than focusing on details.

• The General Index — A bunch of tables that serves as a searchable index of 107 million science articles according to Vice, serving as a map to the paywalled domains of scientific knowledge.

• What Humans could be — "Imagine if we were all taught about the depths of joy that are possible? This would include not only the joy that comes from the relief of our deprivations, but the deeper joys that can come from being inspired to reach outside of ourselves."

• Why Judaism? from The Pull Request — A fascinating exploration of the value of religion, specifically Judaism, with regards to finding meaning.

• Research as Understanding — Research is not churning out papers. It's following curiosity to the edge of human understanding and deciding to go a little bit further than what's already known.

• Sauna use as a lifestyle practice to extend healthspan — A paper by Rhonda Patrick exploring all of the research and knowledge around why saunas are dope. I'll be referencing this a lot in my upcoming post.

• TESLA: The Life and Times Podcast — If you want to learn more about the legendary Nikola Tesla, this is the most engaging and informative resource I've found.

• Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferriss — If you needed any reason to be further bullish on Web3, Crypto, and NFTs, well here you go.

👋🏽 Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of any of the links mentioned, and if you have any thoughts on the ever-evolving structure of this newsletter.

You can either tweet at me or reply to this email — replies go straight to my inbox 💌

బై (see ya)
— Thot

life chapters, pop culture, and ai-generated art

Hey friends, happy Sunday! Drumroll please 🥁
 

Welcome to Season 3 of Thot's Thoughts! The time has come to grow this project and switch up the format.
 

For starters, I'm moving away from the monthly release. I decided on a monthly cadence early on to serve as a forcing function to make sure I actually wrote and did stuff every month. I don't think it's necessary anymore, since I've been consistently shipping this newsletter for almost a year now and I enjoy it too much to stop any time soon.
 

Fitting my life into neat monthly increments doesn't feel right, and that's why I'm moving more towards the notion of "life chapters" instead. An example would be a chunk of time spent in Florida for the holidays. This might span multiple months or less than one, but the general vibe of time period is the same.
 

Another change is that I will no longer be writing mini-posts along with my updates. I want this newsletter to serve as a lightweight wrapper around my other projects and writing, and not be content in and of itself. Though, I frequently have things I want to write about that I wouldn't consider long or well-thought out enough for full blog posts, but not ephemeral enough for Twitter. To remedy this, I've created a scratchpad on my site for this kind of content.
 

Here's a diagram that visually represents what I'm now trying to do. Notice that I've got large blocks for individual projects & writing, and then a newsletter sent out towards the end of the life chapter which summarizes and shares everything (including interesting things that I find) throughout the time period.

🗺 Personal Updates

• I started August with a last-minute trip to Phoenix, after which I was in SF for a few weeks. I then went to Florida to spend time with family. Currently I am in Spain (Madrid) until 9/18, after which I'll be spending the rest of the month in New York City. Hit me up if you're around!

• I also got Tarot reading from an unnamed psychic. It looks like I'll be going through an huge career transition within the next 6 months. 👀

• My hair is reaching new heights. Crisp $10 bounty to anyone that can snap a good picture of me with a manbun.

🎨 Artifacts

• Anime — I recently binged Attack on Titan (twice) and loved it so much that I wrote a blog post about anime, its origins, and what makes it so enjoyable.

• Big Island Travel Journal — About a month ago, I was on Big Island, Hawaii for a week. This post is an experiment in travel writing and explores my experience, lessons learned, and some recommendations that I wish I'd had before going.

• Scratchpad — Something I've not been able to figure out is how to write lightweight posts about an idea without blowing it up into a full blown blog post that consumes me for a few weeks. This is my answer to this dilemma.

• Crying in H-Mart Book Review — I'll be honest. I cried multiple times reading Michelle Zauner's memoir and was sad for several days afterwards. I would recommend accompanying this book with some study of the "Diving Women" of Jeju — Mack goes into more detail in her brilliant post on the topic.

🍯 Best Finds

• 🎧 Joscha Bach on Lex Friedman — Joscha's two appearances on Lex's podcast have been some of the most information-dense and mind-blowing hours I've had the pleasure of listening to. Topics include free will, a formalized definition of intelligence / consciousness, the distinctions between different kinds of artificial intelligence, and the cultural context of "happiness".

• ✨ Wikiwand — Wikipedia is incredible, but its interface is a bit dry. Wikiwand is a Chrome (and Firefox) Extension that upgrades the user experience by converting each article into a well-formatted, aesthetic, and easy-to-read page.

• 👚 Worn Out —The tech bro repudiation of fashion for utilitarian purposes has always struck me as short-sided. This piece has helped put that feeling into prose in a beautiful way. It's inspired me to dive deeper into fashion in a sustainable way that allows self-expression to flourish.

• 🐻 Bear Nation — Spoiler, this isn't about bears. Rather, it's a fascinating exploration of the obesity epidemic and how it might be related to a diet that induces "torpor", a mammalian mechanism that is activated when bulking up for hibernation.

• 🎵 Happier Than Ever — I pre-emptively judged Billie Eilish and thought she just made trashy pop music. I gave her another chance after some friends with good taste and my 10 y/o sister urged me to. This album is incredible, and likely my favorite of the entire year. Highly recommend giving it a listen.

• 🖼 AI Art Machine — Artificial Intelligence has come quite far. The world has been blown away by the power of language models which power GPT-3 and OpenAI's Codex, but what is unbelievable to me is the ability for these models to create art. This is an AI art generator available online in a Google Collab notebook based on some open source code & models. All you need to do is input a prompt along with some other parameters and you're off to the races. Here are a few interesting things that've come out of my explorations:

"two people walking into an anime sunset"

"a jar full of rocks, pebbles, and sand in hawaii"

👋🏽 Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think of any of the links mentioned, and if you have any thoughts or ideas on the format.
 

You can either tweet at me or reply to this email — replies go straight to my inbox 💌

బై (see ya)
— Thot

🗺 Personal Updates

Booling.

This month began with two glorious weeks off of work, with another half-week off towards the end. In that time, I revamped some of my personal project management systems (thanks David Allen), somewhat caught up on my long list of TODOs, and began working on an exciting new side project: a memex, which I'll dive into more detail later.

My pre-frontal cortex also finally fully developed when I turned 25. Mack planned an amazing weekend of festivities that culminated with a trip to Big Island, Hawaii.

Upcoming Travel Plans:

• Wesley Chapel, FL (majority of August) 🤠

• Madrid, Spain (Sept. 11 to Sept. 17) assuming international travel is still kosher by then

• New York City (Sept. 18 to Oct. 2) — if you'll be around, let me know!

🎨 Artifacts

• My website has a fresh coat of paint! As I mentioned last month, I get the urge to re-vamp my site every 6-8 months with a new look & feel. This time around, I updated some of the styling to suit my mood of the moment and added some new features including image previews of posts, a progress bar, and some componentry that better adheres to design principles.

• I've also added a "Travel Journal" on my site, which will be for writings about my travel experiences. There are a few on there already from when I found myself in Southeast Asia, and I'll be writing about my time in Big Island, Hawaii shortly.

🔮 A Personal Search Engine

A few weeks ago I came across this tweet from Linus, better known as @thesephist:

https://twitter.com/thesephist/status/1412956530220093448

Over a weekend, Linus collected a bunch of his personal data (blog posts, tweets, journal entries, etc.) into a system that would allow him to search through everything on demand. He essentially built a prototype of Vannevar Bush's memex, which Bush defined as "a device in which an individual stores all their books, records, and communications to supplement their memory".

