What if you could place a line of development through an artist’s lifelong work? Take Claude Monet, for instance. You start with his scribbles at one year of age. Then you see him start to improve at two years of age. And before you know it you get to the Haystacks, Water Lilies, and his other impressionist works known the world over. If you follow this line of development you’d see the evolution of the artist’s internal state of consciousness from nascent to mature, nuanced, integrated, and complex. And you would see an idea go from humble origins to full fruition.

This was the inspiration for my most recent art piece at burning man. It took the form of a word sign where each progressive letter doubles in size, from a two inch tall I to an 11 foot tall E. The word is ITERATE. Each letter is made of different materials and evolves in terms of build quality, size, and complexity. And it recharged off of solar in the day and was illuminated at night.

Here I’ll walk you through the ins and outs of this art piece a year in the making.

Small Beginnings after a week in the dust. Photo credits at the end.

Background

One of the earlier forms of this idea of representing the increasing complexity of consciousness was to choose an artist and show their literal progression with representative artworks from year to year. This would show their evolution along a single axis with the messiness, false starts, and switches between styles and artistic mediums. But this approach was too married to an individual artist and didn’t quite represent the core idea. So I went back to the drawing board on how to create this strange idea.

Exponentials are notoriously hard to reason about. Humans have oh so many cognitive biases. Two big biases are that we think about the world linearly and locally. But exponentials are everywhere around us. Fractals, population growth, and compound interest are a few examples. So as I sat with the idea of creatively representing the progressively compounding evolution of a system, a sequence exponentially increasing in size was a key component.

But systems not only compound in terms of size. There’s also complexity. Monet’s early caricatures (he started as a caricature artist) are certainly smaller than the massive Water Lilly paintings made at the end of his life, but they also represent a depth of consciousness from a lifelong artistic pursuit. So the next dimension of compounding became the complexity. Each progressive letter had more detail, fewer rough edges, better lights, and deeper intention.

Material and time spent creating the letters were additional dimensions of the progression. Each progressive letter was twice the size and took roughly twice the time to create as the previous one. If I were a true purist, I would have made the letters in that progression, timelines be damned. But the reality was that after making the I (it took me a few seconds), I had to focus on the E so that I could make my deadline for shipping it to playa. So I rewired the electricity in my garage, taught myself to weld, and got to work.

While in the build process, I re-read the Tao Te Ching. Known as “The Book of the Way and Virtue,” this is the foundational text of Taoism written around the 6th century BCE. From this collection of poems, one poem resonated with the core intent of the art piece. In it is the line “all great achievements come from small beginnings.” This is similar to the better known quote from the same book: “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I named the piece Small Beginnings after this poem and included it as a sign in front of the piece.

Small Beginnings at night.

The Piece Itself

The Visualization Exercise and Poem

The sequence begins with a visualization exercise. If you’re building something great, it can be daunting to start. So the exercise is to project out an idea into its full fruition. This is an exercise that builds intuition of a different reality. For the readers of Carl Jung, intuition can be opposed to sensing. Sensing focuses on immediate sensory information. Intuition maps information to deeper mechanisms, patterns, or possibility spaces. Deeply intuitive people leverage some integration of conscious and unconscious information in order to build a detailed internal map of the world. It's an art and a skill and this exercise (which I wrote) seemed to map well to bolstering one’s intuition. Following the visualization exercise in italics is the full poem from the Tao Te Ching.

The I

Scribbled on a page from one of my notebooks, the I is the two inch tall beginning of the word. The page came from the notebook I was using when I first had this idea last year. It was the smallest step in the beginning of the larger project.

The T

I molded the T out of sculptor's clay. The inspiration here was automotive design which uses clay to form the design of a vehicle before putting it into a wind tunnel to test aerodynamics. The T seemed to me to be the next step of a design process moving from the two dimensional space to a three dimensional space while retaining the flexibility of clay necessary in the design process. And yes, you can’t work with clay without revisiting the Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze hit film Ghost, so we watched that while making the T.

The E

This letter transitions from clay to wood. Haphazardly cut into a board using a jigsaw, it was a simple and easy way of creating something in a more permanent medium than clay.

The R

This letter was the first to have its own lighting. Made from a 2x4, it also has a single lightbulb from the wiring of a lamp installed on top. With our camp art car playing music next to the art piece, I flipped the light on and off to the beat.

The A

This letter introduces color, acrylic, and more colorful lighting. I was deeply amused by putting flashing Christmas tree lights on the inside giving it an aesthetically weird feel. It had increased intentionality relative to the earlier letters but still a rough look and feel.

The T

The T transitions materials from wood to steel. Created quite simply and wrapped with rope lights, this letter was just shy of 5 ½ feet tall. This was the first climbable letter.

The Large E

The main focus of the piece is the final E. Just shy of 11 feet, it was laser cut steel full of fractals, fractal progressions, and the fibonacci sequence. The fractal sequence of squares on the side are climbable and the top is reinforced steel that could hold the weight of a small marching band. Inside are programmable wash lights. I got a lot of pleasure going out to the piece each evening at sunset, finding somebody hanging out on the E, and then asking them their favorite color. I’d then turn it on and switch the color to whatever they’d say and leave it on that color for the night.

The steel plates on the E were laser cut on a $600k laser cutter that was by far the most impressive piece of machinery I’ve ever seen. It had cooling towers for liquid nitrogen and created highly intricate designs. In it was all the geeky math and fractals I spend far too much time noodling on in my free time. Cut into the E were the Mandelbrot set, Julia set, and Sierpiński triangles. It also includes sacred geometry which, in its full progression that is tattooed on my arm, progresses from a single dot ultimately to Metatron’s cube, which contains all the Platonic solids. More details on that here. Geeky math indeed.

What Got Left Out

My collaborator Nate taught me the Leonardo da Vinci quote “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” True to form, there were many components that didn’t make it into the final piece. I left my welder out for 20 minutes to make a quick run back to camp when the worst wind storm of my 11 years on playa hit. The wind spun the fan of the welder so fast that it turned the fan’s motor into a generator, pumped electricity backwards through the welder, and fried the circuit. Given my fried welder and my failed attempts to panhandle a welder from other artists, there were many finishing touches I couldn’t do. This mainly applied to the angle iron I was looking to put on some of the corners I had to assemble on playa.

In addition to that, I had more plans for the lighting. I wanted to have a single blinking light on each of the letters flashing in sequence to show the hockey stick shape of the exponential. Rewiring and programming LED’s turned out to be more involved than the time I had allowed. I also planned to have the first letter illuminated by a kerosene lamp (the same used to light the streets of Black Rock City) with other, simple electric candles for the earlier letters. These ideas also didn’t make the cut before the inevitable abandonment of the piece.

My new SpaceX engineer friend trying to repair the welder after the storm. In jest, I told her that she has welded rockets so she should be able to build me a new welder from scratch. It’s just electricity and metal after all. She told me I sounded an awful lot like Elon.

Other Photos

Notice the climbable fractal progression on the side of the E.

An example of Nate’s masterful CAD diagrams of the piece.

The build process.

Forklifts and semi trucks to get the E set up.

Madelyn and I after a day of building.

Sunrise at the art piece.

Leave no trace efforts. Amazing what metal shavings a magnetic rake will find.

Inspirations

As Banksy once said, good artists copy and great artists steal. (Ok, that was actually Picasso.) But let me break down some of the inspirations for this piece.

