2023: Year in Review
JMW Turner - Snow Storm, Steamboat off a Harbor’s Mouth
It’s 1894, the peak of the smallpox epidemic in Britain. The empire is on its toes. Whispers of war hover as the Chinese ban opium, England’s most profitable export. A winter storm plagues the south coast. Violent waves lap the village’s edge, shattering onto Main Street. The town square is deserted; nothing is quiet. Residents are in hiding. Maybe from the storm, maybe from the disease, maybe from thoughts of war. The raging wind assails anything daring to stand upright.
Age 64 and haggard, the legendary painter JMW Turner straps himself to the foremast of the Ariel and demands to be sailed into the maelstrom. He believes he will die.
Only known photo of Turner.
Beginning a new painting, he is gripped to create honestly from a well of his own experience. No more proverbial illustrations or second-hand oil representations. Vulnerable personal contact alone will provide the necessary lucidity. Before painting the storm, he needs to know it on its own terms. He believes that only in desperation, at risk of total loss, man has a chance to see beyond himself.
The owner of the ship sees Turner’s humanity and is subjected by morbid pity. A pity that rakes his boat across mutinous waves in the chilling storm for four hours. The final end is the painting above.
At the first exhibition of the work, a thoughtful few saw his brilliance and proclaimed he had transcended. Most critics invoked scandal, disagreeing on the validity of the event and therefore the art. They claimed Tuner had gone mad and painted nothing. This is high praise (according to Wilde), when critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
To me, this was the moment Turner graduated to the upper echelons of art history. I believe the work stands on it’s own two legs. The observer is reflected in the work, proving its vitality. Mere critics are ostracized, unable to make contact with the raw self-torment of the honest man crucified on the mast. The cost of truth seeded on wringkled skin, rubbed raw by wet rigging, born on 36x48 canvas.
In the dried brush strokes, I hear Turner howl a personal “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” through cracked lips. I feel his relief when the air fleeing his chest meets the gael, embracing as relatives at a funeral. In the whirling composition, I see the consequences of honest anguish and searching, a recipient of blood-borne peace, painting without need to be understood. In the greys and mysterious greens is my own tear-stained face and wandering soul; bursting with conviction, starved of belief. Turner understood the storm.
In 2023, I began wrestling with God. My Christian faith flatlined and with it a naivete that kept my hair done and words organized. It began slowly in January. Grief hung itself on the edges of my mouth. I didn’t know why. My innards understood before my mind (a trend for the year). A churning gut and nervy, craving mind slowly revealed the source. I fought myself at first, applying effort where it was weakest, pushing myself into deep isolated struggle.
With the Spring, I took a drive from the cold, dry Salt Lake to a San Jose in superbloom. When the landscape exploded into color, my mind caught up with my gut. It’s most probable I’ve been deluded by compelling narratives, intense conditioning, sufficiently complex divine command theory, desire for social cohesion & inclusion, and familial pressure into a view of life where everything makes sense. All neatly fitting into a mature theological framework. Delusion isn’t adherence to truth, a core value of mine. This is not a bad thing. Most of what humans have thought for most of history has been wrong across all disciplines (physics, theology, cosmology, geology..). The lives of our ancestors were not less meaningful because they didn’t know something. I’d argue most were much more compared to the post-modern hedonic contagion. Delusion is not evil. It is incredibly helpful, necessary, and core to human existence. We can delude ourselves into believing pretty much anything, and we do! Think of all the wild & diverse convictions people groups have today. This topic alone warrants books on books of prose (this is a good read), but to continue with my story…
I have a personal conviction to live in accordance with what is true to the best of my ability. I’ve been a devout Christian my whole life. The sunk cost is everything I’ve stood for and every relationship where intimacy hinges on shared values (family, friends, lover).
“The first principle is you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.”
In March, like Turner, I strapped myself to a mast and sailed into the storm. I have been given a set amount of time in some relationship with a biological, fleshy mass, limited senses, consciousness, and a much grander potential spiritual (meaning minimally perceivable) reality. If I’m going to spend this time and live this life, I’m going to spend my heart and soul with it, aligned with the rendition of delusion that seems closest to truth.