Why is this even useful? The human brain isn't designed to store the vast amounts of information that we create in our modern world. It can approximate this ability to some extent by surfacing thing in associative contexts (going from the word "gray" ⬜️ -> gray dog 🐩 -> your childhood dog sparky 🥺 -> a memory of the time he ate your homework 🧾). However, storing data isn't what the brain is best at — it's best at forming connections from information that it loads into working memory.

This is why I'm so obsessed with knowledge management and can spend hours sorting out my thoughts & learning into the right contexts. The closest thing I've come to having my own memex is my Roam Research graph, but even that has its limitations. Everything I can find in my Roam is something that I've actively parsed through and taken the time to write down. What about the vast amounts of memories, experiences, insight, and information that don't get written down?

This question is what has inspired me to start this next side-project: my own memex, which will serve as what Linus dubs a "personal search engine". I'm sure there are services out there that do the job, but I think the value of building my own system outweighs the time commitment. I much prefer that a system that I create has access to the very personal data, images, and messages that I hope to feed to it. Some of this data, including my journal entries are some of my most private and cherished possessions, and the last thing I would want is some lame SaaS company to have access to all of this. I want ownership of my own data.

So, how am I going to do this? To start, I'll need to figure out exactly what data stores I want to include in this system — here's a non-exhaustive list to get started:

• My Roam Research graph: I back this up twice a day to a private GitHub repo in various formats (including .json which I will format all of my data into).

• Google Data: For better or for worse, Google collects data on everything you do in their all-encompassing products (unless you opt out) which you can access and download through Google Takeout. This includes search history, YouTube watch history, Chrome history, location history, among many other things.

• Publicly shared content: This includes all of my blog posts and tweets mostly.

• Text Messages: As an iPhone user, I can download all of my text & iMessage data into a SQLite database — it's a bit technically involved but that's what you get when poking into Apple's fortresses.

• Messenger Data: Most of my Facebook data isn't very useful except for my messaging data, which can easily be accessed and download through the DYI tool.

• Twitter Likes: This data set has likely some of the highest signal-to-ratio of my consumed information. Unfortunately, the only way to access this is through their public API which isn't meant for this purpose (it can only get you your latest 20 likes).

• Pocket Content: Most of the interesting articles I find on the internet are saved to Pocket. It wouldn't make much sense to index every webpage I've come across on the internet, so maybe a curated list of articles that I've actively saved would be more useful.

When building a memex, I see two approaches to solving the problem of sorting & organizing all of your personal data: (1) the "personal search engine" approach (which I am moving forward with) and (2) the "daily dashboard & timeline" approach. The latter is something that Andrew Louis has worked on for a few years now. His system is searchable with a customized query language but isn't a search engine in the purest sense of the term.

With all of this data, I think that context is valuable and that is where I can take a page out of Andrew's system. When did I first write a note, take a picture, or send a message? What was the temperature like that day and what else might have influenced my state of mind? Context is crucial when searching for information on the internet, and even more-so when considering information that you've personally created & consumed. By using this context to inform your thinking, you're building stronger self-awareness into your life and future decisions. In the best world, this turns into a virtuous cycle that further improves your own knowledge graph.

So, what is the most important piece of context to make sure I include? TIME. Knowing when I wrote something, liked something, consumed something, or otherwise captured something will be crucial for deriving other data points like items that show up on the same day or other details about what that day was like.

What are the steps to building this?

1. Clean and parse data into uniform .json format for all data sources. This will undoubtedly be the hardest and most time-consuming part, since I'll be glueing together various APIs and datasets into something useful. The data is also liable to change without notice, breaking something in the process. And finally, this will also need periodic maintenance so that I can update the data over time until I automate the collect & import process.

2. The next step is to index the data so that it's searchable. Indexing simply means creating a uniform data structure around your disparate heaps of data so that you can quickly retrieve and process information.

3. Once we have all of our data in a format that is readable by the machine, we can work on the actual search algorithm. I don't need to reinvent the wheel here and can simply use the best existing full-text search algorithm This should be able to sort the returned data from a search input through some measure of relevance. This should also be able to return a number of specified items so we can paginate on the UI. Which brings me to...

4. The UI! Once we have a system that has ingested all relevant data and can sort & search through a term given to it, we will need to build a UI that can let the user do it in an intuitive way. I really like how Linus built Monocle and will likely draw a lot of inspiration from his UI once I get this far.

There you have it. This is a project that will take some time to build properly, but is something that has a lot of potential to be expanded in many directions once I get the MVP out (a tool that can search through all my data). Here are some long-term use-cases that I can see myself eventually building out.

• A day context for any given note (what weather was like, what you did, where you went, etc.)

• Day timeline that can give you an overview of what the day was actually like

• Automated habit creation (since you know quantitatively what happened on a given day)

• Twilio integration for auto-tagging certain things that I want to notate (if I choose to) like people I was with, off-hand activities, etc.

• To scale this beyond myself, turn this product into an electron app with data on a local database or personal cloud so that there's minimal data privacy issues

Let's see how far I can get on this project by the next newsletter!

🍯 Best Finds

• 📝 The Tyranny of Numbers by Thomas J Bevan: I serendipitously found this article after deciding to take my Apple Watch off for a few days to see how I felt. Shocker — I feel great, minus the FOMO of not recording a particularly intense tennis session or the fact that I couldn't prove I was standing for 18 hours in a day.
  
  "... and once you do this, once you are no longer tyrannised by numbers you will find that intuition, discernment and the appreciation of the intangible, the ephemeral and the beautiful will grow in their place."
   

• 👾 Github1s: This one's for my code fiends. Github1s allows you to view entire GitHub repositories on the browser as if you're browsing with VSCode! Brilliant.
  
  Carbon is another code-adjacent tool that allows you to input code snippets and get a well formatted and aesthetic box to share it on whatever medium you prefer.
   

• 🌡 The Well-Tempered Traveler by Google: Beyond subsidizing earth-shattering science through advertising dollars, Google uses it's unparalleled troves of data to do more mundane things, like making planning travel easier. This is a useful resource that shows you a visual representation of weather (temperature and rainfall) of various cities to plan out the optimal time to visit.
   

• 🔊 Pink Noise: I was never a fan of white noise, as it was annoying and irksome. Pink noise on the other hand feels much more amenable to my ears and I find myself able to get into a deep state of focus much more easily, especially when my environment is peppered with noise.

👋🏽 Conclusion

This month has been rich with life and inspiration, and I'm genuinely so grateful for all of the opportunities, experiences, and people I have in my life. 24 has been one hell of a year, and I can't even imagine what 25 will be like — I'm glad to have you along for this journey. Stay tuned.

Just a reminder that you can interact by replying to this email or tweeting @nikhilthota.

Ciao,
— Thot

smart notes, a new job, and swimming

🗺 Personal Updates

Switching to a bullet-point format here:

• Currently thriving in SF with Tech Bro Summer in full swing. I don't even think in roundtrip anymore.

• Transferred to WhatsApp and made it "LinkedIn official".

• Taking ~2 weeks of time off between jobs 👆🏽 spending it mostly writing, reading, walking, sauna-ing, and booling with friends.

🎨 Artifacts

I finally worked my way through How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. Reading a book about the ideal way to take notes is peak nerd, as Mack never fails to remind me. This book, however, has changed my approach to note-taking for the better. Taking "Smart Notes" is all about turning inputs into insightful & actionable outputs through writing. Expect a write-up in the future that deep dives into my overall knowledge management system.

My website is starting to feel stale. Every year or two, I feel like tearing everything down and starting from scratch. Though, I now have a good foundation so the plan is to augment its functionality by migrating my book reviews over from Goodreads and maybe add some more 𝘢𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 to my site overall.

