November 2025
Incandescent Chicken Lights, Namibian Livestreams, and Nuclear Fusion
“Why am I getting this email?” — You
Keeping in touch is hard.
This email’s purpose is to:
share what I’m up to and cool stuff I’ve found
stay in touch with you (feel free to reply with what’s new!)
Quote I Love:
“Everything is rented.” - Frank Sinatra
Things Exciting Me:
Travels: Visiting Seattle for a Weekend Conference
Toured the Boeing Factory (huge) and Amazon Spheres (beautiful)
Fun Fact: After the Great Fire of 1889, Seattle lifted its streets by 10–30 feet, leaving behind an underground maze that’s still accessible today. Crossing an intersection meant climbing down a ladder, walking below the street level, and climbing up another ladder to reach the next sidewalk.
Road Tripping with Dad from SF to LA for Thanksgiving
Highlights included Carmel Beach, Big Sur, and Hearst Castle
Hearst Castle was developed over 28 years and wasn’t finished at Hearst’s death. Hearst’s corporation ultimately deeded the property to the state of California, as its upkeep was far beyond what any private owner could reasonably manage.
Hosting Jazz Nights!
What I’m Ingesting w/ Takeaways:
Obvious Adams by Robert R. Updegraff (Personal Favorite of David Ogilvy)
The book follows Oliver Adams, an ordinary man who builds an extraordinary advertising career by seeing and saying the obvious.
“I tell you, Mr. Oswald, I believe that lad [Adams] has the making of a copy-man. He’s not clever — and goodness knows we have too many clever men in the shop already — but he seems to see the essential points, and he puts them down clearly.”
Takeaways: Obvious solutions are overlooked, Keep it stupid simple, Make an idea explode in their minds
“The obvious is nearly always simple — so simple that sometimes a whole generation of men and women have looked at it without even seeing it.”
David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy on Lex Friedman Podcast
Dr. Kirtley is the CEO and co-founder of Helion, a nuclear fusion energy company
Dr. Kirtley explains 70+ years of cutting-edge nuclear physics in 2.5 hours.
Thoughts I’m Pondering:
Choosing Faith
People often say science disproves the divine. The world wasn’t created in seven days; the universe unfolded over billions of years. Yet in the Lex Friedman/Dr. Kirtley podcast, when Lex asked Dr. Kirtley what surprised him most, he answered simply: “That it all works.” The strong force, the weak force, gravity, the Earth’s precise orbit… so many variables must align perfectly for life to exist at all. The more we learn, the more improbable it seems, and the more questions emerge.
One of the oldest is the problem of evil: If God exists, why do bad things happen? Is God unable to stop suffering, or unwilling? It is a difficult tension with no tidy resolution.
Somewhere in that uncertainty, faith emerges. If proof were abundant, it wouldn’t be faith; it would just be fact. Faith is believing in something when the evidence challenges your logic. It is choosing to trust in goodness even when you have seen enough of life to know how much darkness there can be.
The older I get, the more good and bad I encounter, and the harder that choice becomes. I recently learned that Theodore Roosevelt lost his wife and his beloved mother on the same day. In his diary he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.” And yet, somehow, he found light again. He chose faith in people, in purpose, in life.
I hope that at the end of mine, I can say the same: that despite all the evidence of the bad, I chose the good.
Other:
Fun Fact: The Future of the Past
I flew out of Dulles International Airport and noticed that instead of a shuttle or airtram, a 100-person “mobile lounge” escorted me to my terminal. When architect Eero Saarinen designed Dulles in the 1950s, passengers still had to walk out to their planes in bad weather, so he introduced a fleet of 40 mobile lounges to carry them directly from the gate to the aircraft. He did not anticipate how quickly commercial air travel would grow or how jet bridges would take over, leaving Dulles to find new uses for the lounges. They might not be the most practical anymore, but they’re still pretty cool.
Product Pick: The Buckwheat Pillow (impulse buy turned product of the month: it’s firm, moldable, cooling, and all natural)
Other: Attending the Marriage of Figaro Opera, Incandescent Chicken Lights That Help with Sleep, Chamath Palihapitiya on Bitcoin when it was $80, Watch a 24 Hour Live Stream of the Namib Desert with animals!, Furniture Air Hockey
I love the quote “Keep it stupid, simple.” Thanks for introducing me to it.