No question is out of bounds, no belief is beyond suspension, no conversation is too heretical (and as a result I’ve become a heretic in every room I’ve occupied since). Let the winds blow and grounds shake, they’ll be met by a self that is gentle and bending only to what is. As any disciple of life: My strength is in my weakness. My end is in my beginning. My doing is in my undoing.
"III O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,…
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
…
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.”
T.S Eliot, East Coker
I do not know what I am looking for. Possibly a wagon like Pascal’s, a vision in the mountains revealing “a truth worth surrendering to” like Moriarty’s, something much more minute, or nothing at all. What I do know is that I am infinitely capable of deceiving myself to make my life feel important, meaningful, and coherent. I’m too willing to employ a narrative to bring continuity to my experiences. Additionally, being wrong feels just like being right until I have an experience revealing my wrongness.
In pressing into the search and engaging in discussion, it became apparent (this could be my own arrogance) that most people don't care to understand their own worldviews. A better approximation is they wish to feel comfortable with their perspective of the world; to have sufficiently networked semblances of cause and effect; to avoid conflict and have theories that feel smart within the contexts of their emotional conditioning. It is too easy to think we understand what we're talking about when we really just have well memorized dogma, shared language, common sources of information, and a limiting set of questions our in-groups validates. I'm being overly cynical - but I see parts of myself in this description. The searching is a process of constant friction, a suspension of belief and comfort in order to grope around in the dark. I do not know how long this can be sustained or what end will come.
I could write tomes on the processes of searching and still not do it justice (you can see some of my notes here, although most takes place on paper), so I won’t venture into those now. I do not believe I’ll discover answers to everything or reinvent religion, but I do know this wandering is how I must be spending my energy. It’s a knowing beyond my mind and body. If I’m to know God or this collective, higher order intelligence that I believe I have intimacy with, I’ll come to know them on their own terms.
It is not farfetched that all my life I’ve been interacting with an infinitely dimensional thing through low dimensional means.
For now, I will keep reading, discussing, praying, writing, participating in religion, observing, meditating, testing, and wandering into churches like Phillip Larkin. I must get out of my own way - adhering to strict principles of humility, integrity, and diligence - for I am my own deceiver.
The human cognitive system is fine-tuned to produce beliefs, with intrinsic bias toward cognitive closure (a made up mind). A grave danger exists when life’s foundation is removed. A vacuum replaces it. The soul becomes hungry for meaning, craving to make anything a god. A divine silhouette is ripped into the heart. The filling of this space must be resisted to maintain clear sight. I am convinced the removal of all priors is necessary to seek “an original experience with the universe” as Emerson put it.
Humans have belief-consistent information processing architectures. When new information is introduced, we process it based on our existing beliefs - rather than approaching with a beginner’s mind, the mind of a child. Our mind subconsciously and actively silences information outside the dynamic range of our beliefs. Due to this, your experience is likely neither subjective or objective. It is processed by a third-party architecture. Qualia isn’t fundamental. This basic equation underpins all known cognitive biases:
Prior beliefs + belief-consistent information processing = bias.
To step outside of the distortion field, beliefs must be suspended - and - to my perception, each who has done so for long enough while pursuing rich enough questions has emerged with wisdom for the benefit of mankind. My life is not about me, this shouldn’t be either.
The whole point depends on his being humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy: Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventure, and just enough doubt in himself to enjoy them.
G.K Chesterton, Orthodoxy
A wise man once told me “If you want to know how you feel about something, say goodbye to it.” I have, and I love Christianity. It is true that your first religion feels like a mother tongue, a comforting and soothing internal environment. A lossless method of expression. At some point however, we all must leave our mothers. There is language for this in Christendom, but to my foolishness, it doesn’t adequately capture the heart of the effort. If external conformity is holding to dogma and internal conformity is maintaining consistency, I must slip past advanced dogma and settle without the comforts of the motherly care I’ve received. I am doing so now as a child coming of age, far from home. I miss and reflect fondly on her care of me. I'm eager to love her and keep her close, but am unsure of her role in sustaining me into the future. To close the thread without diving into the nuances and weeds, a just statement is that I am open to Jesus being the resurrected son of God, but am not dependent on or convinced of it. I pray time will reveal correct direction, as each second spent in limbo asks more of me and I don’t have much more to yield. Come what may.
