Perhaps humans have evolved to have such a sophisticated sense of pattern recognition, that we don't even consciously understand the patterns that we're recognizing. When you read a post, an email, literally anything that's been written with an AI LLM (large language model), you can always tell. You might not even know how you're able to tell, but you can tell. (EDIT: At least everyone on THIS email list can tell. Recently I learned about a man who was making AI videos of a man with...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
"My biggest breakthrough being here was realizing how much I want to play guitar again". This was a biotech startup founder, a neuroscience PhD who specializes in psychedelic research, who had spent much of the retreat we hosted running back and forth between pitches to raise a few million in investment capital for his venture. I couldn't hide my grin. I grit my teeth and clenched my fists to try to hold back how giddy hearing that made me. (because honestly, same) We (kind of) advertised the...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
What's on your bookshelf? There's a specific kind of writer who will never write their book. Not because they can't. Not because the idea isn't there. The idea has been there for years — fully formed, urgent, important, the kind of thing that keeps them up at night with its visceral realness and its weight. They have seventeen notebooks. Gorgeous ones. The kind you buy at the specialty paper shop because a dream this real deserves the right vessel. Each one is filled with outlines, character...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Anthony Bourdain once said that the problem with being a chef is that you ruin restaurants. You know too much. You've been behind too many doors. You know that the bread they're charging $18 for was frozen this morning. You know the "house-made" sauce came out of a bag. You know the chef whose name is on the menu hasn't touched a pan in this kitchen in four years. You know what real stock smells like at 6am, what it costs to source the right fish, what it actually takes to make something that...
4 months ago • 10 min read
If you’re feeling brave—or just tired of lying to yourself—I dare you to face an inconvenient little truth right now. Pick up your phone. Yes, that glowing oracle you keep in your pocket like a digital rosary. Open the Screen Time app and look at your weekly average. Let the number hit you in the chest before you start rationalizing it. Then do a real gut check. Not the polite kind. The kind where you actually tell the truth: How much of that time was you deliberately using this device with a...
7 months ago • 20 min read
I'm taking a sabbath this weekend after a very hectic couple of weeks of moving to a new city in the middle of a new program launch, amongst about a dozen other wild personal life things I've been juggling. This week's newsletter is an edit of an oldie called You Can't Be Anything You Want to Be. (Spoiler alert: you can be more wholly who you actually, inherently are). What is your visceral, emotional reaction to the following idea: “You can be anything you want to be if you set your mind to...
8 months ago • 6 min read
This Thursday, I'm going to be moving to a new city. This will be the fourth city that I've moved to in 2025, and I'm experiencing a bit of an ego death around it. When I moved to Kelowna, British Columbia this past April, it was with the intentions of laying roots and establishing a community that I could raise my future children with. I'd just survived, and was rebuilding from my own 'dark night of the soul' where everything from my business, my relationship, my home, and anything else I'd...
8 months ago • 11 min read
A book that changed my life, and the lives of countless artists, entrepreneurs, and aspirants pursuing a higher calling is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I read it at least once per quarter. In my view, its impact can be attributed to the boldness it has to define the enemy. In that book, Pressfield's definition of the enemy is capital-R Resistance - the intangible, invisible universal force which acts against the creative impulse of the artist’s soul. It relentlessly and ruthlessly...
8 months ago • 12 min read
The basic idea is this: Our brains aren't optimized for growth, change, and optimization. They're geared towards the very specific, important tasks of keeping ourselves alive, and doing that while expending as little energy as possible. This is an evolutionary/designed feature, not a bug, that allowed for the survival of our species across a history whose majority included conditions of scarcity that were rather hard to stay alive in. It's also why, despite now living in an age of abundance...
8 months ago • 5 min read
