• Born at the Right Time

    Born at the Right Time

    A picture of me with my grandparents, siblings, and some cousins before going sledding I’m on a Boeing 757. Out of my window I can see the wingtips, which are bent at the ends to improve fuel efficiency. The web address of the airline is printed on the tips, which should seem totally normal, but…

  • My Early History as an Entrepreneur

    My Early History as an Entrepreneur

    Despite mostly cutting myself off from parental financing in high school, I’ve actually only had a “real” job for less than a year total in my life. I attribute this not to any great genius on my part, but rather to habit. It was what I was used to doing. I knew that I couldn’t…

  • My 2009 In Review

    My 2009 In Review

      I’ve given up on doing my yearly or bi-yearly goals. Why? I don’t actually do them, and I don’t actually care. I like having a somewhat chaotic life, changing my priorities and focus as I go along. Most of the time when I look back at my previous incomplete goals I’m glad I didn’t…

  • RV Deluxe

    RV Deluxe

    I like taking a problem and coming up with a solution so extreme that I end up happy I had the problem in the first place. Taking showers in the RV is acceptable at best, and on cool winter days is a bit of a chore. I solved that problem by joining a spa in…

  • Preparation vs. Readiness

    Preparation vs. Readiness

    I once visited some friends in San Francisco who had copied our idea of renting an extravagant house and splitting the cost between the pickup artists who lived there. We called ours Project Hollywood, they called theirs Project San Francisco. We sat around their living room, bonding over stories of the perks and follies of…

  • My Favorite Places in San Francisco

    My Favorite Places in San Francisco

    I’ve spent most of my time in San Francisco since fleeing the oppressive summer heat of Texas. Since then, mostly thanks to awesome recommendations from other people, I’ve discovered some amazing places here. This is a selection of my favorites… all of which should be checked out by anyone who lives here. Know somewhere else…

  • Get a Tutor. They are Amazing.

    Get a Tutor. They are Amazing.

    After years of butchering a few foreign languages, I’ve developed a keen ear for them. I can’t necessarily understand what people are saying, but if someone is speaking in one of the languages I can get by in, I can hear it across the room. An older man and a younger Japanese woman were sitting…

  • Margaret

    Margaret

    I used to park my RV in a bad area of SF. No one else wants to park there, so it’s always easy to find a spot. One night a friend and I were hanging out in my RV, we lost track of time, and soon the buses weren’t running anymore. She calls a cab…

  • How to Actually Save Water

    How to Actually Save Water

    This was going to be a long sweeping article about how wrong we are when we care about different things: how many megapixels a camera has, how much electricity we use by keeping the lights on, using cell phones on airplanes, and swimming in the water when there’s lightning out. But instead of trying to…

  • The Most Important Thing in The World

    The Most Important Thing in The World

    A couple weeks ago I did an “I Am A” on Reddit about being a former pickup artist, which meant that thousands of people could ask me questions about it. And they did. The questions flooded in faster than I could reasonably respond to them, which meant that sometimes I didn’t answer in as much…