2025: in review

2025 has been an eventful year.

I did quite a bit of travel, ate at probably too many restaurants, checked more books off my reading list, tried to stay active, and spent a lot of time working, learning, and growing personally. Oh, I also spent more time writing, so this is my first proper year-in-review.

Consider this a short and sweet personal reflection and letter of gratitude.

2025

In January, Chapman has interterm, which is a short break between semesters where you can travel, do internships, or take a course. I took a class called Puzzles & Paradoxes in Economics. My professor let me do some of it online, and around the same time the Palisades fires were unfolding in LA, I made a spontaneous decision to backpack Japan with my roommates.

We went to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and a ski trip in a tiny village called Nozawaonsen. Japan is one of my favorite places on earth (and a great place to join your online lectures at 6 AM).

There's a calmness to it that's hard to describe until you feel it yourself. The attention to detail, the respect for shared space, the general quietness everywhere. Noah Smith recently wrote that Japan represents "alternative modernity": a place substantively similar to other rich, free countries, but that feels different. I think that's right.

Some of the highlights:

Then I started my fourth semester of college.

Throughout the spring, I tried to explore more of Southern California when I had a free weekend. I went to Joshua Tree, surfed in the desert (Palm Springs Surf Club), and a handful of short trips to San Diego to see my brother, and Malibu to see my girlfriend. My parents also returned to Northern California and I gave them a surprise visit.

In early 2025, I also started being more active on 𝕏1. Surprisingly, it led to some new relationships and a few quick trips to visit TBPN2, Stripe Sessions, Canva Create, and a few other startup offices.

A few other Q1/Q2 highlights include: a sprint triathlon with my two roommates to raise money for ALS, four-year anniversary with my girlfriend and getting to celebrate her graduation.

In early summer, I traveled through Italy and France with friends and family.

When I returned home, I quickly found an apartment in downtown LA and spent the summer with TBPN in Hollywood.

My first day started at 6:30 AM with a team workout, then breakfast, then straight into the office. By 11 AM, the show was live.

What inspired me was the reward of showing up daily. While other podcasts publish weekly or monthly, we made contact with the world every day. Our feedback loop was tighter, and we were able to iterate much faster.

A few other TBPN-intern summer highlights include: traveling to NYC with the team for Figma's IPO, jersey-swapping with Eric Glyman at Ramp, attending YC Demo Day in SF, checking if the "996" discourse is real, when Soham Parekh came on the show, and Friday Murphs with Tyler.

One thing I'll say if you're thinking about competing with TBPN: good luck. You can't compete with someone who's having fun. John and Jordi do it for the love of the game.

After summer, I was excited to return to school and be with my friends again.

In the fall, I started on a few side projects, got back into tennis, and picked up reading more seriously. Here's a few books I especially enjoyed (send recs my way for 2026):

To close out the year, I turned 21 with my best friends in LA and spent the holidays at home with family.

Beliefs

As I mentioned earlier, I started to write more frequently, and genuinely try to become better at it. A couple months ago, I met with Chris Paik, who is an excellent thinker and investor. He has kept a public document full of frameworks that draw on concepts from various studies. When we spoke, he told me the nice thing about doing this is that you can come back to it months, or even years later, and see how your thinking has evolved.

Since then, I have adopted his practice and I'm excited to look back on some of my writing and witness that evolution myself. This year, there have been a few defining thoughts and ideas that I had jotted down that I want to share here:

Agency4. Earlier this year, Andrej Karpathy had a viral piece on agency being more important than intelligence, especially now that intelligence is "on tap." I agree, and can personally say the best opportunities in my life have come from being autonomous and when I look at the most successful people around me, agency is the common thread.

Move fast with urgency. I think people can go a lot faster than they think. Speed is a force multiplier. Often the resistance you feel is the sign to speed up.5

Urgency, though, can also be miscalibrated. For speed to be productive, it's contingent upon the quality and direction of your inputs. Even small, consistent changes compound massively.

That said, our lives aren't companies, and I don't think we should optimize them like one. There are exceptions to having urgency and systemization, such as personal relationships. Many wonderful things happen in serendipity, and if you become too consumed by "outputs", you'll miss them.

Strive for opportunities with asymmetric upside. I think of these as opportunities where outputs can scale far beyond initial inputs. This is the logic behind Paul Graham's quote "Do things that don't scale." Publishing your thinking on 𝕏 has asymmetric upside (where else can you post a meme that has the potential to be put in front of the top CEOs, world leaders, or even the Pope?). Venture capital is built on asymmetric bets. So is writing a book, starting a podcast, building software, or even meeting someone in-person instead of Zoom.

But I believe the single greatest asymmetry is in relationships. In a world where many people are transactional, genuine curiosity and helping with no expectation of return is its own reward. And yet, it compounds. An introduction that takes five minutes can change someone's trajectory. This year, I helped more friends with important career decisions. Watching someone you've been rooting for succeed is one of the best feelings there is.

Onward

At school, I study economics. Economic growth is a function of capital (K), labor (L), and technology (A). But these inputs aren't equal; capital and labor face diminishing returns, technology doesn't.

You can keep building factories, buying GPUs, piling on more machines… but if the productivity of labor stays flat, growth eventually stalls, you end up with more capital than your workers can effectively use.

The only way through is A—technology that makes each worker more productive. This is the bull case for AI, and why technology startups drive economic expansion.

Technology is and has been the driver, and startups are the engine.

Innovation comes from people who see something others don't and have the agency to pursue it.

This clarified where I want to be: in and around innovation. In a world where intelligence is becoming abundant, the scarcest resources are agency and taste, two things I've tried to cultivate more this year.

As this year ends, I feel energized and grateful to be around people pushing this frontier. It's a special time to be young, ambitious, and American.

Here's to 2026!

Thanks to my friends for reading before I shared. The cover painting is Odysseus and the Sirens, c. 480–470 BC. Shoutout Samay and Dan Wang for inspo on writing this.