🤿 Reflections

I have a... confession to make. I'm an adult that doesn't know how to swim. I spent the majority of my childhood in one of America's wettest states: Florida. As is tradition in the swamp, my parents put me in swim lessons. Though, my 8-year-old self decided that he preferred video games on land and my parents didn't fight it, not knowing how to swim themselves. If only they knew the depths of fear & fomo that this decision would instill within me.The following is an account of my swimming journey up until now.

Throughout middle & high school, I avoided friend's houses with pools, social outings at the beach, and water parks like the plague. It wasn't until college that I decided to dip my toes in and recruited a friend of mine who was on the swim team to teach me how to swim. That old Aristotle quote rang true in this case — knowing how to swim ≠ being able to teach it.

"Those that know do, those that understand teach." — Aristotle, probably

I kept at it and eventually learned how to freestyle in the shallow end of the pool for ~25m thanks to YouTube and a healthy glob of anxiety. I learned how to use the kickboard and bought myself a dapper pair of goggles (and a pair of speedos, before promptly returning it once my 25m-freestyle-high wore off). The summer after my sophomore year of college, I interned in South Florida, just 15 minutes from Miami. I had decided that enough was enough and scoured the local area to find a swim instructor.

None of the instructors I found had much experience with adults because for someone growing up in Florida, learning to swim is synonymous to learning to walk. Eventually I found someone that seemed friendly and open to teaching someone over the age of 8. I went to the local YMCA twice a week to flounder in the pool and she attempted to teach me the basic strokes & how to tread water. After a month of this, I felt much more comfortable and added lap swimming to my comfortable repertoire of exercise.

My internship ended and I felt much more confident in a pool, assuming I could touch the floor. Unfortunately, the confidence to swim in the ocean or dive into the deep end still eluded me. After this promising start, my swimming growth took a backseat to school and the internship hunt. A few more summers of missed opportunities in the Pacific Ocean and Lake Tahoe flew by, and I gave it another shot and signed up for adult swimming lessons at my University during my final semester.

It was comforting (minor schadenfreude?) to see grad students and professors that were far more fearful of water than I was — one even struggled to dip his toes into the water. I remember what it felt like to be in that position, and I feel for him and respected his tenacity as a tenured professor with glittering accolades that should have it "figured out". Unfortunately, the lessons weren't that great and yet again, I learned that an excellent swimmer does not make for an excellent swim instructor.

I continued to practice and pushed my boundaries whenever I could, occasionally venturing into the deep end and practicing my treading. My school had a program at a nearby lake (Lake Wauberg) that gave you a sailing certification after a few classes. The only caveat was that you had to be able to swim 50m in open water and tread for at least 3 minutes. I made it close to this amount but alas, was swept away from my practice yet again by the demands & vibes of the semester.

Since then, I've managed to jump into Vietnam's Ha Long Bay (albeit with a life jacket on) and surf in Hawaii. Though, Covid-19 had other plans and the public pools of the world closed down for about 1.5 years. Things are opening up, and I'm swimming again at the pool in my local Crunch Fitness. It's a slow & steady process but between tread-offs with Mack in the Scottsdale public pool to learning how to breast-stroke at Crypto mansion parties, I'm getting there. More importantly, I'm realizing that learning to swim as an adult doesn't have to be scary — it can even be fun. I have a feeling that this is the last summer that I'll be a landlubber.

Why does any of this matter? I thought that I was an anomaly (and maybe I am as far as Floridians are concerned) but it turns out that > 50% of Americans say they cannot properly swim. That's an insane metric, and considering how nourishing the water can be, too many people are missing out on the healing that time spent in water can bring. I hope to learn how to swim confidently as an adult and document my experience along the way for anyone else that struggles with this. It's possible, and I will show you the way.

From Melon Dash, the creator of the Miracle Swimming School for Adults:

...

"Panic doesn't happen in my class," Dash said,

"because I start by saying 'Your job is to have fun.' It's not that they need to learn how to tread water, they need to learn how to be here."*

Here are the skills & milestones that I am focusing on:

1. Learn all of the major strokes (freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly)

2. Master the breath control necessary to be effective

3. Be able to tread water indefinitely

4. Swim comfortably into deep water and feel at peace

5. Venture into open water — waves, sea critters, and all

Above all, I think Mary Roach from the New York Times Play Magazine sums it up best:

"... I don’t care about form. All I want is to be one of the people who can jump gleefully into deep water and remain there, splashing and laughing."

🍯 Best Finds

🧴 Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? by Rowan Jacobsen: One of the first questions I had when hitting the pool this summer was "do I need sunscreen?" — I've long been skeptical since the idea of buying a product to slather it all over my skin seemed a bit sus, especially since my ancestors in hot & humid India have been fine without it for generations.

This post is a look into the science and economics of sunscreen, and has given me a more nuanced opinion on sunscreen and its relation to Vitamin D. tl;dr time spent in the sun is important and considering my skin color, I don't plan on wearing it beyond hours of exposure in a very high UV-index environment.

📑 Studying Studies by Peter Attia: Reading scientific literature (especially health & medical papers) is a skill in itself. There's a lot of jargon and its surprisingly easy to lie with statistics. This series gets to the heart of it and explains a lot of the common ways people misinterpret these studies, and some strategies to better understand what's actually happening.

Check out my Twitter Thread on the series for a nice summary & more context.

🔮 Mini Lectures in Probability by Taleb: Like him or not, Taleb is a polymath with a gift for breaking down complex concepts. Like Attia in Studying Studies, Taleb goes through fundamental concepts in the realm of statistics and probability to give us a more intuitive understanding of things like standard deviation, fat tails, power laws, etc.

Alas, even with all that knowledge he has yet to learn how to put a sweater on.

📓 PediaPress: Have you ever wanted to turn Wikipedia pages into a book? Me neither, but it's cool to know that it's possible! I found this as I was researching for my upcoming mega-post about Anime and found this 563 page book with its contents fully sourced from Wikipedia articles.

👋🏽 Conclusion

That's it folks! A friend told me over coffee that there wasn't a clear call-to-action in these newsletters. I genuinely love the feedback & thoughts that I get from ya'll so here's a reminder that you can interact with this newsletter by either Tweeting at / DMing me or just replying to the email.

Au revoir!
— Thot

knowledge management, algae, and the desert

🗺 Personal Update

I'm currently in San Francisco after spending much of May in Arizona. My ashy ankles & kneecaps are rehydrating as a vibrant summer in the city is a-brewin'. I'll be here for 2+ months, the longest contiguous time I've spent in SF since 2019. ✌🏽

🎨 Artifacts

I recently finished Island by Aldous Huxley and have a book review ready, fresh off the press. This is a dreamy work of utopian fiction and is in striking contrast to his seminal Brave New World — I've expanded upon the similarities and differences in detail in my review.

I also finished Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. This book hit deep — I can now understand why so many consider it their favorite book of all time. Check out my book review for more.

In the vein of creation, after re-reading How to Take Smart Notes, I have taking inspiration from the prolific Niklas Luhmann and am writing what I want to in a given moment rather than forcing myself to work on an idea without the right inspiration or resources. As a result, there are 3 larger bodies of work that I am alternating between right now (anime, roam / personal knowledge management, and ... cheesiness). 🧀

🥑 Experiments

This past month, I've been chowing down on globs of spirulina, chlorella, and other nutritious micro-algae every day. I'm sane I swear — these algae are some of the most dense and bioavailable sources of protein & nutrients available. There is also some promising research showing that they might protect the brain and improve metabolic function.