• Straightedge: A decade ago, one of my all time favorite art pieces was brought to playa. It was called Straitedge. It consisted of a series of vertical poles stretching for 2.6 miles. On each pole was two lights flashing in unison along the whole line. One represented a straightedge placed on the earth and the other represented the curvature of the earth. At one end, the two lights were side by side. This was the point that the straightedge touched the earth. As you rode your bike along the line of poles, the lights would diverge until eventually the two lights were five feet apart. What I loved about this work was that it made an abstract natural phenomenon—the earth’s curvature—intuitively accessible. I tried to do the same thing in my art piece but with exponentials.

• I’m Fine: Last year my favorite art piece was called I’m Fine. From a distance, it looked like typical burning man snark: a large sign that just says the words “I’m Fine.” But as you approach it, the meaning inverts. You see that the letters are made out of street signs from Ukraine with bullet holes and bomb blasts from the war. It was accompanied by an air raid siren linked in real time to sirens in Ukraine. The sign in front of it spoke to the commitment to be fine in spite of adversity. This inspired the aesthetic weirdness of the art piece with a different meaning from afar versus up close.

• Believe: Jeff Schomberg and Laura Kimpton brought out many word signs to burning man over the years. In Reno, they’re best known for their large Believe sign. Many years ago–perhaps in 2015–I met Jeff on playa at his work where he asked me to press some buttons in front of the sign. At each push the top of the different letters would explode in flame. He also gifted me one of the dove cutouts from the steel sign. This was the main inspiration for the E.

• Scale: In this book, Geoffrey West discusses fractals and their relationship to the scaling functions of biological organisms, cities, and companies. This fueled an early curiosity in fractals that informed the fractal progressions on the E. It also made me question why the default geometry taught in schools is Euclidian geometry rather than fractal geometry and makes me wonder how different the world would be if we taught children natural fractals before the unnatural shapes of triangles, squares, and circles.

Looking Forward

Seeing people interact with the art piece was deeply rewarding. There was the couple I found crying there saying how it resonated with them after a tough year. There was a small group that spent a good sunrise on top of the E, deepening their connection. There was the person who pitched me her new book idea on it and another person who pitched me his new movie. There was the startup founder for a more human social media platform who said it was his favorite piece that year. And the list goes on…

I loved the way this piece came together. Aesthetically, the final result looked a lot better than I had planned. I’m a heady dude, after all, and like most modern art I get enamored with concepts over aesthetics. I had wanted to do a deep dive into welding for some time and this gave me an excuse to learn. There’s something about the physics of metal and electricity combined with a bit of danger that really draw me in. I don’t know yet if I would bring this piece back out. If I do, I’d love to add a 22 ft tall exclamation point at the end that’s climbable, covered in programmable LED’s, and has a basket on top to watch the sunrise.

Regardless of its form, I’ll continue to iterate on the various ideas in this piece.

Acknowledgements

It takes a village. I’m deeply grateful to the following people for the help on this project:

• Madelyn: In metalwork, the welder welds and the grinder grinds. Welding fuses together metal and the grinder cleans the welds so they look good. Madelyn was the master grinder turning my amateur welds into something halfway presentable. She was also with me every step of the way helping on everything from making design decisions and solutioning challenges to reminding me to eat and packing my clothes for burning man while I was focused on the build.

• Nate: He’s an engineering savant. Nate has incredible breadth and depth as an engineer, mocking up 3D CAD diagrams as a hobby. Simulating the physics of this and reengineering that, Nate was an incredible thought partner and contributor to the project through and through. He was the main engineering mind behind the E and was responsive to my unceasing feedback of “that’s great, but can we add more math?” Men often catalyze friendships through shared projects and this was no exception.

• Jeff: As mentioned above, Jeff is the master of word signs. His work can be found everywhere from Union Square in San Francisco to the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas and elsewhere across the US. Jeff was kind enough to invite me to his workshop, share the technical details of his process, offer shop space if I needed it, and give me feedback on my build.

• Brad and his crew: Running one of the main transportation and storage operations for burning man, Brad put up with my relatively crazy request to pick up the E from my garage and transport it to and from playa. Tony, Adam and the rest of his crew were awesome to work with. They rolled up to my house with a forklift, pallet jacks, and a flatbed truck to transport it as well as helped me place it on playa. All while having a great time in the process.

• Ken: I rolled up to playa not exactly having a plan for where the E would go after the burn. I mentioned it to Ken and he simply said “oh, you can just keep it at my house.” So now he has a giant E in his front yard and I have a good excuse to visit him.

• The Artery: As the main resource for artists at burning man, the Artery did a great job getting me started, introducing me to the right people, keeping everybody safe from the storms, and checking in with me throughout the build and strike.

• Pre-burn build: Madelyn, Mark, my parents

• On-site build and leave no trace: Madelyn, Huub, Dylan, Alex, Andrew, Maral, Marc, Logan

• Photography: McKinsey

• Funding: the camp Elementum contributed 15% of the project’s budget. The rest was self-funded.

• Thought partners: Kelsey, Marc

I’m happy to announce that my all time favorite tattoo is now on my own body. This turns my right arm into a composition integrating my primary interests: philosophy, mathematics, and neuroscience. From neural networks and probabilities to ancient Egyptian symbolism and fractal geometry, this bad boy has it all. So buckle up for a walk through the six days of tattooing and tacos I just wrapped up in Mexico City this past week with the legendary tattoo artist Rodrigo Salcedo Velarca.

An overview of the whole composition

Integration of the Themes

“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.” - Carl Jung

The centerpiece of the composition integrates these three themes with a marble head split in pieces revealing an anatomical brain within. On one side of the marble head and brain is a biological neural network. On the other side is an artificial neural network, that crazy invention that won the Nobel Prize this year and allows for everything from recognizing puppies in photographs to chatGPT. The thing that’s endlessly exciting about artificial neural networks is what’s called the “universal approximation theorem” that states that artificial neural networks with certain characteristics can theoretically represent any function, or any relationship between inputs and outputs. Want to map an input question in chatGPT to an output response? There’s a neural network for that. Want to map stock market data to the migration patterns of Canadian geese? Theoretically, a neural network can map that too. And, of course, a biological neural network is responsible for everything you’ve experienced in your life to date. So this centerpiece integrates the themes with the marble head alluding to Greek philosophy, mathematics through an artificial neural network, and neuroscience through a biological neural network.

The centerpiece before additional elements were added

Philosophy

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

The first theme is philosophy organized around one of my all time favorite concepts in philosophy: the “sacred yes.” This originates from the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The sacred yes is his solution to a thought experiment of “the eternal return of the same.” If you were to relive the same experience day after day and year after year, could you affirm or say yes to that experience? This is a test of the affirmation of life despite adversity, monotony, control, etc. He calls this approach amor fati or the Latin for “love of fate.” This theme represents a general orientation towards life as one of affirmation.

This idea is represented by a staircase leading upwards to an open door. In that door is the mathematical function for an exponential, or e^x. Graph this and it plots a hockey stick that more than doubles at each unit increase of x. Euler’s number, or e, is itself interesting as it’s a widespread mathematical constant that exists in calculus in the way that pi exists in geometry: it’s a constant that’s necessary for making that branch of mathematics work. One might think of a constant as what was fated by the initial construction of the physical universe to which all observable phenomena must adhere. Next to the staircase is the Egyptian Ankh (☥) that symbolizes life and the eternal. Like all good symbols, it’s rife with meaning including the integration of masculine and feminine. Also part of the tattoo are the words “amor fati.” Connected above the staircase is a symbol for expansion. This came from Rodrigo’s work creating a lexicon of various abstract, hieroglyphic-like symbols. One evening over dinner I pulled this from his deck of custom made tarot cards and not only did the symbol fit the piece but adding a component pulled at random to a permanent tattoo perfectly fit the theme of the love of fate.