“An unexamined life is not worth living.”
[Since writing the above and fully surrendering, I’ve undergone deeply personal spiritual experiences I’ve no words to house. If I were to write the above now, it’d read differently.]
Roots
The coffee jiggled violently. I witnessed a miracle when none spilled and it floated toward me. It reminded me of the Seminoles refusing to leave their land. Stubborn and outmatched, I love that spirit. My grandma smiled proudly, the drug arriving safely in front of me. “Thanks Mimi.” “Of course sweetheart, you like your coffee black don’t you?” I take a sip. She doesn’t ask questions to get responses, like how poets don’t write to be understood. Leave enough of her questions blowing about the room and she’ll finally say what she’s thinking. Her hands got shakier this year. I wonder how long till’ my hands shake the coffee. I wonder what she’ll do with herself when she’s unable to serve coffee anymore.
When people get older, they need help again. They return to that childish state of physical need. It’s so human and beautiful. It’s sad how many families send their old to be with the old, closed off and boxed in by sterile, whitewashed walls, to be cared for by “the experts.” The other generations lose so much. I do not like how birth and death are hidden like this in the West. It’s inhuman.
I’ve ended up at Mimi’s house in East Tennessee three times this year. The first was in May. I stayed the night. We stayed up until 3AM crying over Jesus and my dad, shuffling pictures she’d forgotten about. It had taken until 1am to get past the chatter phase - she’s insistent in that regard. You need to get her alone and affirm her security before she’ll really talk. I love her. She knows it. She also forgets to feel it. I imagine it’s symptomatic of all the abuse she’s endured.
Her story is my story, I’ve come to see. Such it is with all of my family. There is genetic momentum and epigenetic betrayal on display in each second of “my” life. Will Durant said it best “The present is the past rolled up for action, the past is the present unrolled for understanding… It is the present, not the past that dies. It is only the past that lives.” In this light, I am my family history rolled up for action. My lineage is me unrolled for understanding.
In 2023 I explored my family tree. Billionaires, overdoses, incest, murder, slavery, betrayal, war, nation-building, robber barons, corporate takeovers, the invention of junk mail, rape, and good ol’ great uncle Silas who lived in a log and shot any soldier who entered his village, regardless of what team they were on. While I’m sure my family is far from unique, it feels that way. These stories and sets of facts capture me. Tracing who shot who, who married who, who made something of themselves through the ages is so damn interesting. However, it’s always felt distanced, as if my family was a secondhand good. Never fully mine. The fruit of my journeys: for the first time it’s beginning to feel personal. It’s my history too.
An effect of this research is a transcendent sense of duty. I stand on the shoulders of giants. It is a matter of responsibility to live my life in a manner that could only be lived now - as I put it in a journal entry (pardon my excited capitalization, I like drama):
“LIVE A LIFE THAT COULD ONLY BE LIVED NOW. IN THIS AGE. WITH THESE TOOLS. DO NOT LIVE YOUR ANCESTORS’ LIVES. THEY’VE TOILED AND WRITTEN DOWN THEIR WISDOM SO THAT YOU MAY GRADUATE BEYOND AND EXPLORE WHAT LAY FURTHER.
DO NOT BE BURDENED TRAVELLER BY THE WEIGHT OF THEIR CONSCIOUS. RATHER BE EQUIPPED AND ENCOURAGED. THEY HAVE CREATED GREAT HORDES OF WISDOM AND TOOLS FOR YOUR JOURNEY AND FIND DELIGHT IN ITS USAGE, JUST AS YOU WILL FOR YOU DESCENDENTS.”
