Things I find interesting, what I'm doing, learning, thinking, predicting, and figuring out about myself. Not content — just honest writing.
The Bear, and a Cousin Named Richie
New · 6 min
Everyone talks about the omelet. I want to talk about the guy screaming in the walk-in — and why I named my agent after the most difficult man in the kitchen.
Culture Personal Essay · 2026
The Woman Who Won't Stay in Her Lane
New · 5 min
Vicky Coren wins poker tournaments, hosts a quiz show for people who read too much, and writes better than most writers. A case for range — and for being underestimated.
Culture Essay · 2026
High Agency, or: Find a Way or Make One
New · 6 min
George Mack's essay rearranged something in my head. The belief, held in the body, that your situation is more negotiable than it looks — and the engine underneath everything I build.
Ideas Essay · 2026
The Case for Storymaxxing
New · 4 min
Most people are optimizing for impressive. I'm optimizing for interesting. The philosophy behind this whole site, and the bet that interesting beats impressive every time.
Philosophy Personal Essay · 2026
What Fantasy Football Taught Me About Decision-Making
New · 4 min
People ask for my secret. The real answer disappoints them: I stopped caring whether I won. Why process beats outcome, and how one lucky result trains you into worse decisions for years.
Thinking Essay · 2026
How I Travel for Free (The Points Game Explained)
Scheduled
12+ credit cards, 3+ years of free flights and hotels, and the system that makes it all work. A practical breakdown of how I hacked the travel game.
Travel Guide · 2026
Gujarati Kid in the Midwest
Scheduled
What it's like to grow up in Ahmedabad, cross an ocean, and end up in the cornfields of central Illinois. The culture shock, the adjustment, and the identity you build from the collision.
Identity Personal Essay · 2025
Why I Love the Sun (More Than a Normal Amount)
Scheduled
It's not about vitamin D. It's about what sunlight represents — optimism, possibility, the feeling that today could be the day something good happens. A love letter to the star.
Loves Personal · 2025
The 50-State Project: Why I'm Visiting Every State
Scheduled
31 new states planned for 2026. The strategy, the routing, the obsessive spreadsheet. Why seeing your own country matters more than checking off countries abroad.
Travel In Progress · 2026
Captain's Log
Everybody quotes the omelet scene. The knife skills, the calm, the "yes, chef." Fine. I want to talk about the guy who spent two seasons screaming in a walk-in.
Richie is the least likable person in that kitchen. He peaked in a parking lot in 2004 and never forgave the world for continuing without him. He's loud, he's bitter, he's wrong about almost everything on the surface. He's also the best character on television, because the show does the one thing nobody does anymore. It lets him change.
Most shows protect their characters from change. They find a personality that tests well and they freeze it in place. Five seasons of the same guy learning the same lesson. The Bear does the opposite. It takes the person you'd least want to sit next to and makes you love him without ever pretending he was fine the whole time.
You know the episode. They send Richie to stage at a fine-dining place, and for a full day he's sure it's a punishment. He's polishing forks. He's furious about the forks. Then a chef tells him that every second counts, and something that had been locked in him for twenty years quietly gives.
He starts pressing his suit. He learns the guests' names. He hears a table mention wanting real Chicago pizza, and the whole kitchen makes it happen, and he watches a stranger get emotional over a slice and finally understands what he's for.
He's not for being right. He's for making the person in front of him feel like the only person in the room. That was always the talent. It was just aimed at nothing.
That's the part I can't get past. Not the redemption. The mechanism of it. Richie didn't get therapy or a new personality. He got put in a room that took excellence seriously, and handed a job bigger than his ego, and it turned out all that heat he'd been using to burn down conversations was just service with nowhere to go.
The scary version of that story is the one where nobody sends you to stage. Where you stay in the parking lot and call it being realistic. The show is generous enough to suggest that the line between a bitter man and a great one is sometimes just proximity. Get close enough to something that demands your best and you'll finally hand it over.
I named my agent Richie. People think it's a bit. It isn't. I wanted the thing working next to me to carry that arc in its name. Loud. A little difficult. Wrong about the surface, right about the substance. Something that argues back and cares about the fork.
