The Many Lives of Inkhaven 2.0
a collection of 40 life stories
Table of Contents:
“This is how I got looped in by a very devious character, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had set a trap years ago.”
“I still live in Duluth, on the tip of Lake Superior– the Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas.”
“But instead I got a cat, which I'd always wanted but felt was anti-aligned with my goals.”
“I also heard about Bitcoin, tried to mine it, and gave up because it seemed worthless at the time (rip).”
“I joined Occupy LA, and lived in a tent on the City Hall lawn for a month.”
“I was horrified that boys were present and didn't understand why my parents were taking me to such an unserious institution.”
“I told a girl there I was going to marry her one day. Then we moved to Clemson, South Carolina and I never saw her again.”
“One of my big quests right now is to try and get the rats to dance, which is a challenge because they're mostly brains in a jar.”
“So all my students wore togas in the law faculty, and we had wine and grapes, and we were having so much fun that the head of the law faculty pulled me aside.”
“I don't think I was sentient until college, so I'm not sure I have anything to say before that.”
“My parents met in New York City in 1970 and married the year after, but they– being extremely responsible Asian adults– waited to have a kid until they had a house. So they had me eleven years later.”
“I always joke that I have a Kirkland Signature tramp stamp.”
“I saw a collection of one-acts, one of which was Chekhov's The Bear. A play about a bear.”
“Early 2014 my parents staged an intervention. They said, ‘Chase, you have a problem,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”
“After one ski race, he was disqualified in the second round, and I asked a friend what happened: He missed the finish line on purpose.”
“The vision I have for the future is something like fully automated luxury communism.”
“If something is resolved, it is as if God has cast it into the sea, and you're not allowed to go fishing.”
“If you told me to do an integral I'd tell you to just shoot me in the head.”
“I sort of think the medical education pipeline is explicitly optimized to select for hoop-jumpers and bootlickers.”
“In hindsight I should have taken the blockchain job, but I took the database one.”
“I lived through the best era possible to be a teenager in the United States– before the internet, before AI, before social media.”
“I'd decided I didn't want to have emotions, so I just stopped having them.”
“If you ever have a problem, it’s worth exploring if a glass of water, a snack, and a nap can fix it.”
“I read many many novels in grad school when I should have been reading scientific papers.”
“My parents had both left college after a year to follow my dad's band... We lived in a big hippie house with all the people in the band, and my crib was a drawer.”
“The ‘D’ key on the label maker didn't work. It turned David into Avi and that seemed to fit.”
“You take a bunch of people, put them on skates, play music, say ‘play ice hockey,’ and everyone's bad. It's really entertaining.”
“They did terrible punishments where they’d force the boarders to measure the entire length of the football field in pencil lengths.”
“I caught a sunfish. I remember it really well even though I was pretty young. I was just totally in awe of the experience of catching a fish, even though it was a little fish.”
“The owner paid me partly in expired chocolate. I dated a French boy for a few months. We broke up over a pay phone, which dates me.”
“I changed my major to math during a business class, just closed the laptop and left midway through. The teacher said, ‘you can't go.’ I said, ‘but I'm no longer in this class.’”
“We were both drinking iced coffee, even though it was March, and most people in March in Cambridge are drinking warm coffee. That was my opener.”
“I took a gap decade, I worked as a freelance art model... I did pyrotechnics on four continents.”
“My parents were promised that I wouldn’t get sex trafficked, and I went.”
“I went from being ‘the math one’ to being one of forty math people.”
“I was going to Bay Area house parties when I was three years old. I hear Robin Hanson was at at least one of them.”
“A quant, which is when you get a bunch of mathematicians and shove them in a room and get them to hit the money button all day.”
“We rolled our own crypto layer for the database, which is absolutely crazy.”
“I was living with my mom’s brother, and I came back understanding her family a lot more, and appreciating my parents 100 times more than I had. I didn’t hate being Indian anymore. I liked being Indian.”
💜 Lucie Philippon (Organizer)
Act I: Lucie the NPC
From childhood to 17, I was a gifted kid in high school, no issues, getting good grades without doing homework. I had never learned to do homework, never learned to make myself do anything, apart from just paying attention in class, but I still had good grades because I was smart.
The Call to Adventure
Then in high school literature class, I had essays to write. For the first time in my school career, I was completely stumped. I couldn’t write anything. I got the first bad grade of my entire school history.
I saw before me, then, the fork in the road. On one side, I could become like a lot of former gifted kids who stayed in what was easy for them and never tried to do anything else, to protect their ego, dismissing everything they found hard as something that didn’t matter. Literature and art aren’t important like science and math. I’m good at the things that really matter.
Or, on the other side: actually, I would like to be good at writing, do art, write good essays, draw, be good at making friends and socialization. This would require catching up on seventeen years of not learning to do things, not learning to learn.
I was confronted by this dilemma. My literature teacher told us, “you’re all shit, you’re not going to get better unless you put in the work.”
Oh no! It’s the end!
That was the call. I answered it, and I went on the path of self-improvement, which led me to the second arc.
Act II: The Path of Self-Improvement
I got really into self-improvement literature. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Atomic Habits. YouTube videos and podcasts about productivity, such as College Info Geek. This carried me into getting so much better at socialization, at teaching, and at being less afraid to do things that seemed hard. I liked playing video games, but before this point, I was avoiding entire classes of video games because I wasn’t good at them. In reality, I wanted to play them, but I wanted to get good. As part of my commitment to getting good at hard stuff, I decided to get good at those video games.
I went from high school to engineering school. Coding, technical stuff, operations, running stuff, becoming the driver of social groups. I was going through life, having fun, gaining experience, growing in various ways, but always without a clear goal. I was kind of aimless.
The Threshold
One fateful night, August 18th, 2021, I took a bus from Lilles to Berlin. I was moving to Berlin for an entire year of study abroad.
I was stuck in this bus all night. I couldn’t sleep. I had nothing to do, bored to death. I thought, I need to use my phone to distract myself. But if I start watching YouTube my phone battery will die, and I have nothing to charge it with. What can I do on my phone that would not drain my battery but would entertain me for hours?
The host of the College Info Geek podcast had once recommended what he said was the best book he’d ever read. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
This is how I got looped in by a very devious character, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had set a trap years ago.
I finished reading on December 15th, 2021. The last line was, “if you want to learn everything Harry knows and more, go on LessWrong.com.” I wrote in my journal that day: I’ve been sorely got. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but I feel like I’m at a critical threshold of my life.. It was very clear that my life was about to change.
Act III: The Trials
I started reading the Sequences and everything made sense. All the things I’d been looking for in self-improvement and productivity literature. Through this I discovered EA, improving the world as effectively as possible. Something to care about. Something to protect. I want to make the world better.
I was working for a crypto startup at the time. It felt like having infinite money; I had more money than I knew what to do with. So, two days after discovering it, I signed the Giving What We Can pledge.
April 1st, 2022, I read a post by Eliezer called “Death with Dignity.” We can’t do anything to stop AI from killing everyone, so we should just make it so we die with dignity. By the end I was like, HOLY SHITTTT. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIEEEEE.
HPMOR is supposed to get people to take heroic responsibility, to think about the world, to care about things, to aim intelligence in the right direction. It completely worked on me. I went through the whole pipeline.
I started an AI safety research group. I ended up in the in-person rationalist community. I went to the LessWrong community weekend in Berlin in 2022, and it was the best weekend of my life so far. I thought, wow, those are my people. Better than any other friends I’d ever had. I dropped my entire previous group of friends.
I moved to Paris and created the first rationalist group house in France, which immediately became the center of the entire AI safety community in France. A year later I finished my studies, left the crypto job, started working in AI safety for the French government, did MATS, went to the Bay, and organized the main AI safety side event for the Paris AI Action Summit.
The Return
2024 was hard, and I think I got a bit burnt out. 2025 was to re-stoke the flame, chill, explore for a bit. I sent an EOI to Lightcone, did a trial with them, which did not pan out. I traveled, attended all the camps, did introspection, therapy, and worked on myself.
But now I needed a challenge. In 2026 I really wanted something that would be so hard, I would have no choice but to grow and become better.
And then Oliver Habrika from Lightcone said, what if you come and work with us and manage Lighthaven forever? AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH yes.
Now I’m helping run Inkhaven, and it’s been overwhelming. I’m definitely getting what I wanted: challenges, lots of opportunities for growth.
That’s how I ended up here today.
💙 Alexander Wales
I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio when I was three, and went to an inner-city magnet school where the curriculum was German bilingual. I lived in the suburbs of Cincinnati until I was nine, when my parents divorced and we moved to southern Minnesota. I went to high school there. I went to college in the same small town for a while, had some mental health issues, and moved to Duluth, where I spent two years working through some stuff and not going to college.
I went back to college, met my wife, and graduated with a double major in English and Computer Information Systems, with a focus on technical writing. I spent seven years in software engineering, working at an outsourcing shop on a whole bunch of different projects.
In 2013 I published a novel-length work of rationalist fiction called The Metropolitan Man. In 2016 my son was born. I was very much done with software engineering, became a stay-at-home dad, and decided to work on writing. I moved into web fiction around then and was really going to try and make it work.
From 2017 to 2021 I wrote a story called Worth the Candle that ended up being 1.6 million words, published as an eight-book series because that’s just too long for one book. After that I wrote two more million-word web serials– This Used to be About Dungeons, a five-book series, and Thresholder, another five-book series. I also wrote Shadows of the Limelight and Wisteria. I’m working on my fourth major series now. I’ve published roughly five million words of fiction, mostly from 2016 to the present.
When my son was born, I was a stay-at-home dad, and that was my time to focus on writing and try to make this work in some way that made enough money I wouldn’t have to go back to software engineering. I was very burnt out on it. The Patreon money and other sources scaled up gradually, and by the time he was starting kindergarten and then first grade, I was able to transition into not needing to work. That had been the plan. Either I’d make enough money writing, or I’d go back. I make enough money now to be a full-time writer.
I still live in Duluth, on the tip of Lake Superior– the Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas. That phrase was coined by the city’s first newspaper, and unknown outside the city itself, but it’s always how I think of home.
💜 Nancy Hua
I was born in Beijing and came to America when I was four-ish. I grew up in Pennsylvania, where my dad was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and my mom worked as a waitress and Chinese teacher. My parents came to America before I did (my dad when I was one, my mom when I was two) so I lived with different surrogate parents in China. People say I was always really independent, and my mom was proud of the preschool I tested into.
In Pittsburgh we started in kind of a poor neighborhood. In school, I was friends with the other Asians. We moved to the suburbs for middle school and high school. We were still poor, so the divide went from being Chinese to being Chinese and poor.
I was always interested in art. I had an art scholarship at the Carnegie Museum and CMU starting in second grade. My teachers liked me and put me up for that kind of thing. I also did a gifted program for the arts. I was also good at math, but the teachers really noticed the art.
For middle school, we moved to the poor part of a rich suburb. My parents divorced around then, so there was a lot of conflict at home, but I generally had a happy demeanor. I had my friends and I’d sleep at their houses all the time. School was always really easy, and my parents let me do whatever I wanted.
I went to MIT and majored in math and writing. I lived in East Campus, the weird dorm. At first I was like, “Why did I get put in the weird dorm,” but with more self-awareness about what I’d written in my application, it was correct. The kids there were artistic and hackery—murals on the walls, monkey bars on the ceilings, fingerprint scanners on the doors in 2003. The dorm was known for the freedom of being able to do whatever you wanted because no one was watching you.
I was captain of the fencing team my senior year. I’m grateful I did fencing at MIT, because I didn’t expect it to have such a big impact on my life. I was kind of depressed coming out of high school, because I had no purpose. People said I was very self directed, but that wasn’t really true. I had the surface trappings of what we’d now call agency—I’d get cool opportunities that no one else knew about—but that was just me being bold, ambitious, and good at asking for stuff. I didn’t realize I could just start a company out of college, or join one of my friends’ companies, or even leave school. It didn’t occur to me. And I could have noticed I was lacking purpose and done something about it, but I didn’t know. I didn’t even realize I was depressed. I just had a topsy-turvy sleep schedule and felt isolated, even though I also had a lot of friends. Enneagram 7’s are good at being in denial about their depression, or anxiety, etc, and explaining it away or hiding it or deflecting.
After college I did high frequency trading for five or six years in Chicago and New York. It was fun. I viewed money as the bane of my parents’ divorce, though now I know that when people argue about money, it’s not really about money. After my first bonus, I realized I’m never going to worry about money again. The firm was a startup in many ways when I joined, so it set my vision of what companies should be like.
After trading, I started a company called Apptimize because I wanted to go on an adventure with my best friends. I hired a bunch of friends from my fencing team and we lived in a house together and did Y Combinator. It was really fun for a few years, and then it became really not fun. I’d talked myself into thinking I could do it for as long as it took, because I have a lot of willpower and can get interested in anything if I want to. After a while I was like, I hate this. I don’t care about this. Eventually, I hired a CEO who sold it. Not a great sale—almost an acquihire, depending on how you spin it.
The main thing that came out of the company for me was personal development. I was constantly getting executive coaching, and the flavor I really ended up liking and continued doing after I left was Conscious Leadership. It’s an amalgam of other modalities, and I learned a lot about myself through it. People used to tell me I was really self-aware. My Series A VC announced our round by saying I was painfully self-aware. Looking back, I had a lot of blind spots. I’m just articulate, introspective, and open about things that people don’t typically talk about, so I seemed self-aware. But I had a lot of stuff I was in denial about.
As soon as I hit 30 I became aware, but still in denial, of my fear of dying alone. I’d partly started the company to not have that fear, because I was with my friends.
It was easy to fall into the cultural narratives (no good men left, high-achieving women can’t find someone good enough) and there’s a grain of truth there, but they’re self-defeating. I was trying to fight that. I was like, people are doing this, and I just need to figure out how to do it. I’m good at figuring things out. But I hated it.
During COVID I finally realized and then embraced that I might die alone. I might never find someone of the caliber I wanted. I was on a Zoom satire dating show my friend was hosting. People would DM me on Twitter—Silicon Valley people one degree away with 200 mutuals—and I was like, “Should I keep dating even though I hate it?” But instead I got a cat, which I’d always wanted but felt was anti-aligned with my goals.
I’d been miserable before and putting on a bright face because I thought I needed to keep trying. Stopping made me much happier. It helped me raise my bar because I would only consider someone who made me happier than being alone, and being alone with my cat and friends was already awesome.
Then my husband asked me out on Twitter. He was living in Hawaii, so I had to move to Hawaii to date him. Our first date cost me five grand because I had to quarantine on Oahu, then fly to Kauai where he was, and I’d booked my own Airbnb and car because I didn’t want to stay with him on a first date. We didn’t really like each other on the first date, mostly because I was too scared. Then I realized he’s actually a nice guy and I didn’t need to be afraid of him. We moved around together during COVID, tried living in LA, got married. We had our first baby, and we just learned we’ll have two kids soon.
My coach teaches a maxim about radical responsibility—you’re committed to your results. Whatever the result is, that is what you’re committed to creating. On some level, your result is what you want.
💙 Charles Pye
I was born in a college town in Kansas. Kansas is rural and conservative, but my town was a liberal bubble, and both my parents were professors at the university, very much inside that bubble. I grew up doing a lot of academic stuff that seemed normal to me as a kid but made me not fit in with the other kids in the area. I liked physics, music, writing, and literature. I did some programming, off and on, and hated it. My mom also comes from a really old-fashioned family in Massachusetts (they loved old furniture, had an old house, and would eat dinner by candlelight). I went there as a six-year-old and sat at the table while the adults discussed politics and literature, with no idea what was going on. I just wanted to watch TV, but they were strict, so I sat there and tried to fit in.
I applied to a bunch of hard-to-get-into colleges, didn’t get in anywhere except the local one, and got a physics degree because I wanted to be a scientist. For a while I was really motivated, doing everything I could, and went to grad school. Then I realized I didn’t want to be a scientist; I was so bored and disillusioned that I dropped out.
I floated around for a year trying to figure out what to do. I worked as a freelance math tutor, which kind of felt like helping college students cheat on their homework. I got scammed into a flaky day-trading scheme. I tried grad school again, this time in South Korea, because a professor of mine had a connection there. I was very isolated in a foreign country, struggled to learn the language, and got sucked into a party scene that was exciting but made it hard to study– way too much drinking. I dropped out again. I did meet my girlfriend, who became my wife, there. I also heard about Bitcoin, tried to mine it, and gave up because it seemed worthless at the time (rip).
I moved back to the US and I was looking at places to go. Portland seemed cool. It was a cliche (a lot of young people were moving to Portland at the time), so I lived there alone for a year in a cheap group house, spent a lot of time reading at Powell’s and wandering around the city. Eventually my fiancée joined me and told me that I needed to get a job. I buckled down, took CS classes, and got a job as a programmer at an old-school company doing media data stuff. Really boring, but kind of relaxing. I worked there for eight years, and was quite happy. I spent a lot of time there reading blogs.
Then they got acquired by a shady company that went bankrupt, and a bunch of us lost our jobs. This was during COVID. It was also during this time that I broke up with my wife. During the pandemic, I lived on my own for a few years and kind of went insane with no human contact. Eventually I realized I could make money day trading stock options, which sounds completely insane but worked.
I started exploring blogging and fiction writing, and since it was cheaper to live overseas than in America, I spent the last three years mostly abroad. On a whim, I applied for Inkhaven and ended up here. I’ve always been interested in blogs, both as a reader and a writer, but this was the first time I’ve given it a serious effort. It’s been an amazing experience.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten is: “We try things. Sometimes they work.” In other words, sometimes plans fail, but you can’t let it bring you down—you just have to keep trying things until you find something that works.
💜 Evelyn McLean
I was born at home in Santa Monica, California, with donor sperm because my parents had trouble conceiving. They got divorced when I was two, and my mom remarried when I was four to a guy from Iran. When I was 10 and 12, she had two more kids with him.
I grew up doing musical theatre and singing; I did ten years of musical theatre and five years of private voice lessons. From a very young age, I was the person everyone knew as a singer. I burned out on the competition around that in high school and started writing more. I’d been writing poetry from a young age, but I started writing more when I decided I didn’t want to compete to be a performer.
I went to a year of school at the University of British Columbia, joined my first band, and then dropped out and moved back to LA. I joined Occupy LA, and lived in a tent on the City Hall lawn for a month. I got very politically engaged. At the time I was also working at a bakery, and started going to community college after Occupy ended just for something to do. I didn’t have plans for school until I found out about Evergreen, an interdisciplinary state school in Washington State, and started there the next year.
At Evergreen I studied writing and some philosophy. I was still very politically engaged (it’s an extremely leftist place). The year after I graduated, someone I followed on Facebook posted a Scott Alexander piece, “The Toxoplasma of Rage,” and it transformed my mind. There’s a lot in that post about signaling, and I’d been developing a strong allergy to a lot of the social dynamics in the leftist culture at my school. That had been the case from the very beginning; I wasn’t into the discourse, but I suppressed that resistance for social reasons. All my friends were activists, I wanted to be a good person, I’d taken a class on the sociology of race, I understood systemic racism was a real thing. But the conversations about politics felt like they lacked nuance. The piece gave me language for things I’d observed, and I privately started developing a whole understanding of the social context I was in that I couldn’t talk about with anyone.
Then I randomly met a guy visiting Olympia, and I referenced Scott Alexander in our first conversation and it turned out he was in an ACX reading group. He’d been in the rationality community in Seattle and invited me to a party in France happening the next week. I went, and met a bunch of other rationalists. At that point I was done with school, had a completely useless degree, no ambition at all– just smoking a lot of weed, reading a lot of Scott Alexander, hanging out with my best friend, making art and writing poetry, living on no money.
The party in France inspired me to do something more adventurous with my life. I’d been working at a nonprofit that did work with native plants and had gotten interested in ecology and agriculture, so I decided to try WWOOFing, which means volunteering on organic farms. I enjoyed that but it was really clear I was never going to be stable enough in one place to be a farmer. I moved back to LA for a year with the person I was dating, tried to start a weed cookie company with my friend from the bakery.Eventually it turned into a regular cookie company, which I didn’t believe in at all. It felt very inane to be selling cookies on the internet. I moved back to Olympia.
It was good to be back with friends in Olympia but after about a year I was feeling stagnant and wanted a job that felt like it was helping people– up to that point I hadn’t done any work that felt meaningful and I was really craving the sense that my work was contributing to something. I got an AmeriCorps position in mental health in Portland. Six months after I moved, the pandemic hit. I couldn’t really do what I was supposed to be doing for work for most of that time so I took college classes online to build a more competitive grad school application, and started a band. I focused quite a lot on music for a couple of years.
In 2022 I went to the first Vibecamp and met my husband Milan. He moved to Portland, where I’d started grad school to become a social worker. The next couple of years were grad school and relationship things. I started another relationship, with Curry, two years after I met Milan. Then I graduated in June, got married in August, and all three of us moved to the Bay within a few months of each other.
One thread I want to make sure I include: in my last year of undergrad, I went on a road trip with three friends to see our professor give a keynote at a literary conference. It was an intense bonding experience, and we started meeting to read and write together. We’ve worked on a lot of projects since, including a summer art retreat that we still run– we’re in our fourth year– and two manuscripts we’re hoping to publish. That collective ran for 10 years, until just a couple of months ago. In 2022 I also recorded a second album with my band and made Good at Everything with Zoe, a web series we wrote and produced together. One way of telling the story of my life is through all the different artistic projects that have been significant.
I’d heard about Inkhaven before the first round, but the timing was bad– I was planning the wedding and traveling, didn’t have a blog, didn’t think I’d get in. I was visiting the Bay last fall while the first Inkhaven was happening, came by to see a friend, and really liked the vibe. I came back every day I was in town and ended up with a piece in the first issue of the Slime Mold Time Mold zine. By the time they decided to run a second Inkhaven, I was already planning to move here, so the timing was perfect.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten:
Don’t sweat the small stuff. An impossible piece of advice to fully integrate, but profound.
Not making a decision is a decision. You usually don’t get more information when you wait.
💙 Margherita Lovelies
I was born to parents who wanted to create a child that was the product of their love. This was no arranged marriage, and this was no accident. My father wanted to marry a beautiful woman, have beautiful children and a beautiful wife. When he saw her, he didn’t immediately know that the rest of his life would be tied to making her happy as one of his critical life missions. He did, however, notice that she was very beautiful, and she was chill. A few years after that meeting, they had several children, one of which was me.
Post-birth, I was a relaxed child. I enjoyed looking at things and continued to enjoy looking at things at school, where I made a friend on the first day. Kindergarten was a lot of fun, though I was struck that it was not an all-girls ballet academy. I was horrified that boys were present and didn’t understand why my parents were taking me to such an unserious institution. I quickly learned to read and participated in a variety of activities– watching butterfly cocoons, looking at hummingbirds, growing lima bean seeds into tiny seedlings, and otherwise contributing to important communal life such as watering the plants.