A problem innate to health & nutrition research is that the human body is finicky, and what benefits one person will not necessarily benefit another. This is why I champion personal experimentation through self-administered n-of-1 trials in which you determine for yourself whether a treatment jives with your particular biology. However, even with self-experimentation, it's difficult to extract meaningful insight without a rigorous and well-designed protocol.

So... that's what I'll be discussing in this month's newsletter. Instead of doing what I set out to do (write about my experience using algae) — I decided to zoom out and procrastinate by creating a robust system for myself to aid in self-experimentation.

source: xkcd

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT)

A well-designed RCT is the gold standard for modern scientific & clinical research. The intent is to reduce bias, balance unknown factors, and isolate the exact variables being measured. How can we take the best aspects of RCTs and apply them to our own self-experimentation?

• Randomization is used when assigning subjects to groups to minimize selection & allocation bias. Since I am the only subject, we'll need to be a bit clever here — I'll need to participate in both experiment groups at different times. I can randomize the order in which I'll participate in any group on any given day. This leads us to blinding.

• Blinding is to (1) prevent the subject from knowing what they are being exposed to and (2) prevent the scientist from unconsciously biasing the results. One way to implement blinding is to get a friend to organize & assort everything, but this is self experimentation we're talking about. Again, we'll need to be clever and simulate blinding by making the test and control items look as similar as possible. Gwern has written a lot on this topic.

• Isolation of the control variable is next. Since life is complex and it's impossible to perfectly isolate a variable, there will be some leeway we'll have to live with. As much as possible, I will keep my days standard (or make sure the chaotic energy of life is evenly distributed throughout both test & control windows).

• There are two kinds of data to consider when conducting self-experiments.

  1. The first is the automagically gathered biometric data from fitness trackers like Oura & Apple Watch or digital usage data from something like RescueTime or Rize.

  2. The second is subjective sentiment data collected through reflection e.g. "how is my energy level today from 1 to 10?" which should be specifically tailored to the variable I'm looking to test. This also includes qualitative findings that can inform a broader understanding of the results.

• Once we have the data, we can run simple analyses like regression to map the incidence of control / test to the collected data. Since biometric & well-being data is bounded and inherently thin-tailed, we can assume normal Gaussian distribution and find correlations.

Now that we've got a basic pseudo-scientific framework for a self-experimentation protocol, how would we apply this to the aforementioned dinner of delicious algae?

1. Creating a placebo algae will be tough. One option would be to use a kind of algae with no proven health benefits as the control group and a mishmash of "healthy" micro-algae as the test group.

2. The health benefits of algae take roughly ~1 week to kick in, so we can collect data from the ~1 week after this initial loading phase.

3. Thus, I'll need to create a set of test & control algae baggies with 14 globs in each. At the beginning of a 2-week window, I will randomly pick a baggie and take the algae daily until I run out, while collecting data for the latter 7 days.

4. During this data collection period, I'll measure a broad swath of health factors like sleep through Oura, general aerobic and athletic performance through my Apple Watch, level of focus during the day through Rize, and subjective levels of well-being and energy.

5. Finally, I'll run a few regressions to see if there was any statistically significant increase in my measured health factors by eating algae.

Doesn't that sound fun? I think so. 🦠

🍯 Best Finds

💊 Higher than the Shoulders of Giants by SlimeMoldTimeMold: This article is a fascinating history of drugs. It makes a strong case for the argument that our modern world wouldn't exist without the creativity, energy, focus, and perspectives that drugs like caffeine, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and psilocybin unlocked in society.

💻 The Art of Code by Dylan Beattie: The YouTube recommendation algorithm strikes again! This talk re-invigorated my love for computers and touches on simulations, the mandelbrot set, deep dreaming, quines, ridiculous programming languages, and what is truly meant by a "Rockstar".

💰 Wealth Shown to Scale by Matt Korostoff: Our brains can't grasp multiple order-of-magnitude wealth gaps between average people and billionaires. This brilliant visualization will hurt your hand by the time you're done scrolling through Jeff Bezos' fat tail of wealth.

🪙 The Bit Short: Inside Crypto's Doomsday Machine by Crypto Anonymous: I wrote the a sentiment similar to the below tidbit in my journal a few days ago following the recent events of our favorite roller coaster:

Crypto just went back up again. WTF, huh wat. What a volatile asset class.

I would recommend anyone who invests in crypto to read the above article and learn about the sketchy dealings of Tether and its implications. If you're still down to clown in the wild west, here's an excellent article on setting up a yield farming system to earn substantial interest on crypto assets.

👋🏽 Conclusion

Times are a-changin' — my first real career transition is happening this month. I'm switching to a role in WhatsApp working on messaging graph infrastructure. This is fundamentally different in nature from the product engineering that I've typically done but I'm looking forward to feelin dumb again. Expect a write-up on the transition in the coming months.

In other news, Macc will be spending the summer here in SF in a hacker house for women as she searches for her place within the Crypto Metaverse. Wild times.

Adiós ✌🏽
— Thot

S02 E02: Alloying Adults with Animation 📺

book reviews, tech history, and anime

🗺 Personal Update

I began this month in Florida and flew to San Francisco after getting jabbed at my trusty local Walgreens. I've been here since and have been spending time with friends, playing tennis, and not eating for 72 40 hours. Though, more adventures in the mountains and desert are in the horizon.

🎨 Artifacts

I'm back on the book review train! First up we have a review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. This book is polarizing, left me with a strong desire to learn more about philosophy, and implement many of the ideas presented — all signals of a good book IMO.

Next, we have a couple more around the sphere of tech & computing history. Here's a review of Hackers by Steven Levy and one of The Innovators by Walter Isaacson.

• I was inspired to read these after seeing this post on stitching together mental instruments by reading clusters of interrelated books. I hope to read a few more about the topic of computing history and eventually write a post summarizing my gleanings by weaving together multiple perspectives into a tapestry of understanding.

🌊 Life Reflections

I recently started watching Attack on Titan (AoT), which is (according to Ranker) currently voted as the best anime show of all time. I haven't been this enthralled by a show in a long time and yet again, it's an animated show that takes the cake.

Like many 90s kids, I had an anime phase in my youth that didn't stick as a long-term interest. Like video games and Twitter, it's just too good and I know my younger self would've gotten obsessed if I hadn't pulled the plug. Though, my recent late-night binges of AoT have made me wonder: what is it about anime that makes it so enjoyable?

Before I get any further, I'd like to dispel the idea that anime is for kids. It's an irrational bias that people have since they might have watched cartoons as a child and now consider anything animated as childish.

Saying all anime is childish is like saying all watercolor paintings are childish because you used to fingerpaint in kindergarten.
— answer-questions on Reddit

The fact is that many of the most well-known anime shows are not for kids since they explore dark and complex themes. The first episode of AoT itself messed me up for a while — I can't imagine how a child weaned on The Fairly Odd Parents would react.

Animation

I've written about Avatar: The Last Airbender in the past, but there's a tangible cultural difference between western anime like ATLA and a Japanese-influenced anime like Attack on Titan. The canonical comparison here is America's Pixar vs. Japan's Studio Ghibli. Both cultural contexts manage to express the raw power of the human spirit through well-crafted characters and narratives.

Animation as a medium has a far more expressive canvas for an artist to realize their vision. Every detail can be tweaked to impart the ambience that the creator is looking for — including art style, music, pacing, characters, lighting, general vibe, etc. This control over the final product takes a greater level of skill to perfect but can lead to masterpieces. This explains the wide variance that makes bad anime terrible and good anime amazing.