A neuron and reversed optics diagram (described below). Also the symbol for expansion and stairs

With each of the three themes, there’s related symbolism. For the theme of philosophy, the symbolism is the elemental triangles. These represent earth, wind, fire, and water. The balance between symbolic and literal symbolism throughout the composition reflects the dualism between mind and brain or sacred and profane. This is one of the key dualities throughout philosophy: how does the subjective experience of the world interact with the physical world? Do the actions of neurons create conscious experience or does consciousness dictate material changes in the brain? This is a paradox for the ages with countless volumes written on it. As with many polarities and big questions, it’s less a question to be solved than, to paraphrase the poet Rilke, a question to be lived. This theme of duality is seen elsewhere in the tattoo with two circles or a combined circle and square.

Mathematics

“To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.” - Richard Feynman

The second theme of the tattoo is mathematics, or the world perceived objectively. What drew me to mathematics initially was the idea that human cognition is full of biases. Left unattended, our default is to understand the world conventionally, emotionally, egotistically, linearly, locally, etc. Through a more rigorous understanding of mathematics, you can start to move outside of these biases. This central idea fueled my interest in science, statistics, neuroscience, and the list goes on. Mathematics is the language of nature and the foundation of understanding the world outside of human subjectivity.

This theme is represented with a gradient. This concept in machine learning can be visualized like a topological map showing the peaks and valleys of a given terrain. Viewed in one direction the tattoo looks like an abstract topological map but from the other direction it looks like a portion of a face. In machine learning, you’re using mathematics to try to find the global optimum, which can be thought of as the highest or lowest point within a topology. This is why these approaches are sometimes called “hill-climbing algorithms” as they iteratively work through a given space in order to find the optimum as a mountaineer would climb a mountain. This optimum can be the highest reward or lowest error between a model’s prediction and the true values. The most common solution for this is called “gradient descent” where you update your model of a given space at each iteration by taking a step toward the optimum. This is similar to how humans find their own optima in life, moving through the world and taking steps in the direction that best optimizes their desired outcomes. This piece includes the formula for “gradient ascent,” which looks within a given space for the maximum.

A topological map symbolizing a gradient

The second component of the mathematics theme is emergent phenomena. These are complex patterns that arise from simpler elements that are not easily predictable from the individual components. Stock market dynamics, flocking behavior of animals, and protein folding are a few examples of emergent phenomena. This composition represents this through the movement from mathematical simplicity to complexity and then back to simplicity, starting and ending with a single point on my hand and on the base of my neck. This movement of emergence and dissipation follows the evolution of sacred geometry:

1. Single Point: a point with no dimensions (no length, width, or height) as the starting point for all geometry

2. First Circle: a circle made by the set of all points in a plane that are a given distance from the central point

3. Vesica Piscis: two circles where the intersection of each circle is the center point of the other one

4. Seed of Life: from the Vesica Piscis, you draw new circles around the initial circle with the center of each new circle on each of the intersections between a new circle and the initial circle. This structure can be found throughout nature, especially in cellular division and embryonic development

5. Flower of Life: continue this pattern by tessellating new circles at intersection points for a total of 19 circles

6. Metatron's Cube: this adds straight lines between every center point of every circle in the Flower of Life to one another. Notably, this figure contains all five of the platonic solids, which are shapes like the cube and tetrahedron that all exist within the Metatron’s cube. When you place a Platonic solid in Metatron’s cube, it touches on all sides

Also to the theme of mathematics is a representation of the second law of thermodynamics. This speaks to the fundamental direction of energy moving towards higher entropy. Natural processes move towards a state of maximum entropy or disorder. This is the irreversible movement of things such as food coloring dispersing in a glass of water. The food coloring will never be concentrated again unless significant energy is applied, which itself creates more entropy. The second law of thermodynamics is often referred to as the “arrow of time.” It is represented with the sun and moon with a long line with an arrowhead at the end. Interestingly, life is a local decrease of entropy (e.g. the order within a living cell) that increases entropy globally since it consumes energy and releases heat and waste. The supposed end of the universe is the “heat death” where maximum entropy is attained and energy is uniformly distributed. Theoretically, this would happen ten to the power of one hundred years from now.

The mathematical symbolism includes a small θ (theta) on my right hand representing the parameters that a machine learning model learns. I debated also getting an ε (epsilon) on my hand as well which stands for the irreducible noise and error in any system, but I decided against it to keep it minimal. I think of this symbol as a “shibboleth.” This Hebrew term is for a part of a plant and has a difficult pronunciation, therefore acting to distinguish a given person based on their pronunciation. Similar concepts might be Americans pronouncing Spanish or French R’s or a German umlaut: non-native speakers will never really get these things right. So this small component was meant in part as a reminder to demarcate signal from noise but also as a distinguishing element for those who are curious about the human experience.

I also have a few other elements like P(A|B) which, pronounced the “probability of A given B,” is the beginning of Bayes Theorem that, in probability theory, pertains to how you update a belief given new information. There’s also a σ (sigma) representing the spread of a dataset around its mean. Finally, there’s a 1 - ϵ which speaks to the explore versus exploit tradeoff. This concept is throughout machine learning and in the way we run our lives as the tradeoff between how much we do novel things to gain more information (like try a new restaurant) versus act on information we already know (like going back to a restaurant we know we like). This tradeoff is essential to decision-making and one of the main algorithms we live by daily to find our optima.

Neuroscience

“The foundational equations of physics, the periodic table of chemical elements, the endless ATGC chatter of your genes–none of these express anything about consciousness. Yet you awaken each morning to a world in which you see, hear, feel, and think. Experience is the only way you know about the world.” - Christof Koch

The final theme is neuroscience, or the world perceived subjectively. This is a nod to my interest in meditation, consciousness, and the brain. The brain is the most complex thing in the known universe with ~86 billion neurons and ~100 trillion synapses (or connections to other neurons), which is several hundred times more than the stars in our galaxy. This means that a given neuron forms from one thousand to one hundred thousand connections with other neurons. Imagine being in the largest stadium you’ve ever been to, standing in the center of it, and having lines extending from you to each seat in that stadium. That’s how connected a single neuron can be. And a neuron is not a neuron: there are upwards of a thousand or more cell types in the brain including many many different types of neurons. Wowzers.

This theme is represented by a sun surrounded by the rotation of planets. Inside of the sun is a human eye. I’ve been joking that the eye is so realistic that you can see it blink. The sun here is analogous to conscious awareness illuminating its surroundings. The sun is a symbol of excess, of the free sharing of energy without receiving energy from its surroundings that is the condition under which all known life exists. The profound and very strange philosophy of Georges Bataille characterizes this as the sun’s “squandering without reciprocation.”

Nearing completion with the eye of awareness, centerpiece, and sacred geometry sequence

Also in this theme is the inverse of the normal diagram of light entering the eye, symbolizing the effect of the act of perceiving on reality. This can be thought of as the observer effect in quantum mechanics where the observer changes reality or, at a more basic level, the way that our prior concepts influence the way the world appears. Finally, there’s a small neuron. This was a creative interpretation because, well, a hundred thousand connections felt a tad excessive. Visually, there’s overlap with this design and that of a computer chip.