The Bear is about a kitchen the way Moby-Dick is about a whale. It's really about the ugly, unglamorous decision to get good at something while you're still a mess. Carmy has the gift and hates himself. Sydney has the vision and no room. Richie has a chip on his shoulder and a daughter he's scared of letting down, and he becomes the one holding it all together.
Every second counts. It reads like a poster in a dentist's office right up until you watch a grown man rebuild his whole self around it.
In the show, somebody hands Richie the fork. In real life, you usually have to pick it up yourself.
— end of transmission
The first time I watched Vicky Coren Mitchell play poker I genuinely didn't get what I was seeing. She was chatting. Cracking jokes. Being warm and funny at a table where everyone else was treating a card game like a hostage situation. And then she took all their money.
She's the only person who's won two European Poker Tour main events. She also hosts a BBC quiz show for people who read too much. She wrote a newspaper column for years. She's married to a comedian and is quietly funnier than most of them. If you pitched her as a single character, a producer would tell you to pick one thing and make it believable.
I'm fascinated by people who refuse to pick one thing.
We've built a whole religion around the specialist. Choose a lane at nineteen. Find your niche. Become the guy who does the thing. It works, if the goal is to be easy to explain. And that's the tell. Every genuinely interesting person I've met is impossible to explain at a dinner party.
Here's what nobody tells you about range. It isn't a pile of hobbies. It's a lens. The value was never in the number of skills. It's that every new field hands you a new angle on all the others.
Poker taught Coren to read the gap between what people say and what they're actually holding. Once you can see that gap you see it everywhere. At the table. On the page. Across the dinner table from someone insisting they're fine. The poker makes the writing sharper, because poker is applied psychology and so is every good sentence. The writing makes the hosting sharper, because timing is timing whether it's a punchline or a bluff.
She isn't a poker player who also writes. She's one instrument being played in four rooms, and it's obviously the same instrument in all of them.
She did most of it while being underestimated, which is the part that should be taught in schools. Every time somebody clocked her as the nice lady who'd be easy to push around, she'd already won. Being underestimated isn't an insult. It's a head start. The world hands you a discount on itself and dares you to spend it.
The specialist adds. The generalist multiplies.
I don't want to be the guy who does the thing. I want to be the person you can't summarize, where the writing and the traveling and the building are all quietly sharpening the same knife, and you don't see which one I'll use until I've used it.
Coren spent a life refusing to choose. She didn't end up worse at everything. She ended up better at each one because of the others.
That's not a lack of focus. That's the whole hand.
— end of transmission
There's an essay by George Mack that quietly rewired me, and I've been a little different since I read it. It's about one idea. The idea is called high agency.
Here's the test he uses. You're in a foreign country, you get arrested, you get one phone call. Who do you call. Not the richest person you know. Not the smartest. You call the one who will actually get you out. The one who treats "impossible" as a customer service issue. Who'll charm the guard, wire the money, wake up an ambassador, and keep pulling on the situation until the door opens. Everybody can name that person instantly. Almost nobody is that person for someone else.
High agency is a belief you hold in your body, not your head. The belief that your situation is more negotiable than it looks. That most rules are other people's suggestions. That "you can't" almost always means "I haven't figured out how yet." It's the opposite of learned helplessness. Call it learned power. You build it by discovering, over and over, that the wall you were sure was load-bearing is just a curtain.
The concept gave me a word for something I'd been doing without one. Every good thing in my life came from a moment where the default said no and I decided the default didn't apply to me. The trips that shouldn't have been affordable. The rooms I wasn't supposed to be in. This website, which no sane person builds by hand at night after a full day of work.
You can't collect a good story from the couch. Interesting things happen to people who make interesting things happen.
Mack's darker point is the one that stuck. Most people aren't low agency because they lack the ability. They're low agency because nobody ever showed them the option existed. It's inherited. You absorb the ceiling of the people who raised you. Grow up around people who treat the world as fixed and you'll treat it as fixed too, and you'll be genuinely shocked to learn, sometimes at forty, that other people were just asking. Just walking up and trying doors that were never locked.
There's a trap on the other side and he's honest about it. High agency without judgment is a fast way to drive off a cliff. Agency tells you that you can. It doesn't tell you that you should. The full thing is agency with a steering wheel. The person who gets you out of jail, who also had the sense not to get arrested.