Another factor is that the creators don't need to cater to the egos of famous actors who could strong-arm the direction of the project. The most user-facing contributors to an anime are the voice actors, who are criminally underrated. How else can you explain one of the main voice actors of Pixar's most acclaimed franchise being more well known for her second life as a whimsical historical writer?

As a form of escapist entertainment, anime is a medium that can't be beat. You might relate to the character's internal struggles, but their external circumstances are sometimes so absurd that it's comical. There might be some level of distance from reality needed for content like this to be truly compelling — the stories you see are divorced from real life so you feel free to fully immerse yourself in the plot without drawing mental parallels to your own life.

As an American, it's also a welcome escape from traditional western media. Don't get me wrong, most forms of media can be great, but anime holds a unique spot in culture. When inundated with western media, the focus on dialogue, story, and viewer immersion in anime is a welcome change of pace.

I've only scratched the surface as there's so much more to the difference between western & eastern media, the manga origins of anime, and the bizarre subcultures that exist. For now, I'll enjoy having a show to look forward to every night and know that my worries will melt away into the world of the Titans.

🍯 Best Finds

👾 Tails: Tails is a tool that I recently discovered for protecting your privacy online. It's an operating system installed directly on a flash drive that can be plugged into any computer that supports USB and wipes all user-data when you shut down. It's free and comes with privacy software by default like Tor, PGP encryption, etc. I recommend this video as a primer.

📝 Mailbag #2 by Tim Urban: A delightful look into the mind of one of my favorite writers. Every single question answered has a unique perspective or insight to consider.

📝 Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too by Pieter Levels: I tend to take a terrible amount of time to reply to messages, emails, or requests from those I don't consider kin. This is a feature, as Pieter Levels describes in this post. Here's a video with more actionable ways to become 'unreachable'.

"Prioritizing responding to DMs from strangers if my girlfriend is sitting next to me and wants a hug, or my friend wants to go for a walk, or I haven't called my parents in a week, or there's a critical bug on my sites. It'd be stupid to."

🎧 Tyler Cowen on the Lex Friedman Podcast: Tyler Cowen is a genius — no doubt about that. He's open-minded, curious, and can seemingly present an eloquent counterfactual to anything. This episode in particular challenged a lot of the ideas I've internalized like the demonization of bureaucracy and crypto maximalism.

🎧 The Complete History and Analysis of Bitcoin by The Acquired Podcast: I've stopped compulsively checking Bitcoin prices but will be forever blown away by its impact on the world and am always yearning for more information. This 3 hour behemoth is the most comprehensive resource I've found on learning about the history of this insane movement.

👋🏽 Conclusion

I actually have a lot more to say about the topic of anime, so I plan to write a more thorough post on my website soon. In other news, I've started supplementing algae. Expect an experiment write-up in the May 2021 edition of this newsletter!

Adiós ✌🏽
— Thot

new season who dis — are jobs a scam?

🗺 Personal Update

I left Colorado earlier than expected and caught a flight the day before a historic snow storm dumped 40 inches of snow in the area. I've spent the past few weeks defrosting in Florida.

🎨 Artifacts

After months of grueling development, scope creep, changing requirements, and legal / privacy churn, I finally shipped what I've been working on at Facebook for the past few months. It's a feature that allows you to create meeting plans on Facebook Marketplace & then share these plans with trusted contacts to provide a layer of safety. Here's a video.
 

As I mentioned last month, I'm evolving this newsletter. It feels a bit early for a season 2, but the previous format was spreading me thin. Instead of having separate sections for career reflections, life reflections, and personal experiments, I'm now going to pick just one of these to flesh out in detail.

👨🏽‍💻 Career Reflections

One of the great ironies of life is that when you achieve something you've been working towards (e.g. get from point A to point B), you often feel empty and restless afterwards. It's partially because of a post-dopamine release of prolactin, and partially because of an assumption that getting to B will solve your problems. The reality is that you ought to find a new B soon, or the lack of self-imposed structure will eat away at you.

It doesn't have to always be like this. In an awakened person, the loss of structure and responsibility can be freeing — more time & energy spent towards a higher purpose. However in this case, B is permanently defined as the infinite game of spiritual equanimity.

I'm not there yet, and I don't know if I ever will be. After finally getting the promotion that I'd been working at for months, I felt hollow. Well, not completely — I was elated for a day and got plenty of accolades from friends & family. I didn't know what I was expecting but it wasn't the lasting sense of fulfillment that I'd hoped for.

“If you're doing something for an imagined reward you might achieve it eventually , but you'll probably always be disappointed.”
— On Sticking With It by Ava

This is the problem that I've always had with goals. In the case of my job, the joyful hours spent clacking away at technical problems became secondary to the gravitational pull of promotion — the present moment was sacrificed to the altar of the goal. The obvious solution to the emptiness would be to orient myself towards the next promotion and get back in the game. I could rush to find myself a new B to minimize time spent in the purgatory. However, what does that say about my feelings towards my job?

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”
— Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

When the job itself ceases being meaningful and I find myself in the clout-chasing limbo of corporate advancement, it's time to re-evaluate. I think about things that I do more-so for the sheer enjoyment of the activity like writing or working on fun projects. I'm happy putting in the hours and letting the process unfold by itself rather than expecting or forcing an outcome. It's far more enjoyable and meaningful than scrambling up the career ladder.

I eventually landed back on my motivations for taking this job in the first place. There were a few: (1) it was the most logical option I had at the time if I had to pick one, (2) it afforded me the opportunity to live in an amazing city with close friends, (3) gave me quality experience, skills, and 'career capital', and more importantly (4) I didn't know what I wanted to spend my life doing. This role was a great stopgap while I figured that out.

I still don't think I've figured what I want to devote my life towards yet, but my mind is more aware of the possibilities. I have far greater financial and emotional stability since graduating college, and am thus better positioned to taking risks. The more I consider it, the more I'm drawn towards a less stable role as a founder or early employee of a startup. But maybe I'm romanticizing it.

As for now, I have no immediate plans to jump ship. I am however much less bound by my desire to advance the career ladder. Rather, I'm striving to pay more attention and get as close to the process as possible. I'm confident that when the time is right and the sands begin to shift, I'll make my next move.

🍯 Best Finds

📓 podcastnotes.org: Curation is key in a world oversaturated with content. I've been searching for a resource to recommend me top-notch podcasts while also providing some notes, and Podcastnotes does the job. They release summaries of 5-10 high-quality podcasts per week, which is plenty to chew on. Pairing this with Airr, I now have a formidable podcast consumption flow where I can listen intently but also know that I have my own and someone else's notes to reference later.

🎧 Huberman Lab: This is a podcast I discovered (via Podcastnotes) by Andrew Huberman — a Stanford professor with the gift of scientific gab. It's relatively new, but I've learned more about optimizing my health from Dr. Huberman than any other resource I've referenced before.

🧘🏽‍♂️ Yoga Nidra: Diving... even deeper down the rabbit hole, here is 20 min video of Yoga Nidra, a deep relaxation technique recommended by Dr. Huberman. He advocates Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) Protocols to recharge the mind and encourage optimal learning, and Yoga Nidra (meditation with a focus on physical sensations) is a prime example of this practice. This video in particular helped me enter the deepest meditative state that I've ever felt.

📝 How to get promoted by Slava Akhmechet: I haven't been this paradoxically cynical of and motivated by corporate office dynamics since reading the Gervais Principle. Funnily enough, the author was the same guy that was goofy enough to pontificate on product-market fit and hot girls on Twitter.