The symbolism for the neuroscience theme is the different ions necessary for brain function peppered throughout the composition like calcium (Ca²⁺) and potassium (K⁺). This makes the connection between the symbolism of the elements with earth, wind, fire, and water back to the literal elements. There’s also an Eye of Horus. This ancient Egyptian symbol was for protection, restoration, and the cyclical nature of life. Most interesting for me, however, is that some speculate that it’s actually a map to the pineal gland in the brain, which is responsible for regulating sleep, circadian rhythms, and influencing certain hormones. Regardless of the factual accuracy of this claim, it’s another overlay of the dualism between the literal and the symbolic, brain and mind.

One final symbol is the ouroborus, or the snake eating its own tail. Dating back to ancient Egypt, the first known depiction was on King Tut’s tomb in the 14th century BCE. This symbol is pervasive across many cultures but one of the most aligned interpretations comes from Carl Jung who interprets the ouroborus as an archetype representing the human psyche’s process of individuation, or integrating conscious and unconscious elements to achieve self-realization. It can also be seen as a symbol of infinity and wholeness. It’s depicted on my arm as two interconnected snakes–one lighter and one darker–as a reference to duality.

Wrapping Up

So there it is, a synthesis of my favorite things. Except tacos. Those will have to come in a future addition. This was one of the most rewarding collaborations I’ve ever done. I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks to Rodrigo for his incredible work. I had wanted to do something like this for many years now and it wasn’t until meeting Rodrigo that I felt confident that we could put together something so unique and aligned to the initial vision. This process was deeply satisfying in integrating many of my disparate interests. Our general process was to continue to add geeky references and grandiose symbolism until we ran out of space on my arm. In a very real way creating this composition was analogous to how I live my life: filled with curiosity and creativity until you run out of time and space.

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My circadian rhythms are bobbing up and down in the waters somewhere in the Pacific Ocean around the International Date Line. Deep in the throes of recalibrating my sleep cycle from my recent trip to Japan, I wanted to share some delirious musings.

First off, why Japan? A curiosity in the country first started when I was an undergrad with a quip from Roland Barthes in his Empire of Signs. Ok, you caught me. I didn’t actually read the book. I did better than that: a professor read it and explained it to me. Productivity hack or laziness? Regardless, the quip stuck with me. In the early 80’s, Barthes claimed that Japan was so interesting because it’s a highly developed nation that was remarkably independent from Western influence. It was as though society was forked and Japan was on it’s own adventure while the West put a McDonald’s on every street corner. This might not be totally accurate especially considering the effects of WWII on Japanese society, but this idea, along with a lifelong fascination with Zen Buddhism, spurred an early interest in the country.

So here are some musings from my trip in no particular order and with no claims to the factual accuracy of all of the broad strokes I make here. As this was only two weeks and my first time in the country, clearly my expertise here knows no bounds.

Shinto and Buddhism

The two main religions in Japan are Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto is the native, indigenous religion. Buddhism, by contrast, was introduced to Japan in the 6th century from China, India, and Korea. What’s the difference between the two? One of our guides had a great distinction: Shinto is how you deal with this life and Buddhism is about the next life.

Shinto shrines can be found throughout the country and deal with day-to-day rituals including how to have business success, become more beautiful (it didn’t work for me), and how to support your favorite sports team (yes, there’s a shrine to this complete with Lakers jerseys outside our guide’s apartment). There’s no central Shinto doctrine but rather a series of rituals focused on the spirits that inhabit all things. This is one of the best examples of animism, or this belief in spirits. And while Japan has a prime minister, it also has a hereditary emperor who has a pope-like function as the head of the religion.

Buddhism deals more with the bigger picture, especially regarding death. While there are many sects of Japanese Buddhism, I always found myself most attracted to Zen for its focus on meditation, direct experience over teachings, minimal aesthetics, and its riddles known as “koans” like “what did your face look like before your mother was born?” There are a number of fascinating Buddhist practices here such as mummification where a monk targets a specific diet that will allow them to die while meditating, preserving their body indefinitely. These make for pilgrimage destinations among practitioners. Another favorite is the 1,000 day challenge where monks run from 30 km up to 84 km daily in 100 consecutive day bouts split up over 7 years, all on the path to enlightenment.

The Economy—and who cares?

The Japanese economy has been stagnant for decades beginning in the 1990’s. In the past ten years, there’s been an average growth of .6% or about a third of that seen in most other developed economies. There are a number of reasons for this including an aging population, inflation, and a weak currency. But the most striking part of the Japanese economy is how big its middle class is. Some numbers claim 90-95% of the country is middle class while others say this has declined in recent years. Compare this to the US and China at 50% and to South Korea at 60%.

It makes one wonder how much the high standard of living affects the business culture. Japanese companies known the world over for high end manufacturing and technology are generally more focused on stability than growth. So why care about growing your economy when most of your citizens have such a good quality of life? This is very different from the growth-at-all-costs model of venture capital-backed American startups.

One additional note here is how pervasive fashion is in Tokyo in particular. The streets are lined with familiar brands. Well, familiar to most people. Less familiar to me whose greatest excitement in fashion is finding a functional piece of clothing that I can purchase a two week supply of. Hey, Obama and Steve Jobs did it to lower the cognitive load of getting dressed, alright? Anyways, given the cost of purchasing homes and vehicles in the country, this bolsters the interest in fashion where much of the population funnels disposable income towards fancy clothes like Balenciaga combat boots instead.

Kyoto

Kyoto first came on my radar from etherial music masterpieces named after the city from artists like Air and Makoto San. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Skrillex banger by the name Kyoto too which seems as out of place in Kyoto as a clan of meerkats in a Manhattan executive board room.

This city really got me thinking about the difference between traditional and authoritarian cultures. Singapore, for instance, is quite authoritarian with its ubiquitous security cameras, pervasive use of caning as punishment, and fines for everything from not flushing the toilet or playing music in public ($750) to importing chewing gum or connecting to somebody else’s wifi ($7,500 fine or up to 2-3 years in prison). Authoritarian cultures are top down. Kyoto and the rest of Japan are very traditional (or bottom up). A lot of this culture has its roots in the old Samurai class with its strong ethical code of Bushido (or the honorable way of the warrior). This was similar to the Indian caste system where the Samuai were the highest class followed by peasants, artisans, and then, interestingly enough, merchants. You can feel the tradition throughout your interactions with the bowing, cleanliness, offerings at temples, and many levels of politeness in the language. Forget to take your shoes off or don’t use a basket when shopping leads to an instant reminder.

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years and is now considered to be the cultural capital. Nara (outside of the southern city of Osaka) was the former capital but this was moved in part due to the perception that the Buddhists were meddling in politics (a silly image, no doubt). So the Buddhist temples were banned from central Kyoto, relegating the 1,600 temples—yes, I said 1,600—to the hills around the city.

The Yakuza

I know what you’re thinking: “yeah yeah yeah, will this guy shut up and talk about one of the world’s most notorious mafias already?” Here goes nothing. At it’s height, the Yakuza had close to 200k members. It’s now down to an estimated 25k. In recent years, it’s said that they’ve gotten into more legitimate businesses (especially in entertainment). Japanese Onsens (their public baths) ban tattoos in large part for their association to the mafia, though also because tattoos are seen as unclean. There are gossip columns written about the Yakuza and they put mafia propaganda in adult magazines to attract new members. They also serve a protective function when they run out foreign mafias if they try to establish themselves in Japan. They have offices with well-known locations.

