Modern life has tricked us into thinking travel is good.
It's kind of barbaric for the body.
Last time I went to Asia we measured my biomarkers.
The data was bad…
+ 9 days for blood glucose stability
+ 9 days to re-entrain my circadian rhythm
+ 18 days for sleep architecture recovery
The research:
+ people who travel constantly for work (3+ wks a month) have measurably more anxiety, depression, and drinking problems than people who don’t
+ repeated jet lag is linked to memory-region shrinkage in flight crews
+ your immune system takes a hit. Dry cabin air dries out mucous membranes that block infection which can leave you more exposed to getting sick
This is intuitive because the body runs on a clock. Biological processes kicked off by another, with sleep + sun running the show.
Cabin altitude is ~7,000 ft. Hypoxia alone disrupts cortisol and suppresses nocturnal melatonin for hours after you land. Cabin humidity drops as low as 5% (drier than the Sahara).
If you’re budgeting your international trips: I’d suggest no more than once every 3 months. Evidence shows you need ~1 day per time zone to re-entrain, and east is worse than west.
Once Kate gets back she’s starting the female protocol. This also means she can’t travel internationally for at least a few months while we collect baseline measurement.
The body understands time zone changes as trauma.
I hope that this is my last international trip for a very long time.
Charlie Munger, the Stoic: "Life will have terrible blows in it. Horrible blows. Unfair blows. It doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't."
"There, I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something. Your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion."
I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.
I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.
My takeaways:
1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.
2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.
3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)
4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.
5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million
6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.
7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.
8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.
9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.
10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.
11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.
12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.
13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.
14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....
15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.
16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.
17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.
It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.
But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.
We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.
What an incredible time to be building.
SpaceX is such a bad ass company. In their IPO filing, they wrote this:
• The first private company to develop and launch a liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit (2008)
• The first private company to successfully dock a private spacecraft with the International Space Station (2012)
• The first to successfully propulsively land (2015) and refly orbital-class rocket boosters (2017)
• The first to begin deploying a large-scale LEO broadband satellite constellation (2019);
• The first private company to transport astronauts to orbit, returning America's ability to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (2020)
• The first to manufacture consumer-grade phased-array user terminals at scale (2022);
The first to deploy a large-scale LEO satellite-to-mobile constellation (2025)
• The first to build a gigawatt-scale Al training cluster and largest coherent supercomputer (2026)
• The first gigawatt-scale Megapack battery installation (2026); and
• The only company capable of building orbital AI compute at scale.
BOOM.
In an early meeting at Facebook (c. 2007), when I was describing the goals of Facebook Platform (an area I oversaw) Bill Gates yelled at me/us.
His quote has stuck with me to this day:
“This isn’t a platform. A platform is where the collective sum of revenues of the participants exceeds those of the platform itself.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the tokenmaxxing circle jerk.
Facts.
The fastest growing part of 8090 is our practice of ripping out legacy systems for large enterprises and migrating them to pristine, new, well documented and easy to maintain alternatives.
It also turns out to be less than 50% of the TCO or better as well.
Chamath is spot on.
Downsizing and simplifying bring enormous value to your life.
After owning multiple properties, we are now renting a simple home.
After running companies with hundreds of employees, the current team is only five, incl. me.
Liberating.
When your working life rewards you, it’s easy to ratchet up the complexity: homes, cars, travel, possessions etc.
I have found that all that complexity comes at the sake of your most fleeting asset: your time. Instead of building things, all of a sudden you’re dealing with minutiae and logistics. Instead of talking mostly to engineers, you’re talking mostly to non-engineers. The building stops…the business of managing self inflicted complexity begins.
It’s worth noting that the best players in the game (Buffett, Elon) have kept their life extremely basic, almost monastic/nomadic, as success ratcheted them ever higher.
I think it’s the biggest secret hiding in plain sight:
When the world upgrades your status, downgrade your complexity.