Steve Jobs’ email to himself from 2010, a year before his death, also comes to mind.
The study of world-changers self-talk would be an interesting pursuit.
Rosebush in Blossom - Van Gogh
Known
I fell in love with a wonderful person this year. It was sublime. I also gave her up to see clearly (a topic worth a book). My mind has been brightened and dulled, frightened and moored, a peace remains. It was entirely new for me. While, as admitted above, I’ve been a weak man this year - undisciplined in mind and spirit - I was met and known in it. What a precious gift.
I’m unsure what to do with myself now if I’m honest, which surprises me. I’m quite the independent and I am desiring dependence. I may be the 15th man in Hemingway’s Men Without Women, uncovering a hidden incompleteness in myself, or Joyce’s next portrait of a young artist, revoking what was to reach what now can be. Daedalus, Icarus, phoenix, I don’t know which my story is. Seems to be something time will reveal. I have faith.
Until it does, I’m romancing the moon (the sun is too proud to be admired - I’ve tried and angered my corneas), tasting leftovers of a feast that was exactly what it should’ve been. Stolen words sweeten my tears, since I have a hard time finding my own. Mainly Mary Oliver’s whenever she talks about birds:
… And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
From “The Swan”
Ladybird Lake, Jake Bryer
… The geese
flew on.
I have never
seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.
from “Snow Geese”
Also, Terns, for my poem loving friends. It’s too long to include as text.
While I’ve been in this sensitive space, I’ve thrown myself at art. Touching and feeling all sorts. I’ve never been so moved so frequently! Films, paintings, poems, novels galore.
William Blake - America: A Prophecy
A head full of words that some people know
I write about my career reservedly. Amidst my searching, loving, and learning this year, my work has been the least important of my pursuits. Yet still, it goes.
In February, I moved into a new role at NVIDIA leading our Data Science marketing. I went from marketing and growing NVIDIA’s overall developer ecosystem to bringing to market some of our most technical products. Our CEO highlighted my mission as some of the most important work in the company. The CMO mentored me in response to the potential he saw. I applied myself and turned a low seven figure business into a nine figure one. I worked with brilliant scientists and engineers. I watched NVIDIA’s stock skyrocket, breaking world records as the world realized what the company had built over the last 15 years: the perfect platform for deep learning and generative AI with a massive install base using proprietary software. NVIDIA is the primary benefactor and prophet of the 7th information revolution. I can claim some foresight for my inclusion (as I recognized the GPU in 2018 as a cornerstone of our future infrastructure then bet on NVIDIA as the winner - then last year bet on data science as a field) but truly I am drowning in luck. To be young and formable amidst prophets building technology that will shape the rest of the world - how fun!
The reason I am still at NVIDIA: I get direct exposure to the leaders that are driving the creation of technology that has and will continue to recreate society. Amidst the AI hype, a stock that 3x’ed, immense industry pressure, and disrupted supply chains, leadership has been clear-headed, hungry, & paranoid, playing a game that’s score won’t become public for another 15 years. Everyone’s talking about AI now - great, good for them, NVIDIA was talking about that 15 year ago.. Now we are talking about physics simulation engines for industrial design (voice to finished CAD design), lifelong learning autonomous agent systems for open source modular robots, genome scale protein generation, and the like.
While that is all wonderful, I am a creator. I want to build things end to end. I want to see grease on my hands and feel the fire of passion on my breath. I want to speak quickly and live in flow. The 9-5 schedule, remote work, and cross-functional org structure dissipates my precious connection with source. I want to work in sprints, face hard truths, and be broken and reformed by the pressure of necessity.
I am too comfortable and do not have enough responsibility. The noblest parts of my character are being sheltered. To avoid being stunted, I’ve applied myself some to my businesses outside of NVIDIA, but I will ramp this up further in 2024. More to come on this. I’m so grateful to be in partnership with many amazing people building impactful businesses. I currently am involved in five businesses outside of NVIDIA. I have more industrial momentum going into 2024 than I ever have.