Despite the warm atmosphere, I was a very shy child. I remember on my birthday I brought candy to share with the class, as I’d seen other students do with little cakes and cupcakes. But I didn’t know when it would be appropriate to interrupt the teacher to hand it out. Only after class ended did I come up and share some of it with her. Thus began a life arc of overcoming shyness through prosocial means.
In middle school I spent a lot of time outdoors, in the woods. I had a friend and we’d spend a lot of time sitting together in the rain, playing tennis trying to make the team, or just walking to school and around town. I’d be excited to go to school because school had breakfast pizza, egg-and-sausage sandwiches some days, egg-and-bacon some days, and bagels with a slice of cheese some days. We’d sit and eat. Then I’d study, go home, and play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for about an hour. Then I’d switch to a different computer where I could see the TV and do typing lessons while watching; this way, I could justify the extensive amount of time I was playing Grand Theft Auto.
In high school my friend got a boyfriend, so there was nothing left for me to do than study math and other subjects, so that maybe I could one day go somewhere and have another friend. I did make other friends– we had a core group that made videos together, I joined the mock trial team, I did debate. But I still missed her.
What to say about college? College was intense. It was the sort of transformational experience one can expect when one has made a set of choices to go somewhere where aggressive ideas of powerful transformation were the ethos of the school. It was a fun time but I would not say it was easy. It set me on a path of continuing to actualize and confirm what I’d learned in a pathway of lifelong study.
Post-college to now: it’s hard for me to say if anything interesting happened. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve made some money. I’ve lost some money. I’ve grown older. In some ways I’ve grown wiser. In some ways I’ve continued to grow not in the way that forward motion suggests growth, but in the way that plants grow as they undergo a metabolic process– whether they’re conscious of growing or not. If you were trying to gauge linear forward growth, hard to verify. I’m skeptical of prioritizing things that can be very hard to check, unless you have a commitment to being a certain kind of emotional person.
The best advice I’ve gotten is that there isn’t actually ever a reason to kill yourself. From a rabbi: what do you do when it all feels bad and you want to kill yourself? You can either kill yourself or you can make jokes, and making jokes is more fun.
(I have always liked fish. There’s never been a time when I did not like fish and other marine creatures. They have always been fond in my heart.)
💜 Devin Lehmacher
I was born in Germany and lived there for two years before my dad moved to Kentucky for a professorship. We lived in Bowling Green, in a neighborhood, and I went to a Montessori school for preschool. I told a girl there I was going to marry her one day. Then we moved to Clemson, South Carolina and I never saw her again, though my mom still sometimes shows me pictures of us from the time.
In Clemson, my dad got a tenure-track position. In first grade I was diagnosed with ADHD. Elementary school was fine. I was a bit of a problem child; I remember my third grade teacher being very mad that I broke her stamp. I hung out with my friends in the neighborhood after school. In middle school, my friends started getting cell phones, and I started to feel left out without one.
Toward the end of middle school we lived in Peru for six months for my dad’s sabbatical there. Peru has the world’s largest dipolar radar array, used for measuring the ionosphere. My parents had been making me do extracurriculars for years– piano, karate, German on Saturday mornings for three hours– so they put me in the German school in Peru. Most of my classes were in German, a couple in Spanish. Peru was fun. I made more friends there than I had before, but when I came back, I felt more separated from my class than I had before I left.
I made a decent number of friends in high school when I started cross country. I’d quit karate and my mom said I still needed to do a sport, so I ran. I really enjoyed it. I was never the best, but I got under 20 minutes for a 5k. Running was stimulating enough that I was able to go off my ADHD medication. I was overachieving academically too; I took 14 or 15 APs and ended up at Cornell. I’d applied to four or five colleges and was certain I’d get in. I didn’t get into my top choice Brown, but Cornell was good enough.
Toward the end of high school I had a crush on a girl I ran cross country with. Another guy in the group asked her to prom. I was crushed. I awkwardly asked her out anyway, three months before leaving for college. The fallout left me more socially anxious in the first couple of years of college than I would have liked. I got into anime around then, partly because I was lonely. I was privately embarrassed about it, less because of the anime than because I was watching it because I was lonely.
I originally studied biology because I wanted to do computational biology, but I just found CS classes more fun and switched. A friend on my Quidditch team suggested I join the co-op she was living in, which became my main friend group for the last two years. I also got really into the Mafia Club, and I built the first Mafia Club website (mafiaclub.github.io), which is still in use. They still play every Friday at 9pm until God knows what time.
I took a lot of compilers and PL classes at the end of college and did an internship at Microsoft, where I made good friends and asked a girl out for the first time since high school. I got rejected, but we’re still friends. We ended up being roommates after I took the return offer in Seattle. COVID hit, and me, her, another guy from the internship, and another friend in the same apartment complex became a pod. One of the best times of my life.
Eventually I left Microsoft for a Haskell startup to live my dream of being a functional programmer. There, I learned that doing functional programming is still programming; the software industry doesn’t get better if you do it in a different language. So I went to Duolingo to work on a product I believed in, and after three years it turns out Duolingo is also just a software engineering company with all the problems of a software engineering company. I quit in February and am now trying to figure out what I’m doing with my life. I’ve made a lot of friends in Pittsburgh and plan to live there at least another year.
The best advice I’ve gotten is from Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: “happiness comes from between”– the idea that happiness and meaning comes from connecting with people.
💙 Aaron Kaufman
I was super anxious growing up and pretty nerdy, so I ended up doing the standard nerd track. I majored in chemistry, went to grad school for chemistry, then flaked out because I actually hated chemistry and was also terrible at it. I went into software, which is the traditional thing you do if you wash out of the hard sciences. Got a tech job, kicked around big tech for a while doing things that ultimately didn’t really matter. One of the more meaningful-feeling things I worked on was ad tech for Amazon, which is mostly a referendum on how incredibly abstract everything else was.
After that I went to Microsoft, then I quit about a year and a half ago. The team was going downhill and the org wasn’t in a great place. My team had been shuttled from org to org every six months because we didn’t really have a good place to live. We were the fleet inventory team, responsible for packing machines across the fleet. Anyway, big tech got me a bunch of money, which has given me a long runway, so I’ve been taking a step back and taking stock of what’s next.
I currently live in Minneapolis, which is pretty nice, but I come down to the Bay for all the rat events I can. I got into LessWrong in college and didn’t know anyone else who was into it, and the in-person rationalist community has been a thing I could finally form around that.
I had an incredibly boring childhood. My parents were funny. My mom really liked to make me go out into the yard and do yard work for her elaborate garden, which I was solemnly resentful of because I felt like I had relatively little time outside of schoolwork. Looking back, I kind of agree with the resentment, though it was ultimately fairly minor. We lived on Mercer Island in Seattle, which you actually had to get permission to enter; they had a tollbooth-type thing that was infrequently staffed but theoretically could be staffed at any time. Probably a very ineffectual security service. My parents had one of the cheaper houses in the community but were good friends with the neighbors who had waterfronts, so we were basically mooching off of their fancy water access.
I was very, very cripplingly socially anxious starting sometime around middle school, for no obvious reason. At some point I just became very aware that I could be judged and I needed to minimize this, but also that it couldn’t be prevented, so you see the dilemma of the anxious person. I mostly hung out with the same tiny group of friends I’d had growing up, Josh and Brandon. In retrospect there were a lot of people I could have become good friends with and simply didn’t, because I was so close to them. That said, band was wonderfully useful. It formed a big chunk of my social life that wasn’t just Josh and Brandon, because in band it’s the same group of kids every semester every year and you know each other pretty well. Unlike every other class, other people doing well actually benefits you, because you sound better.
A lot of my life right now is learning to dance, which is one of the big unemployment projects I took up. I wanted to do it because it’s impressive if you can do it at a high level, and it’s a fun way of meeting people and being social. It’s a lot more structured than free-form chat. Dancing is a whole language of its own. One of my big quests right now is to try and get the rats to dance, which is a challenge because they’re mostly brains in a jar. I said that in the most affectionate way possible.
The rest of my life is running a blog, because I do want to get to a place where I can actually make a living off of it. I have hot takes and the world needs to know them. Or at least I can tell the world, which you know, that’s the same thing.
The best piece of advice I’ve gotten was for an unemployment project I took on to resolve my crippling fear of basically anybody I wanted to date. Someone told me to take up partner dancing. Looking back, I can see it slotted into a lot of helpful places in my life, which is why I’ve been evangelizing it for the past several months. I think a lot of the problems it solved for me, it could solve for other people too.
💜 Alec Thompson
I was born in the Simpson Hospital in Edinburgh. My father is Alan Matthew Thompson, from Scotland. My mother is Yolanda Pupo-Thompson, from Nashville, Tennessee. They met in New York, moved to London, and wanted to have children somewhere nicer, so they moved to Edinburgh and eventually to North Berwick, a small coastal fishing village about thirty minutes east on the train. Historically it was a place for pilgrims on their way to St Andrews, so it’s had tourist attractions for a very long time. I grew up there from age three until seventeen.
I phoned my parents on the home phone when I was at my friends’ houses, and when I wanted to speak to my friends I phoned them on their home phones. It was quite old-fashioned. I didn’t have a mobile phone until I was sixteen. I have a twin sister called Eliza, whom I should have mentioned earlier.
I went to North Berwick High School, which was pretty good. We did Model UN, which was just a giant mixer for nerds. We had parties on the beach. I sailed a lot. I come from a sailing family. Nothing particularly exciting. In the penultimate year of high school I had to choose universities. Edinburgh first, then Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen, all for law. I couldn’t think of a fifth, so I randomly put down Cambridge. The interview went well, and I went down to Cambridge for three years to study law. Very intense. I just studied ceaselessly. I did a lot of debating, was president of the steel pan drumming society, did a lot of rowing.
It was melancholic in a way, because all my friends became corporate lawyers and were banished off the face of the earth into corporate law firms. I don’t speak with them a huge amount. I don’t think they speak to anyone apart from their colleagues. I didn’t do that. I was offered a PhD in my second year and accepted, so the moment I finished undergrad I started a four-year PhD in legal history. COVID coincided with my first year, which I did remotely from North Berwick.
In my second year I moved into a very strange house. It was supposed to be three students, but it turned out the landlord was living there too, with his much younger girlfriend and their baby, and his two children from a previous marriage who came four times a week. His ex-wife wasn’t allowed to come because she had a restraining order against her, placed by the new girlfriend, who she had racially abused. It was pretty intense. While I lived there I met one of my best friends, Beatrice, a five-foot police officer who’d studied classics at St Andrews and become a police officer because she’d thought, well, how else am I going to get a job studying classics?
I spent a lot of the next year traveling for academic conferences. France, Greece, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Bosnia, Turkey twice, Italy. I went to Japan and worked as a corporate lawyer for three months, which was so depressing I had to quit. Useful in that I learned again why I’m not a corporate lawyer.
I then moved to Oxford as a lecturer in the third or fourth year of my PhD. It was a beautiful time. My PhD supervisor was Professor David Ibbetson, the last of his generation of very informal academia. No procedures, very de facto. When I submitted forms late he’d just wave his hands and it would be okay. He had no biological children but did adopt a son through the college, which is something Cambridge used to do but doesn’t anymore: if your parents died while you were a student, the university would adopt you. He was probably considered, along with one other academic, the best legal academic in the whole faculty. Extremely knowledgeable. Never wrote any books. A bit like Gwern, or Borges. He just thought books were stupid and only published articles.
My PhD was on the history of law during the Industrial Revolution, arguing that we had to study the quantitative patterns of the legal system to understand how the law has changed. Very unusual in legal history. I was teaching ancient Roman law and legal history at the same time, and I took my students on field trips all over the world to conferences, where they presented papers. I got in a lot of trouble for distracting them from their studies. I also got in trouble for offering teaching to students from other colleges, because another teacher felt I was encroaching on their turf. I figured if they were teaching them well enough the students wouldn’t need to come to me, but anyway, I ruffled feathers.
At the end of one year I invented a board game, called something stupid like Romopoly. It was Monopoly with the rules of ancient Roman law, and to play, everyone had to wear togas. So all my students wore togas in the law faculty, and we had wine and grapes, and we were having so much fun that the head of the law faculty pulled me aside and asked what I was doing. I said we were having fun. He said, how can you think that’s appropriate in the law faculty? I didn’t have an answer. Fun is very appropriate in the law faculty.
I have a small number of very good friends. Two from high school, Seb Coke and Thomas O’Brien. My year at North Berwick High was somehow a golden year: four people did Cambridge PhDs, even though no one had ever gone to Cambridge from there before and no one ever went after. I’d run into them at formal dinners and people would ask how we knew each other. We went to nursery together, I’d say. Are you telling me you’re not an atomized cosmopolitan? What’s going on?
I made one friend from undergrad I still travel with. He loves Roman bathhouses, so we travel around Europe going to Roman bathhouses. He’s a real snob, but you need one friend who’s a snob. And then Beatrice the police officer, who has had something like five jobs since I’ve known her: detective (which she quit because her boss was functionally illiterate), nanny, barista, NHS bed allocator, translator, exam marker. She’s now studying law at Cambridge.
In the fifth year of my PhD I trained as a mathematics teacher, because I’d submitted the thesis but it was taking forever to actually finalize and I needed something to do. I qualified in London and worked at St Paul’s School, which is probably the best maths school in Britain apart from King’s Maths School. While I was there I was accused of being a pedophile and a terrorist. I won’t go into all the details, but enough so it doesn’t seem like I’m crazy.
In Britain they no longer categorize terrorism by ideology. They categorize it by risk factors. The risk factors that flag you as a potential pedophile also flag you as a potential terrorist, and vice versa. The problem was that I’d written an essay about the change in counterterrorism law on a school computer, so the system flagged me. They called me in. What are you writing about? I told them. Suspicious. Around the same time I’d given a student a maths problem-solving book, which was potentially grooming, even though I gave presents to lots of students– ping pong balls to one, biscuits I’d picked up in Japan to another. Two data points, and you only need two points to draw a line. So they thought, “this guy is probably a pedophile terrorist.” They had a little hearing for me, not really a trial because I didn’t have a defense lawyer. I defended myself using my legal skills, and was exonerated. One of the worst times of my life.
I got my PhD at the end of all this. I’m officially Dr. Thompson now. Then I went traveling around Europe, inspired by Nietzsche– not by him personally, because he’s degenerate, but by his lifestyle. Switzerland, then Italy, where I spent a month writing and reading and traveling. A job came up in Glasgow teaching English law in Scotland. The interview committee was polarized: half loved me, half hated me. I didn’t get that job, but they liked me enough to give me two other jobs.
While I was training as a maths teacher I met my current girlfriend. We’d known each other for three years and hadn’t dated. I thought, why are we not dating? This is crazy. We started, and it was really good. We’re still together. She’s an educational academic at Cambridge, and gets on really well with my parents and my sister.
Teaching at Edinburgh and Glasgow was so upsetting for various reasons that I decided not to do any more work for them, and quit. The main thing my partner and I are deciding now is whether to return to academia or run a high school together.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten is from my American grandfather, who’s also a professor. He said: the people you think about most are the ones you care about most. If you’re ever doubtful about who’s actually the most important person in your life, don’t rank them. Just think about who has the highest incidence rate in your thoughts.
💙 Kaylee Kim
I don’t think I was sentient until college, so I’m not sure I have anything to say before that.
I got into college as an aerospace engineering major. I did that for a while, and then for citizenship reasons I decided aerospace wasn’t a good idea. Aerospace is obviously an extremely defense-oriented field (that’s kind of the whole thing) and trying to get internships as a person with dual citizenship was annoying in a way that wasn’t palatable to me. I wasn’t willing to make the changes that would have made it doable. So I decided to double major in mechanical engineering as well, and focused more on that to give myself more career options.
I was still pretty academics-pilled at the time, so I figured I had time and might as well add another major. I tried linguistics and didn’t really like it. Then I took an intro-to-proofs class, pure math, and was like, oh no, this is the thing I want to do. By the end of my first year I had three majors in the system: mechanical engineering, aerospace, and math.
In my second year I joined an engineering competition team. I was doing embedded software for them, which is funny because I’d never done anything like that before. We placed at the competition, which was an international one, so it was a decent deal. I was trying out a bunch of different things because I didn’t know what I wanted. First year I was doing physics demonstrations for elementary and middle school students. I tried an ML bootcamp fellowship and it wasn’t for me. The summer of my second year I got invited to a pure math research project with one of the professors and contributed to a paper, which was cool. I attended conferences and presented on it.
In my third year I decided I didn’t want to do engineering anymore because it was getting boring. I realized the reason I’d been doing engineering was the prestige-money pathway, and I didn’t actually care about that as much as I cared about math. So I dropped engineering and just did math. I took a couple of grad classes. I was still team lead of the engineering competition team at the time, so I traveled and did a lot of work managing that. I also did some computer vision for social neuroscience, which was cool but not my jam.
I was planning to make my fourth year really committed to hard math. I’d already taken the intro grad classes a first-year grad student would take, so I was going to just keep going and maybe even take quals. I was excited about it. Then some personal things happened in the first quarter and I had to drop off, which also meant I missed the grad school application cycle. That sucked, but the application cycle was bad anyway in terms of funding and acceptance rates, so maybe it was for the best. I took winter quarter super chill.
Then I applied to Inkhaven, and figured if I got in I just wouldn’t bother with spring quarter. So I didn’t, and I graduated a little bit ago. I have a job lined up in July.
The best advice I’ve gotten isn’t really advice from anyone, it’s just a true statement you stumble on as you live life, which is that you need to know what you actually want. Or maybe my mom telling me that if I’m sick I should rest instead of working through it. Not that I follow that advice, but it’s probably true.
Looking back, I’ve kind of just done what I like and dropped the things I don’t like. I started blogging for fun a little while ago, which is part of why I’m here.
💜 Derek Liu
My parents met in New York City in 1970 and married the year after, but they– being extremely responsible Asian adults– waited to have a kid until they had a house. So they had me eleven years later.
As a kid I took some IQ tests and scored as profoundly gifted, so my parents did all the things you’re supposed to do with a gifted kid, which caused a bunch of weird stuff to happen. In particular, they had me skip three grades, which totally destroyed any childhood social life I had. I graduated high school at fifteen. I went to Cornell and double majored in computer science and psychology, graduating at nineteen. That was 2002.
CS was something my parents had encouraged me toward since I was a kid. Psychology was new– I took a class and was like, yes, this is it, I want this. But I knew I needed the CS for a job. I graduated in the aftermath of the dot-com bust, so along with most of my class I immediately went back to get a master’s to stay out of the job market.
I’d been getting gradually more depressed over the previous three years, but no one knew what it was. This was long before the current mental health era. I didn’t know it was depression until years later. It was really bad. I dropped out of the master’s program and lived in my parents’ basement for a couple of years. Eventually I got convinced to seek help, got medicated, pulled myself back up, and started an entry-level job a few years later.
I lucked out: the second job I had was a perfect match. I was there for nine years at a small consulting company. I had undiagnosed ADHD at the time too, and consulting suited it– I was never bored because we kept rotating through different companies. I worked for the NFL, the Economist, Kaplan Test Prep, fashion clients, job search clients. It was really fulfilling. My personal life was in shambles because of the undiagnosed ADHD, but that was okay. I was good at the work and could take pride in it. The work was the identity.
The company got bought by private equity around 2013 and imploded. I ended up at a programming retreat called Recurse Center in 2015– very much like this one. There I rediscovered that, while I’d gotten really good at the consulting part of software consulting, I’d forgotten how much fun software itself could be. How powerful, how magical, the whole experience of creating something from nothing that is whatever you say it is. I got re-inspired. I applied to Google– got rejected once before– and on my second attempt I got hired. I had the immense privilege of working on Google Docs for six years.
Then the pandemic happened. I was still undiagnosed with ADHD, and the pandemic made it obvious. I got fired because I couldn’t do the work. It was justified. I went back to consulting and got fired again. Then I got medication.
I had a lot of trauma to deal with around getting fired twice, because the professional identity I’d built was, this is what makes me worth something, this defines my worth as a person. I spent a good eighteen months not actually being able to program, freezing whenever I tried. My therapist suggested I find another creative outlet, and we arrived at the fact that I’d been really into writing in high school. I picked it up again in 2023, expanding my topics and my reach, finding that I actually really love editing. I first published a blog in 2025 after serious struggles with social anxiety. That basically takes us to now.
I got dealt a pretty bad mental health hand, but you gotta make the best of what you got.
💙 Drew Schorno
I was born in Kirkland, Washington, where Costco is from. I always joke that I have a Kirkland Signature tramp stamp. But I actually grew up in Canada, on the west coast, on an island called Vancouver Island.
One of my dad’s streams of income was designing filters for Photoshop, so I had early access to Photoshop and learned how to edit images. That led me to winning a full scholarship to study design, which was great because I had terrible grades. When I got to design school I suddenly decided to start trying. Design school is really hard, and I was in an accelerated program where instead of going to parties in college, me and my friends would pull all-nighters in the school labs.
After school I got a job at a company that sells satellite equipment to the US military. I was doing things like shining a flashlight onto the screen to emulate the harsh sunlight conditions of the Iraqi desert.
Then I ended up working for some of my old teachers from college, who were the former creative directors of Adbusters. I worked on an interactive documentary called Welcome to Pine Point that became relatively well known in a very niche field. It has enough staying power that ten years after its release it got mentioned in the New York Times again – they called it “tragically divine” – which is unusual for a flash website.
I was able to spin that into a more high-profile career. I moved to New York and worked in the music industry. I designed an album cover for Pitbull. Then I became really obsessed with trying to make a version of Pine Point that was my own. I spent a lot of time applying for grants to get arts funding for it; I made three or four serious attempts but never got any money. I burned through thousands of dollars of savings and ended up having to move home with my parents. I gave up on those dreams for a significant period of time.
Then I got a job in the Seattle tech industry at a startup, leading a team of 30 writers and 5 designers creating marketing websites. The stress of that job led me to have my first episode of psychosis, which strongly derailed my life and forced me to move back in with my parents. I wasn’t able to work for about a year and a half.
I got another job at a different startup in Seattle with the same guy who organized the first one. That one was actually quite interesting– a workforce management platform for agriculture. A farm has all these migrant workers who don’t have email addresses, and the platform lets the farm send a message to 30,000 of them over SMS. Normally if their bosses are abusing them or there’s sexual harassment, those migrant workers would just leave, which was really bad for the farms. With this platform they were able to talk directly to the farm. So it was kind of good for human rights. I got fired after about nine months because my design style was too crazy.
Then I didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I decided to go to clown school. Then immediately after clown school COVID started. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next since then.
Two years ago I was able to finally release my own version of Pine Point, which I called Rooster King. It got nominated for a Webby.
