I was at this company called Breather for six years after finance. Left in the end of 2019. I worked with Evan Beard, now runs Standard Bots, recently valued at a billion dollars, the most deployed robot down, American robotics company. But I liked this newsletter that I was writing. And I thought maybe I could start writing some longer form essays and at least see what happened for like 3 months until I found a real job. And the market crashed. I got absolutely crushed in this one. My stock had it just kind of like flatlined. What my job is, I get to invest in the companies that I'm most excited about. Ultrasound on a chip, be able to image the brain from outside the skull at higher resolution that's ever been done. They just raised $470 million making microreactors.
What do you think is your mission now?
Taking things that are complex but important and communicating them in a way that people resonate with.
Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me out to the West Side Highway. This is great.
Yeah, such great weather. We're lucky. Okay. So, when you left your job at Breather and then you were figuring out what startup you wanted to build, one thing that stood out to me is that you were making weekly coaching calls with your mom. Can you tell me a bit more about that in that period of your life?
Oh man, dark period. It was amazing. So, I was at this company called Breather for six years after finance. Way too long. Amazing experience, great people, whole thing. Finally, by the end, I got sick of it. Left in the end of 2019 and then was thinking about what to do. I started thinking about kind of like a Soho House for nerds. I was going to call it The Not Boring Club. I'd been doing a debate club as kind of like a test run, and we had done some dinners and were just kind of getting started. I was looking at spaces to sign a lease. Thankfully, I didn't do that. I was talking to some investors to invest. Thankfully, I didn't do that.
And I'm sorry to interrupt. Why were you thinking about a debate club specifically? Why was that the thing that was pulling you?
There was a conversation actually that I had with my mom and her business partner.
She's a consultant, like organizational development type stuff.
And she has a business partner because she has like a side business.
She has her little practice.
Consulting practice. Okay.
Exactly. And so they were up here for meetings and we got a drink. And this was, I think, when I was in either finance or Breather; the answer would have been the same. My mom's partner was like, "What do you do for fun?" Or like, "What do you do outside of work?" And I was like, "Actually, nothing really, you know, like I don't have..."
Like a thing. And in college and high school, I ran cross country, I was in the debate club, and I was social chair of my—I did a lot more stuff. And then I realized that I'd become very one-dimensional. And so I was like, I think a lot of people feel like this. One, thank god COVID happened and saved me from actually doing the business because I think it was a bad idea. I think it was an idea that wasn't a good fit for me because I don't want to be out every night and kind of hosting a place like that.
Takes a special type of person to be able to do.
Totally, and not the type of person who would then be happy writing for, you know, six years alone. So went like a very different route, but also I think everybody has these ideas that are like some version of the Peter Pan extend-my-college-experience type thing. I think that was very much one of those types of ideas.
And why do you think you became one-dimensional during your period of finance and then Breather?
I mean, during finance, it's kind of like you don't even have a choice really.
You just work all the time.
You just work all the time. And I think there's something liberating about it versus working for myself now. When you're in control, you want to work really, really hard, but you don't have somebody to blame for working all the time. Whereas then I kind of just turned off the idea that I could do anything. And if I was free for a weekend or could go to something, it was like a nice surprise. But I think that mind shift was actually great that for a little while here, I'm just going to be working all of the time and that's totally fine.
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And what was your goal with work then? Like if you remember Packy at that period of time, were you working to do what?
It's a great question. And I think I was interested in finance vaguely as a concept and the idea of doing something that made a bunch of money when I was young. And then I went to Duke and most people went into finance from Duke, and so did that. And I think it was just to be good at it and to continue to move up in it. I don't think that I had, you know, "I want to run a private equity fund and so I need to do X, Y, and Z thing." Whereas, and the reason I ended up—one of many reasons I ended up quitting—one is I was fine, I wasn't going to be world-class. Two, I had some friends who still work in finance who were way better at it than I am and loved it. In their free time they would read the Financial Times, or in their free time this is what they studied and what they loved talking about and researching. And that certainly wasn't the case for me. For me, I was interested in startups. There was one startup at Duke when I was there and I was an intern there for a little while, nothing serious. They're actually still around.
It was called Shoeboxed.com.