If wealth = the sum of the transformations I can cause, then I am growing wealthier at an exponential rate. I am so grateful and feel my results outpace my effort, I cannot claim responsibility. I am humbled and grateful, and not in the LinkedIn-humble-brag fashion. I truly feel small in comparison to the weight of responsibility and vision of what could be. I feel the conspiring of the universe weaving my story before I touch it:
“When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.”
- Paul Coelho
To close these thoughts: my career is a method of expressing who I am. Curiosity is the fuel, value creating businesses are the vehicle, truth-telling markets are the environment, an enriched life for billions of humans is the direction.
Onward!
My missions:
Enrich the lives of billions of humans through technology.
Make a meaningful contribution to humanity’s corpus of wisdom.
Live a life animated by love, aligned with truth, devoted to justice.
Companies I’ve maintained multi-year positions in:
Replit
RNDR
Coinbase
ASML
NVDA (obviously)
Going Pro.
I took my schedule more seriously this year. I’ve separated planning and executing and instrumented 10s of new techniques to ensure my will is translated into my actions. Distraction and dissipation were my primary enemies in 2023.
It’s infinitely surprising to me how I will sabotage myself. I have to treat myself like a toddler, carefully engineering my environment to keep myself focused and engaged on the right tasks.
One day, I want to live without a calendar or watch. That day is not near. I work my butt off to ensure my calendar accurately reflects my priorities and the way I actually want to spend my time. This is more arduous than it may sound! And very often, I do the planning in order to forget the plan. It lives on in my subconscious and my efforts stay directed.
My effectiveness and awareness of self has skyrocketed. I do feel I can create or accomplish anything with time, and can imagine the exact steps to do so, given the peak performance toolkit I’ve evolved and used this year.
Reserving the right to wander.
This year I had a grand total of four free weekends. The intensity of my presentness has waned. I haven’t had time to wander and my spirit has suffered. My hands twitch and I pick at my face to stay high. I’m an addict to noise. This isn’t like me. Simultaneously, I’ve opened many important discussions with myself that I haven’t had space to make progress in. While I’ve directed effort and time to pursuing these questions, nothing unknots the soul like my missing friend, boredom.
I’m prioritizing the search. The “thing that happens when you are not wrapped up in the everydayness of your own life.” as Percy Walker called it.
Slow steps. A mindful heartbeat. Deep breaths. Patient “no”s. Disregard for agenda. Honoring the ordinary.
“The secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
2023 by the numbers:
Cities lived in: 18
Weddings attended: 5
Mountains Climbed: only 3 :(
Countries visited: 8
New close friends: 14
Miles driven: 12,465
Books read: ~12 - busy year!
Lessons I’ve internalized:
The small things form in the same way as the big things.
The greatest things form in small inconspicuous ways.
You do not need time to make decisions, you need information (caveat: some information is time dependent)
Work on things that create time invariant knowledge.
Give others space to evolve. Never approach someone with the assumption that they are the exact same person as yesterday.
Resistance is what creates shape.
All we interact with is representation. Edit the representational process to modify how reality generates.
Intelligence is compression.
There’s a schism between intelligent art and art that makes you feel intelligent.
The right information at the right time is priceless.
The dynamic range of a human will far exceed any other thing you will interact with in your life.
Living meaningfully: Reduce the number of important things in your life to as close to 0 as possible, then maximize against those things. For everything else, treat it like play.
Symmetries can be rotated without be refactored and solved. Previously unsolvable problems can become solvable if things can be assumed as symmetric with another system. Symmetry only applies to higher dimensional objects, not lower.
Technology is scalar. Values are vector.
Virtue is to the soul as fitness to the body. There is an ideal form.
Occupy the little gap between emotions and feelings.
Many stupid things are uttered by people whose main motive is to say something original.
One destroys an enemy when you make them a friend.
The space between wisdom and action is courage.
Describing an experience neuters it. This is especially true on the backend of experience, when it’s still fresh on the lips. Poetry transcends this.
Changes I’ve made:
No caffeine first 90 mins of the day, if at all.