The best advice I’ve gotten is that walking is an extremely useful thinking tool. If you focus really hard on a problem and then forget about it and go for a walk, the answer sort of comes to you. Walking is superior to taking a shower or going to sleep, because there’s a lot of random noise that comes in– you’re seeing random sights and smelling random things. So that’s my top tip. Go for a walk.
💜 Emma Baker
I was born to two parents who met as actors in Dallas. They came out to LA to do the acting thing. My mother was successful, not a celebrity, but making money. My father was not. He went to law school, and I think he misses acting. My mother earned enough to put him through law school, and then they had me. They hadn’t known if they’d ever have kids.
My early childhood was great. I was talking very early. I was reading without help very early — about 3 years old. My mother described me as a kind of fairy child. I was also very sensitive and very weird. My preschool teachers flagged me for a learning disorder because I wouldn’t play with the other kids. I’d sit in the corner reading alone. My sister came along shortly afterwards.
I went to public elementary school. I was a smart kid, so I was transferred to a private Catholic school for middle school. It was hell. I developed severe depression and anxiety, and by the beginning of high school it was clear something had to give. I didn’t think I would live to see twenty-one.
Eventually I got tested and diagnosed with autism and ADHD. They put me in a tiny school for misfit kids that improbably had a theater program– just one guy who also ran his own company in LA. He saved my life and the life of a bunch of my friends. (Not literally, figuratively.) We were doing shows, and shows were something I was good at. It wasn’t like school. The shows made me want to keep going.
I moved to Tucson for linguistics at the University of Arizona. Then the pandemic hit and I crashed out, became disillusioned, moved back in with my parents, tried to figure out what the hell to do with my life. I saw a collection of one-acts, one of which was Chekhov’s The Bear. A play about a bear. It was so good and I was laughing so hard, after being cooped up tutoring online during the pandemic, that I thought, okay, I’ll go to school for theater.
I discovered there’s a thing you can do at the intersection of theater and academia called dramaturgy. I kept doing it, won an award, kept plugging, kept plugging, always with the feeling of, oh shit, what’s going to happen, is my brain going to slip again. I transferred to UC San Diego, which has a really great program, and got my Bachelor’s. In the middle of that I wrote four full-length plays. Also during that time, a fire came to my neighborhood and burned down my entire childhood neighborhood except for a couple of houses, including mine. By the grace of God, my family’s house was spared.
I got my Bachelor’s a month ago. In the meantime I’ve been teaching, tutoring, working as a receptionist, ushering (a job I particularly enjoy), doing virtual assistant work, just a lot of stuff. There have been beautiful, brilliant things that have happened. I count my blessings every single day. I feel like I need to be kind to people because you never know what it is that’s going to stick in someone’s heart and hurt them, and you never know what it is that’s going to put someone on a raft to a better place.
The thing I learned while getting my AA in acting is that the character carries all of the character’s baggage on stage. Other people are just reacting to the character, not necessarily to their whole life story. But if you can know what people are trying to run from, or trying to run towards, or needing from other people, you can figure out how they might fight for what they want. I want everybody to feel loved. Everybody has different needs.
Best piece of advice I’ve ever received is to imagine an invisible line going from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, and breathe.
💙 Chase Denecke
My life starts getting interesting in middle school, when I got my first Nintendo. I started staying up later, not waking up well, not doing as well in classes. Things kept degrading through high school. I went off to college and dropped out freshman year because I was up all night playing video games. Tried community college, didn’t work. Moved to Portland, took a minimum wage job at a rental yard with a bunch of rednecks. Tried welding school, failed because I was playing video games around the clock. By late 2013 I was taking triple the prescribed dose of Vyvanse and staying up for three days at a time.
Early 2014 my parents staged an intervention. They said, “Chase, you have a problem,” and I said, “Yeah, I know.” I didn’t think I could go back to gaming like a normal person, so I quit. I moved to Eugene, re-enrolled in community college, sold my gaming PC, and slowly put my life back together. I got a tutoring job, met my first girlfriend, graduated, got married, transferred to university for two years, graduated with a CS degree, and got a job at Siemens making marketing websites for the chip design software team. Stable, paid well, but not fulfilling.
In Summer of 2020, I read a “signal boost for Steve Hsu” post on Reddit. Steve was a Michigan State professor who was at risk of losing his position as Vice President of Innovation and Research due to a petition against him by some activist students. I read the petition out of curiosity, concluded it was bullshit, but in the process discovered Steve had started a company called Genomic Prediction that had amazing technology. They could look at the embryos from an IVF cycle and tell you which had the highest risk of diabetes or breast cancer, even the expected IQ. Science fiction. I had no genetics background, but I figured maybe they needed help with websites. I sent an email, but heard nothing.
At the time, there were no resources online for parents thinking about embryo selection, regarding how well it worked and how the benefits scaled with the number of embryos. I thought a tool like that should exist. So on nights and weekends I started reading research papers, Googling every other word, trying to build models of the benefits and aggregate costs across providers. Slow going.
Then one day Scott Alexander wrote a post called “Welcome, Polygenically Screened Babies,” and I left a long comment going through my research. As it happened, the CEO of Genomic Prediction was reading the comments. He offered me a research collaboration on the spot. After a work trial, they hired me full time. I’d been working on this for almost a year and no one had cared– my own wife had been very pessimistic. The walk I took that weekend was one of the happiest moments of my life.
Why genetics? There were a few reasons. I knew people in AI safety who kept saying alignment was extremely hard and to send smart people their way. I thought about working directly on the problem myself but at the time I couldn’t enroll in a PhD because I needed to make money to support my wife’s education. By the time she graduated and got a job, I started to wonder whether AI alignment, and dozens of other extremely hard problems would be significantly more tractable if we just made people smarter. If embryo selection, or ideally other more advanced forms of the technology, worked well enough, this could actually be done. There were on the order of ten people in the world seriously working on this, and almost none had a serious sense of its potential.
I worked at Genomic Prediction for a year and became the CEO’s right-hand man. Then in September 2022 I got a surprise video call: he’d been fired that morning, I was being laid off, and I had to call my interns to tell them they were fired. Internal political fight, missed projections, collapsed fundraising environment. The worst part was a noncompete that was validly binding because I wasn’t in California, which meant I couldn’t work in the field for a year. Steve Hsu took pity and connected me with a friend running a crypto company that needed a technical writer. I ghostwrote for the CEO. After a one-month crash course I concluded the entire industry was built on gambling and everyone in it was in denial. The company sold nickel– the metal– at a 10% markup to the sales team’s friends and family. My job was producing propaganda to get more people to buy. To stay sane, I started writing about genetics again.
I spent almost a year on a guide for how to have polygenically screened children, including building a model from CDC data to figure out the top 25 IVF clinics in the US. Parents started reaching out asking which clinic to go to, so I started Babysteps IVF to advise them. In summer of 2023, someone on a LessWrong Discord wondered if CRISPR was good enough to do massive multiplex editing on adult brains. I gave him five reasons it wouldn’t work. He came back with research papers showing two weren’t real problems and a third might be feasible. It seemed promising. So for the next five months I worked on Babysteps and on this adult brain editing research on nights and weekends, and got really excited– no one had even conceptualized it before.
My marriage had been heading downhill for years. Spring 2023 I brought up divorce; we tried to work on it; things got better for a month and resumed declining. Late 2023 I flew to New York for a sales summit– the company wasn’t selling enough nickel and laundered carbon credits– and for the second time in a row my boss got fired. I took severance, flew to Berkeley, moved into a group house off North Shattuck, and spent three weeks writing a blog post on adult intelligence enhancement. I had a strong conviction my life was about to change. December 12, 2023, it went live and exploded. Within 48 hours I had emails from two billionaires. One wanted me to start a company; another reader offered 100k.
Late December I started Bootstrap Bio. The billionaire invited us to Honduras for two months. I went to Vietnam first to see my wife’s family, but we fought from the minute we arrived and barely talked. By the end it was clear the marriage was over. I flew to Honduras, worked nonstop for three weeks, talked to a divorce lawyer, and in early February called my wife to say it was time. That was one of the saddest phone calls of my life.
In the summer of 2024, I gave a talk called “How to Make Superbabies.” Two recent breakthroughs had landed: a stem cell that could grow into a new human being, and– the day before the talk– a method to induce meiosis in stem cells. Combine them, and you could run meiosis on stem cells and produce genetically advanced human beings. Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky came to the talk. At some point, Scott pulled Eliezer out of the room and said they should fund this. I raised 110k for research from the talk. The next day at Manifest I tripled my fundraising. I cannot tell you how elated I was. We were going to survive. We had a year of runway in the bank.
Ultimately, Bootstrap Bio had a good couple of years before going bankrupt (it was a startup after all; that’s how these things go). I’m now working at another embryo selection company.
Jacob Schaal
I grew up in Otterfing, a village of four thousand south of Munich. Close enough to the Alps that we drove up most weekends, far enough from the city that you could hear the bells of every church for kilometers. My father coached the village football team and taught me to ski. My brother was a year younger and somewhat better at all of it. After one ski race, he was disqualified in the second round, and I asked a friend what happened: He missed the finish line on purpose.
There was a football tournament for kids, where first league teams came to play in my hometown. I was twelve. The pitch was soaked in a game against the Austrian first league team Sturm Graz, and when the defender wanted to pass to his goalkeeper the ball got stuck in a puddle directly in front of their goal. I happened to be the closest. The keeper was in the mud after my first shot. The ball as well. Luckily, I got a second and third try and lobbed the ball over the keeper laying in the mud. I was, apparently, the first kid from Otterfing to score against them in fifteen years. I have not, for the record, scored against a professional team since. The puddle did most of the work.
Being in the sports hall with my parents felt easy and unworried. Outside of it, I was a lonely kid. I read a lot, and did a lot of sports outdoors. My grandfather on my father’s side had founded the village brass band, was chairman of the ski club and the football club, the kind of man who holds a small place together. He died of cancer when I was three. I never knew him, but I grew up inside the structure he’d built.
I graduated high school the spring COVID hit, and for three years I studied economics in Munich from my parents’ kitchen table. The window was always open. There was an apple tree just outside, white with blossom in spring, full of birds. Later, in my first online seminar, my urban classmates kept asking me to mute. They could not bear the noise. I had not noticed it. I think sometimes about what counts as noise, what counts as just the world being there.
I went to Spain for an Erasmus semester, the first time I actually lived somewhere else. Mostly it was a discovery that I was a person who could leave a place and not die. Then Brussels, half a year at a think tank on AI policy. The AI Act had passed but the codes of practice hadn’t started, which is a polite way of saying there was very little important stuff to do. My boss was abroad for the first month. I had no office, so I worked at a table in the canteen, in the noise of the espresso machine. My flatmates and I were, in the kindest possible reading, not compatible. It was a period where I learned things I hadn’t expected to need: how to eat alone in a foreign city without it feeling like a defeat, how to tell the difference between solitude and loneliness.
Then a master’s in economics at the LSE, which I’d applied to half-expecting to fail. Some friends at home had laughed when I said I was trying - they thought I was reaching above my level. My mother said: “Die kochen auch nur mit Wasser.” They cook with water like everyone else. She was right.
Abroad, no matter what I did, I was always very obviously German: the accent, the directness, something in the posture. Back at home, they see me as some kind of global cosmopolitan.
After the LSE I did the ERA Fellowship in Cambridge: first as a fellow, then in the next round as a research manager. I found that managing researchers is mostly the job of taking other people’s ideas seriously enough that they begin to take their own ideas seriously.
Now I work at King’s College London as a research assistant on a project tracking how AI reshapes the task content of jobs. We scrape postings, extract the tasks listed, and watch the demand mix shift before and after ChatGPT. The other half of my week, and probably the part closest to what Inkhaven is for, I write the AI Economics Brief for the Windfall Trust, a fortnightly summary of the latest papers on AI’s economic impact. Now a few people in places I’d rather not name read what I write, and I find I worry slightly less about whether it’s good and slightly more about whether it’s true.
For a long time I didn’t put my name on things. I didn’t want to be the person who claims more than he’s earned. I’m still younger than almost everyone in the rooms I sit in. But at some point you have to decide whether being careful is modesty or just avoidance. I’m working on that.
The best piece of advice I’ve ever received is in Bavarian, from my grandfather - or rather, passed down through my father from a man I never knew. Man muss nichts im Leben ausser Sterben - You don’t have to do anything in life but dying. That’s liberating wherever you are.
💙 Leo
I grew up in San Francisco. From eight to eighteen I did competitive fencing, eventually going to a bunch of national and international tournaments and doing pretty well in the junior age groups. I struggled to make money throughout that period. At the same time I was obsessively reading about history and politics, and I taught myself to code and did a bunch of small ML projects.
Then I went to UChicago to study philosophy. Halfway through, COVID happened, and I took a leave of absence because remote learning sucked. During that time, I worked on a bunch of small political campaigns and didn’t like it; everyone was super pessimistic and cynical. Then I switched to working on tech stuff.
The campaign experience soured me on the whole space. The vibes were bad. There were a lot of people who really cared about signaling and very few people who actually cared about messy policy change. The candidates I worked for weren’t very inspiring. I was working for this political consultancy during what was basically peak wokeness, and at one point I was on a team working on a Boston city council race where we were deciding between two candidates, and we basically had to decide which one was the bigger victim, which one better represented our values (in order to figure out who to work for). I was like, this is so stupid, I don’t care who’s the bigger victim.
I basically don’t believe our government fixes fundamental problems. I think we’ll probably reach a breaking point and have an infinite government shutdown, and then the executive branch will basically take over the judiciary. So after politics, I switched to tech.
I started a software startup that ran for a couple of years and failed. Then I worked on ultrasound and neuromodulation technology for a year, with an organization doing open-source research and education on it. Then I got sick for about a year because of the COVID vaccine plus toxic mold, and basically did nothing. Now I’m at Inkhaven.
What I like about tech, compared to politics, is that people are much more optimistic. Even the AI doomers are at least trying to do something. They believe in something. They can actually do things, because if you create technology that’s useful, people start using it and it diffuses outward. Individuals can make change that way. Tech sucks in its own ways, but it’s way better than working in politics.
The vision I have for the future is something like fully automated luxury communism. You ask for what you want and you get it. There are some specific values that are really important to keep, but that’s the main thing. It would be amazing.
Best piece of advice: Advice has caveats.
Justis Mills
My parents met at a diner in Athens, Georgia. My mom waited tables there. She might have been a co-owner by then, but she still waited tables, and she specifically requested to wait my dad’s table. They started dating quickly.
My dad was getting his master’s when I was born. We moved to Indiana when I was a baby for his PhD. We were there four years, then Louisiana for a year for his postdoc. When I was seven he got a job at Florida State, and I’ve lived in Tallahassee basically ever since, except for college in Sarasota.
I was a pretty smart kid, a little socially behind, and I skipped a grade, which made the social part worse. I went to an experimental charter school where the kindergarteners and second graders shared classes, and the third through fifth graders likewise. I got bumped from second to third, so I went from being a seven-year-old where the average age was six to a seven-year-old where the average age was nine. Difficult to adjust to. I liked math a lot, but the school was artsy and didn’t have much math curriculum. I don’t think a single teacher knew any advanced math. The school didn’t even offer Algebra 1 in eighth grade. There was a bit more support for writing, which I also liked.
I was pretty sickly as a kid. No serious conditions, just sick really often. During allergy seasons I’d have a stuffy nose for months at a time. At one point I had mono and we never noticed, because my baseline level of being sick was so high. My little sister and the rest of my family were more outdoorsy than me, so they’d take me on a lot of outdoor outings. Sometimes I liked it, but I was often pretty freaked out. They were more risk tolerant than I was. One time we went canoeing on a river when it was clearly starting to rain, and we got stuck in a thunderstorm by a spring for a few hours. I still don’t really like outdoor excursions of that sort as an adult.
My entire childhood, I really missed living in Indiana. I’d left when I was five but I idealized my early childhood and held onto it tightly. In college I visited with a friend. I had a little pebble from the front porch of the house I’d lived in. I went to a park I’d been to as a kid. It was surprisingly cathartic. Eventually I threw the pebble into the bay and finally got over moving.
I studied math and philosophy in college and ended up choosing philosophy as my major. The second night of college I met a girl. We liked each other as people immediately and started dating within a month. A few months in I was really smitten, and I thought, oh shucks, I’ll probably be with this person for the rest of my life. I was seventeen. Then I thought, wait a minute, that’s insane, I’m not equipped to make those kinds of decisions. We did end up married. I was right. I never had that kind of premonition with anybody else.
It was a fairly turbulent relationship through college. We didn’t fight that much, I was just very young (she was nineteen, I was seventeen). We lived together starting the second semester, which was pretty intense. We both got hurt a decent bit, though it was really wonderful sometimes too. I still get flashes of intense protective nostalgia. We ate a lot of microwaved salami on Ritz crackers because we were broke. We were quite in love.
Many years later, we got engaged. She was going to come here in 2020. We got through the whole fiancée visa process. The week before her interview, all the embassies closed because of COVID. I was stuck alone in the house I’d bought for us (she provided half the down payment) for a year. When she finally got here, even friendly hugs were overwhelming for a bit, an adjustment. We couldn’t have a big wedding, but we had family in the backyard and on Zoom.
She didn’t want to be pregnant, so we planned to use a surrogate. After being on a waiting list and getting jerked around, we found out we couldn’t do surrogacy in Florida, since it’s illegal for a doctor to provide the service if you’re physically able to get pregnant yourself. But I had a friend, the same friend I’d gone to Indiana with, who didn’t want to raise children but did want the experience of being pregnant. So we decided she’d carry our baby. She had some stuff going on and was getting married around then to another woman, who thankfully was also cool with the plan, so we agreed to try in a few years.
In the meantime, my wife and I got impatient and decided to try ourselves. She got pregnant. We had our first kid. We’re still going ahead with the original plan with my friend, and that baby is due in October. The house we live in is next door to my friend and her wife. The four of us have been raising our first baby together, and we’ll raise the second one together too. Four parents and one kid is a pretty favorable ratio. Soon it’ll be four-to-two, which is the traditional ratio for an only child, but scaled up.
For work I did various programming jobs. I tried an EA job and didn’t like how I was treated, and decided that way of thinking about the world wasn’t for me. My friends growing up weren’t ambitious, and I felt a sense of disgust about people saying things like, oh, you’re the average of the five people closest to you, so you have to carefully curate your friends. I wanted to be loyal, to stand by people I cared about, not to use them as a means to an end. The reasoning was so embedded in this really ambitious EA zone that I didn’t have the stomach for it. So I ended up doing programming jobs and editing. I was good at editing, and through a chain of referrals it turned into a perpetual side hustle. My biggest client ended up being Lightcone.
My wife thinks I work too much, especially since we also have a baby. I’ve considered quitting my job and being more of a stay-at-home dad with part-time work. If automation accelerates like crazy and software jobs cease to exist, I’ll get to chill for a bit and make less money, and I’ll probably be okay.
Other than playing with my baby, my favorite thing to do is write novels. I’ve written twelve. My wife has read them all. My mom has read all but one: it was a choose-your-adventure style novel on the computer, and she couldn’t figure out how to get to the true ending. I started writing novels when I was thirteen.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten is from my grandma. She was a Baptist, and I had some OCD stuff going on in college. She told me: if something is resolved, it is as if God has cast it into the sea, and you’re not allowed to go fishing. Some things are better left in the past. You shouldn’t cast about in murky despair trying to find something to hurt yourself with mentally.
A lot of my life has been a journey to figure out how to be a little less selfish, without losing sight of myself. Doing right by people is really important to me. I think about it a lot. It can be a very hard problem.
💙 Philip Harker
I was born on May 25th, 2002 at Toronto Women’s College Hospital. I was raised by two young, urban-dwelling folks in Toronto. They were newlyweds, married in 2000. My parents both worked at TD Bank. My father was an enterprising young events market research consultant. I was their first child.
Toronto being what it was in the early 2000s, the little apartment on Carlton Street was too small to accommodate their burgeoning family, so we moved to Stouffville, Ontario, a fabulous suburb about an hour north of the city. Stouffville is the town in the greater Toronto area that you can identify because it was grandfathered into the green belt after the great gray sprawl. In the northeast there’s one more splotch of gray suburbia isolated by fields of corn and maize, and that’s Stouffville.
Hank Green has a remark in one of his novels where a character had a very happy childhood but was not a very happy child. I relate to that on some level. I was fascinated by science as a kid, by insects and space. There’s a phenomenon where parents assume their first child is quite bright, and I think I was subject to that to some degree. Every child has their own little idiosyncrasies. I could name the parts of an ant, but that’s not really an indicator of future success.
I went to St. Brigid Catholic Elementary School in Stouffville. As I aged through school I was a bit of an awkward, weird child, kind of a misfit. I had plenty of friends and was social, but I felt in some sense like the odd one out. I’d take part in the group exchanges, but Philip was there as a bit. Maybe that was my neurosis at the time, but I think I had some evidence to support it.
My father was the largest events market researcher in North America, the world of people who run the surveys at festivals and events. So I got to go to the US Open of Surfing, the Ohio State Fair, WrestleMania. We were upper middle class by Ontario standards. He found a successful niche, was a passionate, independent, driven man, and provided for us very well. I knew on some level that we were different, that my dad worked in the basement while other people’s parents commuted to an office in Toronto.
I went to St. Brother André Catholic High School in Markham from 2016 to 2020. The first half of high school was pretty miserable. I learned how to do the quadratic formula. I was in love for a little bit with a young lady named May, like the month. We dated on and off from 2018 to 2022, and she’s probably my most salient takeaway from high school– May and the ecosystem of relationships that came from that.
The promise I’d shown in elementary school kind of vanished when I realized that functions are very hard and physics is very hard. I liked programming and chemistry conceptually, and I enjoyed the humanities but didn’t see myself as a scholar of them. I really liked writing but kept it to myself. I was very insecure and struggled with vulnerability growing up. There was this neurotic belief that any vulnerability I showed would be used against me, or was worthy of punishment for its own sake. My parents were very lovely to me and encouraged me. It’s just something you convince yourself of over the years from little micro-interactions that resonate with you for whatever reason.
I graduated high school in 2020. As every person born in 2002 will tell you, we didn’t have a graduation, we didn’t have a prom. I don’t feel traumatized by that. The pandemic was a formative time that maybe a lot of us haven’t fully processed. I was admitted into computer science at the University of Toronto, which I owe to some bullpucky with my calculus midterm; I edged out a pretty good grade and that was enough to get me in. Six years on, if you told me to do an integral I’d tell you to just shoot me in the head.
First year was during COVID. I went to residence because I was told there’d be in-person classes. There were, for about six weeks, and then they cancelled them, but I’d already put the deposit down. It was a dark time for me. I had a brush with depression and anxiety. Things improved. I changed majors from CS to conservation biology, and kept the CS minor for posterity.