👋🏽 Conclusion

Keeping up with the precedent I set a few months ago, I want to share another goal that I was able to mostly accomplish. I wanted to become comfortable carving blue runs on a snowboard by shredding the 'gnar for at least 10 days in Colorado. I went 9 times and would've gone 10 if the aforementioned snowstorm didn't wreck our plans.

Do I feel comfortable on blues? Depends on the day and the run, but overall I'd consider this a success. I'm excited to hit the slopes again next season. ✅

Adiós ✌🏽
— Thot

Snowboarding, Local Infrastructure, and Frozen Dead Guys

🗺 Personal Update

It's been another month of transience for me. I started the month in San Francisco, spent a few weeks in Arizona and am currently in a small mountain town in Colorado near the Eldora Ski Resort, living with some close friends until mid-march.

🎨 Artifacts

I've been cookin' up come updates to my website. The first is a new page for viewing all of my /writing. The second is a page to get a pulse on what's going on in my life right /now, inspired by Derek. I highly recommend viewing them on mobile. Also huge shoutout to my very talented friend Carl for the banner assets.

• My /now page is currently manual (I have to pull in my books & listening history by hand) but I hope to automate it in the future to update whenever there's a push to my site. Might even write something about using APIs and web scrapers 🤫

I also recently published a piece about the inherent discomfort associated with most creative and growth-oriented pursuits. Ironically, this took me almost 3 months to complete. Clocking out at ~600 words, that's 7 words and .01 graphs per day.

👨🏽‍💻 Career Reflections

I got promoted! After a grueling remote H2, I've finally made the transition from a small new-grad cog to a slightly larger industry cog. Mo money mo problems. All jokes aside, I'm happy that my efforts paid off and I get to further push the boundaries of my career comfort zone.

I've been thinking a lot about the value of 'jobs' and came to the conclusion that one of the best parts of being employed is the implicit social network. There have been talks of water-cooler conversations, forced social interaction, and contrived happy hours, but I think there's something to be said about these rituals.

Since the start of quarantine, I've found it difficult to keep up with friends outside of my immediate bubble. It was difficult before, but now there's a powerful justification to absolve all flakiness: Covid-19.

One thing that's helped in this regard is scheduling 1-1s and chats with friends (both in and out of work) during work hours. I find that this remedies some of the social serendipity lost to remote work.

🌊 Life Reflections

A society cannot function without infrastructure. In a well-functioning system, infrastructure is easy to take for granted. Spending weeks in a small mountain town is a culture shock and not just for the fact that they have a festival dedicated to frozen dead guys.

1. We need to drive to the local laundromat to clean our clothes since our Airbnb doesn't have a washer or dryer.

2. Garbage needs to driven to the local dump, where we need to pay to discard anything that's not recyclable.

3. Neither USPS nor Amazon deliver to houses. Packages need to be addressed to 'General Delivery' and be picked up at the local post office.

4. Power outages ranging from 2 to 48 hours are common and expected here.

5. The internet caps out at a whopping 10mpbs for the whole gang of remote workers living here, leaving us at the whim of our hotspots. At least the host is planning on getting Starlink this summer?

6. Being nestled in the mountains, there are no Uber / Lyft pickups. You need to drive ~20 min into civilization to catch a ride.

There is however, something magical about living in a tight-knit community of 1336 residents. You see the same people at the laundromat walk over to the grocery store in their snow-speckled boots. You wave to the deli worker and laugh with the cashier over the fourth bar of Ghirardelli's dark chocolate that you've bought this week. You walk by the reservoir and see some kids fishing in the frozen lake, right by the local crystal shop. Even in -20° weather, the Nederland community stays warm & sticks together.

🥑 Personal Experiments

Last month, my experiment was to read Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming and implement the practices mentioned in the book. Unfortunately, I wasn't as diligent as I could've been with my dream journal and found it difficult to remember most of my dreams.

However... I managed to have a lucid dream! Half-way through the month, I found myself in a bus driving through the desert surrounded by random athletes and high school acquaintances. The absurdity of the situation hit me and I became lucid — the excitement was short lived and within a few seconds found myself awake in my bed.

I don't think I'll be actively trying to induce lucid dreams in the near future, but I will be keeping some of the practices that I've learned this month.

• Dream Journaling: If I have a vivid dream, I want to write it down. If not for improving my lucid dream induction in the future, for keeping a running record of the bizarre machinations of my subconscious.

• REM Optimization: It turns out the REM sleep (the stage of sleep in which you dream) happens primarily towards the end of a night. While important for dreaming, this stage is also theorized to promote self-induced therapy for the brain. For both of these reasons, I want to make sure I'm getting ample REM every night.

• Reality Checks: If you don't actively question whether you're dreaming during your waking state, you won't think to do the same while you're dreaming. Lucid dreaming aside, these checks are easy and can bring you closer to the present moment. Examples include looking in a mirror, trying to fly, and pressing your hand into a wall to see if it goes through.

February's experiment wasn't necessarily a success, but that's okay. Experiments are for trying new things and seeing what sticks and can be incorporated into daily life.

One of my recent musings has been around energy inputs & outputs. More specifically, what happens to internal energy when you come into contact with external inputs. For myself, too much stimuli in the form of news, emails, or content overwhelms me and I find it difficult to create anything meaningful.

A few years ago, I wrote about some ways to reclaim your digital attention but I have since creeped back up to an unmanageable load of Substacks, podcasts, and feeds. My experiment for this month is to cut out everything non-essential and see what ends up sticking afterwards.

🍯 Best Finds (nectar of life?)

This week's finds are a little... eclectic. I'm sharing a broader array of things that I've found interesting instead of limiting myself to articles, podcasts, or other forms of media. My north star for this is 5 Bullet Friday, which is one of the few email subscriptions that I've kept up for the sheer breadth of value it gives me.

📝 psychedelics: a personal take by Ava: Lyrical and analytical, this piece explores the value of psychedelic substances for personal growth. With all of the brilliant research being facilitated by MAPS, we are in a psychedelic renaissance and I'm here for it. Bring on the trippy twenties.

📱 Airr: I discovered this app a few months ago but didn't pay it any mind until recently, when my podcast addiction reached a feverish high. I was listening to hours of podcasts a week but barely remembering or learning anything. My intention when consuming content is partly for entertainment, but mostly for learning.

Airr solves this issue elegantly by giving you the ability to highlight and share snippets of podcast episodes with a simple gesture of your headphones. I liken it to Kindle highlighting, but for audio.

🍺 Bourbon County Stout by Goose Island: This is the most delicious (and affordable) beer I've ever had. If you're into dark & chocolatey drinks, this is the one for you. It's ~$13 per bottle with a 14.3% ABV, giving it a similar alcohol-to-price as a decent bottle of wine. Thanks Wyatt!

🎶 noTunes by Tombonez: Apple is great, but they need to know when to chill. I don't want iTunes opening up every single time I connect my headphones. This simple Mac App prevents iTunes (which I honestly haven't used in years) from launching and denting what could be a productive work session.

👋🏽 Conclusion

That's it folks! The format of this newsletter has been tiring if I'm being honest. I feel as though my writing is spread too thin since I don't want to spew a thousand words in every section. As I mentioned in my December 2020 newsletter, one of my intentions with adding seasons & episodes was to give the newsletter the flexibility to grow and evolve in a structured way over time. It might be time...

Let me know what parts of the newsletter you love the most and what parts you glaze over, and I'll take that into consideration as I narrow the scope of what I'm trying to do here.

Adiós ✌🏽
— Thot

Hawaiian Memory Fragments, Lucid Dreaming, and Goal Setting

Hello hello! A quick meta update before we get into it. I'll be linking all of my newsletters on my website. I like having all of my content in a centralized place, for ease of sharing. You can check it out here.