Population Decline

The “total fertility rate” is the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime. To sustain a population, you need a rate of 2.1. The global fertility rate is currently 2.3 meaning the global human population is expanding, however this is incredibly unbalanced with the highest rates in Africa and much lower rates throughout the rest of the world. Japan is notorious for having a low replacement rate at 1.4. However, I didn’t realize that South Korea is actually much worse at a .7. This means that each generation South Korea’s population will decrease by two thirds (unless they cook the books by increasing immigration). Japan’s population will decrease by a third each generation. Why is South Korea so much worse? Well, it’s complicated. But it seems to be partially related to the social pressures that have resulted in many South Korean teens fleeing to other countries like Japan at the earliest opportunity. One interesting barometer of social pressure is plastic surgery rates where an estimated one-fifth to one-third of women in South Korea's capital have undergone the procedure.

Hiroshima

One highlight was a day trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which had the somber ambiance akin to a holocaust memorial. The bombing of Hiroshima killed approximately 140k people in total including the aftermath. Walking into the museum is two floor-to-ceiling photographs of the city: one taken before the bombing and one taken afterwards. The initial exhibit is focused on artifacts like the clock stopped at the moment of the blast, the stairs with a human silhouette forever imprinted on them, and the clothing of children victims coupled with their stories.

One surprising element of this history was the timeline. The Postdam Conference is where the plans for post-war Europe were discussed with President Truman, Churchill, and Stalin. The first successful test of an atomic bomb was July 16th, 1945. The start of the conference was the following day, so Truman was at the conference when he learned of the first successful test. Truman then quickly ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, which took place just weeks later on August 6th followed by Nagasaki 3 days after that.

Clearly this history is controversial for a number of reasons, one notable reason being that the Americans were concerned that Japan would get too close to the Soviets and would retain a hereditary monarchy after its likely surrender. Part of the controversy surrounding the bombing was whether expediting the already likely Japanese surrender in a way that would better ensure separation from the Soviets and democracy was really worth it. Unlike the strong propagandist messages throughout the war sites in Vietnam I visited back in November, this museum was balanced at representing the real suffering caused by war with the complexities of that political moment all in the service of a message of peace.

There’s now a flame at the site of where the bomb dropped that will burn until atomic weapons are all disassembled.

First vs Second Order Fun

This is a helpful frame for traveling. As a friend once said: “Hugs are great. You either get a good hug and it’s legitimately a good hug so you have a good hug. Otherwise, it’s awkward, and I relish the awkward. So it’s still good because you laugh about it being awkward.” This is the difference between first and second order fun. First order fun is what you legitimately enjoy. Second order fun is what you enjoy in retrospect. It’s the “I’m glad I did it” after seeing something weird swimming in your miso soup or scratching your head after trying a fermented something-or-other that just doesn’t translate.

Sumo Wrestling

Sumo is the national sport dating back to 300 BCE. It was originally performed in Shinto shrines to entertain the deities, settle disputes, and ensure a bountiful harvest. It still maintains those religious roots. These clashed with contemporary society recently when women doctors entered the ring when the referee was having a heart attack. The ring is considered the sacred space where the gods dwell. Only the referee and wrestlers are allowed in, and there’s a ring blessing and purification process before it’s used. The women were repeatedly asked to leave while they were attending to the medical needs of the referee. Later the commission apologized for being overly rigid, demonstrating a slight modernization of the tradition.

Food

It’s always interesting to ponder the societal effects of nutrition. In China, the food was excellent but also felt like empty carbs, likely due to the lower soil quality and heavier use of chemicals. Japanese food seemed a lot healthier overall with a simplicity to ingredients relative to their neighbor to the West. Here are the most notable meals:

• Kobe beef: Waygu means “Japanese cow” and Kobe is a specific strain of Japanese cattle. This spot in Tokyo was one of the best steaks of my life. First order fun.

• Tako-yaki: Fried balls of batter with octopus and sauces. My favorite street food. First order fun.

• Okonomiyaki: A savory pancake covered with cabbage, noodles, and other goodies. Mostly second order fun…because carbs.

• Ramen: A soup-er tasty dish. Get it? I know, I’m about ready for this blog to be done too. Anyways, I prefer udon over ramen with soba (buckwheat) noodles coming in third. Totally first order fun.

• Sushi: Duh. We ate sushi at a Michelin star restaurant, multiple conveyor belt sushi restaurants, and many convenient stores. Largely first order fun, but a little second order fun too when our food was still moving.

• Tempura: Fried seafood and vegetables. Good but I was trying to take I break from fried foods. More second order fun than first order fun.

• Yakitori: Different skewers of meat and veggies. The delight of a keto diet. First order fun, especially for Waygu beef skewers.

• Katsu-don: Rice topped with breaded meat. A convenient store go-to for a quick bite. Very good. First order fun for sure.

• Matcha: Powdered green tea. Pretty bitter, but great in pastries or iced with a bit of sugar. First order fun.

• Curry: Influenced by India, there’s actually quite a bit of curry in Japan though it’s not as spicy as its Indian counterpart. First order fun, especially with fried chicken or an omelette.

• Tofu: Totally second order fun. We had traditionally made tofu in a beautiful restaurant situated in a Kyoto Zen garden. Yuck. I’ve eaten paper that’s more flavorful. Given the more extensive use of spices in China, their tofu wins the first order fun prize in my book.

Wrapping Up

Whether Roland Barthes’ observation still applies to Japan is an open question, but at the very least I can see where he’s coming from. It’s up there in the “very very different from America” category for me with some other spots I’ve traveled to, most notably Moldova, China, India, and Morocco. I was really struck by how much Japan exports their culture. It seems wholly self-contained in a way that many other countries that are more prone to import their culture do not. Japan has major contributions to food, music, technology, business, religion, entertainment, and the list goes on… Sure, there’s plenty of foreign influence, but this island of 125 million seems like if the rest of the world disappeared they might not even notice.

In a future trip, I’d love to go back to do the Shikoku Pilgrimage which is like the Camino de Santiago or pilgrimage to Mecca but for Buddhism. At 40-50 days of walking, this pilgrimage visits 88 temples. I’d also love to do a full geisha show. These are the high end, meticulously and classically trained entertainers (not sexual as some assume). While we saw one theater geisha show in Kyoto to honor the spring, it’d be great to see their mastery of traditional dance, music, and conversation in person.

In brief, Japan was one of my favorite places to travel. First order and second order fun abound. And a massive shout-out to Dan and Erica to amassing such a great crew to crash their honeymoon.

I got married. Obviously this was the best wedding I’ve ever been to, and likely the best experience of my life. Speaking with others, they reflected similar sentiments with comments like “the best wedding,” “my heart feels so full,” and “restored my faith in humanity.” So what makes a wedding and a relationship so good? And how can we disseminate these ideas so that they become more commonplace?

A Relationship Agreement

When my now wife and I started dating, we enacted periodic check-ins. The core idea was that for a relationship to be healthy, both parties individually and the shared dynamic need to be healthy. We called this the “three beings” as a way of assessing the health of me, her, and the relationship. The goal of this was differentiation and integration: to ensure that each person remains sufficiently independent and connected. Too independent and you’re just roommates. Too connected and you’re codependent. 

The relationship agreement also came from a pretty epic one-liner from my best man (paraphrasing slightly): “the probability of you writing a contract and it being identical with the state’s marriage license is exactly zero.” So I believe that the optimal route is to differentiate the legal marriage from a non-binding relationship agreement stipulating what the relationship means to you. And no, we’re not getting legally married at this time though that will likely change in the future.

This is what we came up with. Some of these points generalize well and others don’t. But it provides a foundation for what the relationship is, answering basic questions like what we want, how we like to be interacted with, and what changes can cause an existential threat to what we signed up for (changing an opinion about having kids, for instance). One friend cried while reading it saying this should be open sourced. Hence, this blog post.