Shout out Shoeboxed. You could take a picture of your receipt and scan it super early. Ramp does that for free as part of the product now. But back then OCR, optical character recognition, was new and all of a sudden you could take this messy process where you put receipts in your shoebox and digitize them. This was like 2007 or something. And this guy I worked with there, Evan Beard, now runs Standard Bots in New York, which was recently valued at a billion dollars and raised $100 million, the most deployed American robotics company. And so it was cool.
No. An idiot. Should have. Always invest in your friends, I think probably, even if...
Yeah, that's actually a common thread that I've been hearing from everyone who has a regret about not investing in their friends. Not even because a lot of those friends ended up building amazing companies, but because it's just kind of like a good rule. If you can do that to support your friend, who knows, maybe they'll do something amazing next time. And even if it didn't work out this time around.
Totally. And I think also we had been close-ish during school and then we lost touch a little bit while I was in finance and he was doing startup stuff for a while. And so now we reconnected. I probably texted him yesterday and we wrote a piece together. But I didn't know him at the earliest stages. By the time I knew him, the company was already worth a bunch. I think it still has a lot of room to go, so I should probably just bite the bullet and invest here. But all to say, the thing that I really cared about was that in a dumb way—you see kids now who are in college or high school or 12 years old who are interested in startups and they're really interested in...
Actually building a startup.
Actually building really meaningful things. My side thing when I was in finance, in the summertime, I'm from outside Philadelphia originally, and so we'd go to this town Avalon, New Jersey, which is like Irish Catholic people from outside Philadelphia go to Avalon, New Jersey. And it was impossible to get to. There was a train to Atlantic City for like one summer called the ACES train and then that shut down and whatever. And so we had a bunch of friends coming back one weekend, had to take a limousine back because it was like the only way we could all get back. And we were like, "This is way better than whatever we were doing before. What if we did this every weekend?" And so we did that. We told people about it, we told more people about it, they told people about it, and eventually we were able to take a party bus down, or two party buses down with 50 people every weekend there and back. And it was the most fun thing in the world. So I taught myself how to build a website for it.
That's amazing. It was like Uber Black before Uber became...
It wasn't a business. I didn't have insurance. I got very lucky that nothing happened. But it was just like in my free time, the thing that I wanted to do was teach myself how to build a website and how the internet worked and make $10,000, and it was more that than trying to get better at finance. And so ultimately knew that I was going to leave, was going to go to business school, and then stumbled on this company Breather.
And do you remember why you were so interested in being a self-starter when you were young? Was it because of your mom and her having a business?
Yeah, my parents both have their own consulting practices, and so there's definitely that. My brother now has his own company called Create that makes creatine gummies and creatine. Shout out Create. And I was smart enough to invest in that one. And then my sister has a company. She lives in South Africa now, but she founded it in Ghana, a fintech in Africa. And so there's something in the water clearly. I think it's the fact that both my parents were entrepreneurial. We grew up upper middle class, so there's definitely room above, but you have the comfort to take risks without going hungry. And so I think it was like a perfect socioeconomic spot. Went to good schools and all of that, so I feel very fortunate. But I think that combination, that stew, clearly produced something in us.
Okay, so let's jump back to the debate club. So COVID happens and you were like, "This debate club idea, maybe it's going to be a great business. I need to become less one-dimensional, need to bring my hobbies back." And then during that time again, you have your weekly calls with your mom.
Yeah. Well, so I was on garden leave for the non-compete period for about four months where I was still getting paid by Breather. This was like October to February, and I was planning this club. And I wasn't sure. My mom does business coaching as well as part of her practice with some of her clients. It's not her main thing, but if she's working with somebody, she'll also do the one-on-one stuff. And so she was like, "We should just do this just to keep you accountable because you're for the first time not working with anybody. And so if you have things that you want to bounce off of me or things that you're working through, let's chat." Because I had had a coach at Breather paid for, and I really enjoyed that experience.
Did you have any reservations about having coaching by your mom?
No, because it's not super deep; it's on the business side. And what I found with the business coach—and maybe this is the coach and maybe this is my mom—the really valuable thing is that you kind of just talk at them and they ask hard questions until you talk yourself into the right answer.
Yeah. So it's kind of on you to figure it out, but it's a methodology to process your own thinking.
Exactly. And so similar with my mom. She's actually the one who told me once I started the newsletter to go full-time, to change the name to Not Boring, because the club was going to be called Not Boring Club. And she's like, "That's a way better name than the emails Per My Last Email when it was just a side thing." But when it was the main thing, I needed to change the name, and that was her idea. So yeah, that was wonderful.