🗺 Personal Update

I spent the first two weeks of the month in San Francisco, got settled into my new apartment, and did my routine health appointments (we all good 🥵). After that, Mack and I flew to Hawaii, where we worked remotely & spent quality time with some friends that are currently living here.

🎨 Artifacts

On my flight back west, I got through the majority of The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. It was a short, well-written gem on some things about money that we frequently forget. Here are the thread and book review that I wrote.

If you recall, my January experiment was to learn and practice breath-work (specifically Buteyko breathing). In my research, I found Breath by James Nestor which summarized a lot of the major breathing disciplines out there. It has nuggets of wisdom from Nestor's ~10 years as a pulmanaut (breathing enthusiast). Here are the thread and book review that I wrote.

🌊 Life Reflections

I'm writing part of this letter from a beautiful house that my friends rented (and that I'm subsequently crashing at) on Diamondhead in Oahu, Hawaii. As my friend Spencer described in his recent post, it feels unreal to be out here.

The dichotomy between the quarantined world we currently live in and the Hawaiian government literally paying for remote workers to move to the islands is stark. Covid-19 has been relatively non-existent in Hawaii thanks to strong governmental leadership and the people's willingness to cooperate. As such, the tourism-driven economy of Hawaii is ready to spin its wheels again.

For casual travelers like myself, the barriers for entry (a negative test within 72 hours of your flight) were palpably high in the < 10% capacity Hawaiian Airlines flight from SFO to HNL. Even with the stamp-of-approval that I am helping the local economy, I felt guilty. Guilt, however, is a deceptive siren and not the correct frame of reference for making decisions.

Prior to coming here, Mack and I read Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell at the recommendation of a friend. It's a journalist's rehashing of Hawaii's tumultuous history. I highly recommend the audiobook which is narrated by the author (who by the way is Violet from The Incredibles), Keanu Reeves, Paul Rudd, and other random stars.

Here's the tl;dr of Hawaiian history from 1778 (when Captain Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to visit) to now:

• King Kamehameha I first united all of the islands after years of conflict.

• Henry Opukahaia's parents were killed in the bloody power struggle, which gave Henry a distaste for his native ways. He moved to the mainland and found himself at Yale college, where he became a devout Christian and vowed to launch the first mission to Hawaii and civilize the savages. He contracted typhoid at the age of 26 and died shortly thereafter.

• Inspired by Henry's story, a group of missionaries decided to carry on his dream and set sail on the Thaddeus for a 164 day journey to The Sandwich Islands. Notable figures here include the Binghams (preachers), the Whitneys (teachers), and the Chamberlains (farmers).

• When the missionaries arrived, they found that the Kapu system and old religious order were both ended by King Liholiho.

• Missionaries converted Kaahumanu to Christianity, who was King Kamehameha I's favorite wife and held the real power in Hawaii.

• Missionaries, with the support of the elite, created a written Hawaiian language and spread literacy to both the chiefs and commoners of the island.

• The Kamehameha I line effectively died out with the death of Nahienaena and her child by her brother, Keokauliani. Kalakua and his heir successor, Liluokalani, were the next era of monarchs.

• The Hawaiians were increasingly influenced by Western culture and were dying off because of European diseases. Their land was also being divided and privatized by the foreigners.

• The rise of huge Hawaiian sugar and pineapple plantations led to an influx of Chinese and Japanese laborers, who were pushed out of the newly created government and voting system.

• Queen Liluokalani was ousted out of her role as Monarch by the Hawaiian rebels led by Sanford Dole, William R. Castle and Lorrin Thurston. Kalakua, her predecessor, was fiscally and morally irresponsible, which led the American-born rebels to take matters into their own hands.

• Hawaii is officially declared an American territory in 1900 by President McKinley.

The systematic dismantling of native culture by outside forces is always a sad sight to see — though, the Europeans weren't the only complicit party. The Hawaiian elites (Ali'i) welcomed European influence and Christianity as a way to bring their kingdom into modernity. There's no doubt that the missionaries and Ali'i alike had good intentions, and they did manage to do some amazing things for the people like vastly improving literacy, establishing global trade, and providing a spiritual salve when the old ways were abolished by Liholiho.

Maybe it was inevitable, but I can't help but wonder what Hawaii would be like today if the free market of ideas had been allowed to operate without interference from the biased influence of elites and missionaries.

🥑 Personal Experiments

This past month I did a deep-dive into breath-work and specifically, Buteyko Breathing. It involves training your lungs to operate on less oxygen. The backbone of the practice is the Controlled Pause (CP) which measures your body's oxygen efficiency. Here's how you do it:

1. Bring your attention to your breath by breathing normally through your nose for 2-3 min.

2. After a normal exhale, hold your breath once all of the air in your lungs is gone and start a timer.

3. When you feel any involuntary movement in your throat or diaphragm (air hunger), stop the timer and breathe normally again.

4. The number of seconds you lasted is your CP.

It's difficult to accurately measure it the first time as the involuntary movements are subtle, but you'll eventually get a feel for it. My first accurate measurement was 13, but after a month of doing semi-regular exercises, I've increased that by 92% to 25.

Do I feel any different? It's hard to say. When running experiments, you should modify one variable while keeping the rest constant but that's hard to do when spending the month strewn in multiple time zones. I do feel qualitatively better, and the biomechanics of improved oxygenation are compelling to me. The majority of the exercises can be seamlessly incorporated into your life with a bit of practice. Here's what I've learned to be useful that I'll take moving forward:

• Always breathe through your nose.

• Use your diaphragm when breathing and avoid shallow breathing through your chest (it triggers the flight-or-fight response).

• Occasionally do breath holds after the exhale when walking.

• When stressed, do a few cycles of the perfect breath (5.5s inhale & 5.5s exhale).

Next month, I want to gain control of my dreams. Lucid Dreaming is a form of metacognition in which you're aware of and potentially able to control a dream. It has been associated with benefits like a more deeply connected brain and better mental health. However, it has its potential downsides.

The plan is to read LaBerge's seminal work on the topic and implement the techniques in the book. I'll be writing my thoughts down in a journal and will share a synthesis of my findings next month. Mack will also be joining me on this journey as my accountability partner. 💭

🍯 Best Finds (nectar of life?)

📝 Deliberate Practice for Knowledge Work by Simon Sarris: Simon Sarris is one of my favorite writers. Reading his work feels like getting lost in a beautiful forest of fables and life experiences. This piece argues that the best way to cultivate deliberate practice for knowledge work is to just have fun with it and play.

📝 Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21 by The Paris Review: This one's an oldie, drawing from an interview done with Hemingway in 1958. It's a peek into the creative process of one of the world's most iconic writers.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

📝 No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees by Sahil Lavingia: Can a meaningful tech career be a component of your life that provides enough money in exchange for 10-20 hours of your week?

This is the tale of how Gumroad went from nearly going under to piloting an organizational structure with no meetings, deadlines, or full-time employees. This innovation in the nature of work is a significant departure from the VC funded 60+ hour work == life weeks of Silicon Valley.

🎧 Carl Jung — Heroes, Alchemy, and Connection by James Beshra: After listening to this, I checked whether Carl Jung was still alive. It turns out he died in 1961. Regardless, this interview with him is organic and insightful.

James: You actually make a large point in your work and lectures around dismantling heroes. That our heroes should be “unclothed, shirtless, with flaws revealed.”
Carl: Yes, that is actually one of our largest, societal, collective flaws. We put heroes on mantles, with unattainable stature, washing them clean of any flaws.