A point that we didn’t include but we might add in the next iteration is a “default dead” clause. This would say that the relationship agreement is terminated after 12 months if it’s not renewed to encourage periodic reflection on whether this is truly the best thing for everybody.

Wedding Principles

Sometimes it’s more productive to narrow the possibility space by starting with what you don’t want. We didn’t want any inauthentic cultural imposition on what a wedding or love is, anybody feeling obligated to be there, and any obsession with pictures. My running bit was “no wedding planners brainwashed by rom coms need apply.” Ok, maybe that’s a bit too harsh but we wanted to protect the vision to allow for something more authentic for us.

The first principle is to set the priorities. For us they were people, nature, and music, in that order. Get the right people in the room and amazing things happen. Think you can make something cool? Well, literal billions of years of evolution have made nature pretty damned incredible, so nature became priority two. And for music? Well, good music is just, well, good. Here was our ceremony hit list.

A second principle became experiences not pictures. Pictures by definition are about representing a moment for a later date, so they go against being present for the experience. We had a photographer and videographer, and we got some great shots in the process, but that wasn’t the priority. It was about creating unique experiences with our closest loved ones. Too many people make too many design decisions around pictures, sacrificing a non-trivial part of the moment in front of them.

Further to the end of prioritizing experiences is to create a full spectrum experience. We did a 5-day event. We wanted the playful, the serious, and the adventurous all rolled up into one. See below for what this looked like in practice. Each facet of our identities had a place over the course of the week.

Finally, create a closed container of active participants. This is critical to any group dynamic. We didn’t have anybody outside our community involved in anything. Caterer, photographer, videographer, chair placer, DJ, make-up artist, etc were all us. We asked our community to help with all these things not because we’re cheap but because we wanted it to just be us co-creating an event. No spectators, all participants. Thankfully our crew is incredible, and they put in a massive amount of work.

The Event

Day 1 was arrivals and a casual dinner. We rented a beautiful house for the length of the event with gorgeous views over Lake Tahoe. On the first day, we grilled up some great food at this venue and just got to know each other a bit better.

Day 2 was a hike to my favorite place on Earth. This was the Lake Aloha Trail in Lake Tahoe, literally the trail that convinced me to move to California almost a decade ago. Then we did a totally goofy showing of Point Break where we had props to act out scenes, spoke the classic one-liners in unison, and had a recorded personalized video introduction by actor Gary Busey. 

Day 3 was a doozy. We started with a cacao ceremony. What’s that? Well, cacao is the base of chocolate that some say has medicinal qualities. You can turn it into a tasty warm drink to have a non-alcoholic excuse to spend time with your friends. We wanted to make sure that everybody had a place to participate so we went through a meditation and an exercise for everybody to share their intentions for the relationship. A real tear-jerker.

Day 3 sunset was the ceremony. We did this in three parts. Part 1 was the relationship history where we shared some of the highlights of the relationship with a focus on depth over breadth and the lived experience over the biographical history. Part 2 was the relationship philosophy. We started with a reading from Anthony de Mello (see appendix) before our wonderful officiant (her dad) read the first few points of the relationship agreement. Part 3 was vows. I have orders of magnitude more public speaking experience than my wife and of course she totally out-shined me. Later she shrugged it off casually saying “I just spoke from the heart.” Then was dinner and speeches followed by DJ’s playing late into the night in a room filled with colored lights, LED’s, art, and tasty healthy desserts.

Day 4 was a bit of a recovery day with a late brunch followed by a choose-your-own-adventure. There’s a lot to do in Tahoe but the most popular was off-roading. We rented side-by-sides and went up to Genoa Peak, not far from the venue. We took turns careening up and down steep rocky fire roads as I blasted the most indulgent metal and electronic music. We couldn’t stop laughing about this for…well, I’m still cracking up about how ridiculous this was.

Day 5 was the total solar eclipse. We were up by 4 AM to high tail it from Tahoe to the Black Rock Desert, where burning man takes place. We sat in natural hot springs as we watched the moon eclipse the sun. An epic ending to an incredible week.

Next was the “oh, god, it’s over–hoard all the memories and hope you don’t forget anything” phase. Inevitable. We’ve just been writing down everything we can to improve our retention of the memories.

Conclusion

One important piece that I didn’t put together until now is that most weddings follow the “arrival, ceremony, reception” structure. That means everybody lands in different mindsets and has to context switch into a wedding ceremony. This makes it harder to have group cohesion. The game-changer for us was the cacao ceremony: it allowed us to meditate together, participate in a nice group exercise, and otherwise hivemind before going into the ceremony. If I could add anything to a normal wedding structure, it’d be this. It also gave us a shared asset created by the whole group of written intentions we can keep forever.

The relationship agreement was also key. For us, it was the basis of creating an intentional relationship. Here’s the link so you don’t have to scroll up. And yes, chatGPT did the first draft with some heavy editing afterwards.

A massive shout-out to all the active participants who showed up so incredibly well last week. Open sourced protocols that help people live more fulfilling lives is a passion of mine. My hope is that this blog in some way helps you unlock another level of intentionality in your relationships.

Appendix: Reading from Anthony de Mello’s The Way to Love

I love this passage because it connects the idea of love to that of freedom and Buddhist attachment. Here’s the reading:

Maybe now you are ready to say, “I’d rather have my freedom than your love.” If you could either have company in prison or walk the earth in freedom all alone, which would you choose? Now say to this person, “I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, to indulge your taste, follow your inclinations, behave in any way that you decide is to your liking.” The moment you say that you will observe one of two things: Either your heart will resist those words and you will be exposed for the clinger and exploiter that you are; so now is the time to examine your false belief that without this person you cannot live or cannot be happy. Or your heart will pronounce the words sincerely and in that very instant all control, manipulation, exploitation, possessiveness, jealousy will drop. “I leave you free to be yourself: to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking.”

And you will notice something else: The person automatically ceases to be especial and important to you. And he/she becomes important the way a sunset or a symphony is lovely in itself, the way a tree is especial in itself and not for the fruit or the shade that it can offer. Your beloved will then belong not to you but to everyone or to no one like the sunrise and the tree. Test it by saying those words again: “I leave you free to be yourself…” In saying those words you have set yourself free. You are now ready to love. For when you cling, what you offer the other is not love but a chain by which both you and your beloved are bound. Love can only exist in freedom. The true lover seeks the good of his beloved which requires especially the liberation of the beloved from the lover.

Hey folks,

It's been a hot minute. As promised, I'm doing a new issue of the newsletter every so whenever. So true to my rigorous timetable, I present to you one of my favorite sets of experiments. Let's rewind a few decades to when researchers created a utopia for rats...and then, in true human fashion, completely over-interpreted its implications on the supposed doom of human civilization.

In a small town in Maryland in 1947, a scientist named John built a giant rat enclosure in a barn. This place was basically a Disney World for rats. It was huge—estimated to hold 5,000 rats—with plenty of food, water, and toys. Everything short of princesses and cotton candy.

But the population leveled off at a mere 150.  Infant mortality climbed up to 96% as mothers neglected their children and aggression spiked. Mating became unimportant. Submissive rats became despondent. So with all that material abundance combined with growing (and ultimately shrinking) populations, the reason for the decline in numbers had to be psychological.

Why make rat utopias? Research often involves "animal models" where animals are chosen (or genetically engineered) for traits that represent phenomena seen in humans. Need an autistic fruit fly? There's a SKU in a scientific version of Amazon.com for that. Need to photograph a brain in action? Grab a zebrafish whose transparent skin allows you to photograph their brain as they swim.