That's awesome. So I saw that you really started your writing with Rite of Passage, and I remember that time in like 2019, 2020 when David Perell started coming up on what used to be Twitter, now X, and there was a lot of hype about Rite of Passage. I was at the time a really big fan of Ali Abdaal, the productivity and business YouTuber, and he took Rite of Passage and I was like, "Oh, maybe this is something that I should do." But unlike you—and I'd love to learn about it—I was not that into writing. I always tell myself that this is something that I really want to learn at some point, and I felt like Rite of Passage was a huge commitment for someone who really cares about writing. So unfortunately, sadly, I'm kind of bummed about the fact that they closed the cohorts. I didn't take it, but you did. And tell me more about that decision, why you decided to do it. And were you writing before Rite of Passage?
In college I was an econ major and a philosophy minor. And so I had to write a bunch for the philosophy minor. And I always enjoyed writing. Like in high school, I enjoyed writing for class, but I'd never been on the newspaper. I wasn't a writer-writer.
And what about it in writing that you liked?
I like the idea of being able to put together—maybe the same reason I like debate—put together an argument in words. In a conversation I'm fine, but I'm not going to knock anybody's socks off. But if I have time, I can sit there and grind it out and come up with a good argument and really, hopefully try to put something clever and creative down on paper. In middle school, if you got in trouble in Latin class, he would make you write an essay. And most people were like, "Ah, this sucks." And you had to read the essay in front of the class as part of the punishment. And most people hated that, and I was like, "I'm going to take this opportunity to make fun of the whole thing and be funny." And so I did that. I did the same thing in high school. And so I think some of that kind of just carried over and certainly influenced particularly the early Not Boring writing when it was a little more jokey and a little less serious.
Yeah, I think that's what I liked about writing. So I was at Breather. At the same time, this guy Ben Roller and I had spent Christmas break writing this strategy memo about how we had terrible gross margins on our product, negative 25%, and we had these long-term leases. So we spent Christmas break figuring out what can we do to turn this business around, and then we wrote it down and gave it to the exec team and they're like, "Yep, this is a great idea. Go do it." We gave it to the rest of the company who had to actually execute the plan, they got excited about it, and I was like, "That's cool. You can just..."
You can just write your way into decision-making.
Exactly, write your way into decision-making and getting people to rally around it. And so there's something interesting there. And so that was kind of a little signal. And then frankly, the exec team that we had hired kind of the last year at Breather just wasn't super cerebral. And so I saw a tweet from David Perell talking about Rite of Passage. I think I had probably 200 Twitter followers at the time. Saw a tweet from David Perell, who I viewed as this celebrity on Twitter because he would get 100 likes, that kind of thing.
And he's so articulate. He's so good at it. So it was a particular exec team meeting where I said the word "innumerate" in context. We were talking about how people in the company didn't know our numbers well enough or something like that, and I said the word "innumerate" and they looked at me like I had seven heads. And then I saw David Perell's tweet about this writing course and I was like, "I'm just going to do that or else I'm going to lose any kind of last mental anything that I have." And so just took the course and it ended up being great. I think for maybe the same reason as coaching, there were some interesting tricks. There's like find your personal monopoly, which is I'm never going to be the best at writing about business, but if you pick in the early days business and Philadelphia sports and pop culture or something, you find an overlap where you, because you've overlapped it so much, you have to be the best in the world at that very specific thing. I thought that was a really interesting idea. But a lot of it was just every week you had to show up with a new essay written and join a small group, and you couldn't be the one who hadn't done the assignment. And so a lot of it was just getting in the practice.
Were there a lot of people who dropped out of the groups during the cohort or not really?
I don't think so, actually.
Wow, that's very impressive because in most live courses there's high attrition.
Yeah. It was just a very well-done course. Good people, small group, and he kept it super compelling.
And if you were to bring it down to three things outside of accountability and showing up every week, what were the other things that really helped you kick off your writing by taking this course?
Honestly, I think it was really just getting into the routine of doing it. The personal monopoly thing, so figuring out what you want to write about that is interesting to you. A lot of people who get started in content creation generally—could be writing, could be YouTubing—they're like, "What would the market want out of me?" Or, "What is a thing that there's a hole in, or something I saw that was kind of successful?" And I think you just get so tired. I mean, you tell me your experience on this, but if you're pretending to be someone that you're not...