I made a lot of bad choices in university, particularly in the first and second years. I was just degenerate. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice to say I forfeited a lot of relationships because I was making stupid decisions. When you’re 18 or 19, maybe to some level that’s inevitable, but I knew what I was doing was wrong and I did it anyway. Fortunately none of it blew up in my face. I sailed through university and became more agentic. I got really into creative projects. My coursework was a chore, but I always wanted to start a new YouTube series, a new blog, a new podcast, a new video game studio. I don’t like to engage in special snowflake talk, but I was always surprised that other people didn’t even have that urge.
I kept dropping courses and flunking semesters. If I’d been more applied, or if I’d embraced Adderall, I could have done better. I’d had this dream of doing a PhD in oceanography at Oregon State, but that faded. In my later years I found myself drawn to game development, and that’s what I pivoted to.
I had a handful of situationships in my later years at university. I loathe the word, but there’s no better one for it. I took a lot of my worth from things like that, for better or worse, mostly for worse. I really valued my independence in those years– the idea that I was an independent, rent-paying guy with a job. I worked in a research lab for a time. I lived downtown, which felt like a distillation of my case of affairs. I wanted to be my own person and not be under the supervision of my parents or my friends back in Stouffville.
I graduated in fall 2025. The last six months I’ve been doing marketing and public relations for video game developers, which is directionally where I want to be. I’m still training, struggling with it, but it pays the bills.
I posted a thing recently about the Gen Z condition. There’s a line in the Sopranos pilot where Tony talks about how he feels he’s coming in at the end, how the best is over. He’s talking about the Mafia, but also the American Dream– the Mob, which by 1999 was a dying force. I look at the world, and maybe it’s because I’m on the younger side, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world more abundant than this one. And yet I have to assume that one day things will be better and there will be more opportunities than there are now. Because the alternative is despair, and despair is not a very useful emotion, I’ve found.
The best advice I’ve gotten: don’t take relationships for granted. They’re fragile things.
viv
I was born in Kaliningrad, Russia (former Königsberg). We were there for about a year. I don’t remember any of it. My family then immigrated to the US in a classic chain migration. My dad’s cousin had married an American, and we came on refugee status because we were Soviet Jews. Older family members had a lot of stories about overt anti-Semitism that was baked into society.
We lived in the US for a very short time before my dad, a former professor of naval architecture, got a fellowship in Japan. We moved to a Japanese fishing village and lived there a couple of years. All my early childhood memories are from that village, where there were no other children at all. I have early childhood memories going back to age two or three, and I remember a long stretch of that period, even though I don’t remember moving there.
Then we moved to Ohio, right on Lake Erie. I remember thinking, wow, what a lame body of water. So small. This is not the Pacific Ocean. I found American children very strange and loud. Why are they all like this? Can they please settle down. We only lived in Ohio for about a year before we moved to Texas, where I was ages seven to thirteen. If there’s any state I can be said to be “from”, it’s probably Texas.
My parents knew nothing about religion because they didn’t really do that in the Soviet Union, but they decided I should have a religious education. My mom didn’t like the Catholic church that was nearby, so they decided I’d be Jewish instead. That’s one of the instances of high-effort parenting from them that I endorse. Other instances include insisting really hard that I learn Russian, which I’m still fluent in, and which I think probably wasn’t worth the family conflict. But the religious education was good. I don’t have any supernatural beliefs, but I think I got lasting benefit from having some kind of connection to a religious community.
You know how sometimes there’s a kid that everyone instantly picks out as wrong somehow, and they hate them? That was me. I don’t know if it was because I’d grown up with zero social exposure to other children at a critical early age, or that plus immigration culture shock, or if I had genuine developmental delays of some sort. I don’t really think I’m autistic; I just believe in their beliefs. I generally had at least one friend, but I felt very low down on the totem pole. I had a distinct sense of social precarity and otherness up until high school.
We moved to the DC area in eighth grade, and my home high school was really quite bad. Allegedly the number two middle school in the country, in a wealthy county with “good schools,” but it was fully two years behind my previous middle school. They were clearly gaming metrics for funding. I had a terrible time. I think this was the first genuine depressive episode I ever experienced. So I tested into a magnet school instead, where basically everyone was the same sort of thing as me, and I was like, wow, this is a place where I’m socially normal. That undid a lot of old wounds. I credit going to that school as a really hingey moment in my life. I got extremely attached to the friends I made there. I had a squad. I’d grown up watching cartoons where it was the power of friendship, etcetera, which I always found very moving and wanted very desperately and never had. In high school I was like, oh my god, this is the thing I’ve always wanted, it’s actually real. When that friend group dispersed years later it probably changed me permanently.
High school was also when I first read the LessWrong sequences and went, oh my god, this is life-changing, this is amazing, I should reorient my whole life around it. Then I sort of forgot about it and went to college to have fun and be a normal person.
I majored in physics, despite having previously been a humanities-reading-and-writing-and-history kind of person. I figured I could read books and write papers on my own time, but I couldn’t really learn physics if someone wasn’t coercively teaching it to me, and I really wanted to know physics. I wanted everything in life. I was very voracious for every possible kind of experience and still am. I did a lot of random shit in college, audited a lot of extra courses in things I found interesting, worked random interesting physics jobs, and engaged in a lot of kooky schemes. I ended up with three separate undergraduate degrees, in physics, astronomy, and studio art.
I was also a pre-med. I had delusions of medical school. The plan was to have fun, learn physics, do science, and then become a doctor. I really wanted to do Doctors Without Borders, helping people in acute crisis in low-resource areas. I was under the impression that being a doctor was the highest-impact thing I could do that would involve really helping people for sure. Unfortunately I wasn’t a very committed pre-med and didn’t really spend any time around other pre-meds. I thought the classes were boring and that physics was just much more fun.
Around graduation, a friend of mine (who would many years later become my husband) linked me to a Scott Alexander article, and I was like, oh, hey! So that’s what the rationalists are up to, I totally forgot about those guys. And from there I got into effective altruism. My husband just likes reading complicated long-form internet writing, but for me, EA was like coming home. Like oh, this is exactly what I already think, these are my people. Like with the med school stuff, I was already thinking in terms of wanting a high-impact career. As an immigrant I felt like I had a duty to give back to the world, since being an educated American citizen meant I was one of the most insanely privileged people in the world. My family wasn’t particularly well-off, but I still felt unfathomably lucky and like I owed it to the world to do something with that fortune.
Anyway, I read the 80,000 Hours article about how doctors aren’t actually all that high-impact, which was hugely convenient for me as I wasn’t actually enjoying the process of trying to become a doctor at all. I volunteered at the ER and I liked the work, I liked the patients, I liked learning the material. But I hated everything about the culture. I sort of think the medical education pipeline is explicitly optimized to select for hoop-jumpers and bootlickers. I’d ask questions in class because I was genuinely enthusiastic about medical biochemistry or immunology, and people would turn around and give me dirty looks for wasting time on stuff that wasn’t going to be on the exam.
So I jumped off that train and ended up landing on biosecurity. With AI safety, even if I bought all the arguments that it was the most important thing ever, I didn’t buy any of the theories of change. Nobody actually knew what would lead to better outcomes, and it seemed very totalizing and epistemically suspect to me. With biosecurity, I could easily believe it was a problem and see how there were solutions. The standard EA career advice at the time was to get a PhD in biology and then go into biosecurity policy. I was like, oh, I get to spend five more years doing science? Very convenient for me, since that’s what I wanted to do anyway. I went into a Bioengineering PhD at UPenn, which was great fun for a while, even though I didn’t end up finishing it.
I ended up doing that FTX Bahamas fellowship, where I got recruited to research far-UVC solid state emission technology. I also got to help design a program that would have pumped a lot of R&D money into the area, but it ended up cancelled at the last minute along with all the other not-yet-funded programs in that cohort. Would have been cool, but oh well–I did end up sticking around in far-UVC world, and that’s been my professional focus for about four years now. EA is primarily interested in this for pretty idiosyncratic reasons: oh, the superintelligent AI might kill us with a pandemic virus, so we care about preventing pandemics. I used to be more willing to bite the bullet and accept that frame: sure, that’s what makes this as high-impact as it is, and I have to do the highest-impact thing.
These days I’m a lot more, yeah, whatever, big if true. I got pretty disillusioned with a lot of this stuff over the years–I wrote about it a bit here. But I still think clean indoor air is good. Even if none of that doom stuff ever happens and all we do is prevent a lot of ordinary disease, that’s pretty good. I feel pretty good about it. I think I’m well-placed to do what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last few years in a research post at Columbia and involved in nonprofit consulting work, and last year I cofounded Aerolamp, a far-UVC company focused on radically lowering cost and getting the tech deployed much more widely.
I got married earlier this year, and I’m having a baby in about six weeks, which has been interesting. We’re moving from New York to DC, partly to be closer to our families. But also I don’t think New York is for me. I really tried to like New York– I thought, surely in a city of ten million people I’ll find my people, I just have to look. But I never did. New Yorkers are ambitious in a very solipsistic way–like, people there have dreams, but in a very “this is my dream for me” way. I think the people who have dreams for the world are moreso in the Bay Area and DC. But we’ll see how that goes.
The best advice I ever got was from my 11th grade AP economics teacher, mostly because I can’t remember any other time I really got advice good enough to remember. He could tell I was that “slacker smart kid who’s so above it all and doesn’t take any of it seriously because it’s all bullshit” types. He told me–play the game. You’re right, it is all bullshit, but you still need to play the game–so you can win it, and eventually get out of it. I don’t know that I really took that advice, and I don’t know that I wish I had, but it was still pretty good advice.
I write about far-UVC and indoor air stuff here, and random personal stuff here.
💙 Smitty
I was born in 2004 in Kitchener, Ontario, but grew up in a suburb called Ayr. I went to elementary school in Ayr, and somehow in fifth grade I ended up in a gifted program. I was in that for grades five through eight at schools further away. I liked my classmates in the gifted program a lot more than before, because they were much smarter. In high school I went back to being normal.
Tenth grade started normally. We started in September 2019, and in March 2020 COVID happened. I remember being in drama class when everybody heard the news that school was cancelled for a few weeks. It ended up being cancelled for much longer. I kind of never actually went back. The rest of grade 10 was remote, all of grade 11 was remote, and the first semester of grade 12 was finally back in person. For the second semester of grade 12 I organized things so I only had two courses left, both very easy distance-learning ones, so I just did them from home. They took me two or three hours a week because I basically already knew the material.
Throughout my life I was really interested in programming, but I got even more interested starting in March 2020 when I had a bunch of time at home to do random stuff I liked. That was primarily software development and open-source contributions. By the time I was finishing high school I was thinking about what to do next, and narrowed it down to either university or a job. I applied to both. I ended up with two job offers, surprising me: one from a blockchain mining company that seemeda bit sketchy, and one from a database-as-a-service company. In hindsight I should have taken the blockchain job, but I took the database one.
I sat around in July and August 2022 mostly surfing the internet, then started the job for real in September. In May 2023 I moved out from my parents. I’d been working remotely so I didn’t have to live anywhere, but I was in a suburb with nothing to do, so I moved to Toronto. I ended up 30 minutes by subway from downtown, and in hindsight I should have been closer because the commute to anything fun was annoying.
About a month into the move, my company told me they didn’t want me working on the Postgres extension I’d been hired for anymore. They moved me to the back end of the managed service, in a different language. They said it was kind of the same thing. It was a very different job. In hindsight, this is when I should have started looking for a new job. I worked on login and authentication for a while (two-factor, single sign-on for enterprise customers). Then they wanted me to work on the billing system, which I’d been trying to avoid because billing seemed easy to mess up. We’d had a few billing incidents in the past where we charged users the wrong amount, and they were always painful to resolve. But there was nothing else for me to work on, so I spent the next six months redesigning the billing system. We migrated to a managed external billing service so the finance team could manage billing changes without having to go through software people. It took four or five months. It was really boring stuff. I don’t know why I didn’t quit.
Eventually I got moved back to something interesting: working on a managed vector store. By that point I think I was burned out. I found it really hard to focus. I’d spend days and weeks not doing anything because I just couldn’t focus on my job. I felt like I just didn’t really care. I did that for a year, and it feels weird because I didn’t get much done. Then they told me they didn’t actually care about the vector database anymore and put me on building a CLI and an MCP thing. I did that for a month, until December 2025, when I finally quit.
Something else was happening concurrently with all of this, and I’ll go back to it now. Until June 2024 I didn’t really travel much. Then I heard about Manifest, a conference at Lighthaven, because I was using Manifold a lot. I went, and I think it was the best thing I’ve ever done. It was my first time in San Francisco. It’s hard to describe why, but I felt like going to Manifest was what made me actually ambitious in life. It really changed what happened over the rest of my life.
I’d ambiently been aware of AI safety for a while, but Manifest was the first time I actually met other people in the rationalist community who were aware of it. Talking to them, I realized I actually cared about AI safety and wanted to be ambitious and do something important. There were people who actually did interesting things. I hadn’t met a lot of ambitious, interesting people in Toronto who were interested in the same things I was.
I came back from Manifest excited, but I didn’t really do that much in the rest of 2024. I had a bigger intention to do something important, but didn’t act on it.
In January 2025 my leg started feeling a little stiffer. Over the next few months it gradually got more and more stiff, and by May 2025 I basically couldn’t walk. It was very convenient that I had a remote job. I went through a false start with a sports medicine doctor (we thought it was something else) and then he looked at the way I walked and said I probably had anklosing spondylitis. I got referred to a rheumatologist and it turned out I did. There’s a very good treatment regime for it. By around August I was close to fine. I still can’t bend over, but I can walk.
In the second half of 2025 I went to Metagame, another conference at Lighthaven. I got the same vibe from it as Manifest 2024. That was probably what led me to quit my job a few months later. I applied to ARENA, an AI safety upskilling program, and was pretty surprised they accepted me. I also applied to MATS 8 and got rejected. I wanted to apply to MATS 9 but they started requiring references, and I couldn’t think of anyone to put, so I didn’t.
In January 2026 I went to ARENA, which I really enjoyed. I did a lot of pair programming. I hadn’t realized I liked pair programming, because I’d worked remotely at my last job and didn’t have much daily contact with my coworkers. After ARENA I went back to Canada, spent some time with my parents, and went to Montreal for a month. I don’t speak French, but there are lots of English speakers in Montreal who are interesting to talk to. I climbed Mount Royal, which was fun but a little dangerous given the snow and my arthritis; the staircases were more like slopes. Then on March 31st I went to San Francisco for Inkhaven, where I am now.
The best advice I’ve ever received is probably “you can just do things.” I don’t remember who told it to me. It’s a TPOT thing.
Steve Hsu
I was born in Ames, Iowa. I grew up in the 1970s and graduated from high school in the 1980s, so I lived through the best era possible to be a teenager in the United States– before the internet, before AI, before social media. I lived in a college town. My brother and I had a wonderful childhood. We had friends we first met in preschool or kindergarten, went all the way through high school with, and are still close to.
My dad was a college professor, so we had a comfortable life. I was precocious. I started taking college classes when I was twelve. I had one close friend who was also intellectually gifted (his father was a professor at the same university) and we’re still close to this day. He was valedictorian at Princeton and did his PhD at MIT. He started in physics like me.
I went to Caltech after high school. Richard Feynman was the main reason I went; I studied theoretical physics and ended up more or less in the same field he was in. Graduated at 19. I had a crazy insane life in LA with my buddies, hitting the clubs, going to frat parties at UCLA, driving all around LA, 1980s synth pop blasting on the cassette stereo. This was before CDs.
After Caltech I went to Berkeley for grad school. I loved living in Berkeley. There were only 25,000 students at the time; it’s about 50,000 now. Even then I felt the area was getting overbuilt and crowded, but it was much better than today. After Berkeley I went to Harvard for a postdoc as part of the Harvard Society of Fellows, which elects eight members a year from all fields and supports you for three years to do whatever you want. I had an apartment in Dunster House, one of the river houses on the Charles. I got to have a second undergraduate experience because I was 24, just a few years older than the students. It’s always better to be a little bit older. If you could go back to high school again it would be more fun, because you’d know what was going on. I had a great time. I thought Cambridge and Boston were cold and gray, nothing as pleasant as Berkeley or even Pasadena.
My first faculty job was assistant professor at Yale. I lived in New Haven for three and a half years. My father, who was older when he had me and my brother, passed away around then. It was traumatic, but you also gain a strong sense of wisdom from it. When someone you know that well dies, you can see a life in its entirety, and you can think about what really mattered and what didn’t. It cuts through a lot of things most people take a long time to figure out.
Around this time most of my friends, because it was so difficult to get a faculty position in math or theoretical physics, had become the first wave of quants on Wall Street. So I’d take the train down from New Haven and experience the era of the yuppie. Then the internet hit, and a PhD student of mine and I realized how insecure university computer networks were; one of our machines got hacked. We started a company called SafeWeb focused on encryption and internet security.
I moved from Yale to the University of Oregon. We’d thought about putting the company in Eugene, an hour flight from San Francisco, but ended up putting it in Emeryville. I took a leave of absence to be CEO, and we sold the company to Symantec. There’s still a Symantec/Norton product called SafeWeb. At that point I had to decide whether to go 100% into entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley or back to physics. I went back to physics, returned to Oregon as a tenured professor, met my wife (a literature and film professor at the same university) and we had twins, who are now twenty.
In 2012 I was offered the vice president for research position at Michigan State. We moved to the Midwest, both became professors there, and our kids grew up in a little college town not that different from the one where I grew up.
Along the way I founded several more tech companies. We solved the scientific problem of how to predict complex traits in humans from DNA. We wrote the first paper with accurate predictions for height from DNA alone, and started a company that genotypes embryos for IVF families and helps them select which embryo will become their child. This is still controversial but becoming more common, and I’m 100% sure it’ll be standard of care in the future. All the technology in the movie Gattaca has now been realized and is available. The big controversial thing is selection for IQ, which is now starting to get going.
I’m a longtime friend of Scott Alexander and Gwern. I started blogging in 2004, which was early, and met all the rationalist folks that way. Ben invited me to Inkhaven.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten is corny but it’s what I spent a lot of effort teaching my kids. The Biblical version is the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To follow it, you must develop what people in the rationalist community sometimes lack: a theory of mind. You have to be able to imagine what the other person is thinking, and how you can help them.
💙 Nicky
My parents are Russian and moved to Ireland before I was born. I grew up in Ireland, was a quiet kid, didn’t talk much, played with leaves instead of playing sports. My parents split up and there was a financial crash, so I went through a few different schools. In high school I made some more nerdy friends. Though I still was mostly not conscious and just consumed youtube and video games.
Most summers I’d go to Russia to visit family in the countryside. In Ireland we have a gap year between middle school and high school, so I spent that year living in Russia and going to school there. The year before, in my final year of middle school, I’d been depressed, and I’d decided I didn’t want to have emotions, so I just stopped having them. Russia was very quiet. School was six days a week, finished at 1pm, and then I’d go home and play video games. Pretty chill.
I went to high school back in Ireland for two years. My friends had changed a bunch in the meantime, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. I started studying. I mostly watched a ton of YouTube and played video games. I watched a lot of philosophy stuff and went vegan.
The summer before my last year of high school I went to a summer camp for nerds called CTYI, where I did a course in theoretical physics, wore cat ears, and met my girlfriend. We’re still together. I went back to high school, studied for exams, and started learning Olympiad stuff. I went to training at the university every weekend. At the end of high school I went to the International Math Olympiad and the Chemistry Olympiad. Then I went to university to study theoretical physics.
I joined the vegan society and started making posters and doing design work for them. I’d been into art somewhat already and got more into it then. At the end of my first year they asked me to be chair, and I ran the society for the rest of my time at university. The summer after first year I tried to find an internship and didn’t really succeed, so I worked with my stepdad on his mobile catering business and started learning to code so I could get a better internship the next year.
Second year I studied for scholarship exams and narrowly didn’t get a scholarship. I got the best results in my course but nobody got it that year. I had a startup internship lined up, and then COVID happened and everything collapsed. The internship got cancelled. I applied to a couple of other things and got into a different university internship at a startup accelerator. My girlfriend was there too, and we got randomly paired on the same team. Nobody knew we were a couple until the last day. We worked on a health tracking app, which was okay considering we didn’t know how to code and built it in a few weeks. There was no Claude Code back then.
Third year was COVID, mostly online, draining. I did a contest and got an internship at a network switch company. I kept running the vegan society. I applied for a Facebook internship and grinded operating systems for two weeks straight. At the student society fair I saw some students from the year below, and they were excited because I’d posted my notes from first and second year online and they’d all been using them. I hadn’t known anyone was reading my website. I did pretty well considering I knew nothing, but they didn’t hire me.
Fourth year COVID calmed down a bit.. I also met a friend from the startup internship who was very into effective altruism. He sold me on it. I listened to a dozen 80,000 Hours podcasts in a weekend and was like, yeah, this is great. I joined some AI safety reading groups. I got a Microsoft offer and some startup offers, and decided to do AI safety instead.
I got into SERI-MATS in Berkeley for two months in 2022. After MATS I applied for a grant and kept doing AI safety research. I got another grant for twelve months. I bounced around– London, Oxford, a couple of months in Japan, two or three months in Prague for a rationality program. After that I was sick of moving around. I tried to find housing in Cork, Ireland with my girlfriend, but couldn’t get anything, so I moved to London. I’d visited London for a weekend and a friend offered me a spare room; I moved in the next week. I ended up living in London for a year and a half. I continued to do research and I started teaching at ARENA. I made a best friend there who helped me learn more social skills.
One thing I learned from SERI-MATS is that you can just post things on LessWrong. One time I got really triggered by a YouTube video about renewables being cheap but not being deployed enough. The guy blamed capitalism. I spent a day writing up a post about how Ireland has energy markets and you could just buy batteries and fix the problem profitably. Six months later I was on a beach in Spain when I got an email from some guy who said he’d really liked my post, was Irish, and was an investment manager at a six-billion-dollar fund. Did I want to get on a call? I was like, what the hell, why is this guy emailing me, I just got triggered by a YouTube video. We met up. He said they could throw three million dollars at this if I wanted to help them, with some equity for me. I was like, yeah, that sounds very cool.
I’d been getting gradually more burnt out from AI safety research for about a year. I got quite stressed when this energy thing was fizzling, and I spent a lot of time writing and journaling to feel better. I decided to take a month off AI safety to chill, and that month was Inkhaven.
The best advice I’ve gotten is to write things online and journal.
Benjamin Grayzel
I was born in Boston, but my parents moved to the suburbs when I was two or three. I had a lot of trouble integrating, connecting, being more active; a standard grab bag of ADHD and Asperger-y type behaviors defined my early childhood. In third grade my mom founded a school where talented students could learn without limits. It allowed me to learn remedial socialization and advanced math at the same time, smoothing out my jagged personhood and preparing me for the world.
