While traveling in Lisbon, I attended two meetups for entrepreneurs. This was my first peek into the entrepreneurial side of the city.

• Meetups in Lisbon are predominantly attended by English-speaking foreigners.
• Portugal offers a Golden Visa program: Foreigners can obtain citizenship in 4 years by investing €500,000 in real estate.
• There's no capital gains tax on cryptocurrency in Portugal.
• Americans can often stay in the Schengen zone beyond the typical 90-day limit without issues, except in Switzerland.
• Most bars in Lisbon offer only one type of beer, simply listed as "beer" on the menu.

• Project: New Socks City - sustainable socks made from ocean waste
• Challenges:
  • High storefront rental costs in Lisbon
  • Communicating sustainability message effectively to consumers
• Solution: Organizing pop-up markets for Lisbon makers

• Project: Datastake - SaaS solution for African data collection
• Goals:
  • Improve access to quality data for businesses and NGOs
  • Establish a marketplace for selling structured data
• Choosing Portugal for:
  • Low corporate tax rate
  • Preference for straightforward tax payment

• Background: Created 35 companies, 13 still running with 100M total revenue
• Current focus: Robotic warehouse automation
• Advice:
  • "Choose business partners carefully"
  • "Don't undervalue yourself as a software engineer"

• Project: YouTube channel "Chica Czecha" on education
• Insight: Online content creation is valuable for entrepreneurial careers

• Background: Sold a DNA testing company
• Current project: Estimating carbon footprint in supply chains

• Background: Sold an ed-tech company
• Current project: Complete online high school education
• Market insight: Varying acceptance of online education across EU countries

• Role: Undergrad in student entrepreneurship association
• Advice on startups: "Focus on the problem, not the business model initially"
• Insight on Portugal: Good for raising kids, but young people often leave

• Pedro: Indie video game developer, creator of Idle Paladin
• Jose: Hardware startup for predictive maintenance on molding machines
• Gabriel: Hardware startup helping blind people learn braille

• Background: Wine business owner
• Moved to Lisbon pre-Brexit to maintain EU status

Guest: Never being born is quiet and peaceful. But to become a sensible being, burdened with the imperfections of human nature, plunges one into pain. It’s messy and worse than never being born. For example, once alive, one suffers from laziness because it takes tremendous effort to understand the world and find one’s place in it. Most cannot manage this and end up living against their nature. Another example is empathy, which can be painful because we know that living freely might hurt our loved ones, so we end up shackled by our obligations and relationships.

Host: To never exist is to never think or feel, but it’s hard to call that peaceful and quiet without the experience of being. The turmoil that a living being creates is mostly directed inward, rather than disturbing the peace of others or the world. In fact, the world remains as peaceful as it has always been, regardless of whether thinking beings exist. The most violent event I can imagine is a supernova—a star exploding when it can no longer bear its own weight. These events have always occurred; they are neither peaceful nor quiet, yet they continue regardless of human existence. However, the inner turmoil within oneself is real. A careless being may suffer endlessly through samsara. But this suffering doesn’t have to be a permanent state. One can move closer to enlightenment by understanding both the world and oneself, letting go of obsessions, accepting life as it is, learning to distinguish between distractions and what truly matters, and cultivating inner peace.

Guest: Is it fair to bring a child into the world if it means plunging them into suffering? Is it fair to create suffering just to fulfill one’s own desire?

Host: The problem of existence is a challenge for all thinking beings. A child knows nothing of non-existence; their world, life, and psyche are all they know. A child also knows nothing of pure peace; human weaknesses are part of the package. Since the problem of suffering is inseparable from the existence of a thinking being, it’s only fair to give both life and suffering to a new life. It’s also fair to withhold both. You and I are the descendants of a long lineage of beings who chose the former. Natural selection—both genetic and social—has ensured that populations of humans who embraced life, despite suffering, are the ones that survived.

Guest: If my child blames me for their suffering, what can I do?

Host: You should not blame yourself. You are not the creator of their suffering; suffering is innate in every thinking being. You are not even responsible for most of their circumstances—history and society play a significant role. The best you can do is be honest and help your child understand themselves and their circumstances. Make use of the tried-and-true psychological tools your tradition offers—whether it’s Christianity or another spiritual or social order—to help them live better with others and with themselves. The strength of life lies in its freedom: the freedom to be curious and discover the unknown, to change our circumstances and create new experiences, to overcome adversity, and to build our own sense of fulfillment.

On a crisp autumn night, my wife and I found ourselves in the emergency department of UCSF Children's Hospital with our son. As he dozed off in my arms, fatigue overcame me, prompting a walk around the ward.