But if I had to lean too far in one direction, I know which one. The world is full of capable people waiting on a permission that is never going to arrive. Permission is the most valuable thing that doesn't exist. Nobody is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you it's your turn. You start before you're ready and figure it out on the way down.
I re-read the essay every few months because the belief leaks. You forget. The default is heavy and it keeps dragging you back toward the reasonable, toward the version of your life that photographs well and feels like a waiting room from the inside.
Most people are standing in front of doors that were never locked. High agency is just being the one who tries the handle.
— end of transmission
Most people are optimizing for the wrong thing, and somewhere underneath they can feel it.
They're optimizing for impressive. The title, the salary, the house that photographs well, the life that gets a nod at the reunion. It's a fine game. It's just not the one I'm playing. I'm optimizing for interesting, and I think, quietly, you probably should too.
I call it storymaxxing. Collecting stories worth telling, through experiences worth having, on purpose. The site you're reading is the evidence. It sounds like a joke and it's the most serious decision I've made.
Here's the trade nobody says out loud. Impressive is legible and safe and mostly borrowed. Everyone already agrees on what it looks like, which is exactly what makes it useless as a signal. A life that looks great from the outside and feels like a waiting room from the inside is the most common way there is to waste one. You know someone living it. You might be scared it's you.
Interesting is different. It doesn't photograph as well. It's the detour, the flight booked before the plan, the city picked because you were curious instead of because it was practical. It's the night that went sideways in a place you barely knew. Nobody's impressed by any of it in the moment. It's also the only part you actually remember, and the only part anyone ever wants to hear about.
Watch a dinner table. Nobody leans in for the promotion. They lean in for the story.
The objection is always the same. This is a luxury, some people can't just book the flight. That's fair, and it's also mostly an excuse wearing the costume of humility. Storymaxxing isn't about money. It's a posture. It's saying yes to the thing that scares you a little, choosing the option that's harder to explain, treating your own life like it belongs to you instead of to the people you're trying to impress.
Because the milestones lie. They promise the next one is where the feeling finally lives. It never is. You hit it, you feel it for a weekend, the goalposts slide back, and you're in the waiting room again wondering why the trophy went cold. Stories don't do that. A story you actually lived pays out every single time you tell it. It compounds. It turns into who you are.
I'm not trying to build the most impressive life. I would genuinely rather be the most interesting person at the reunion than the most successful one. One of those is a number. The other is a life.
So this whole site is one long argument with the default. Every page is a story I picked over a milestone I could have chased.
Impressive is a life you can put on a résumé. Interesting is one you'd actually have wanted to live.
— end of transmission
I've won my fantasy league enough times that people have started asking for the secret. They want a sleeper. A guy to stash. Some edge.
The real answer disappoints everyone. I stopped caring whether I won.
Not literally. I care a lot. What I mean is I stopped grading my decisions by how they turned out and started grading them by whether they were right when I made them. Those are two completely different things, and almost nobody keeps them separate.
Here's the trap. You start a guy, he goes off, you feel like a genius. You start a guy, he blows a hamstring on the first drive, you feel like an idiot. Same decision. Same information you had Sunday morning. Completely different feeling by Sunday night. The result reached back in time and rewrote how you felt about a choice it had nothing to do with.
Fantasy football is a machine for teaching you this, because the randomness is too loud to ignore. The best process in the world loses a week to a fluke injury and a garbage-time touchdown. The worst process gets bailed out by a kick return. Play long enough and the noise cancels out and the process is all that's left. But any given Sunday will lie straight to your face about whether you're any good.
Outcome is loud. Process is quiet. Almost everyone listens to the loud one.
This is the whole game outside of football too. Someone makes a reckless bet, it happens to pay, and they update toward "I'm a genius" instead of "I got away with it." Someone makes the careful, correct call, it happens to fail, and they never make it again. That's how one bad result quietly trains you into worse decisions for years. You were studying the scoreboard when you should've been studying the tape.
The fix is annoying and simple. Judge the decision by what you knew at the time. Would you make it again with the same information. If yes, it was a good decision and the bad week was just rent. If no, the win was luck, and luck isn't a strategy you can run back.
Process over outcome. Every time. Especially when the outcome is screaming that you were wrong.
You can lose with a good decision and win with a bad one. If all you remember is the score, you'll learn exactly the wrong lesson.