And need a depression resilient mouse? Easy. Just take hundreds of mice, try to drown them in a pool, and those who take the longest before they give up trying to swim are more depression-resilient. (Not all animal models are this cruel, obviously, but that one is tough to swallow.)

So a rat utopia, believe it or not, can be used as a model of motivation. In a more pessimistic light, it can also be a model of societal collapse. It helps us answer the question of how we deal with material abundance combined with growing population numbers.

After a few scientific publications came the news headlines that society was going to collapse because these rats stopped mating. Without the pressures of resource scarcity or without personal space, how could these animals possibly act as stand-up citizens of their rat utopia? And what might this mean for the future of humans? (Spoiler alert: there was a lot of doom and gloom.)

There were follow-on studies on humans, too. One found that being in a crowded high school but with plenty of food in the cafeteria had no influence on behavior, stress, aggression, etc. So maybe rats aren't perfect models of human behavior...

Though incomplete as an analogy, the rat utopia does bring up many fascinating questions. For instance, what happens as we transition from post-war scarcity to material abundance? Or think about automating jobs (I'm looking at you, truck drivers). If we automate so many jobs that universal basic income becomes a necessity, how does this affect human motivation? Or happiness? Or our sense of identity?

All interesting questions. But as with any big question, our answers often reveal more about our hidden biases than rational reasoning. In other words, are we fundamentally fearful about unfettered group human behavior? Or are we optimistic about a future where we can all go play while the machines do the work?

This reminds me of the John Adams quote: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy [...] in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, and music."

So it's about motivation as we adapt to fewer external pressures. And it's about how we might transition from a scarcity to abundance mindset. And our biases about the future and our ability to change with grace.

There's a lot to be written on the rat utopia. But if we stop waxing poetic about the future of civilization for a moment, there's one question in particular that's both deeply personal and essential to how we understand our own motivation.

What do we do when we don't really have to do anything?

Until next time,

Conor

P.S. If this was at all interesting to ya, feel free to share!

I recently decided to make an investment into a cannabis-focused public benefit corporation (think part company, part nonprofit). So I figured it was a good chance to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of cannabis. Yes, cannabis. Whose research used to be dismissed as “hippy science” but whose benefits and drawbacks are now a lot better understood. So here we’ll exchange our flower leis and bongos for lab coats and clipboards to dive into that strange world of the hippy science of cannabis.

First off: cannabis 101. The plant has been used medicinally and recreationally for at least 5,000 years. Cannabis targets the body’s so-called “endocannabinoid system” which is responsible for many things. Like, a crazy number of things. Many of its functions are autoregulatory where it helps the brain and body maintain homeostasis. Medically, cannabis has been FDA approved for the treatment of epilepsy and it also has well-studied effects including for anti-inflamatory, anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic, and pain reduction applications, to name a few. Evolutionarily, you can trace the endocannabinoid system back as far as sea-squirts. Yes, these guys whose earliest shared common ancestor with humans is around 550 million years ago:

All that to say, the endocannabinoid system is really important. And there are two main components to the cannabis plant that affect this system: THC and CBD.

THC is basically the only psychoactive compound in the plant. That’s fancy talk for it being responsible for finding cartoons funny, sudden cravings for ice cream, and giving peace a chance, man. Its effects are “biphasic,” meaning that at low doses THC can have positive effects like euphoria and relaxation while at high levels it can cause anxiety and paranoia. One fun fact: while THC is often used to combat anxiety, chronic use actually results in consistently higher stress hormones and a lower capacity for emotional self-regulation. Ok, so that’s the good, bad, and ugly of THC.

CBD is arguably a much more interesting compound. Well, family of compounds actually. Though technically THC is a family of compounds too. It’s complex. There are over 500 known compounds in the cannabis plant. We’re really just scratching the surface here. But I digress…

While THC takes the body out of homeostasis, CBD often returns the body to homeostasis. For instance, CBD has been shown to enhance “fear extinction,” or the extinction of conditioned fear responses. That means there’s pre-clinical evidence for endocannabinoid-related clinical PTSD applications (trauma is about as far as you can get from homeostatic balance). And as for safety? CBD generally has a pretty solid safety profile. Hell, the FDA approved one compound for epileptic children starting at 1 year old.

But there’s more. A lot more. CBD use has exploded in recent years due to three main applications: stress, pain, and sleep. Personally, I believe that CBD is the best, non-habit forming substance you can take to combat the epidemic of stress. Other solutions (think Valium) are effective but also highly addictive. As the baby boomers age, non-opioid pain management becomes increasingly important (my grandma at 96 years young is a daily user). And finally, CBD use for sleep has grown immensely with research evidence supporting its efficacy as an alternative to other supplements like melatonin, which has fallen out of favor recently as it helps you fall asleep but not stay asleep.

All of this informed my decision to take a private equity stake in a public benefit corporation that has a consumer CBD line as well as an impressive patent portfolio and many cool strategic plays up their sleeves. This company, Ojai Energetics, has many advantages that separate it from alternatives including water solubility that increases the body’s absorption since most CBD users take way too little (I’m looking at you Venice, CA cafés with your weak CBD lattes). Also, they publish all their lab reports so you can verify exactly what’s in the bottle. This is incredibly important as the FDA doesn’t regulate supplements and all those CBD pop-up shops in strip malls don’t really inspire trust, if you know what I mean.

So that’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of cannabis. It checks the box for clinical applications as well as broader consumer efficacy for that trifecta of stress, pain, and sleep. And a lot more to come than just that.

Stay tuned… Conor

I was looking at all the holiday cards I received from family and friends this year thinking “man, I love staying in touch with people but don’t have a cute kid. Hell, I don’t even have an ugly one.” One might not normally think of fun discoveries in neuroscience and artificial intelligence as “cute,” but they’re what fire me up most so I figured it’s as good an excuse as any to keep in touch.

To that end, the geeky shit I’ve been loving since my last newsletter…

• Exploring neural networks. Since I don’t have a kid but like hiking and math, here’s my version of a family Christmas card. These images walk through the inner mechanics of a neural network, visualizing what different components of the network are doing in a complex algorithm. Deep neural networks combine layers of artificial “neurons” that apply transformations to data. It starts with our input data. In our case, it’s a bunch of numerical values representing pixels in an image. The network takes that input and passes it through a series of layers where the output from the previous layer is the input to the next layer (roughly). Each layer transforms its inputs using what it has learned about the dataset so far. After going through many of these layers, it becomes possible to identify complex objects. You can see how earlier layers are identifying basic strokes and shading while later layers are showing, well, a lot of animal faces. That’s because this network was originally trained on a bunch of animal images. Here’s a bit more detail if you’re interested.

• Flipping stress upside down. Is stress bad? Well, it depends. Normally we think of stress as bad, and this has been the prevailing logic for decades. One study changed this. It took about 30k participants and observed them over 8 years in order to see how their stress and their perception of stress affected their risk of premature death. The findings? Having high stress and a perception that stress is unhealthy combined was associated with a 43% increase in premature death. However, those with high stress and the belief that stress was healthy had lower mortality rates than those with low stress! This points to the idea that mindset really matters. The researchers go so far as to claim that the mindset that stress in unhealthy is associated with 20k US deaths a year, the 15th highest cause of death above both AIDs and homicide.