In the lobby, I immediately noticed a group of police officers talking with two doctors. Their attention was focused on a corner room with an open door, their demeanor neither tense nor relaxed. Suddenly, a commotion erupted from inside – loud murmurs, cursing, and cries of "Get away from me!" from a girl. I turned away, heading for the restroom.

Upon my return, silence had fallen. Curiosity piqued, I deliberately walked towards the exit, passing the girl's room. Glancing inside, I saw her sitting on the hospital bed in disheveled scrubs, arms wrapped around her curled-up legs. She was a thin Black girl, perhaps 13, with curly hair tinged orange. Her body was tense, her face expressionless, eyes fixed intently on the space before her. A nurse stood nearby, both silent, neither noticing me.

Questions flooded my mind: Was she scared? Was this her first encounter with the police and an emergency room, or a familiar experience? Where was her family? Could the police, doctors, and nurses truly help her, or were they just another step in her way downhill? Would she feel supported by society, or frustrated by the uniformed adults who confined her to this corner room? Would she emerge stronger in body and mind, or more ill and distrustful?

She and I both must face life and death alone, in a world that is often unforgiving. The small measure of safety and freedom I enjoy was carved out by my family and friends and safeguarded by my ability to navigate the rules of society. Yet, when those very rules trapped me and shut doors in my face, I experienced my own share of desperate moments. In those times, I would retreat to my safe space, crying in defeat, but after gaining more strength, I was ready to struggle again. What would I have become without those second chances? Deep down, I fear I already knew the answers to the questions in my mind.

Why did you play with the food and not eat it like I told you?

This is what my father asks my toddler, and the answer, if we think about it, is simple: curiosity.

Curiosity is so deeply embedded in us that we often overlook it. It’s why we reach out, touch, and explore. I touch things because they’re interesting. I engage with the world because I enjoy interacting with it.

This impulse to explore and interact is more quintessentially human than any scientific breakthrough, legal framework, or moral philosophy. Our own experiences—our own truths—are the foundation for higher-level reasoning and meaningful social coordination. We seek more of our truth, not less, and we trust our innate ability to interpret it to build our understanding of the world.

Yet, there’s a fine line between teaching conclusions and nurturing curiosity. When shared conclusions resonate with an individual’s intuitive truths, they strengthen the social fabric. But when conclusions are imposed as dogma—designed to shape intuition instead of emerging from it—they can distort the collective understanding of reality.

In asking that rhetorical question, my father reflects the Confucian tradition, which values ancestral order and societal harmony above all—even above reality itself. While this tradition has its merits, it also reminds me of a fundamental Enlightenment principle: truth rooted in reality is indispensable. This principle may be simple, even stereotypical, but it’s one I can’t imagine living without.

Parenting is a wild ride, and today was no exception. It’s 9:30 PM, and I’m trying to convince my toddler son that sleep is a wonderful idea. We’re snuggled in bed, and I pull out my classic argument: "All your friends are already asleep, buddy. If you want to have fun playing with them tomorrow at school, you need to rest now so you’re not sleepy during playtime."

To my relief, he starts panning, tilting, and rolling—like a little camera drone settling into its dock. These are the telltale signs he’s beginning to wind down, his body finding its way to dreamland. Optimism fills the room; I imagine a smooth ride into his dreams and, for me, some quiet overtime work.

Then comes his first demand: more milk. I call his bluff immediately.
"Hey, we just had two bottles! No way you need more milk. Let’s go to sleep."
He insists, and just to spice things up, threatens to cry. Classic toddler. I cave.

I get up, tell him to hold onto his pillow, stay still, and wait for me. I return promptly with a bottle of 50% diluted milk—because, you know, compromise—and dangle it like the prize it is.
"Let’s go to sleep now," I say, feeling victorious.

It almost works. Almost.

Twenty seconds later, his sleepy little brain realizes the milk is still in my hand. He asks for it. Fine. I hand it over, thinking, Now we’re good. Surely this is the endgame.

But no. He clings to the last sliver of energy in his tiny body and declares he needs… water.

Now, this is absolute BS. He never drinks water in the bedroom, and the untouched milk bottle in his hands would serve the same purpose. I try reasoning.
"Hey, the milk will fix your thirst too! Drink that!"

He threatens to cry again.

And then it hits me: I’m the toy. I’m the shiny object keeping him from falling asleep.

So, I try a new strategy. I get up, ask him (once again) to hold onto his pillow, and make intense eye contact to double-confirm he understands: stay still while I get your water.

Here’s the twist—I don’t come back.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s sound asleep, and I’m laughing with my wife about the sheer absurdity of the bedtime shenanigans.