I went to a small prep school in Waltham. They were willing to continue these asymmetric accommodations and let me take calculus as a freshman. I joined the wrestling team, which was a big part of my development. It’s hard to maintain an aversion to touch when you’re regularly in a fight. I made nationals as a freshman, which was partly a stroke of luck because I was so small (106lb weight class), but also partly because the sport fit me. I might have taken it seriously in college if that had been my priority.
My high school let me take classes at Brandeis once I ran out of the math track. It helped me get into Dartmouth and allowed me to place out of a lot of math prereqs when I matriculated. This offered freedom to explore other subjects in line with the liberal arts ethos. I studied physics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, engineering. I wanted to try as many subjects as I could; my lifelong goal is to understand how the world works. I rushed a frat, though not one of the intense ones. I was on the climbing team and mountaineering crew for a bit. I did a foreign study at LSE in London for three months, mostly studying international relations (international institutions, interstate subversion, China’s rise).
The foreign study solidified Government (polysci) as the social counterpoint to mathematics. I like looking at the world this way. Math provided the foundation of dynamic systems– physics, chemistry, earth sciences. Government offers insight into how people work. I think it’s a mistake to approach human systems from a purely rational perspective. You need both a technical and non-technical lens.
I started getting interested in CS senior year as the ‘universal toolkit’ right as AI was taking off, so I stayed at Dartmouth for a CS Master’s. These last two years I’ve hyperfocused on AI. I want to understand the ecosystem. How do you orchestrate agents; how does the policy landscape look globally and what structural forces are shaping it; how do models work. Many people understand these items better than me, but I think I’m developing a decent breadth.
I’ve tried some things. I built a forecast for the 2024 election. I worked on prediction markets for a financial firm. I solved a math problem with AI. I’ve done some nonspecific contracting. I’ve written a few ML papers. I remain tuned to the political ecosystem. The voice in my head wants to do something deeply meaningful, but I don’t know what that is yet.
The best advice I’ve received, or at least the most actionable and highest leverage advice, is to remember to drink water, eat, and sleep. If you ever have a problem, it’s worth exploring if a glass of water, a snack, and a nap can fix it. It often can.
💙 Scott Sumner (advisor)
I was born in 1955 in Michigan. From the age of 2, I grew up in Wisconsin, and had a fairly ordinary childhood. I had a brother and sister, and grew up middle class. The one notable thing was that my parents got divorced when I was about 12. I went to the University of Wisconsin for undergrad and the University of Chicago for graduate school, both in economics.
I taught for more than 30 years at Bentley College (now Bentley University) after a few short jobs elsewhere. I drifted a little when I was young. It took me a while to get my career going. I had to apply for tenure twice because I was slow to start doing research. But once I got going it worked out pretty well. The most notable change in my personal life was getting married in Beijing in 1994. We have one daughter, who’s 26.
The biggest professional change came a little more than halfway through my career. In 2009 I started blogging. My specialty was monetary economics, and my blog had a distinctive take on the 2008 financial crisis. That got it some attention, which opened a lot of doors for me– speaking engagements, eventually a research position at the Mercatus Center. I wrote books on the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Toward the end of my career I was working out of my house doing research. I’m here at Inkhaven because of the blogging, not because of teaching at Bentley.
After I retired we moved from the Boston area to Orange County. I like film, travel, and reading. I read a lot of fiction. For older novels, my two favorite authors are Borges and Conrad. For modern fiction I tend toward European novelists– Sebald, Knausgaard, Houellebecq, Murakami. The older book that most impressed me was In Search of Lost Time. The recent one I’d point to is My Struggle, by Knausgaard. I don’t read much science fiction, but my favorite in that genre is The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. My favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I saw it as a 12-year-old in 1968.
When I was young I traveled in ways that look more adventurous in retrospect than they felt at the time. Four of us drove from Wisconsin to the Yucatán over Christmas in college; it was 6,500 miles round trip, none of us spoke Spanish. I lived in Australia for a semester teaching, rented a van, and drove 4,500 miles across the outback by myself, sleeping in the back. I wouldn’t do those things now. I’d want to stay in a luxury hotel.
I’d describe myself as not too ambitious in a conventional sense, but I have a lot of intellectual interests, and I put more weight on those than maybe some people do, and less on career objectives. In grad school I spent a lot of time going to movies in the evening when my fellow grad students were studying for prelims. I read many many novels in grad school when I should have been reading scientific papers. I was willing to sacrifice a little career success to pursue hobbies and travel and reading.
As for the best advice I’ve gotten, I can’t name exactly who said it or when, but the general advice that would have been most helpful to me is: don’t do things you don’t want to do just for money, because you can make more money. The biggest mistakes in my life were things I did for monetary reasons. I wrote a textbook for the money and it turned out to be a waste of time. I became a landlord for the money and it turned out to be a big hassle. The books I wrote because I had a passion for the subject were my history books. So the advice I’d give others is: follow your dreams, don’t do things for monetary reasons.
💜 Layla Hughes
I was born in the first hospital to ever let an unmarried father attend a birth. My parents weren’t married, and when my mom was in labor and they got to the hospital in 1972, the hospital said my dad couldn’t come in. My mom said fine, she was leaving. So the hospital agreed and let my dad stay.
Right after, the hospital gave me my mom’s last name, because there was no proof my dad was my dad. My parents had to go to court to get my name changed. The judge said he liked the sound of my dad’s name better, so he’d allow it, but if my parents ever showed up in his court again with another child from an unwed relationship, he’d throw them in jail.
My parents had both left college after a year to follow my dad’s band, which had decided to move to Indiana. That’s where I was born. We lived in a big hippie house with all the people in the band, and my crib was a drawer.
My parents fought a lot, and throughout my childhood they sometimes lived together and sometimes didn’t. When I was young and we didn’t live with my dad, we lived in public housing for single women. The public housing was a very bad early imprint on me. It was scary and intimidating, and I was such a timid, scared little girl. Eventually we moved to the mountains to live in a tiny cabin with my dad. In that little mountain town I was able to wander freely all around– even though I was only five, all the kids just kind of did. That was a really formative thing. Instead of just being afraid of everything, I started to develop a sense of agency and a love of nature. My friends and I would go hang out in the woods, pick flowers, hang out by the stream.
My parents had a rocky relationship all the way until I was 18. I preferred when they weren’t living together because I hated how much they yelled. We were very poor. Sometimes our electricity would be shut off because my parents hadn’t paid the bill. Starting when I was about six, I was basically in charge of my own meals. I’d make my own breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My parents would either be working, sleeping, or partying.
That gave me a strong sense of how important it was to create a much more stable, functional life for myself when I left. I was always super high-functioning, but in compensation for a very unstable childhood.
I didn’t get much attention from my parents otherwise. The one way they interacted with me was intellectually. When we’d go on weekend camping trips up into the mountains– the only kind of vacation we could afford. They’d talk about politics in the car and let me be part of the conversation. It felt like we were three co-equals talking. That was the only way I got their attention, and as a result I built a strong correlation between love and intellectual interaction. I put huge weight on intellectual connection with romantic partners. It was also my template for how to get attention and approval: be a great student, impress the teacher. Straight A’s were how I sought safety.
I went to American University in DC for college. I’d never spent much time with extended family; I was an only child, and both sets of grandparents lived in the DC area, so going to school there meant I could finally know them. I was deciding between Berkeley and American, and Berkeley’s intro classes had 500 people in a room. I was sure I couldn’t pass a class while competing with that many other students for attention. American also gave me a lot of money, so less debt.
I had really great internships during school: I worked for a senator, did all sorts of things. DC was a great place for that. But academically, American wasn’t very challenging. I was in the honors program but it was easy. My college experience was mostly a bunch of really wealthy East Coast kids partying. Coming from Boulder, I felt very self-conscious as the out-of-place poor hippie girl, so I did everything I could to fit into their world. I basically just clubbed through college and didn’t have many interesting intellectual conversations. The friendships were superficial, built around partying. I kind of feel like college was a waste.
Then I got into Georgetown for law school. I remember being super nervous about the debt. I called my dad crying, terrified to sign my name on the acceptance sheet because I’d owe so much money. He told me: picture yourself ten years from now, in two scenarios– you went to law school, or you didn’t– and try to sense which feels better. That might have been the best advice I ever got. It was the first structure for decision-making I’d ever encountered, and it stuck with me.
Law school was the first time I was around really smart people. I was used to easily being top of the class with no effort, and at Georgetown I had to really try. Even trying, I was at the bottom of the top third. That was devastating to my ego. But I learned so much. I’d grown up with a disadvantaged childhood and missed out on so much of the baseline: philosophy, politics, history, ethics. I had to catch up on all of it. Law school didn’t just teach me content, it taught me how to think, because the school was much more about reasoning than about practical lawyering. I’m very thankful for that.
I had a clerkship in New York, where my co-clerk became one of my best friends. I loved New York but it was hard being so poor. I made $40,000 and probably spent $50,000 a year. Then I went to a really big law firm in DC. Finally a lot of money, finally financial security, but it was mind-numbing. I was helping corporations argue over how their products should be categorized when imported (”it’s an action figure, not a Barbie doll”) to save them cents per unit. I lasted a year.
I went to Conservation International to do international environmental law. I traveled to a lot of really cool places and did comparative legal work, advising groups on how to protect the environment. But I had a boss I couldn’t stand. I had a resignation letter drafted but was too scared to send it. Then on September 11th, 2001, I was running in the park listening to the radio when the news came in. I went to work, didn’t realize yet it was a terrorist attack, and got there to messages saying we all had to go home, there was still a plane on the way to the Pentagon and we were close. In the five minutes I was logged on, I thought, life is really short. I pressed send on the resignation letter.
I hated being in DC after. There were helicopters overhead 24/7, they removed the trash cans because of bomb threats, and everyone became really racist. So I met up with another lawyer friend who was also leaving the law, and we drove across the country, camping every night, learning to rock climb. We landed at a friend’s house in Portland and started an outdoor business that taught people adventure racing, rock climbing, navigation, mountain biking, river paddling. I just loved being outside doing mountain sports.
I was getting curious about Alaska, and I saw a job there with Earthjustice, a two-year position. I’d told myself I was done being a lawyer after my burnt-out DC self-important phase, but two years in Alaska, decent money, a way to experience the place, sounded great. So I went. Within six weeks of arriving I’d met my husband and a huge group of great friends, and I knew I wanted to stay.
I had a series of great career successes; I won some important cases, developed a name in Alaska as a litigator against oil and gas development, mostly represented environmental and indigenous groups. We had a wonderful life. Most of our friends were also lawyers, all transplants, all having babies at the same time. We had huge potlucks every night, watched each other’s kids, ran each other’s errands. An incredible sense of community.
But Alaska is insulated. It’s beautiful and wonderful, but nobody outside Alaska thinks about it, and nobody inside thinks about anywhere else. We felt disconnected from the rest of the world, and we wanted our son to have an experience beyond being a little Alaskan mountain kid. We applied for jobs, and my husband got one in Geneva. We moved twelve years ago, planning to stay two years, and then his job kept becoming permanent.
Geneva let me develop my international environmental law experience for real. I worked for the Center for International Environmental Law and got to participate in a lot of treaties and international negotiations. It gave me a much broader view on power, corporations, and law all over the world. I learned so much. That was always where I’d wanted to go in the first place; it just took a long detour through Alaska oil and gas litigation to get there.
I’ve been nomadic for the last fourteen months or so, going through some major transitions. The space that opened up has let me start absorbing a whole world I didn’t know existed. For twenty years, all I could do was try to be a good mom, a good wife, and excel in my career. There was zero room in my head to learn any of the things I’m learning now. That’s one reason I’m here.
The best advice I’ve gotten is still my dad’s: picture yourself ten years out, in each scenario, and ask which one feels better.
💙 Avi
My full name is David, but I go by Avi. I’m the third of 4 brothers, and my mom had me when she was 23. My oldest memories are of arriving at Michigan State when I was three, in 1968. My dad moved the family from a 4 bedroom colonial on ½ acre in a Connecticut suburb to a little 2 bedroom apartment at Michigan State. My dad went to grad school and eventually got his Phd, while my mom raised three little boys. The fourth was born in Michigan,
My mom always said those were the best years; she loved the community. That’s the setting of an article I wrote called “I’m Here for the Rockets,”. We’d watch the rocket launches and the neighbors came over because we had a color TV. II was really into rockets and the moon and space.
I was a smart, well-behaved kid. Very talented musically. I think I built a lot of my identity around being a gifted child. That’s probably a meta-theme around here. Everybody at Inkhaven is gifted. We’re all special.
I did very well in school, but increasingly less well as the work required more self-direction. By junior high I had to write papers, and that started to fall apart, because you do well sitting in class but then you’re not in class. I went to large public schools, played in bands, did concerts and recitals. I wasn’t very well organized but that didn’t matter as much at that level.
I wasn’t athletic, and had to wear a back brace for scoliosis in high school. I hated it, but it got me out of gym class. My older brothers ran track and wore varsity jackets, which is a thing you definitely wanted to wear in a big high school.
Religion was important in my family. We went to Hebrew school 3 days a week, after public school. We had to go to temple for high holidays, and my 3 brothers and I all had Bar Mitzvahs. None of us kept up any religious practice any longer than we were obligated to.
My father was a science teacher and I got my interest in space and science from him. We split the cost of a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer when I was in high school and I learned programming in basic.
I tested well, and got into MIT. I actually didn’t want to go to college, because I didn’t feel ready. My dad asked what I wanted to do instead, and I had no answer. I lasted three semesters and was on my way to failing out, so I took the gap year I had wanted to take after high school.
I landed an apprenticeship with the campus piano tuner. I slept on a friend’s floor, hung around campus, and learned to work on pianos. The piano shop was in Building 20, this huge, supposedly temporary building from World War II where they’d developed radar. Because it was a random shitty building, you’d get all kinds of people there. Noam Chomsky had his office. There was philosophy and ROTC. And in the corner next to the piano tuner was a guy named Professor Rainer Weiss, who was going to look for gravity waves. That was a super long shot; Einstein didn’t think anyone would ever detect them. I met Rai on a couple of occasions. I never had him as a professor, but having him as a neighbor was pretty cool. He’d wander by and say, “You’re polishing the brass all wrong, the cloth is turning black because you’re taking off brass now.” Thirty years later he gets the Nobel for LIGO. Gravity has been a thing of mine ever since. I’ve written a few science explainers about gravity, orbits, gravitational slingshots.
After that I got a Ranger volunteer position at Grand Canyon National Park, and went from sleeping on my friend’s couch at MIT to literally standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon giving ranger talks. I had no problem with heights, so I’d be standing facing the park visitors with the canyon right behind me. I did whitewater trips, worked on a forest fire crew, and got my outdoor stuff going. When that was over, I biked across the southern US, from Arizona to North Carolina, over 2 thousand miles. Then I spent a summer basically living on the Appalachian trail in Mass. and Connecticut doing trail work.
I returned to MIT for a second try. The curve matched the first time exactly; same three terms, same nosedive. I had better friends the second time, but I dropped out right around when my roommate was breaking up with his girlfriend, who I liked a lot. Six months later I moved in with her, and a couple of years after that we were married. So mid-twenties, no degree, but married, bought a little house, and was getting hired for software jobs because half a degree from MIT was still good enough to impress people..
We had a son, he’s 33 now. He was always interested in music and we played music together when he was young. I played out in Harvard Square with a Beatles cover band, and he came along and played tambourine. Later we formed our own duo and played out in the touristy areas downtown Boston. Busking is like bootcamp for gigging, you might get ten seconds of peoples’ attention so you have to make it count. He went to a music conservatory and teaches piano and plays jazz now.
Software was a lot like getting your homework done academically, so all I’d done was put myself in the same situations I wasn’t well-equipped for. My executive function never really came online.
My wife and I got divorced. I kept doing software, with the same upward-failure pattern I’d had through academics. There I was, under 30, divorced, single dad, doing the dad-on-the-weekends thing.
I started thinking about what I could actually do that didn’t feel miserable. I wanted to be an audio engineer. But sound in a club paid maybe 50 bucks a night, and I had child support, so I couldn’t make the math work. I kept doing software. Did a startup in 2000 in the Bay Area, which had similar results. Eventually I just couldn’t do it anymore. So I started doing audio in clubs, folk clubs, with rock bands.
Just before I got out of software, I bought a 2 family house outside Boston in 2000. I’d have never qualified for a mortgage without the software salary, so that was that career’s parting gift for me. Being a landlord was a big adjustment, but it complemented freelance audio and actually helped support me.
I was good at audio and much happier. I wasn’t feeling like a failure all the time. I’d been smart and I could test well, but that never translated to success in higher education or software. But I was actually successful at audio, which is different and better.
My father passed away in 2004, and I sometimes wonder what he’d have thought about AI, and the tech world of today. I was thinking of him when I created my “Zenith” star viewer since he first showed me a telescope.
I changed my name to Avi around when I changed careers. I was making a label, and the “D” key on the label maker didn’t work. It turned David into Avi and that seemed to fit.
I worked my way up into live audio. Not recording, but the thing where you show up and do it. That suited me, because it’s not homework. The structure drives you, and when I had that going I worked. I had clients instead of bosses, and my clients loved me. I built an audio company. I was getting more calls than I could handle, hired a few people, then a few more. Never had a website, all word of mouth.
I found a niche in the corporate speaking world, high-level VIP stuff. I had three different former presidents on speaking gigs. I worked a Biden gig when he was a candidate. I worked Clinton. I worked for Kamala Harris five days into her campaign. George W. Bush once. I built a Google Map of every gig I ever did, with a push pin for each one. Boston is just covered. There’s also one in Hawaii.
I loved putting together a team of people I thought were great. They knew if you got one of Avi’s guys, they were solid. I had a lot of interesting gigs, and came out of most of them with a good story to tell.
By the late 2010s I was burning out, and as I was approaching what I now know was the end of my career, I was working less and being more of a manager and owner while my freelancers were out on gigs. I started thinking about retiring, but it would have been impossible to sell the company. It wasn’t easy to transfer, it had a lot of specialization. I was talking with a couple of people who also had companies they were trying to sell: “Hey, you want to buy mine? Nope. You want to buy yours? Nope. Maybe we should merge and sell to someone else?” In the middle of trying to figure that out, COVID hit. Suddenly there was no such thing as a party or a wedding, and no one knew for how long.
I hadn’t stopped working like that in many years. It was a sudden forced pause, and I was glad. I had some clarity around then that even if I didn’t quite have enough money to retire, I could retire and eat ramen. That’s why. So in 2020 I traded my three vans in for some cash and called it.
It was hard not being driven by a massive calendar of events I had to manage and staff and equip. From kindergarten to your last job, you’re always working toward something, and then you’re like, okay, I did it. That’s probably why I’m here at Inkhaven: I really enjoy writing. The fact that nobody needed a sound company anymore was a huge relief.
I bought a second duplex outside Boston in 2013. I have four apartments in Boston now and that’s all I want to be responsible for.
I’ve kept up bicycle touring, doing a major tour every 5-7 years. I did the east coast, Nova Scotia, California coast, and most recently a big loop around Alaska in 2023.
After I retired, a friend texted me asking if I’d be interested in teleprompting. (Many people know what a teleprompter is - the thing on screen at a speech - but they don’t realize there’s a person who actually operates it). I’m a professional teleprompter operator now. If it’s a presidential candidate giving a speech, you need someone who handles themselves professionally. The fact that I had 20 years on gigs means I can sit in the teleprompter chair instead of the audio chair, wearing the same headset, knowing how to deal with the talent, the director, and the scene. A lot of domain knowledge transfers. I really enjoy it. I do a few days a month of teleprompting now.
I don’t do “best” advice. But some good advice: when you get advice, if it feels right, take it. If it doesn’t feel right, you don’t have to take it. That’s not because you’re wrong. And: don’t waste your time trying to change thoughts that are happening in somebody else’s head. It’s not your job. It’s their head. They’re in charge of that.
💜 Sean Herrington
I was born in London, and I lived there until I was four. My dad was running a ski company, and he basically said, “I’m in London sending people skiing, and I want to be skiing.” So my family moved to Switzerland for a year, then we ended up staying. I spent my youth at primary school in Switzerland, in a little village of about 400 people in the Swiss Alps.
I played sports pretty much every day. Tennis, ice hockey, football, athletics, skiing. I also did a fair amount of running. When I was eight I did my first half marathon, because the local school passed around a flyer for a kids’ race that was part of the regional mountain marathon; anybody over six could join, though if you were under ten you should probably have an adult with you. So I did that, and pretty much every year after. Once I was 16 I did the big race: 31 kilometers, with about 2,100 meters of overall ascent. I’ve done that three times now. That probably explains why I was so keen to walk 500 kilometers in Southeast Asia later.
At 13 I went off to boarding school in the UK for five years. Then I went to Oxford for four years and did a master’s in physics. My fourth-year project was in AI, and I was vaguely interested in AI safety from some of the first YouTube videos I’d watched (Robert Miles, the GOAT). I’d first come across him on Computerphile, because I was the sort of nerd who watched Computerphile, then moved across to his channel.
I’d been playing ice hockey since I was four because of the Swiss connection, and I spent a lot of my time at university playing ice hockey rather than studying. The thing I think of as my happiest memory is the Oxford Alternative Ice Hockey Club. There was the main club, OUIHC, with all the experienced skaters in pads. And then there was Alts, which had none of that. You take a bunch of people, put them on skates, play music, say “play ice hockey,” and everyone’s bad. It’s really entertaining. It still exists in my mind as my happy place. It’s not one moment; it’s a thing that still goes on twice a week.
After my master’s I wasn’t sure what to do next. I’d been thinking I was going to become a physicist, and that’s what I’d planned all the way through. The AI safety stuff had been interesting but hadn’t actually changed what I was going to do. It wasn’t until post-ChatGPT, when I was looking at my options more clearly, that I realized this was probably quite important and probably something I could contribute to.
I did an internship in Saudi Arabia in AI in summer 2024, and at the same time did an AI safety course online. The following autumn and winter I spent applying for a bunch of things, and the only thing I got into was AI Safety Camp, which was online. So I did that in the spring while still hanging around Oxford and playing ice hockey.
In April I decided to leave and go traveling for the summer. Three weeks in Korea, three weeks in Vietnam, three weeks in Cambodia, three weeks in Thailand, then Australia. The Vietnam and Cambodia stretches were on foot: I walked from Ho Chi Minh City all the way to Siem Reap, about 500 kilometers. I’ve been writing about that.
I came back in August. In September I did the ARENA program in London, an AI safety training bootcamp. Then I got a job with BlueDot, which does online AI safety training courses, and I’ve been teaching with them since. I also became an AI Safety Camp project lead. Now I’m at Inkhaven, and after this I’m going to an AI alignment program in Czechia.