• State of AI. The artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI released a new pretrained model known as GPT-3. Pretrained models allow you to reuse the findings of one AI model on new use cases. This one absolutely dwarfs the complexity of previous models. It’s a natural language model used to generate human-like text. It cost an estimated $10M for the compute resources to train it alone. Here’s a comparison of the complexity of this new model when compared to other state-of-the-art models as quantified by the number of “parameters,” which is basically the individual units of information the model is learning. For the full geeky rundown, see this State of AI Report. This means anybody can use reuse this best-in-class natural language producing algorithm without racking up a $10M bill. It’s truly mind-boggling how open sourcing this type of solution advances industries.

• High impact career. You have 80k hours in your career. How do you use them to have the most impact? That’s the idea behind the startup 80k Hours. It’s career guidance that optimizes for impact. Should you create a startup that addresses the world’s toughest problems? Or make a bunch of money at a corporation and donate it? I’ve used this site many times in my career to work through these ideas.

• Being an information juggernaut. The firehose of information we receive each day is somewhere around 174 newspapers worth a day. Oh, and that study was from a decade ago. Compare that with just 2.5 pages worth back in 1986. So how do you navigate so much information? My favorite strategy has a few tenants:

• Prioritize books because they have the greatest density of information (think of how long a blogger takes to write an article when compared with a book)

• Your attention is one of the most important things in the world since all your experience is really just the summation of things you paid attention to. Make sure the author earns that attention. Be an unapologetic skimmer

• Take note of every book that’s recommended to you and at least read the summary. If the summary entices you, read the table of contents. And if that earns more of your time, read a few pages of the introduction

• Still not sure if it’s worth the read? Try a service like Blinkist that gives you a TED-talk length, 15 minute summary of the book. Then decide whether it’s worth the time

And that’s a wrap! Hope this didn’t suck. Be sure to let me know what you think about the topics and format.

Conor

This is an exploration into the inner mechanics of neural networks. Each image in this series emphasizes a different layer in the network, showing how different components come together in a complex algorithm.

But first, a primer…

Deep neural networks combine layers of artificial “neurons” that apply transformations to data. It starts with our input data. In our case, it’s a bunch of numerical values representing pixels in an image. The network takes that input and passes it through a series of layers where the output from the previous layer is the input to the next layer (roughly). Each layer transforms its inputs using what it has learned about the dataset so far. After going through many of these layers, it becomes possible to identify complex objects.

This process works similarly to human vision where there are a number of progressive layers of neurons. Each layer enhances the signal it receives by interpreting increasingly complex objects. In both artificial and biological neural networks, earlier layers will identify basic patterns like edges of objects and shading while later layers identify more complex patterns like an eye or leaves.

These images were generated by emphasizing the influence of particular layers. They are in progressive order moving from earlier to later layers. The original image is at the end.

You can see how enhancing the first couple layers results in strokes and other basic patterns. This is because they have learned basic edges and their orientation.

With higher level layers, we see more complex (and sometimes downright strange) effects. Since the model was originally trained on an image dataset with many animals, you’ll see eyes and the faces of dogs.  In one layer, you also see my chest covered with dog fur and a dog face. In the final layers, you see far fewer distortions as those layers have learned more complex objects.

This is a complex process and I glossed over many of the details. But that’s the gist of how human and computer vision operates. In brief: information is processed in a hierarchical manner where low level inputs are gradually abstracted into more complex representations.

See this link to walk through the images in more detail.

Insert the obligatory “this year was a doozy” comment. I set up an email collector some time back and imagine my surprise when I checked the sign-ups this morning to find far more interest in a newsletter than I thought. Given all the change this year, I wanted to double down on keeping in contact with my network with some tips and curiosities from the world of brain science.

I promise to keep it brief, practical, and sufficiently strange to give you a couple of dopamine squirts and a smidgeon of awe for the complexity of the brain. Oh, and no marketing unless it’s something that’s been a true force multiplier in my life. If you’re not down, feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings.

That said, here’s a few musings from 2020:

• Coolest image. Ok, this one is actually from late 2019. But bear with me. When you sleep, three sets of rhythmic waves can be seen in the brain. It’s been known that distinct patterns of electrical activity take place in the brain while sleeping. A recent study revealed that this electrical activity is coupled with changes in blood flow (in red below) and cerebrospinal fluid (in blue). The reason? Unknown, but it likely has to do with memory consolidation and clearing cellular waste. So instead of counting sheep when you can’t sleep, just think about the coordinated waves of fluids lapping the cradle of your consciousness.

• Biggest breakthrough. My high school biology teacher used to say “you’re just a bag of chemical reactions.” I thought it was hyperbole…but it’s not. DNA is the blueprint for constructing proteins, which are the most abundant molecules in living systems. When new proteins are created, they fold into a 3 dimensional shape that determines what the protein does. The protein folding problem is a “grand challenge” of immense implications because it is incredibly hard to predict what shape a protein will take and therefore what it will do. In 2020 a Google team released AlphaFold, which is an artificial intelligence-based solution to solve this problem. Is it solved? Largely, but not fully since there are many edge cases and environmental factors. But this is a huge step forward in understanding the mechanism of DNA.

• On creative minds. Every so often your favorite minds team up on a project that makes you feel like you’re watching a neuroscience version of the A-Team or Avengers…or something (I don’t know, I actually haven’t watched those movies). Anyways, one dominant theory for expertise is the “neural efficiency” hypothesis where high performers undergo more efficient neurological processes when compared to their “non-eminent” peers. One 2020 study looked at this effect in eminent and non-eminent thinkers. It confirmed this hypothesis in the “default mode network,” which is also known as the mind-wandering or imagination network, where eminent thinkers show less activity. This network can be thought of as having two branches: one is rumination (think negative self talk) while the other is creative (think the ah-ha moment in the shower). Maybe that helps explain why creatives are also often dark souls. It’s another layer deeper into the mechanism of creativity.

• Book I’m most excited about. Ok, this one might be marketing-y but I swear it passes my filter as a force multiplier in my life. I read an advanced copy of Steven Kotler’s Art of Impossible and absolutely loved it. It’s a guide for motivation, learning, and creativity that is both theoretically rigorous and deeply practical. It’ll be released later this month but if you pre-order a copy now there is some added content for goal setting, managing distractions, etc. Seriously. Can’t recommend it highly enough. Preorder here.

• Goal setting strategies. I’ve long struggled with the best goal setting strategies. I’ve gone from spreadsheets tracking 100 or so daily habits to vague intentions set one New Years Eve and only recalled the following December 31st. My new favorite strategy is three-fold:

• Reflect. Take a single sheet of paper, divide it into 12 quadrants, and label each with a month from the past year. Use only bullet points of the most memorable parts (highlights and lowlights). Mark the really important ones.

• Name. Each year gets a theme based on how to double down on making the highlights from the past year a more central part of the following year. Name your year something succinct.

• Plan. Take another single sheet of paper. There are two sections. The first defines a mission, a goal, and the waypoints. The mission is a high level intention for your entire life such as “Advance society’s transition to a technological utopia.” The more idealist the better. The goal is a concrete application of that such as “Create a biotechnology company with $100M annual revenue that solves…” The waypoints are high level milestones in that process. The second section is four boxes with goals at different timepoints: lifetime, 10 year, 1 year, and 90 days (shout-out to Max Hug for this format). You only get a maximum of 5 goals in each box. Frame it. Keep it on your desk.

• Best change management song. Maybe change is the theme of every year but it was especially true of 2020. Best beats for embracing change? New Morning has been my go-to for the last 1.5 years.

And that’s a wrap! Hope this was fun and informative. I’ll try to do this more often, though probably a bit shorter. And please please please, let me know what you think.

Wishing you all the best in the new year,

Conor

PS. Feel free to share if you know of somebody else who might get a kick out of it.