...you can't sustain it. And so I think that's part of it, really finding the thing that you want to write about and you'd be happy spending hours and hours and hours writing about.
Yeah, I definitely fell into the creator burnout, if you will, chapter with my YouTube channel that I was doing a few years ago because at the beginning I really started building a community around getting a job as a software engineer and life in Silicon Valley, soft career advice from the lens of someone who is a software engineer. And those videos started doing really well and I was like, "Okay, well, this is what people want to hear from me." And then actually in my own life and career, I was then transitioning out of engineering to products and chief of staff role and I didn't bring my audience along because I was like, "Well, this is what they want from me." And then I had such a burnout because it felt so one-dimensional and so frustrating, and I didn't catch it early enough to really think about that trifecta or whatever the four things that I really care about that I want to combine. So that's really awesome that the course gave you that.
Despite that, the audience capture thing I think still happens to everybody, and I've really tried to avoid it. I think there's been spots where I've fallen into it more than others. And now I feel totally liberated where still I'll write deep dives on companies because I really enjoy doing it. It's what people expect, but people expect it because I've done it a bunch because I enjoy it. But then also my most popular piece of this year so far was about the meaning of life. So I really try to just follow my curiosity on it, and then I just love it. If I were on an island by myself, I would be happy writing 10 hours a day every day, no problem.
What made you feel so liberated to write whatever you care about and not really fall into the audience capture?
Part of it was just having to write an essay every week. Some weeks I just couldn't come up with something that was particularly on theme, and so I'd write a more think-piecey thing or a more personal thing because they're easier to write, and those ended up doing well. And so I was like, "All right, so there's a little bit of that there." And then I think part of it too was I was on this meteoric rise, for a small business newsletter meteoric rise, in '21, '22, and then the market crashed. I got absolutely crushed in this one Twitter interaction. Just a few things happened where it felt like my stock had just kind of flatlined, not even dipped tremendously, but just stopped growing meteorically. And that was difficult for a little bit. And then there was a real like "nobody gives a shit" kind of moment.
Do you remember that moment? What happened?
Not even a moment, a period of time where it's kind of like, "I don't care. I'm going to do exactly what I want." I feel super lucky to be able to—what my job is, is I get to invest in the companies that I'm most excited about, spend time with these people who I think are some of the most extraordinary people in the world, learn from them, and then kind of write about what I learn or just generally what I'm curious about. And I could spend a whole day in the office reading philosophy if I wanted; that would be a productive day for my job. And so who cares? As long as I can pay the bills doing this, why not just write whatever I want on that side? And then part of it too is I've just gotten more into the investing side and learning that I really love that too. And so that frees me up to not put so much pressure on the writing because there is this whole career on that side that I'm super excited about.
Hey, thank you so much for watching the show. If you're enjoying it, please share it with a friend and subscribe to the show. This is exactly what helps me grow it, and I'm so, so grateful to be able to do this. Let's get back to the episode. So, we're going to come back to talking about writing and a bit about investing as well. But for someone who hasn't read your most popular piece from this year, what is the meaning of life?
This piece was called "Riding the Leopard." It's from this Joseph Campbell reader, and he talks about this idea...
Is it the hero's journey or no?
It's not the hero's journey. It's something somebody who had worked with him had put together with different talks that he had given over time. And the idea behind Riding the Leopard was a few years ago I listened to the Telepathy Tapes. I don't know if you listened to it. It was this podcast that went to number one on the podcast charts and it was about these...
Oh, okay. I've heard about it, but I didn't listen to it. I think I started the first episode. Lots of my friends were obsessed with it.
It was so cool. There's debunkers out there and could the experiments have been run better? For sure. But the thing that got me about it was you would hear from some of these non-verbal autistic kids who seem to have telepathic abilities, which is the thing that some debunkers will say, "No, they didn't because their parents would influence how their hand moved or whatever." But they had, pretty clearly to me, some sort of telepathic abilities or at least an unbelievably sensitive appreciation for their parents' touch or directing them to have these unbelievably complex thoughts. And so there was a telepathy piece, but there was also some of them would know languages that they could not have known. Nobody in their family knew those languages or spoke them, and they just knew these languages. It's almost like—do you know the book Many Lives, Many Masters about past lives?
I just read Many Lives, Many Masters.
Oh my god, I just reread Many Lives, Many Masters. It was really good. Wait, why did you read it?
