I grew up in Cupertino, mostly, and was kind of a weird kid. I was simultaneously the problem child and the golden child, and I had a hard time finding peace and stasis. I had a lot of trouble growing up. I got institutionalized as a young teenager, for about a year and a half, in a lockdown treatment center in Provo, Utah. It was a pretty abusive place, similar to ones that have gotten a lot of press lately.

Things started getting a lot better when I was old enough to start community college classes instead of public school. I hit 18 not really knowing what I wanted to do or whether I wanted to go to college. I had a bunch of interests in totally different worlds. So I took six months off to go work in the back country of Kings Canyon National Park, building trails and chasing bears away from our food stores. That was meant to be a short break from school, but instead I just kind of kept going.

I found there were a lot of things I could do to work my way around the country and the world. I worked as a freelance art model. I picked up gig work through serendipity: running into people, dumpster diving, couch surfing. I was a ski instructor for a while. I did yoga teacher training. I did pyrotechnics and heavy machinery operation. I worked construction sites. I got flown to Taiwan to be a tech evangelist. I did occasional freelance writing. Whatever was around. I went to most of the states plus Puerto Rico and about 40 countries during my 20s.

A lot of those were intensive bubble experiences, pressure-cooker situations with a bunch of people doing a very particular thing, building weird bonds with people fast, watching community ruptures expand and exponentiate because of the close-in nature of things. I worked on a bunch of Burning Man art projects. I got disillusioned after a few years, but I was part of a couple of bigger $40 million projects and other burns and festivals around the world. I did pyrotechnics on four continents.

I got into martial arts when I was 26 or 27, and went and trained Shaolin kung fu in rural northeastern China under my shifu, a former Shaolin monk who'd grown up at the temple and left to make his fortune elsewhere. He was a Sanda champion in China for a while, but he hurt his back in a fight when he was 20. He didn't like the touristy schools, including the temple itself, that offered a depraved version of letting foreigners come spend money to get validation and pretend they were doing martial arts. He wanted to offer something intensive; he'd grown up at the temple and was kind of bemused by how conventional and glorified it had become. So he built his own school where he could do things his way and attract the few students crazy enough to want it that way. Including me. That became a big part of my life. I went back several times. I also went to Thailand and trained Muay Thai for a while, and ended up getting talked into doing a fight there.

When the pandemic hit, all my work and travel plans got cancelled. I was going to ride a bicycle from the top of Norway down to Greece. (I'd done a bike trip a few years prior from Key West to Barbados while booking photo shoots, which was a really weird experience.) I was up in Humboldt County for lockdown with my partner Alex, my sister, and a couple of roommates, right by the ocean. I signed up for online community college classes for lack of anything else to do. That ended up going really well, and I got into Stanford as a transfer student. I think I was one of maybe 50 transfer students admitted that year.

Stanford was a pretty mixed experience. It was weird being there as an undergrad in my 30s. I felt like a fish out of water in the CS department culture, but people were nice. My last year there, I got asked to lecture CS109, the intro to probability class, which was really cool. That ended last year, and since then I've been floating around, figuring out what I want to do next. Inkhaven has given me a lot of ideas. For now I'm doing photography.

The best advice I've gotten was from my friend David, who died a few years ago of cancer. We used to have these long phone calls about life and love. At one point I was distraught about a major heartbreak and betrayal at the hands of someone I'd trusted who turned out not to be trustworthy. He'd slowly eroded my self-worth, and I found out he'd done a bunch of really messed up violent things to other people. The signs had been there. He'd been making me feel suddenly bad about myself for a long time.

David told me something like: as you get older, you find out that there are some people where you talk to them, you spend time with them, you get off the phone with them, and your nervous system feels good. You just feel better, no matter what the content of the call was. You feel a little bit more human. And then there are other people where that's not the case. Maybe you've got all these reasons, or they give you all these reasons, why you should be invested in each other's lives. But on a deep, intimate, personal level, at a certain point you just have to listen to your nervous system and not pretend anything is more than it is. Trust your gut.

About the unconventional path: I've got this weird blend of being very chaotic and a little bit type-A. I usually describe it as being existentially high-maintenance, and recognizing that certain conventional paths were making me feel crazy. I would have a vague plan for the next year or two, but I'd know I was happy to deviate from that plan if something better came up. Usually that's what would happen: a large number of things would fall by the wayside because some opportunity to do a cool seasonal job or an apprenticeship-style thing would appear, where I'd learn a new skill. That's how I picked up most of the skills I did. Somebody saying, hey, come to my workshop and help me build a thing and I'll teach you what I know.

I tell people this when they're going traveling: if it makes you feel better, go in with a bit of an itinerary, but go in with the whole that you'll break that itinerary because better things will come up and surprise you. Don't be too attached to whatever your plan is. Let other things happen to you.