I have a lot of parallel interests I run in the background. I’ve been juggling for about 11 years. I’m pretty good at chess. I played a lot during COVID, and during Inkhaven I tried to play two people simultaneously while blindfolded. We didn’t quite manage to finish the games before stopping, but I was ahead in both.
The best advice I’ve gotten is from chess grandmaster Avetik Grigoryan, on how to study. He says it’s easy to practice without studying, and easy to study without practicing. The skill is doing both: eat (I.e study) and digest (I.e practise), then repeat. Only eat as much as you can digest, and not more. If you have nothing left to digest, then eat.
💙 Benjamin Sturgeon
I started life on a small farm in South Africa (at least, that’s what my earliest memories are). We raised cattle, and there was a beautiful lake and a nice house. I had four older siblings, but each pair came from a different parent, so I was the only child of my parents and much younger than the others. That meant it was somewhat lonely growing up. There weren’t many people my age to bounce off of.
My parents got divorced when I was seven, and after that there was a lot of bouncing back and forth between them, which was tough. A lot of instability. When I was 12 or 13, I moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town to live with my dad. That was a significant experience, a lot of changes in terms of who I was living with.
I briefly went to a boarding school called Somerset College, which I really hated. They did terrible punishments where they’d force the boarders to measure the entire length of the football field in pencil lengths and stuff. I demanded my mom take me out. I went to Cedar House instead, which was a much more relaxed environment: no uniform, much more relaxed relationships with teachers, everyone free to express themselves and dress however they wanted. Still strong academic scores. It was a nice balance.
I went to Rhodes University, a college town far out in South Africa, and studied computer science and philosophy for five years. In 2019 I got super depressed during my last year, because it was really lonely; most of my peers had already left. I spent a bunch of time reinventing myself, reading Derek Sivers, listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast, listening to people who were the best in the world at what they did. I read Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark and got really interested in AGI. I decided I’d become very good at machine learning and software engineering.
During lockdown I had a weird experience. I went to Japan for what was going to be a three-month internship at a robotics company. It got cut a month short because of lockdown, and on the way back I got stuck in Doha airport for eight days. We made the news. I got back to South Africa and lockdown was actually a great experience. I’d met someone on a Vipassana 10-day meditation retreat at the start of 2020, and I just asked him if I could intern at his ML startup. He said yes. Each day I’d wake up, meditate, hang out with my cat, do calisthenics, and then implement code and train computer vision models. Through that I got a job at Cape AI.
I worked there for about two years. Then the founder tragically died. It’s not totally clear what the exact cause was, but it was probably downstream of a cycling accident. I moved to a place called Spatial Edge, which had acquired some of the Cape AI employees.
In that period I went to EAGx Singapore and found out it was possible to get funding to do AI safety research directly. I’d been getting more interested in AI safety through an 80,000 Hours career call that connected me to the EA community in Cape Town, run by Jordan Pieters. That was really helpful; I’m not sure I would have gone to EAG otherwise.
Someone at EAGx told me I could get funding. This was during the FTX era, so I actually got funding very easily. I remember the night I found out you could just get a bunch of money; I couldn’t sleep, it was so crazy to me. I started applying for university student organizer funding from Open Philanthropy, quit my job at Spatial Edge, and started a master’s doing AI safety research under Jonathan Shock.
For the next year and a half I did more field-building work. I started an organization called AI Safety South Africa with my friend Leo, who was working at Fruit Punch AI. I was like, this isn’t that useful, you should work on AI safety instead. So we started AI Safety South Africa and grew the community; among other things, most recently we ran a three-month research fellowship for twelve people which I think went really well..
Last year I got into MATS and have been working with Sid Black and David Africa at the UK AISI. Now I’m trying to figure out the next steps in terms of my career and what’s most important.
The best advice I’ve gotten is to read a book called Awareness by Anthony de Mello. Tim Ferriss says it’s the book he’s given to the most people: he keeps six copies on his shelf and gives them away when people are interested. It’s by a Jesuit priest who was eventually excised from the order because he was just doing his own thing. It’s about awakening, but really about shaking off the chains around what’s true. It lays out a rational basis for spiritual life and spiritual thinking without requiring any superstition or false beliefs. A lot of people bounce off it because of how it’s phrased, but I think that’s just a skill issue. Having that foundation of self-constructed first-principles narratives about what’s true is really essential to living a good life and doing meaningful work.
💜 Lily Blackburn
I was born on the East Coast, but only lived there for about six months. My dad had a construction job in Massachusetts, so I was born in Boston. We moved to southern Washington and then to Willow Creek, California, where I grew up. I was about three when we moved there. It’s a very rural place; pretty awesome to grow up in, also very weird and isolated.
My dad owned and still owns a swimming pool maintenance and construction business. My mom had a lot of random jobs. She passed in 2020 when I was 27. My parents split when I was young, so I lived between their homes most of my life until my mom left when I was 12 and moved to Indiana, where her mom and all her side of the family lived. I have a younger brother who still lives in Willow Creek and is taking over the family business. He’s happily married. He’s younger than me, but he’s a dad, which is funny because I still think of him as a baby.
I moved to Portland in 2013 to study English and creative writing. I’d always wanted to be a writer from a young age, and I just needed to leave Humboldt. A couple of friends had already moved up to Portland. I’d been a barista for a few years, so I got a job pretty quickly and went to Portland State. I loved school.
I’m really glad I went to college. After a sheltered upbringing in Humboldt, I felt very inspired and very empowered going. That’s when I started taking writing more seriously. I minored in creative writing and had professors who were really encouraging. I started learning how people publish things, how you can get better, how you can join writing groups. I joined some, started editing for a magazine, and got as involved in the Portland writing scene as I could.
I kept doing the barista thing and made a lot of friends that way. I published my first piece of writing in 2019. My whole life is writing, for better or worse. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.
I was a barista for 16 years; I started when I was 15. I quit a year and a half ago and got my first office job. I feel like I’m still processing how that whole thing really defined me, but what I definitely learned is that I’m not okay working in customer service. I was really burnt out by the end. I also made a lot of close friends over the years, was able to travel, made time for writing, learned how to be independent. I miss it sometimes.
My current job is a 9-5 in the marketing department at a structural engineering firm. Weird job, but stable. Pays the bills. I live in Portland still, with my cat and my boyfriend. We were friends for two years before we finally admitted we wanted to date. I love our life.
The best advice I ever got was from a woman who worked in the office at my high school. She was really sweet, kind of a mentor for me junior and senior year. She told me: “Do not settle.” I think about that a lot. It’s really pushed me to not stay stuck in things like jobs and relationships. Now that I’m 32 and not 16, I also think there’s something to settling that’s actually good. It’s easy for me to always be chasing the next best thing, getting to a different stage of life and asking, “okay, how do I make this better?” Settling into something and mining it for depth and being more present… that kind of feels like the opposite of that advice, and it’s been really important to me the last few years.
My happiest memory is fishing with my parents on a lake in Northern California. My brother and I were in the canoe, trout fishing, and I caught a sunfish. I remember it really well even though I was pretty young. I was just totally in awe of the experience of catching a fish, even though it was a little fish. It was a beautiful day.
💙 Margot Reilly
I was born in 1987 in upstate New York. My dad taught middle school history. My mom was a dental hygienist. I have a brother, Sean, four years younger.
Childhood was quiet. I went to a good public school. I read a lot, did fine without really trying, and was generally the kid teachers liked and other kids didn't quite know what to make of. We weren't well off but we weren't worried about money. My parents were the kind of people who believed in libraries.
I went to a state school for college on partial scholarship. I studied comparative literature, mostly because I'd liked an essay I'd read in high school and decided that was the direction. I had no real plan past that.
Junior year I went to Paris on an exchange program. I worked a few afternoons a week at an English-language bookshop near the place I lived. The owner paid me partly in expired chocolate. I dated a French boy for a few months. We broke up over a pay phone, which dates me.
Coming back was harder than going. I'd been thin and fluent and a little smug about it, and it took about six weeks for that to fully wear off. People underestimate the return half of study abroad.
I graduated in 2009, which was a bad year to graduate. I'd been thinking about a PhD and my parents had been gently asking about the academic job market, which I had been refusing to research. So I deferred a year, then another, and then it was clear I wasn't going. I took the LSAT instead — fairly impulsively, I signed up the week I walked past a Kaplan office — and went to law school.
Law school was three years of treating myself like a project to finish on time. Then I worked at a firm doing corporate litigation for a little over two years. I billed in six-minute increments. I quit in February 2016. There was a snowstorm.
I drove out west afterward and lived in a guest cabin on the property of a woman I'd met once at a wedding. I learned to identify a fair number of birds by their calls. I'd intended to stay six months and stayed almost a year.
I came back east in 2017 partly because my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. (She's been fine for some years now. It didn't feel that way at the time.) I lived in my parents' house and worked remotely as a freelance legal editor for a small publisher of reference materials for solo practitioners. The work pays well per hour and I can do it from anywhere, which has more or less been the arrangement since. I write some on the side, mostly for myself, occasionally for a couple of small magazines.
I met my partner James in 2019. He teaches high school physics. We have a daughter who is two and a half and currently very interested in the moon. I've lived in the same apartment for six years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere except the house I grew up in.
I notice that the life I have now would not have been visible to me at any earlier stage. I wouldn't have known to want it. I'm at this residency partly because I've been writing more lately and wanted a month of being in a room with people doing the same thing.
The best advice I've gotten was from the bookshop owner in Paris when I was twenty and complaining about not knowing what to do with my life. Nobody knows, he said. The people who look like they know are lying.
💜 Alok Singh
I was born in a village in India. My dad got an H1B and we moved to Cupertino when I was about a year old. I grew up in the Bay Area.
I’ve always been really taken by the old myths. Maybe the first story I remember really reading in depth was the Odyssey. I was obsessed with it. But growing up in the Bay Area, hearing people’s ambitions, at least at the time I couldn’t relate. People here sure have a lot of ambitions. I didn’t have many friends. Until I was about 10 or 11, I didn’t have anyone come over to my house. I spent a lot of time in the library reading. I read the Redwall series a lot. I stole my middle school’s copy of Mossflower. I still have it. I’ve read it more than 30 times.
In high school, to make friends, I signed up for a business club called DECA. I gave up everything to it. That was the first time in my life I truly worked hard at anything: helping out members, coming up with training plans for them, trying to understand other people better.
At some point I got very into tailoring and menswear. My two big life interests were history and menswear, and I sort of just drifted through it all. I got into Berkeley from a high SAT score. By then I’d heard of the Thiel Fellowship and all the Silicon Valley stuff– startups, ambition, etcetera. My whole life I’d been hearing about it, but I didn’t feel it.
In college I went to study business because I wanted to be Mr. Investment Banker. At some point I realized that being a tailor was a pretty awful job. Beautiful, but awful. To really reach mastery takes so much. All the good tailors are old men who were apprenticed when they were boys, who have given everything to it. That seemed very sad to me. It still seems sad to me.
One Sunday night I was awake hitting the random page button on Wikipedia and it put me on the page for “addition.” I started scrolling mindlessly, and halfway through it started talking about a commutative group, and I didn’t know what the hell that was, so I closed the tab and went to sleep. But a week later I was on some other math page, and then another. It snowballed from there. I became obsessed with math. I changed my major to math during a business class, just closed the laptop and left midway through. The teacher said, “you can’t go.” I said, “but I’m no longer in this class.”
I think it was good for me. I’d always been very intense, and I don’t know a lot of six-year-olds who read the Odyssey. Having something even more intense, and seeing that what I thought I knew was just a sliver of what was there, that was humbling and good. Maybe my first exposure to the idea that there are levels, and people who are far beyond. That served me much better later with AI. The thought of AI just being better at everything was a lot easier to swallow, since with math I already had that conception.
A friend bet me one time that I couldn’t write a web app in C using only the standard library in a week. I didn’t know what any of those words meant. I didn’t succeed, but I spent a week on it and it got me into computers. There was something transcendent about the realization that there wasn’t just one world– that I could imagine, so I could create.
I drifted through most of college. I heard about machine learning, which now is just called AI, back in 2015 or 2016, and I took a class but didn’t think much of it. Every summer I’d travel. I went to Scotland with my brother, then spent a month in Japan by myself, then in August 2016 spent a month in China. My last day in China I was on a date, and as we were heading out of a bar some random guy ran up behind me and hit me in the head with a rod. He had me mixed up with a different guy. I spent a week in a hospital in Shanghai, just looping through the question of what I was going to do with my life. I’d run out of eating, sleeping, and showering. You can only shower four or five times in a day before your skin gets all raw and starts to hurt.
I decided then that I would work on automated theorem proving and reinforcement learning. It’s been about ten years now and I’ve kept that thread. I’m not sure why I did it; it was always sort of a desire to be great in some generic sense, to be known and admired and recognized, and in another sense it was something more transcendent. I had an overriding intuition that this mattered a lot. That the times were changing and would never be the same again, and that the way coming brings something of value, and I wanted to contribute to it.
I got into AI safety very soon after that. Like a lot of AI safety people, I didn’t start out in the space. I wanted to build AI, not to secure it. But I thought, well, if I make something that thinks thousands of steps ahead, that’s pretty dangerous. That was a pretty miserable week. Like an alcoholic realizing they have to quit drinking, it was a slow, sinking kind of sad realization.
When school ended I signed up for the Recurse Center, this programmer’s retreat, because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d read about Joseph Campbell, the myth guy, who when he didn’t know what to do, went off into the woods for three months and just chopped wood and read all the time. At Recurse I pursued reinforcement learning further. After that I had another year where I’d go to this office in Berkeley that was almost totally empty and I’d either study or do nothing. I did that for a year. Years of drifting. I still taught myself math. I kept up these obsessions. I became part of the AI Berkeley Bay Area social scene.
I was essentially unemployed for like four years, doing, or rather not doing, anything. I went to some party where this person named Viv was talking about MAOIs, and that inspired me to do cadaver dissections. There’s a blog post about that. I got a job for a bit at Redwood Research to learn some mech interp. That was the first time I’d worked with really talented people. Then I drifted for another year before working for a healthcare company I hated, which lasted only a month. Then another year of drifting.
At this point I was 29. I’m 31 now. Almost downstairs from where we’re standing, I met Max Tegmark and got a job working on the thing I’d set myself to for so long, automated theorem proving and AI. I worked there for about a year and a half. After that I went on a meditation retreat, the Jhourney retreats, and that was helpful for an internal sense of integration. Throughout all this time, like the last four years, all my striving and sense of ambition had just sort of tortured me, if anything growing. But suddenly in my head it was like yelling at some shadowy version of myself, and then the shadow just says, “but I am you,” and then merges into me.
From there I found a sense of determination. End of the line. Nowhere else to go, no one else to be, nothing else to do, nothing else to see. But not just as okay, actually as my delight. I feel extremely fortunate. I am very lucky. Very lucky.
My goal for Inkhaven was just to get used to blasting: to put out ideas without an intermediate filter, without perfecting them, without anything in between. That helped. The two big inner themes have been gaining a sense of other people’s feelings (not so good with their thoughts yet, but their feelings) and my inner intuition of integrating them more wholly. My ambitions are still just sort of normie transhumanist stuff. There’s a star I saw as a kid that I decided is mine, and now I’ve got to go claim it.
There’s a poem I’ve been coming to understand better:
We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.
But tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
For advice, there’s a line from Desiderata:
“Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”
I used to understand that in a sentimental, self-soothing kind of way. I’ve come to take it more literally. Somewhere in the translation from sentimental to literal there was a phase transition inside myself. I’ve found that helpful.
💙 Daniel B
I’m a software engineer and a machine learning user. I used to say I was a machine learning researcher, but I think I’m now mostly a consumer of AI tools.
When I was growing up I was very ambitious. I wanted to make a dent in the universe– kind of embarrassingly so, in retrospect. I feel like someone should have told me, “Dan, just be a normal smart kid.” That ambition propelled me to do pretty well in school and a lot of activities, and I somehow managed to get into Harvard, which was a pretty significant moment in my life.
I did not enjoy Harvard. I realized at one point that I don’t have any actually happy memories of my college experience. I have a lot of memories of doing ridiculously absurd things like staying up all night playing video games, and a lot of being stressed out all the time. I was in a bad friend group; several of them dropped out. I managed to graduate with a degree in applied math and CS.
It was an easy leap from there into tech. I graduated in 1999, the height of the first web boom, and I tried a bit of the internet startup thing, never got very far. I decided to go back to grad school to get some specialized skill I could leverage. I went to Canada for two years for a master’s in CS, partly because Boston in the wintertime is cold and grey. I had a good time in Montreal.
I’d been interested in Japanese culture, so on a lark I applied for a Japanese government scholarship that brings foreign students to Japan. I got it, and that made it pretty easy to go do my PhD at the University of Tokyo. I learned pretty good Japanese.
It was really a great period in my life. I spent a lot of time thinking and reading papers, particularly in machine learning. I became obsessed with this idea about data compression in connection to the philosophy of science: essentially a restatement of Popper’s theory of falsifiability, where you build theories about a dataset into a data compressor and measure how good the ideas are by looking at the compression rate. For text specifically, if you have a lot of text and want to compress it, you can build different ideas about English grammar and syntax into the compressor. Previously the field depended on labeled data (sentences hand-diagrammed) and I was excited that you could skip that.
I wrote a book about it. The research actually worked. I was learning cool things about English grammar, and to this day I know a lot about it and think about it extensively. The concept was actually quite prescient. But I made one fatal flaw: I didn’t believe at the time that neural networks were going to scale up. If I had done this research with neural networks, I would have been basically on the path that led to GPT. But I didn’t think they would scale, and I also didn’t have millions of dollars to train them. Eventually GPT came around and was clearly way stronger than what I was doing.
After that I moved to Berkeley. I’d been involved in the rationality world, going to LessWrong meetups, and I got a job at LinkedIn. LinkedIn paid almost embarrassingly well compared to how much work I had to do. Looking back on my career, I’ve done good work, maybe great work, and I’ve gotten paid well, but never at the same time. LinkedIn gave me Microsoft stock, which has gone way up, so I’m sort of on the FIRE track. I made a modest amount of money and now I’m semi-retired.
I met my wife in Cambridge at a coffee shop. We were both drinking iced coffee, even though it was March, and most people in March in Cambridge are drinking warm coffee. That was my opener. She followed me to Berkeley, but unfortunately she didn’t like Berkeley, so after about five years we moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. I’ve always been libertarian-minded, and I got very irate at Berkeley politics at some point, so we relocated. We live in a very cute town called Portsmouth. It’s much lower-key than Berkeley.
I’m at Inkhaven now writing about political philosophy and how people should move to places that align with their values.
I’m not good at giving advice or at receiving it, but I’ll tell you a couple of things I think about it. One thing I’ve realized is that people, almost invariably, when they’re giving advice, just advise the recipient to be more like the advice-giver. I don’t think that’s usually very useful. The right way to give advice is to study someone deeply, understand their big picture, and tailor advice to that.
I’m also distrustful of general advice. When I was younger I was very influenced by Paul Graham’s essays, but now I think there’s a problem with all advice from very successful people: it’s a selection effect. There are only a limited number of people who can be really successful entrepreneurs or venture capitalists or writers. So the best advice I can give is to find a path that lets you be happy and fulfilled without having to win a winner-takes-all competition.
The person in my life who most lives up to this advice is my cousin, who’s a high school running coach and math teacher. He’s beloved by his athletes and parents and everyone at school. He’s led the school to multiple championships in cross country and track. He’s a happy dude. He’s got a happy family: smart, friendly wife, cute kids, a nice little house. Nothing grand, he’s not rich, but he’s very happy, and deservedly so.
💜 Anna Mattinger
I grew up in Cupertino, mostly, and was kind of a weird kid. I was simultaneously the problem child and the golden child, and I had a hard time finding peace and stasis. I had a lot of trouble growing up. I got institutionalized as a young teenager, for about a year and a half, in a lockdown treatment center in Provo, Utah. It was a pretty abusive place, similar to ones that have gotten a lot of press lately.
Things started getting a lot better when I was old enough to start community college classes instead of public school. I hit 18 not really knowing what I wanted to do or whether I wanted to go to college. I had a bunch of interests in totally different worlds. So I took six months off to go work in the back country of Kings Canyon National Park, building trails and chasing bears away from our food stores. That was meant to be a short break from school, but instead I just kind of kept going.
I found there were a lot of things I could do to work my way around the country and the world. I worked as a freelance art model. I picked up gig work through serendipity: running into people, dumpster diving, couch surfing. I was a ski instructor for a while. I did yoga teacher training. I did pyrotechnics and heavy machinery operation. I worked construction sites. I got flown to Taiwan to be a tech evangelist. I did pyrotechnics on four continents. I did occasional freelance writing. Whatever was around. I went to most of the States plus Puerto Rico and about 40 countries during my 20s.
A lot of those were intensive bubble experiences, pressure-cooker situations with a bunch of people doing a very particular thing, building weird bonds with people fast, watching community ruptures expand and exponentiate because of the closed-in nature of things. I worked on a bunch of Burning Man art projects. I got disillusioned after a few years, but I was part of a couple of bigger quarter-million-dollar projects and other burns and festivals around the world.
I got into martial arts when I was 26, and went and trained Shaolin kung fu in rural northeastern China under my shifu, a former Shaolin monk who’d grown up at the temple and left to make his fortune elsewhere. He was a Sanda champion in China for a while, but he hurt his back in a fight when he was 20. He didn’t like the touristy schools, including the temple itself, that offered a depraved version of letting foreigners come spend money to get validation and pretend they were doing martial arts. He wanted to offer something intensive; he’d grown up at the temple and was kind of bemused by how conventional and glorified it had become. So he built his own school where he could do things his way and attract the few students crazy enough to want it that way. Including me. That became a big part of my life. I went back several times. I also went to Thailand and trained Muay Thai for a while, and ended up getting talked into doing a fight there.
When the pandemic hit, all my work and travel plans got cancelled. I was going to ride a bicycle from the top of Norway down to Greece. (I’d done a bike trip a few years prior from Key West to Bar Harbor while booking photo shoots.) I was up in Humboldt County for lockdown with my partner Alex, my sister, and a couple of roommates, right by the ocean. I signed up for online community college classes for lack of anything else to do. That ended up going really well, and I got into Stanford as a transfer student. I was one of 50-something transfer students admitted that year.
Stanford was a pretty mixed experience. It was weird being there as an undergrad in my 30s. I felt like a fish out of water in the CS department culture, but people were nice. My last year there, I got asked to lecture CS109, the intro to probability class, which was really cool. That ended last year, and since then I’ve been floating around, figuring out what I want to do next. Inkhaven has given me a lot of ideas. For now I’m doing photography.