I've been very into all of this stuff, and this is what the piece is kind of about, the weird parapsychology and...
Totally. Like reincarnation?
I think so, yeah. I think there's...
So, I'll go back to the piece and then I'll explain why. Some of these kids who society or the people around them even would be like, "They're just totally lost, they can't speak, they're autistic," when they figured out how to unlock their communication, would be talking about basically something equivalent to the Akashic records, that there's this collective shared memory. Or they talked about the reincarnation of one of their friends who had passed away, and they all saw his spirit and separately told their parents that they saw him there. All these really crazy things that even if you don't buy the telepathy thing, how in the world are these kids tapping into what all of the religions have said forever, but at the deeper experiential level? And I just realized some of the stuff they said rhymed with Christianity or Buddhist text or Daoism, kind of all of it.
Aldous Huxley wrote The Perennial Philosophy, and it's this idea that all of the mystics and the experiencers in all these religions across the world and all these spiritual traditions basically say you're a small part of the universe knowing itself, and that is kind of like Atman is Brahman, all of that. Everybody says the same thing, and then these random kids were also saying pretty much the same thing. And so it sent me down a rabbit hole of looking into all of this stuff. And so the piece was a little bit about that, and a little bit about the idea that the purpose of technology is to expand the potential for new experiences, but our job is to go have those new experiences. The better AI gets, if it takes your job, well, then you weren't that job and that's not the most human thing that you could be doing. It'll do that while you go figure out something else, and there's always something else to go experience. Your job and your role is to go live out this life that only you possibly could.
And so there's a lot more to it than that. And because of that, I've just read widely in it. Somebody recommended Many Lives, Many Masters, and I just think it's fascinating that there is so much evidence. The University of Virginia has thousands and thousands and thousands of records of kids around the world who either have a scar and then a memory of where they would have gotten that scar, or have memories of their past lives with dates and names that they go check and those dates and names are real. There's so much smoke, and then the fact that it all points to the same thing, give or take. It would be the greatest coincidence ever if all these people across space and time all said the same thing that was made up and not true. It just feels impossible to me.
Wow, I have so many bookmarks and questions. Well, first of all, why is it that you think our role is to go and experience things based on everything that you've researched and learned?
This guy Chris Bache was a professor at Youngstown State University. On the side of his religious studies role, he also did 73 high-dose LSD trips and came back kind of saying the same thing: you're the universe experiencing yourself. People throughout history in all the spiritual traditions have said the universe or God or whatever is perfect, and so the reason that we're here is sharding that thing, putting it in physical form where it can suffer and not know the future and all of these things so that it can actually go have experience. Which, like a perfect all-knowing omniscient thing, you can't have experience if you already know everything. And so it's this creative process of having people come down to Earth—some people believe there's an Earth school, whatever—come down to Earth and experience all of these things on behalf of the universe so it can grow and expand and know itself and all of that. And if that's the case, then clearly your job as one of these little shards of the universe is to come down and have experience in only the way that you can.
I just wanted to say that it's almost the same thought as the purpose of everything is to create entropy. So we're experiencing all these things to create entropy, and with entropy something new is going to come out and we'll have innovations and progress and different processes will emerge.
Totally. And on the tech side and the innovation side, it changed my mind on engineering our bodies and longevity and one day do we give ourselves wings or do we whatever. Before I would have been like, "You shouldn't play God" is the phrase that people use, and maybe you're taking it a bit too far. And as I was preparing for a talk that I gave—I published it afterwards—it kind of struck me as ridiculous that God, if there is this all-knowing thing, would be like, "One, no idea that you would have been able to figure out how to do that, so whoops. And two, just at this point in time that we're at, everything that you've done so far is awesome: creating glasses, medicine, bombs, totally fine, but touching any of your skin is way too far." That just feels not correct.
And having wings—if I had wings and nobody else did, that is an experience that no human has ever had. And so if you think that the point is experience-maxing, then getting out there and flying around, certainly you should go out and do that. And so I think there's technologies that expand the potential for experience. They can't have the experience, so the best thing tech can do is expand the potential for experience. There are some that expand the potential, and then the downside of AI potentially is that you all talk to this thing and it gives you kind of the same answer, and you turn off your brain and stop critically thinking. I think that can be bad, and there's some centralizing tech or homogenizing tech that you need to be a little bit careful of. It can be powerful if you use it for expansion and can be damaging if you use it for contraction. And so that's a little bit how I think about it.