📹 Good evening, is this available? by Lubalin: One of the funniest things I've ever seen — thsnks Facebook Marketplace. I bet you can't watch it just once.

👋🏽 Conclusion

The new year is a weird time. I'm not convinced that setting goals during the purgatory-esque holiday months is the most effective strategy. There's also evidence that sharing your goals makes you less likely to achieve them.

In light of this, I'm going to keep my goals to myself for now, but will share them after they're realized. My hope is that this will incentivize me to actually complete my goals rather than just have them.

That being said, this year I wanted to become more proficient at sports and surfing in Hawaii was one of the related goals. I'm happy to say that I was able to face my fear of open water and surf (albeit on my stomach with a life jacket on). ✅

Until Next Time ✌🏽
— Thot

Thot's December 2020 Thoughts

Hello reader and welcome to 2021! Before we get into it, here are a few meta housekeeping things.

• I'm adding season & episode numbers. I was inspired by this article, which argues that the metaphor of the season (1) provides the newsletter a sense of going somewhere, (2) gives me the option to pause & reflect between seasons, and (3) affords me the flexibility to evolve the newsletter in a structured way.

• I also realized that I don't need to publish exactly on the first day of the month. I'll make sure the monthly cadence is maintained, but there's no need to be so precise with the timing.

🗺 Personal Update

I've spent the past 6 weeks with my family in Florida. As I send this out, I'm en route to San Francisco. I'm spending the next few weeks there, getting situated into my new apartment (The Precita Pad?), and then am hopefully heading to Hawaii. More on that next month...

🎨 Artifacts

I wrote a piece blending the science of fasting with my experience doing a 72 hour fast. It's useful for anyone hoping to try fasting and has some... entertaining drawings.

I recently read Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers and wrote a Goodreads review and a Twitter thread about it. Overall it's entertaining, short, and inspiring — highly recommend.

Finally, I gave a brown bag talk to my coworkers on the wonders of ergonomics. The video of the presentation is behind a corporate firewall, but here's a thread summarizing my favorite ideas and some actionable steps.

🌊 Life Reflections

I have a 9 year old sister. One of the main reasons I choose to spend months with family is to be there as she grows up. It's been a joy watching her develop a personality of her own and soak up my unfortunate mannerisms. As she gets older, I've noticed my parents push her to be more grown up — to them, this means being more responsible and aware of the world around her.

This is all good, but it feels like the wrong way to go about it. Childhood is depicted by society as an idyllic time that ends at adulthood AKA a job and responsibilities. Most "adults" are stressed and busy all the time while most children are immersed in the moment and overflowing with spontaneous joy. Who should be learning from whom?

The question I've been pondering: Is it possible to be a responsible and well-adjusted adult while maintaining the innate creativity, spontaneity, and joy of a child? My intuition says yes, and I can think of countless creatives throughout history that have turned their work into play. What do you think?

👨🏽‍💻 Career Reflections

Lol. See y'all next month.

🥑 Personal Experiments

My experiment this past month was to use Twitter more. A few days into it, I realized that the key was to ignore hesitation and post whatever I felt like. I got over my stage fright but ran into another problem... Twitter is supremely addicting. If I checked it first thing in the morning, I would reflexively open the app every time my focus wavered throughout the day. It has an extraordinary grip on my attention, and I found myself running into my 20 min screen time bumpers constantly. I tried a few things to combat this, and lean towards creation over consumption.

• Draft tweets outside the app. When I had an idea for a tweet, I would draft it outside of the app so I had clarity to think about it and not get sucked into the ever-enticing feed.

• Turn off push notifications. This didn't help. I found myself opening the app when bored, salivating for those sweet blue circles.

• Put some 'Twitter time' on your calendar. I know... This is very nerdy. However, scheduling 30 minutes daily to read / write tweets really helped build the habit of actually using the app more. Once it became a habit, my 'Twitter time' block got ignored and I was hooked.

Overall, I've enjoyed this experiment and will continue to use Twitter. I feel more connected to the ideas of the Twittersphere and have had some cool interactions. One of my favorite writers, Derek Sivers, even replied to a thread I wrote about his book and followed me! 🤯

In January 2021, I'm going to... breathe less? I've been deep in some biomechanical rabbit holes and recently stumbled upon Dr. Konstantin Buteyko. He was a Russian physician who created the Buteyko Method for the treatment of asthma, sleep apnea, and other breathing disorders. It turns out that on average, people breathe 2-3x more than they should, leading to excess oxidative stress. Even people without breathing disorders have reported some remarkable benefits like higher energy levels throughout the day, needing less sleep, etc. when following the Buteyko principles.

Is all of this just hype / placebo? Maybe. Are there any medical studies that validate these glowing anecdotal reports of increased vitality? Kind of. Am I going to spend this month finding out whether it's legit? Hell yeah! I'm a sucker for this stuff. Stay tuned...

🍯 Best Finds (nectar of life?)

📝 The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom: This 2005 allegory confronts the timeless conflict between complacency and the advancement of society. I'll let you discover the moral for yourself.

📝 LinkedIn's Alternative Universe by Fadeke Adegbuyi: LinkedIn is bizarre. It has tons of quirks and features that make you confused, annoyed, and intrigued at the same time. I found myself laughing and nodding in cringed agreement to this piece.

📝 An Island, Vegas, Budapest for A Fraction of the Median House Price by Tynan: This guy has figured out co-ownership of property (an island, a set of shared flats, and a small neighborhood) with friends. If done with the right people and system, the experience is far from a Lord of the Flies dystopia. Rather, it becomes an empowering, meaningful, and financially effective way of sharing resources with friends. I wonder if there's opportunity to do this at scale 👀

📹 Learn Mathematics from START to FINISH by The Math Sorcerer: The Math Sorcerer's passion for math is truly infectious. I would love to (attempt to) do an Ultralearning project over the course of a year, poring through the Sorcerer's recommendations.

👋🏽 Thanks 2020, Adiós

This past year has been one helluva dumpster fire, but there have been many things keeping me optimistic with regards to science & technological progress. Here are a few of my favorites to close out this newsletter with.

• For the first time ever, a private company (SpaceX) sent a staffed crew into space. With space travel 25x cheaper than it was just 20 years ago, space tourism, asteroid mining, and interplanetary settlements are looking less like a Sci-Fi fever dream and more like reality.

• Solar energy is also more accessible than ever, with the costs dropping every year. In sunny parts of the world, the cost of solar is now cheaper than that of fossil fuels — this means that there will soon be an immediate economic incentive to switch to renewable energy.

• OpenAI unveiled GPT-3, a text completion system, which had the primary effect of taking twitter by storm, and the secondary effect of showing us what exponential growth in the field of Artificial Intelligence really means.

• Another AI advancement was Google DeepMind's AlphaFold, which has effectively solved an aspect of one of Biology's biggest problems — protein folding. It allows Biologists to more accurately understand the shapes of proteins. This opens a lot of doors in drug discovery, genetics, and medicine.

• Some scientists injected cells into optic nerves and were able to reverse ageing in the eyes. This caused optic cells to become younger and restored vision in mice.

• Google also made headlines late last year with its stake on Quantum Supremacy — a designation given to a quantum machine that can do something strictly better than a conventional computer. Then, late this year... China staked its claim with different technology that can perform certain computations 100,000,000,000,000 faster than a normal supercomputer.

• Finally, in under a year, companies like Pfizer and Moderna created & got approval for vaccines during the biggest pandemic in a century. The logistical hurdles overcome by the US Government via Project Warp Speed are also outstanding.

Fin ✌🏽
— Thot