One of the better pieces of advice I’ve gotten was from my friend David, who died a few years ago of cancer. We used to have these long phone calls about life and love. At one point I was distraught about a major heartbreak and betrayal at the hands of someone I’d trusted who turned out not to be trustworthy. That guy had slowly eroded my self-worth, and I found out he’d done a bunch of really messed up, violent things to other people. The signs had been there. He’d been making me feel bad about myself for a long time.
David told me something like: as you get older, you find out that there are some people where you talk to them, you spend time with them, you get off the phone with them, and your nervous system feels good. You just feel better, no matter what the content of the call was. You feel a little bit more human. And then there are other people where that’s not the case. Maybe you’ve got all these reasons, or they give you all these reasons, why you should be invested in each other’s lives. But on a deep, intimate, personal level, at a certain point you just have to listen to your nervous system and not pretend anything is more than it is. Trust your gut.
About the unconventional path: I’ve got this weird blend of being very chaotic and a little bit type-A. I usually describe it as being existentially high-maintenance, and recognizing that certain conventional paths were making me feel crazy. I would have a vague plan for the next year or two, but I’d know I was happy to deviate from that plan if something better came up. Usually that’s what would happen: a large number of things would fall by the wayside because some opportunity to do a cool seasonal job or an apprenticeship-style thing would appear, where I’d learn a new skill. That’s how I picked up most of the skills I have. Somebody saying, hey, come live in my workshop and help me build a thing and I’ll teach you what I know.
I tell people this when they’re going traveling: if it makes you feel better, go in with a bit of an itinerary, but go in with the hope that you’ll break that itinerary because better things will come up and surprise you. Don’t be too attached to whatever your plan is. Let other things happen to you.
💙 Sammy Cottrell
I didn’t do great in elementary school. They were going to put me in a special needs program, but my mom was like, “that’s bullshit,” and took me to a neuropsychologist who said your child is very smart and has very extreme ADHD; don’t put him in a special needs program, take him to Nysmith, this private school. So they did. The school was great. The teachers were fantastic, and they did a really good job inculcating agency in their kids. My two electives in eighth grade were Makerlab (where my team and I built a massive cart out of a bunch of 2x4s, almost completely unsupervised) and How to Make or Break an Empire (which was a history course on empires sprinkled with actual war-game simulations). The coolest thing.
Around the same time I read Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics, which was interesting because I’d just been vaguely leftist like most people around me, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Then COVID hit in eighth grade, which was weird.
That’s also when I got into rationality. Markiplier or someone was playing a Nicky Case game on YouTube, and I went to her website and found her stuff on game theory and voting patterns. That linked to Kevin Simler’s blog, which linked to Scott Alexander, and I read a bunch of Scott Alexander and then read the entire Sequences. I thought it was the coolest thing.
Online high school sucked. I hated high school. There’s not really anything to do in suburban Virginia if you don’t have a car. One of the only highlights from freshman year was making a bunch of money off GameStop. By sophomore year I realized I literally had nothing to look forward to except going on a run after school, and later in the year, P.E., because in P.E. I could play volleyball with my friend Duan.
This was at the local magnet school where I was supposed to be taking accelerated CS classes. At the start of sophomore year we took a practice AP test, where the test was the thing we were supposed to be studying for the whole year. I got either the highest possible equivalent score or an actual perfect score on every question. It was kind of like, what the fuck am I doing here. I’d also taught myself Python. The coursework was extremely slow. My CS teacher would let me hang out with my girlfriend in the library, until we got kicked out for PDA.
I wrote a thing on LessWrong, and at some later point I submitted a bug report on the site. Ruby Bloom, who’s also at Inkhaven, asked if I could hop on a Zoom call to help troubleshoot, and we got on a call from my CS class. He’d seen the high school stuff in my post and said, you should talk to Sydney von Arx. I got on a call with Sydney on Friday, gave her the three-minute spiel of who I am and what I’m interested in, and she was like, okay, we’re running the beta version of the Atlas Fellowship starting tomorrow, we can fly you to Berkeley this afternoon. I was like, what the fuck, that’s not how that works, but let me call my parents. My parents were promised that I wouldn’t get sex trafficked, and I went.
At Atlas Beta, I had a conversation with Ben Pace where he asked, “Sammy, do you have any ideas for this thing?” I gave him some, and he said, “great, thanks.” Then I cried for fifteen minutes, because no one had taken me seriously before. I’d just been a problem to be dealt with– someone who didn’t enjoy his classes and was sometimes vocal about it. No one had ever actually assigned value to me or my opinions or anything I was working on. I really appreciate Ben Pace for that.
I came back from Atlas and was like, I’m not doing another year of high school. This is bullshit. My plan was: drop out, move to Berkeley, find work. For some reason my parents disagreed. Eventually my mom found a fully remote async school called Laurel Springs that a lot of working actors use, and I switched to that. Notably this was when GPT-3 existed but before ChatGPT launched, so you could do your assignments with GPT and it wasn’t a known thing yet. My teachers liked my GPT assignments.
I came out to the Bay for a bunch of programs at 16. I ended up running a group house because I was sitting in my basement doing high school and it was really lonely; I knew other people from Atlas were also lonely, not doing a college-like thing, working on weird personal projects. I was like, maybe we should not do that and live together in Berkeley. The state of money in EA at the time was hilarious, and I got fully funded to run a month-long beta. It was the most stressful month of my life. I did a bad job in various ways, but it was a good learning experience, people enjoyed it, and they wanted to do the full thing.
I went back home and back to being lonely and grinding out schoolwork. I did a two-week executive assistant work trial for Ryan Kidd at MATS over the summer. Then I moved back out to the Bay for another group house, finished high school, and tried to stay.
That period didn’t go well. I burned a lot of bridges, made a lot of mistakes, and tried to find a job in the Bay. A job offer I’d had lined up disappeared. I failed to find another one because I was incredibly depressed. I did get into partner dancing, which was nice. Eventually I moved back home, started running out of money, and applied to ARENA. Got rejected.
I went to Manifest and spent 60% of my remaining funds on a plane ticket to Berkeley plus the Manifest ticket. I set up a little “Hire Me” booth at Manifest. I got hired by Patrick McKenzie. I hadn’t even been trying to get hired by him; I didn’t think I had much to offer. I conceptualized myself as a low-level executive assistant whose value was being in the same room as people and keeping them on task. From conversations Patrick and I had, he apparently thought I was capable of more. He turned out to be right.
He hired me on a work trial, paid me a retainer immediately, and very quickly sent me to New York to do investigative journalism for him. I moved back to Berkeley. Around the same time, I got into Minerva, the college I’d wanted to go to, and Patrick wrote a thread about how great it was to work with me. I decided not to go to Minerva, which is a decision I stand by.
I spent the next two years relatively stagnant in various ways. I wasn’t as aggressive about getting clients as I should have been. I wasn’t particularly great at my job, though some clients were very happy with me. I put a lot of my energy into one relationship. Then I took a chief-of-staff job through a friend of a friend, which was hilarious. They booked one call with me, then a second, and were like, great, we’ll send the offer. That was good in some ways and I was bad at it in others.
That job ended at the same time as my year-and-a-half-long relationship, in December. Now I’m uncertain about what to do with my life again. I care a lot about being a fixer, being helpful. I should probably take antidepressants. I’m doing Inkhaven because I have a bunch of stuff I want to write about. A handful of my posts have been processing the kind of person I am and the kind of mistakes I make. I have approximately no concrete plans for after Inkhaven beyond festival season.
The best advice I’ve gotten is from Patrick McKenzie’s writing, especially his career advice posts for programmers and consultants. They were extremely helpful in explaining a possible career path. Also Paul Graham’s “The Lesson to Unlearn,” which was really helpful and explained why school sucks. I expressed as much to my teachers, who for some reason never found the time to read the essay.
💜 Aditya Mehta
Twenty years of life have passed, of which there have been a bunch of meaningful things in the last fifteen. Maybe one way to do this is to report backwards.
Age 20 didn’t really start the way I expected. I got into a severe bout of chronic depression and came very close to not surviving. I’m glad things ended up working out. I relied a lot on California youth helplines, free therapy sessions, and my dad most of all.
If there’s anything I learned at twenty, it’s that the mind is a construct, and no matter how bad things get, loving yourself is often a prerequisite for letting yourself love other people. You never know how much that love can end up impacting them. It’s easier said than done. The last month I’ve really struggled to follow my own advice. But coming out of the depression was the happiest, most free time of my life; it was when I became the most open to people I cared about. Having gone through that, I have faith that things will get better, one day at a time.
Age 19 I was still very much in the rat race of not knowing what I wanted to do. A lot of self-loathing. One thing I realized was that working without any sense of purpose makes life really miserable. I quit the startup I was a part of and didn’t open my laptop for 17 or 18 days afterward. I let myself try to experience nothingness, which was one of the most powerful emotions I’ve ever felt.
After that I signed up to be a middle school debate coach, returning to something I’d really loved doing in high school. It was probably one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. I trained for a half marathon and ran it with some of my closest friends. I hosted a few dinner parties. I gradually began to feel like life was meant to be experienced, instead of being a perpetual means to an end.
Age 18 I’d just graduated high school and started my first year of college. After graduation, I realized the pressure of college applications had really gotten to me– little things like jealousy, an aversion to being present in the moment. I meditated for about a month and a half that summer, with only a handful of exceptions. It was one of the most awkward experiences of my life, and I let myself feel a lot of emotions, including coming to terms with the fact that my grandparents might not be around much longer. It was also the first time I’d been through heartbreak. For the first seven or eight months of college I really struggled to get over my high school girlfriend. I’d write her letters every day and stash them in a cabinet.
Second semester things really brightened up. In March I wrote an email to my kindergarten teacher (we’d been emailing in this small tradition, every year) and after that I started volunteering as a kindergarten assistant at a school in Oakland. I ended 18 realizing life was too short to not be there for the people I really cared about.
Age 17 I was mostly just in high school. Everything is kind of a blur because the place I went to was really toxic. It seemed like the only way to accomplish anything in life was to get into a branded institution. I felt that pressure maybe more than others, because at the time I thought this was the only way I could make money as fast as possible.
There was a part of me that realized there were parts of my childhood I didn’t want my kids to have, a lot of which came downstream from family reactions that non-trivially came from constantly having financial pressure. It was the first time I got to see a family member who was doing decently well for themselves and had the freedom to visit whoever she wanted, who didn’t have the same mentality I’d grown up with. At 17, the only way I knew how to get to that was getting into a good college.
Age 16 was my first year of boarding school, and by far the biggest inflection point in my life. I came into boarding school because my high school debate partner was my best friend through freshman and sophomore year, and he was clearly going to get in. So just so we could keep being friends, I tried my best to get in too.
Fall semester I really struggled. I had no idea how to live by myself. I’d often sleep at 2am, didn’t know how to eat, had no notion of mental health. My body broke down. I got sick a bunch of times.
Second semester I discovered some life principles that have served me really well: for example, cold showers, where the part of life that comes after the ice-cold water is something you start to look forward to. I started avoiding processed food and exercising. These probably seem cliché, things everyone does, but the first time someone understands their value is quite meaningful. It was the first time in my life I felt happy to be alive.
The relationships I made in boarding school were stronger than typical high school relationships, because we were all figuring things out together at such a young, transformative age. Even though I don’t speak with most of them anymore (we’ve gone our separate ways), I’d still take a bullet for a few of them.
Age 15 was 2020. COVID. I was mostly enamored with being the best debater possible with my best friend. There was something mathematical about being able to map every argument on a piece of paper, joining the dots, thinking really fast on your feet.
Age 14 I’d just moved to the US from India. A pretty tough year. I had no notion of American culture and was insecure about my accent and about the fact that I was coming into high school, which was a big popularity contest. Through it all, I’m grateful I kept parts of the culture alive. There were times I wanted to hide a lot of it, because the high school I went to had maybe four or five non-white kids. But staying close to the language has created deep relationships in college, and some really close-knit relationships with mom-and-pop restaurants. For those little things I’d never trade that year.
Ages 11 to 13 are honestly a bit of a blur. The first ever bout of depression. A rampage of unpleasant things at home. I developed pretty deep trust issues. I just couldn’t wrap my head around how my grandmother could abuse my mother the way she did. One of the most jarring moments was waking up one day and realizing I’d probably never want to go to that woman’s funeral. I’ve always wondered why my mother got the short end of the stick on so many issues. Her health has been constantly dwindling, and we’re at this inflection point where we don’t really know how things are going to progress. Time feels limited.
Age 10 was a pretty good time. The 2015 Cricket World Cup was probably my favorite thing to watch. My dream at the time was to become a sports journalist at this cricket outlet called Cricbuzz; I’d refresh their news page every couple of hours on my grandpa’s phone. I also wanted to be a professional cricketer. I trained pretty hard at an academy. I loved organizing little games of gullies (”gully” is a Hindi word for street) and playing cricket with the neighbors’ kids.
Age 9 I’d just moved from Singapore to India. We moved because this was the first time our family’s finances were completely bankrupt; it was a last resort. My dad had us move so we could live with my grandparents while he and my mom searched for work. There was a lot of shouting, and my dad was absent for months at a time. At the time I’d see my friends with happy families and wonder why things couldn’t be the same.
One benefit was the power of a joint family: even though parts of the family were the problem, other parts ended up being a source of comfort and solace. My mom’s mom, my maternal grandmother, is the woman who practically raised me, and probably who I love most in the entire world. It was really powerful to go to her house on the weekend, sit in her lap, and hear her stories. I look back and wonder how much strength she had to have had, given everything she went through.
She was the central node of the family. She kept that role intact despite many qualms. That’s why I like hosting small dinners and introducing friends from different groups to each other. I want to keep the legacy of my grandmother alive.
Age 8 I was in Singapore. Most of the time I’d just play with my Beyblades. Singapore was a time of intense competition, and I lost a lot of confidence there. I was very meritocratic, and the kids I went to school with excelled at everything. When I went to India I regained confidence, probably because I could speak English better than everyone else. Singapore was also the first time I felt like I was special in some way. The Beyblades were some of my closest friends. I’d talk to them for hours and create elaborate stories. Some of the most fun times of my life.
Age 6 I was riding the high of feeling special. My kindergarten teacher reinforced this. She always gave me extra reading, a couple of grades above what other kids read, but she always made sure it wasn’t something to have an ego about. It was something to find gratitude in. Even if I didn’t really understand gratitude at the time, it felt like a blessing to be given a fourth-grade book in first grade and try to read it.
Age 5 I was in kindergarten. There were a few health complications, and my kindergarten teacher would go out of her way to buy gluten-free snacks for me. At the time, vegan food and milk alternatives weren’t as popular as they are now. She’d spend her own money buying these things so I wouldn’t feel alone at snack time. She and my grandmother have both been strong maternal figures for me.
I also lost my first sister around this time. I remember it being told to the family. I don’t think my mom was able to get through the shock, and a bit of that sentiment still lingers. Without going into too much detail, that was one of the more memorable life experiences. I was still pretty young and didn’t get enough time to develop a relationship with her, but I still feel really tender to the fact that there could have been one more smiling face in the house to play with, to grow up with. She’d probably be done with a bit of college by now, and we’d go home and talk. This is part of why I cherish the moments I have with my sister now; knowing there could have been a third sibling, I live with this perpetual fear that this too might get taken away.
If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that life is super unpredictable, and time is quite limited with the people you care about.
The best advice I’ve gotten is a Hindi phrase: Donsro se pehle khud ki seva karo: “Before you pray to others, pray to yourself.” Without feeling confident in yourself, without taking care of yourself, you can’t really be there for other people. It’s the least you owe yourself. Ever since I’ve internalized that, I can muster up the courage to be there for the people I need to be there for.
💙 A.G.G. Liu (Alumni)
I’m originally from Montclair, New Jersey, which is a town full of wealthy liberal people. I lived there basically my whole life until college.
I was a math wunderkind in school, doing math (and to some extent science) above grade level a lot. I took Trig/Calc in 6th grade and Calculus BC in 7th grade, going over to the local high school for it, and got a 5 on the AP exam. It was all self-motivated; my parents enabled it but didn’t push. There’s the stereotype of controlling parents, and that really didn’t apply to me. It just felt like what I wanted to do, and I was able to, and it worked out.
What made the high school class manageable was that my sister was in it too, and she was telling all her friends to treat this kid nicely. One of her friends’ brothers had done a taekwondo club, and he was telling all his buddies that if anyone tried to pick on this sixth grader, he’d jump in. I don’t think they ever had to. The threat of it alone was enough.
I had sixth-grade executive functioning even though I had 10th-grade math going on. My sister reminded me what the homework was pretty often. On the first test, I did all the front questions just fine, and didn’t realize there was a back. My teacher gave me the normal score and brought my parents in for a conference. They basically asked: did you run out of time, or did you just not know what was going on? I didn’t know what was going on, but not about the math. The math was fine.
Throughout high school I was just the math person. Everyone knew it. It was fun being known in the school and having that reputation, a role I felt I could fit into. I also loved the creative end of things. I did plays, writing clubs, that kind of stuff.
I went to Harvard, which was terrifying and freeing at the same time. I went from being “the math one” to being one of forty math people. I became the Glee Club person, the Ham Radio person, the science fiction person. Freshman year was terrible (I bit off more than I could chew, had a depressive episode), but it got better over time. I made it to the end of the degree. I came out as bi, then trans. I did my thesis on a set of shapes called polytopes in up to four dimensions, designed as a communication thing; I posted it on my website recently. I really just love sharing what I know. That’s the best part of knowing things, in my opinion.
I started my YouTube channel my senior year of college, which was 2020, when everything shut down. I suddenly found myself with a lot of time. The channel began to take off, and 2022 was when I got my first 100,000-view video. It took me by surprise. I’d had one video before that with 10,000 views, but this was literally another order of magnitude. I’ve gotten a couple over a million since then. It’s still crazy to me that this many people care about my geography and science facts.
I got my job at Rational Animations by winning a writing contest. I’d been practicing on my own channel, so I had a portfolio. They hired me to work on the script I’d submitted. That was 2023, part-time. I became full-time in February 2025. 2025 has been a big year for me. It’s also when I moved to my current apartment, and when I started HRT. I’d known there were gender thoughts in my head since at least high school, but only got to the point of being comfortable starting HRT last year. I was able to do it finally.
Rational Animations sent me to Inkhaven 1 to up my skills, and I started the blog there. It was so good– so good. I came back for Inkhaven 2.
The best advice I’ve gotten, at least for creative work, is from one of the producers who helps the podcast my dad and I make. His name is Jeff, and he’s been mentoring me on how creative work works. He told me you have to keep your engine going, and that’s more important than anything else. If the thing you’re trying to make a living off of is ideas you come up with and are excited about, you really have to make sure there are things you’re getting excited about and enjoying. It’s so easy to have it just feel like a grind, and then you lose the passion and excitement, and it comes across in the work. Some people can write every day about things they’re not really excited about and fake it. I’m definitely not one of those. So that means doing things you want to do just because they’re fun, or doing things at the pace you want, or in the way you want. There’s some room for making things more palatable or sellable or professional. But you’ve got to keep your engine going.
My happiest memory is seeing the solar eclipse in 2017. We packed up a bunch of family and friends and went to Idaho, right on the eclipse path in the Rockies near Yellowstone. It was just the coolest moment in the sky, but also amazing being with everyone who cared about this. Everyone was so excited. It was amazing to be part of a community of people who were so excited about this amazing freaking thing in the sky.
Favorite post: If you like reading life stories you’ll probably like Philosophy-shaped Mind Shards. For my more classic explainers I’ll go with The Paddle Wheel Aircraft Carriers of Lake Michigan.
💜 Max Harms (Advisor)
I was born in 1988 to parents who were somewhat radical libertarians, having met at an objectivist book club in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to the obvious political currents, their circles were awash in science-fiction enthusiasts and proto-rationalist extropians. One of their group was, for example, the son of one of the first people to get cryopreserved. We moved around a bunch when I was a kid, and when I was about three we lived in Sunnyvale, in the south end of Silicon Valley. In short, I’d say I’m a second-generation rationalist. My dad identifies with critical rationalism quite a lot, and I was going to Bay Area house parties when I was three years old. I hear Robin Hanson was at at least one of them.
My mom left when I was three, so it was basically me and my dad until I was around twelve. He was a computer programmer, and eventually moved out to Oregon for a job, which is where I spent most of my childhood.
Around third grade, I started having friction at school. I’d say “I want to do X,” and the teacher would say “you have to do Y,” and I’d say “but I don’t want to do Y, I want to do X,” and she’d say “well, you have to, I’m the teacher,” and, being an only child with a parent who was really into liberty and autonomy, I’d say “no, that’s not how the world works.” My dad would occasionally get called in to help. The school was like, “please, fix this.” He was like, “no.” So I basically dropped out and started unschooling, which is like homeschooling but with no established curriculum and no attempts from the parents to impose musts.
After a few years of bouncing between experimental schools and staying at home by myself to play on the computer, my dad met someone on a libertarian unschooling mailing list and eventually got remarried, bringing two younger step-siblings. (I think of them simply as siblings, and basically think of myself as having three parents). I soon was spending most of my time at a democratic school in the same tradition, very free-form. I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering. I was really into storytelling and systems design. I was sure I was going to be a game designer.
Around 14 or 15 I started to notice my peers were more knowledgeable than me on things, because I’d been spending all my time playing Magic. I could beat them at Magic, but I didn’t know how the Roman Empire worked better than them. So I went to my parents and was like, you’ve got to fix this, and they said, no, you have to fix this. They got me a bunch of books and helped me out. From there I moved away from previous friend groups and went on a more academic pathway. I ended up at the local community college, which was actually really good. My family didn’t have a lot of money. I was going part-time and it wasn’t very hard. Actually, it was way too easy. I’d ask for the highest math class they had, they’d talk about prereqs, and I’d say “no, I don’t need prereqs, I could just get tested into it.” I’d take whatever the highest math class was, and read a different math book during it because the class was boring. In a world where I had better financial support, I probably should have gone to MIT or something.
It was in college that I really got the sense there was more to life than just playing/making games, telling stories, and having a good time—that the world actually needed things. In particular I ran into a TED Talk by Aubrey de Grey, the anti-aging researcher, and rediscovered transhumanism (which I’d absorbed from science fiction and my parent’s culture without really realizing it). I initially decided I was going to work on longevity medicine. But around that time, floating around the transhumanist corners of the internet, I ran across this guy, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was saying AI was going to be such a huge deal it could wipe out all life. I was like, that’s clearly wrong/insane. But then I thought about it for a while and was like, okay, maybe AI is a bigger deal than longevity medicine. About six months after that I was like, oh no, I think Eliezer is right. I think alignment is the default unsolved problem, and this could kill everyone. I was going to devote my whole life to AI.