I'm just very interested in this. I'm clearly not an expert. It's the thing that, aside from tech—I told you about a piece that I'm working on right now, this will come out after, but third time I've written about this company, I could do it every week. I find it endlessly fascinating. So that's one of the things that I would do in my free time. And this is the other non-work thing that if I had to read a book in my free time, and I do read books in my free time all the time, this is what I'm interested in kind of turning my brain off with.
That's fascinating. And is this a recent interest or have you always been interested in life beyond the life that we have on Earth or why it is that we're here, or expansion and experiences?
When I was five or six maybe, my mom still makes fun of me and my dad still makes fun of me for this now, that the thing that I would go into their room in the middle of the night scared by was infinity, just the concept of infinity. And I would just sit there and be like, "It just never ends. But what about 10,000 years?" And it just never ends. And so clearly that was always there. Went to Catholic school; I would not say I was religious at all growing up.
I don't like the "spiritual but not religious." I think I'm...
The labels are kind of...
Yeah, I believe that they're all saying something very similar and I believe it. And so yes, I guess I'd say, but I couldn't tell you which religion.
One thing that I've heard someone say that really resonated with me is that there is faith and then there is religion. So faith is believing in something otherworldly generally, and then religion is a certain vertical of rules and guides and stories that you are told you need to believe and rules that you need to abide by. And that really resonated with me because I feel like I am really open-minded and curious about similar topics, but I don't think I will ever be living my life by a certain rulebook that someone put together being like, "Okay, well, I will only follow Protestant whatever."
Totally. I think part of it too was I went to Catholic school for middle school and there was a girl in my class who was the nicest girl in the class, her mom was super nice, but was divorced. And I remember one of our teachers being like, "Oh, your mom's going to hell because she was divorced." And that's not nice. I don't necessarily want to be a part of that. I'm reading the—I don't know how I hadn't before—but the Tao Te Ching now.
There's like 81 little...
Little poems almost, I don't know what you call them. And a bunch of them are about—part of Daoism's thing is that it's not a religion. And one of them says the more religion there is in the world, the worse—and I'm getting the words wrong. But then all the ideas are very similar to religion. And so do you put all those extra rules on it? Do you not? I think there's value in it. Ali and I met through crypto, and I think that there is almost this underlying protocol that is all of this stuff, and then on top there's all these apps that might speak to different end users, and that's kind of what religions are. And that's a little bit of how I think about it. And so for some people, if it's the way that you can get into these ideas, amazing.
Yeah, 100%. I want to go back to the piece about the meaning of life and this idea of experiences and expansion. What stood out to me is that it's very optimistic, and you're kind of seen as this optimistic guy.
Where does your optimism come from?
I think a similarish place where I've just been very lucky to have a really good life, and knock on wood, nothing terrible has happened. There's been plenty of times where—I'm not trying to oversell these at all—I wouldn't be elected to student government or whatever, and then I would go back and become the president of it the next year. That has been a theme enough times where the first time it doesn't happen, and then the second time I come back and it does happen. So I think there's part of that.
And then part of it is just, I think if you look at the numbers, or if you look at that GDP per capita graph, or any of this, things do just get better over time. It really weirds me out—even the Anthropic kind of way of being is a little bit pessimistic to me. It weirds me out that you would see all this miraculous stuff happening around you and be like, that could go really, really, really wrong. It's good that there's people out there thinking about what could go wrong, and not everybody can be optimistic. I have the privilege of being optimistic because there's plenty of people who are naturally pessimistic thinking about the downsides.
You're like, why not be optimistic?
Why not be optimistic? But I also think it's self-fulfilling, too. If you think that everything's going to be bad, why do anything? If you think that you can't actually make a contribution or solve something, you're not going to start. And so I think the more people who are optimistic, the more you're going to make them. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, for sure.
Do you think optimism is a choice then?
I think people are more or less optimistic naturally, and then based on how they've been raised and the experiences they've had, for sure. But then there's plenty of people who I talk to—because we write this Weekly Dose of Optimism every week—who are like, "Thank you for doing this, because before I would have read the same story and been like, 'This is terrible. I can't believe data centers are using so much water,' or whatever." There's always a way to look at it that is positive. So just even having that in their inboxes, I've seen enough people who've changed their stance. It can certainly be taught, I guess, or practiced.