Getting early morning low angle sunlight first thing after waking.
Demand an agenda for every meeting that reflects why each person needs to be there, including me otherwise I do not attend.
30 mins at end of every day to plan and tee up the next day. I call it “loading my weights.”
Only consuming ancient or hyper-recent media.
Minimal alcohol intake, averaging 1 drink a month.
Worshipping my calendar. I am ordered in my life so that I may be violently creative in my work and thinking.
No morning alarms. 1 evening alarm an hour before bed, sleeping a whole 5 REM cycles to wake naturally.
No drinking from plastic anything. No cooking in non-stick plastic stuff. Slowly am transitioning to natural fiber clothing. Microplastics are a silent killer.
Phone is all the way off for most of the day. All notifications are off all the time. I aim to check it twice a day.
Things I tried:
Carnivore diet
Skiing
Ice climbing
Therapeutic psychedelics (LSD + ketamine) with an expert
Indie films - I love them!
Brewing Kombucha
Baking sourdough and other breads.
Lots of cooking
Adderall
Kava
Tango dancing
Tap dancing
Much more experimental meditation
Near death experiences:
Fell on my trad gear 9 pitches up Lunar Arete, thank god for banger placements. Sprained my ankle & finished the climb (foot jams) in the most intense pain I experienced this year.
Got chased by a longhorn cow on a ranch in Texas hill country west of Austin, narrowly made it past the imaginary wall of a gate. His name was CAO (centralized autonomous organism) lol.
Narrowly avoided a fight late at night in the bush with a Kigandan gang in Central Uganda. Got away on a boda-boda.
Side quests:
Started an orphanage.
Bought a car for a first date (& attempted to profit from it). Ended up losing $7K and making a ton of memories and new friends. Worth it.
Build a new method for working into ownership of a property similar to seller-finance with a business partner, then closed on a property in Asheville, which we’re renting out. Feels random.
Tried to build a 12 story building in Metairie, LO. Up in the air whether it’ll work out.
Things I changed my mind about:
Child-rearing. Done well, it does take a village. I was taught this was marxist and therefore immoral.
Reductionism. We are more than the sum of our parts. Reductionism assumes the visibility of each component. I can’t picture a scenario where that isn’t an arrogant assumption.
The brain. I think it’s more like an antenna than a computer.
Covid. We got it super wrong and most of us were brainwashed. It was a lab leak, lockdowns weren’t effective, school closures were harmful, vaccines didn’t give immunity, after getting it you don’t get immunity, vaccine mandates were foolish, on and on. Revealed to me how little I and others think for ourselves. Not again :)
Perception. Not seeing the world accurately predicates survival. Inaccurate perception is necessary. Abstraction creates the conditions for direction. Intuition and bias are two sides of the same coin.
Entropy. Entropy may not be intrinsic, rather a function of a computationally limited system (us) interacting with computational irreducability (universe) - enter downsampling, loss, etc.
Discipline. Most of the time, discipline is stupid. When your will is focused, following it is effortless. Gritting your teeth and white-knuckling isn’t following your will, it’s fighting it. Curating the will is the high leverage meta-practice.
Climate Change. Carbon emissions is technical debt to make us multi-planetary, to grow our societies to support specialists that will move our heavy industry off the planet so we may zone the earth residential.
American Poverty. There is a leisure class on both ends of the economic spectrum.
Small Talk. It’s necessary. You are mutually establishing tone and discovering the boundaries in which to play.
Things I’m excited about:
Neural operators. Seems like best possible method of bridging the LLMs to atoms gap. RL with real world feedback Anima A is doing great work here. If we can move atoms around with the efficiency we can move bits, it could unlock utopia.
UATX. Higher ed is broken, basically has become a manufacturing line for radicalized surplus elites. UATX is an experiment rebuking neo-liberalism and going back to classical liberalism. If they have a grad program within 2 years, I’m going.
Network states. I think this is the future of countries. It seems like we hit an inflection point this last year. Personally, I’m involved in 3 (Cabin, Praxis, and TNS overall).
Space!