About

HI RICH HERE NICE TO MEET YOU.

The best way to stay in the loop with new stuff is by joining my email list. I try to write high-quality posts, which means you’ll only hear from me once or twice a month at most (and probably far less).

Who are you?

I am a journalist by trade. Like a rat leaving a sinking ship, I abandoned the news industry in 2016 to experiment with a bunch of ‘lifestyle design’ type stuff: dabbling with startups, trading, and writing projects.

It worked out pretty great!

These days I split my time between looking after my baby daughter, doing some minor income-generating activities, and pursuing my creative interests.

If you want to get into the weeds, here’s my attempt to thread my entire adult life into one semi-coherent narrative.

Building optionality

The first epoch of the blog was something like ‘under-explored ways to generate high-quality options in life’.

I wrote a ton about early retirement and financial independence, lifting and nutrition, optimising time and productivity, etc.

This culminated in my book, Optionality, which synthesises ~10 years of my work and lifestyle experiments. It is (I hope) an unusually rigorous entry in the self-help genre.

These days I’m less interested in self-improvement and optimisation.

I’m sure I’ll still write about that stuff from time to time, but there’s a new set of problems I’m obsessed with.

All problems are soluble

I’ve always been drawn to the vague overlapping sphere that includes the rationalists, the effective altruists, the progress studies people, tpot, the GMU economists, etc.

The common thread is an interest in epistemology: what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?

This is really important, in that it’s upstream of everything from increasing your own personal agency, to improved decision-making, making moral progress, and generally solving the world’s problems.

In the last year, I’ve gotten hooked on the ideas of David Deutsch. His epistemology comes close to a ‘theory of everything’. It’s deeply optimistic. And it’s criminally underrated or unknown amongst my tribe.

Here’s my review of Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity, which kicks off the new era of the blog (and the first post on substack).

A bunch of things I want to write about through the lens of critical rationalism:

What kind of memes and cultural practices will lead to MORE PROGRESS
Parenting and taking children seriously
Why I’m no longer an AI doomer
Disambiguating between intelligence, agency, creativity, and consciousness
Aesthetics and art as problem-solving

So plenty of stuff to chew on.

Join my book club

Another great recent joy has been starting a fiction-only book club with my friends Cam and Benny.

In our first year, we’ve tackled Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Houellebecq, Herman Hesse, Kafka, Isaac Singer, J.M. Coetzee, Mary Shelley, Woolf, Borges, John Williams, Maugham, Beckett, and Philip K Dick.

We’ve just started making our discussions public, in the hopes that we might be able to attract a little community of fellow travellers:

…well, do ya?

Here’s a list of all the episodes, which you can filter by literary movement and topic area.

The concept is that we are STEM/finance dorks (Cam is a data analyst with a background in economics, Benny is doing his PhD in machine learning and statistics) trying to learn about literary fiction and classics.

Our quest: to fuse the typically non-overlapping domains of stemlords and lit bros, and become perhaps the most annoying type of person of all time.

Check out The Case for Reading Fiction for the full explanation, along with my big takeaways from the first year.

What should I read first?

Head to the archives for a chronological list of all posts. Otherwise, here’s a hand-picked selection of some of the best, sorted by topic area.

Optionality

10 Principles of Optionality For an Uncertain World — A primer on why optionality matters, how to cap downside risks, and how to hunt for asymmetric upside
Constraints That Liberate – Imposing deliberate constraints to generate high-quality options in life
The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation – The forces that conspire to force us into settling for low-quality choices
Time Travel for Pleasure and Profit – The difficulty of predicting our own future preferences, and why optionality becomes more valuable as the world gets weirder
The Self-Experimentation Guide – My model for the most fruitful approach to running n=1 experiments

Early Retirement

How to Save $100,000 by Age 25 – My viral ‘coming out’ essay on the benefits of frugality
The Joy of Fuck-You Money – How to improve your life with a relatively small sum of money, rather than eat shit sandwiches while grinding toward ‘early retirement’
How Not to Be a Starving Artist – Using a barbell strategy to balance speculative projects with a conventional stable career
Better to Reign in Hell Than Serve in Heaven – Charting a middle path between unconstrained personal freedom and wage slavery
Make Frugality Great Again! — Falling out of love with the early retirement movement

Investing

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is Not Dead – Why you almost certainly can’t beat the market
Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas – Nitpicking the hidden assumptions of the FIRE movement, and modelling how well they hold up in edge cases
The Barbell Strategy for Bastards – How I rejigged my portfolio to get exposure to asymmetric returns

Minimalism

Getting Rid of All Your Stuff Feels Like Taking a Big, Dreamy Dump – On ditching all my worldly possessions to go live out of a backpack
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is Utterly Deranged, and I Love It – Why Marie Kondo is a genius and ‘does it spark joy?’ is the best life heuristic I’ve ever come across
Digital Minimalism Review: Gazing Into the Abyss – The case against solitude, shopping for a new identity, and making more deliberate trade-offs
The Barbell Strategy for Buying Quality Stuff – After hitting peak pathological penny-pinching, I lay out a model for deciding what’s worth splashing out on
The Year of Becoming a Fancy Bitch – On relaxing the pursestrings slightly

Health and Fitness

The Pizza Diet: Eating 222 Large Pizzas In a Row – The problem with restrictive diets and the concept of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ foods
Losing 20kg and Readjusting to Life as a Skinny Guy – On body image, quitting weightlifting, and rapid weight loss
Same Salad, Different Day – Increased mental bandwidth, health benefits, and guilt-free enjoyment of taking an 80/20 approach to eating
Fat People Are Heroes – Applying the Matthew effect of cumulative advantage to fitness and fatness
Minimalist Fitness: The Lost Art of Calisthenics — A lockdown-inspired guide to bodyweight training (with example videos and program)

Psychology

Goals Gone Wild – Why most goals are kind of stupid
Is The Law of Attraction Real? – Predictive processing, voodoo psychology, and the perils of fetishizing positive thinking
Getting to ‘Good Enough’ – Reining in Type A impulses, stopping to smell the flowers, and slouching towards mediocrity
Happiness is a Greased Pig Chase – The fetishisation of measurement and why happiness is impossible to pin down

Reading

How to Read 100+ Books a Year – On completing the 100 book challenge, the tricks and techniques I learned, and why I won’t be repeating it
Quake Books That Shake Your Foundations – A chronology of ‘view quakes’, and the importance of creative destruction to prevent calcification
How to Read a Book — Notes on how to take notes
How to Get Compound Interest on Your Ideas —On keeping a Commonplace book; my single most valuable possession by a huge margin

Travel

Hiking the Himalayas in Flip-Flops – Fun but kind of dumb adventure in which I learn the difference between the Remembering Self and the Experiencing Self
The Madness Of Crowds – On signalling and social contagion, the Mona Lisa as aesthetic herpes, and why it pays to go where the tourists aren’t
The Benefits of Travel – Being forced to deal with a constant stream of ambiguity, solve problems on the fly, and bend with the winds of fortune
Ultralight Travel Packing List: 10 Countries, One 7kg Bag – The challenges and rewards of compressing an entire life into one little bag

Anything Else?

I enjoy hearing from like-minded people, and I try to reply to most messages. If there’s anything I can help you with, feel free to get in touch using the Contact form. I’m almost entirely inactive on social media but it’s possible I’ll one day return to Instagram (travel pics and calisthenics stuff), Twitter (occasional hot takes), or Goodreads (book reviews and recommendations). Hope you enjoy exploring the site. - Rich