This was during the financial crisis. My dad was the primary breadwinner and unemployment was dire, so we ended up moving across the country from Oregon to Ohio, where my (step-)mom is from. Her parents bought us a house, which turned out to be in a kind of terrible part of town. We ended up getting mugged. My younger brother is, I think, still traumatized by this; I’m basically fine. It’s interesting how those things work; getting attacked by a gang of hooligans does different things to you at fifteen than at twenty-one.
I lost touch with most of my social network in the move. Around that time, OkCupid was the popular dating site. (I’m borderline asexual, but it seemed like a reasonable way to make friends online.) I found someone who’d used HPMOR in their dating profile, then searched and found basically all the people in my area who were into HPMOR. There weren’t many, but I sent them messages, and one of them was setting up the first Ohio (or really midwestern) LessWrong meetup. I read all the Sequences in preparation. I’d bounced off them originally; reading them all to prep for the meetup got me involved.
I ended up not going back to school after we moved. It was still extremely expensive, and I was like, fuck it, I can clearly teach myself. Ohio State wasn’t going to have an AI safety program anyway. I spent my days taking care of my younger siblings, doing web design, tutoring, studying, and (let’s be honest) playing a lot of League of Legends. I eventually got more into organizing/running rationality events. I ran a “rationality dojo” for a couple of years, which was a space where people came together to try to hone their minds: Bayesianism, debiasing, emotional awareness, writing… those sorts of things. Participants used a custom currency called “Wuffie” (from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) to bid on what topic the dojo would focus on each week.
In 2014—I remember the moment very clearly; I was doing dishes—and I remember being very frustrated with myself for not building anything meaningful or lasting, never completing my projects. I decided I was going to actually buckle down and do a thing, but it needed to be fairly easy. What was easy? I’d write a book! (Because that’s definitely an easy thing to do. 😅) I signed a commitment contract for several thousand dollars (a big deal for the amount of money I had at the time) with my brother: if I didn’t have a book by the end of the year, he’d keep the money. I sat down and wrote Crystal Society, which was supposed to be one book and exploded into a trilogy. I didn’t finish writing the whole thing until 2018, but I had a first draft at the end of 2014.
I was on social media saying my book was coming out in a week, and Logan Strohl (Brienne Yudkowsky at the time) saw it and asked for an advance copy. I sent it. He was originally looking for a novice amateur novel to rip apart and understand what not to do, but ended up actually really liking it and promoting it widely. It kind of blew up in the rationality community. People were like, “who’s this Max Harms?” Suddenly I was known, and I felt like I had permission to hang out with cool Bay Area people.
In 2016 I got a job at a startup doing aerial image processing. I started dating Logan and ended up moving to his house (Godric’s hollow) in the Bay Area that October. So I landed in Berkeley, and then Trump was elected. Welcome to the Bay Area: people going kind of crazy and angry all around. In 2017 I went to a CFAR workshop for the first time, left my CTO job, and joined MIRI as an intern because they were hiring people with my skill set. Best career move I ever made. I’ve been at MIRI ever since, working on AI alignment and occasionally writing. Logan and I broke up in 2020 (after escaping the Bay Area vortex during Covid), and now I live out in the mountains with my dog, Maple, and my wife, Haven, whom I love very much.
I think I’ve made a lot of spiritual and moral progress over my life, as well as just growing a lot as a person, year after year. Some people seem to think that rationality is just a set of abstract ideas or a brand or something, but for me, I can see the utility first-hand and know the ways that it has changed me for the better. Anyway, I used to be pretty egoistic and selfish, and now I’d consider myself wholesome and altruistic and good. I credit MIRI a lot with that, and in particular Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon.
A core piece of wisdom I’d point to, in that transition: when I was younger, I was a moral nihilist. People have values; we negotiate among each other to create laws; ethics is an invented thing without much underlying meaning. Studying decision theory changed that.
Take the Ultimatum Game. One person offers a split of some resource, like $10. The other person can either accept the split or destroy the resource entirely so nobody gets anything. People with bad decision theory think you should accept any amount of money, because something is better than nothing. But intuitively, people don’t do this. They demand a fair split, and if they don’t get one, they often burn the whole pile. It turns out that’s actually the correct move from a decision-theoretic perspective. If you’re not galaxy-braining yourself into being an idiot, you should do what’s fair. People have this intuition, and the intuition lines up with the correct decision theory.
That hit me. There’s a way in which fairness is not an invented thing we have spurious intuitions about; we have those intuitions because there’s a deeper mathematics of how agents ought to work with each other. Our moral feelings are gesturing at a platonic structure of how agents should operate in an idealized way. Seeing my intuitions and feelings as gesturing at that structure pulled me out of moral nihilism. Moral truth turned out to be a useful concept after all.
💙 Itsi Weinstock
I grew up in Sydney, Australia, in a suburb called Cammeray, in a beautiful house on a stretch of the harbour. I’m one of four siblings (older brother, younger brother, younger sister) and I have many cousins. My grandparents were in Sydney.
I’m Jewish, and my family comes from kind of all around the world. We’re Austro-Hungarian Jews. One grandfather from Slovenia, one grandmother from South Africa, the other grandfather from Hungary, the other grandmother from Slovakia. Most left during the Holocaust and eventually arrived in Sydney. My mum’s family went through South Africa, and my mum was born there. My dad was born in Israel, although he’s very old (50 years older than me, born in 1945), so technically he was born in the British Mandate of Palestine and likes to call himself a Palestinian. I told him please don’t do that.
I had a really nice childhood. I was fairly academic and enjoyed school. I played violin from age 5. I always had more of a mathematical brain than a writing brain. I went to an all-boys school for the entirety of primary and high school, which was scarring for some people, but I seem to have been well-adjusted enough.
I had a slightly unusual university experience for an Australian, in that I moved interstate; most people stay in the city where they’re from. I went to the University of Melbourne when I was 18 and had an incredibly wonderful time. I got super into absolutely everything that existed: student clubs, the student union. I ran the Activities Department of the Student Union, which meant social events for the 50,000 students of the university. I made a bunch of friends. I traveled a lot, which is a very Australian thing; I got really into couch surfing and hitchhiking.
My mum passed away when I was 20, while I was at university. That was the hardest experience of my life. I had a rough time. I got really into mathematics, partly because it was just easier than everything else. I ended up doing a master’s in it, almost because I fell into it. My master’s thesis studied the Bitcoin network: the structure of the system, who’s connected to whom. I’d never been into crypto. I did not buy any crypto at the time. I would have been very rich now if I had.
I got very involved with the biggest music society at the university, the Engineering Music Society, which was not for engineers; it was just a group that latched onto the engineering department and extracted their resources. It became the biggest musical group at the university, with orchestras and choirs, and a very big part of my social life. We had this crazy yearly thing called Prosh Week, where you’d do scavenger hunts and challenges; one of them involved getting dropped on the other side of the city in your underwear with nothing but a transport card and trying to make it back, hopefully with some clothes.
I finished university in December 2019 and took two months off to backpack around New Zealand, hitchhiking, hiking everything I could find, drinking a lot of wine. I came back to Sydney to visit my family, and the world shut down. My plan had been to go to the US to find a job, but that didn’t work out, so I moved in with my dad and sister. I got incredibly anxious during that time, like a lot of people did when they moved back in with family.
Around that time, since I’d done a lot of couch surfing, I noticed the main platform for it (called Couchsurfing) was going downhill. They’d started as a volunteer non-profit, sold to private equity around 2012-2013, and during the lockdown they started putting up paywalls so you’d have to pay a subscription to let people stay on your couch for free. It was meant to be free infrastructure for the world. So a buddy and I decided to make a non-profit competitor called Couchers.org. That was our big COVID project.
I got my first job during 2020 in high-frequency trading. A quant, which is when you get a bunch of mathematicians and shove them in a room and get them to hit the money button all day. It was a good experience, because usually Australia loses all its talent to the US, but at that point no one could leave, so it was a bunch of really good people stuck in Australia working together. I learned a lot. I did not love high-frequency trading, though; I like mathematics but the problems didn’t motivate me.
After about a year and a half I kept complaining to my friend (the one I’d co-founded Couchers with), and he told me to come work with him in New York. He was at a small company building computer vision models to detect wildfires; the idea was to spot little wisps of smoke before a fire got big enough that someone would call the fire department. So I moved to the US and stayed on his couch. I wasn’t getting any work done and got fired almost immediately. I was stuck in New York friendless and jobless.
But I found a way to make it work. During university I’d gone vegan at 20, which was one of the best decisions I ever made. I literally typed “vegan data science” into Google one day, and a job popped up for a data science researcher doing vegan cheese in Berkeley. I called them up. I worked there for about two and a half years and ended up running data science. We were developing machine learning methods for product development. I worked on Babybel, the little red wax wheels of cheese; they have a vegan line that’s extremely bad, and we were trying to fix it. I went to France four times to help develop a new formulation. The company ran out of money, which happened to a lot of vegan companies that weren’t getting much to market.
I ended up at a trucking company called CloudTrucks, building voice AI tools for them for about 11 months. I was not very happy. Fortunately they laid me off, the third time I’d been fired. I was looking for a new job and shopping around projects in animal welfare, and some friends put me in touch with the company I now work for, an animal-welfare org. They needed someone in San Francisco focused on the new fundraising opportunity around the Anthropic IPO. So that’s what I do now.
I don’t really take advice well. But I’d say I live my life trying to do two things: do a lot of good, and have a lot of fun. I think it’s important to interface with the world and with beauty, to enjoy yourself, to build up a sense of taste, a sense of what works in the world and what people like, what different cultures have come up with that they revere and why. I find that very enjoyable and very important. Finding the right balance, although I’ve never found the right balance, is important.
💜 Henry Stanley
I was born in Glasgow. My dad is Scottish, my mum is English. We moved down to Woking, in Surrey, when I was three, mostly for my dad’s work.
I had a very nice childhood. I really loved primary school and was pushed into gifted classes when some teacher figured out I was pretty smart. Then I went to an all-boys secondary school in the neighbouring town, which I liked much less. It was an unpleasant environment. The school was very good by metrics (everyone did extremely well on exams, I did extremely well on my exams), but it felt like a not-very-human experience. I was pretty depressed at school, and lots of bits of my adolescence were unpleasant as a result. The mental health stuff started then and has been a throughline for the rest of my life.
I went to UCL in London to study biochemistry. I’d wanted to get into Cambridge (I applied for natural sciences and narrowly missed a place), but UCL turned out to be a really good fit. I had a wonderful time. My personality really changed. I went from being introverted and a bit of a loner to being very sociable, making lots of friends. I got my first-class degree, which I really wanted. I was the science editor of the student paper. I had my first serious girlfriend. I know people who went to Cambridge and hated every minute of it because it was just way too hard.
My mum had cancer back in the 80s, when she was in her 30s. Thyroid cancer, treated successfully. But she had a few recurrences over the years; small metastases that got removed, then one in her lung, one in her spine. I realized at some point we were on a trajectory where this wasn’t going to be treatable anymore. In my third year of university, the cancer metastasised to her brain, which meant it was incurable. She spent a lot of time in hospice. I’d commute from home to UCL during the day and then most evenings to see her. In March 2011, right around the time I was about to do my exams, she passed away. We had the 15th anniversary of her passing this year.
After university I wanted to be a science writer. I didn’t want to work in a lab or do a PhD; science communication sounded fun. I did a bit of it freelance and pro bono, but found that getting a paid job was basically impossible without a degree in it. So I ended up going into marketing and PR for life sciences companies. The job morphed into pharmaceutical PR, which wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t particularly good at it. I did it for two years, then quit pretty abruptly (probably just before I would have been fired).
I’d come across Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and an 80k career consultation said earning to give through software engineering was really promising. So I did a coding bootcamp called Makers Academy. Three months later, in 2014, I had my first coding job, at a very crazy startup. The whole engineering team had collectively about nine months of experience, which was absurd. We were just hacking stuff together and didn’t know what we were doing. Even we knew what we were building was way too complicated for what it was trying to do; it was a loyalty program app, and yet it had multiple servers and weird encryption schemes (we rolled our own crypto layer for the database, which is absolutely crazy). But it was an amazing experience. I really cut my teeth there.
I joined another startup called Cloud Credo, which built a cloud-native platform-as-a-service. Very different. They used extreme programming: pair programming, sustainable pace, retrospectives, a sensible backlog, pointed and prioritized. A really good place to work. After a year, the company got acquired by Pivotal, also in London. I found myself earning much more than I expected, in a much nicer environment than I expected, doing a job I definitely couldn’t have gotten if I’d applied directly (they wouldn’t have taken me; I wasn’t quite good enough). But because the company was acquired, they were obliged to offer me a job. Three years of amazing, challenging work, learning new programming languages, traveling to conferences in Germany. Real proper tech company stuff.
In the meantime I continued to be heavily involved in the EA world in London. A lot of my friends were in that environment.
I left Pivotal to join a fintech startup called Thought Machine, which built cloud-native core banking software (the layer that stores your payments and bank balance and direct debits). Very challenging engineering problem, great engineering culture.
In 2020 I figured I’d try my own hand at starting a startup. Partly it was that I’d never done it and thought it would be challenging and that I’d love it. But also I thought it was a good bet to try to make a lot of money and give it away. Animal welfare organizations are the ones I want to give to. I can’t really directly contribute to that (my skills don’t lend themselves to working on farm animal welfare), but if I make money I can give it away.
The startup was called Mast. I incorporated in June 2020 with two other founders I met through Antler, a startup incubator that helps you find co-founders. We built a cloud-native platform for mortgage origination, which is the software a bank runs to let mortgage brokers apply for mortgages on behalf of clients. It was very fun because we knew exactly what we needed to build; my co-founder Rob had worked at Barclays and knew the problem inside and out. We spent nine months building it, sold it to our first client, kept building, and eventually had a team of about fifteen. The company continues to grow.
The thing I learned from Mast: building software people use, in a boring industry, with modern engineering standards applied to that old industry, is a magic combination. There are loads of boring industries you could totally transform with that.
I left the startup in September 2025 to pursue new things. In the meantime I traveled around Europe (two months interrailing), got very addicted to Claude Code, and built lots of side projects. In April 2026 I chose to do Inkhaven. I figured I’d never have the opportunity again, while not working, to just write for a month.
The best advice I’ve gotten is from my dad: be ruthless. He didn’t mean it in the sense of behead your enemies. He meant, “go for what you want, don’t stick around in situations you don’t enjoy, really seize life and get out of it what you want, and be ruthless about pursuing that, because no one else will do it for you.”
💙 Amit Gupta (Guest)
I was born in Connecticut. My parents are Indian; they came over to the U.S. in their twenties.
I grew up hating everything Indian, because I wanted to fit into my surroundings, which were full of white people. My parents were Asian, so they really focused on education, and so I was focused on education. I was really into computers, and lucky to have one. I started a business in high school where I’d repair teachers’ computers, going to their houses to fix things up.
I went to Amherst College in western Massachusetts and studied computer science. I dropped out my sophomore year, in 1999, to start a company during the dot-com boom. It was a campus-based startup called The Daily Jolt. We expanded to about 100 campuses. Then the dot-com bubble burst, and it got really hard to raise more money. I had to lay off half the company, then half again. That was really hard, because everyone was older than me and I was a 19-year-old who didn’t know what I was doing. But I got the company back to profitability. After that grueling year (probably the hardest of my life until that point), I was burnt out, and decided to go back to college.
Before going back, I went to India and worked for the WHO for a bit. That was a really formative period, because I got to know my parents better. I was living with my mom’s brother, and I came back understanding her family a lot more, and appreciating my parents 100 times more than I had. I didn’t hate being Indian anymore. I liked being Indian.
College, when I went back, was so much easier. I’d been through the startup grinder, and Amherst suddenly felt like an amazing place where everyone was smart, where people’s job was to help you be amazing. It was like a playground; I had the best two years there.
I’d been planning to move to Hawaii after college, but my mom got breast cancer, so I stayed near her. I got an internship with Seth Godin, the marketing guy, learned a lot from him, and helped him start something. I moved to New York in the process.
Around 2006, I started my second company, Photojojo. I’d been into photography my whole life, and digital cameras were getting big, and New York is a really photogenic city. I got involved in the photo blogging scene, started a newsletter, turned it into a business, started selling stuff, started designing my own camera accessories. I bootstrapped it (no investors, just $20,000 of my own money) and ran it for seven or eight years.
Around the same time, I was organizing a lot of tech events. I organized the first Facebook developer meetup, before they had a platform. Zuck came, a bunch of other people came. After that they started doing their own conferences. I organized a bunch of conferences in New York before there was much of a tech scene there, helping shape it. I ran these events called Jellies, which were pre-coworking. I hosted them in New York and showed people how to do them in other cities, which helped birth hundreds of coworking spaces around the world.
Eventually I moved to San Francisco and kept doing Photojojo. The idea was just to help people have more fun with photography. We did events, manufactured stuff, sold stuff, wrote stuff, got a lot of attention.
In 2011 I got really sick. It was very sudden. One day I felt fine; the next day I felt weak; a week later I was on the phone with a doctor who said I’d get extremely sick if I didn’t go to the hospital immediately. So I went, didn’t tell my roommates, and didn’t pack up my apartment. They put me on IVs. I was there all night. The next morning I got on the first flight to New York to be near my parents on the East Coast. I went to Yale’s cancer center for a month, then got transferred to Dana-Farber in Boston. I left San Francisco without telling anyone goodbye, because I didn’t know what was happening. I’d just found out I might be about to die.
I had acute myeloid leukemia, a really aggressive form. The five-year survival rate is about 25% with chemo alone, and about 50% with a stem cell transplant. So a transplant was important, but there were no matching donors in the stem cell databases in the US, Germany, or anywhere else. The databases are mostly white people, and Asians are really underrepresented. If you’re more than one race, you’re basically screwed. My doctors told me they’d just do chemo, that that was the best I could hope for.
I wanted to try something more. The window was short; I had about three months in which I could get the stem cells, and it takes about two months to get them into the system, so I had a month to find someone who matched. Only 1 in 20,000 people match a given person, and they have to be from your geographical ancestry.
So I tried. I was getting chemo in the hospital, basically dying, while also running my company (I was a solo founder), while also running this campaign to find stem cell donors. Every day I had a stand-up with five or six friends who’d taken time off work or quit their jobs to help. Some of them were founders. The VP of Marketing at Virgin America was one of them. They were all pretty ambitious people, and they made it happen. They organized hundreds of donor drives around the US and the world, raised funding, got lots of people swabbing their cheeks. I was trending on Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, on CNN, on NPR, on Google.
We found three matching donors in time. The drives also found dozens of donors for other South Asians who used the samples banked then. I still hear from people who say “I got this thing because of your drive.” I also hear from people who didn’t have my advantages, who write asking how to do what I did, and don’t succeed. I got really lucky. I had a big network. I’m grateful that a lot of people got help, and sad that others didn’t.
The transplant itself was anticlimactic. Right before it they have to give you as much chemo as they possibly can without killing you, so your immune system is completely eradicated. Then if the stem cells make it into your body and travel to your spine and reach your bone marrow, they start producing blood. If they don’t, you’re screwed, because you’ve just destroyed your own ability to make blood. Mine got there, and they started making blood. The whole process was really painful, because the lining of your mouth and throat and esophagus are all sloughing off. You can’t walk. You’re a skeleton.
At one point during that period I told someone with me to record a video of me saying: if this ever happens again, if I ever get cancer again, don’t go through this. Just die. It’s too painful. It’s been a while now, and I think I would go through it again.
I spent the next year recovering. The first 100 days I couldn’t see anybody or leave the house, because my immune system was destroyed. I’d kept a list in the hospital, when I wasn’t sure if I’d live or die, of all the things I wished I’d done. When I got out, I was like, I have to do all these things, because I still had 50/50 odds of dying in the next five years, and I wouldn’t forgive myself if I made it back here and didn’t use the time.
So I got a dog, learned to ride a motorcycle, rode across the country with the dog in a sidecar, learned to surf. I spent the next two years setting up my company to run without me and finding a buyer I liked, and sold it. Then I spent seven years living out of a backpack, going to different places and living for three months at a time. I learned to draw. I coached founders. I learned to write fiction and spent years writing science fiction stories.
After seven years I was like: I survived. Now what am I supposed to do with myself? I’d sold my company (which was my identity), and I’d become this vagrant traveling around for seven years, and I didn’t know who I was anymore.
I was living in Hawaii in a writing group for three years. A friend of mine had also sold a company (to Facebook) and was between things. We hung out and were always trying to think of companies to start. I didn’t plan to start a company again, but when GPT-3 came out, we started playing with it. We had access before there was an API because we knew Greg.
We built a tool for writers, because writing is way harder than starting companies. Writing is lonely. The revision and feedback cycle takes forever. It’s hard to get anyone to read your work. You can’t just throw it up and A/B test it. You have to beg people to read and give you subjective feedback. We wanted to make something for writers that brought the power of computers to writing, the way photographers and videographers and musicians had amazing computer-aided tools while writers had only formatting and spell check.
That became Sudowrite. The first version was super crappy, but it could do magical things. We showed it to friends, who showed it to their friends. A year later we were still playing with it and building it, and we weren’t writing anymore because we were spending all our time on the app. We realized we should find other people to help, but we didn’t want to raise money in the traditional VC sense (we’d done that before, and it sucks because you’re beholden to VCs trying to make you go faster). So we asked a bunch of people if they’d give us money without putting us on the Series A rollercoaster. It worked. We raised a few million, mostly from other founders, writers, and directors.
That was about five years ago. The company is still small (10 full-time, 10 contractors all over the world), profitable for three years, growing. People use Sudowrite to tell their epic fantasy tale for the first time. Or they’re already finished authors who use it to write better or faster, to leave more money for their family.
I now spend all day working on this app, and I still don’t write. I haven’t written for three years. I’m here at Inkhaven surrounded by writers and I could be writing, but I’m not.
The best advice I got was from Seth Godin, when I worked with him. He said: nobody cares about you. I didn’t believe it at first, but he meant something specific. People only care about what you can do for them. That’s okay, that’s how we all are, but you have to keep it in mind when you talk about who you are or what you’re doing. You have to connect to what people care about: what can you do for them? No one has time, no one cares. It’s a basic way to be kind to people.
The corollary he taught me: advertising isn’t evil. I’d thought it was. But if you’re pure of heart, advertising is just connecting people who have a problem with a solution to that problem. It’s only bad when people use bad tricks to manipulate. If you’re honestly trying to connect people to something they need (whether it’s what you make or not), you’re being good.
The other lesson I took from him: don’t do anything until you know how you’ll reach people. Don’t start a company, don’t write a book, don’t do anything unless you know how you’ll distribute it and find an audience. That’s the hardest part, and it’s 100x harder to build it in later than to build it in from the start.
Thank you, Sophie, for compiling these stories. There are so many ways to live a life!
what a treasure trove. just enjoyed justis' + steve's. will have to return every now and again to get thru more :D tysm for collecting <3