I send my closest friends long, unedited paragraphs most weeks, because a thought only holds up once someone has pushed back on it. My roommate Alex and I do this constantly, asking each other questions that would sound offensive to anyone else: why do you think that, and what are you actually optimizing for? That last one has been the loud question lately, and the last two months are why.

In that stretch I graduated from UT-Austin in ECE with the master's in the fall, hiked Acatenango in Guatemala, and moved to San Francisco to start at Coinbase as a software engineer. Acatenango was 13,045 feet, camping overnight as Fuego erupted every fifteen minutes, and it is hard to stand on a volcano at 2am and still think your problems are large. A few weeks later I was at a desk in San Francisco, which delivers the opposite message: that you are not aiming high enough.

Coinbase is where I feel that pull most directly. The job isn't a bet on crypto prices; the company's mission is to increase economic freedom, rebuilding financial infrastructure so access stops depending on where you were born, and crypto is already a $2.7 trillion asset class. My five-year goal is venture capital, so this is where I learn what is actually worth backing.

The risk is that San Francisco runs on a single monoculture, where almost everyone works in tech and success has one legible definition. This week made the point. Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, passing OpenAI as the most valuable AI company, while days earlier Pope Leo XIV used his first encyclical to argue that AI should be "disarmed," criticizing the race for ever larger models. Holding both of those at once is the real condition of being here.

I am not immune to the pull, but stepping away keeps my thinking from going flat, so I do it on purpose. Last month I drove to Carmel and spent a day at Point Lobos, somewhere nobody asks what you do for work, and cycling 60 miles a week and climbing clear the noise the same way. Cooking and baking work differently: they end with something I made instead of something I solved, answerable to nothing but my own taste, and after a week of solving other people's problems, that is the part that feels most like me.

All of it sharpens the same habit, which is catching myself before I rationalize. A documentary on Japanese whaling stuck with me, not for the conservation angle but as a clean case of people building airtight reasoning around a decision they had already made, which is exactly the failure I try to spot in myself. So I keep asking what I have already decided and quietly started defending. Clarity of thought leads to efficiency of action, but only if the self-examination comes first. This is just the current version of that work.