The Toddler:
Our little guy has mastered the art of trolling adults. He knows exactly when he has the upper hand—bedtime. Crying equals delays, and delays mean the grown-ups lose. It’s mutual destruction, and he knows we fear it. Does he enjoy this? Probably not. But he’ll use it to his advantage anyway.

The Adult:
I played the long game. By predicting his energy levels were critically low, I pulled a next-level troll move: walking away from the negotiation table. He ran out of steam without my distraction. Game, set, match.

For the Toddler:
Maybe trolling adults isn’t the best long-term strategy. It’s rude, inefficient, and ultimately a waste of everyone’s time—including his.

For the Adult (me):
Telling the toddler to wait and then not returning might not be the most trust-building move. Lesson learned.

For Both of Us:
Perhaps we’re better off skipping the trolling altogether and embracing some good, old-fashioned bedtime crying.

And that’s parenting in a nutshell: a chaotic mix of humor, tactics, and lessons learned (mostly by me).

Ariel
By Sylvia Plath in her own voice

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Since my twenties, Sylvia Plath’s story has captivated me. The Bell Jar (1963), often regarded as semi-autobiographical, deeply resonated with me. The protagonist’s journey into a glamorous yet alienating world mirrored my own struggles with identity as a twenty-year-old. Back then, I read Ariel, and its haunting intensity felt like a fantastical, R-rated dream, much like the rest of her work.

Life has since tempered me, pulling me through challenges that have deepened my empathy, particularly for those less privileged. Today, I can grasp nuances I previously missed. To borrow from South Park: I don’t get it, but I get it. Adding to this, the past two years of raising a child have brought firsthand insight into the societal expectation for mothers to provide unconditional care. When I stumbled upon Ariel yesterday while reading to my son at bedtime on my Kindle, its words struck a new chord. The poem vividly captures the physical and metaphorical experience of waking to a child’s cry—a moment of unease and entrapment.

Stasis in darkness.

She is asleep.

Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

Plath’s imagery describes the gradual awakening. Consciousness emerges, shapeless at first, like a tenuous thread extending into the distance.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! — The furrow

Her body begins to stir, and she regains control, as if piecing herself back together.

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Fully awakening, she senses a disturbance—perhaps the cry of her child?

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.

Thirst seizes her, intensifying the disorientation. She hallucinates berries, their taste and texture vivid.

Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

At last, she is fully awake, tending to her baby—soothing, cooing, and comforting with all the exhaustion of countless nights before.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

Resigned, she lays the crying baby down, drained yet serene.

The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.

Relief washes over her as she collects herself, savoring a brief moment of peace.

And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive

She reflects on her life, caught in a suffocating present, with no escape from a past that burdens her or a future that feels equally oppressive.

Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.

And so, she rises, ready to face the morning’s demands.

Reading Ariel anew, I felt a profound connection to the relentless cycles of care it portrays, though Sylvia Plath’s perspective is far from celebratory. Her words reflect a sense of confusion and oppression, capturing the emotional toll of motherhood as a stifling, inescapable burden rather than a heroic endeavor.

I’ve always wished I had more time to dive into the intricacies of observational astronomy. I want to understand mechanisms that seem too absurd to reason about. What are the margins of error in our knowledge? What does it mean to have an acoustic wave in the early baryonic universe (Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation)? What does it mean to have an inflation of space itself happening everywhere at once (Cosmic inflation)?

A common version of the Big Bang theory goes like this: In the beginning, the universe was incredibly small and unimaginably hot—so hot that it existed in high-energy states where even light couldn’t travel freely. Then came rapid inflation, which cooled the universe. During this cooling, lower-energy particles like baryons (matter) and photons (light) began to dominate. For the first time, light could travel through the universe. Because the universe wasn’t evenly distributed, this light wasn’t evenly dispersed. We observe this uneven first light today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Over time, the cooling baryonic universe formed galaxies, stars, planets—and eventually dinosaurs.

Over Christmas, as I sat in my living room with a toddler asleep on my lap, I found myself staring at the shadows cast by our mini Christmas tree in the corner. The warped shadows on the back wall baffled me—it was nearly impossible to deduce the structure of the object creating them. The light source was within the tree itself, small bulbs nestled among the leaves. The overlapping leaves caused the light to pass through layers of complete and partial occlusion. By the time it reached the edge of the tree, the light had lost much of its original shape.

To the human eye, the resulting patterns appeared fractal. Trying to capture the intricacies was overwhelming—an exercise in frustration that could easily induce a headache. Setting aside the view of the leaves themselves, and focusing solely on the shadows, the tree’s mystery deepened. I could discern the shapes of one or two branches, but describing the overall structure, size, or density of the tree felt impossible.

I believe astronomers face a similar challenge when studying the CMB. The patterns in the CMB are like the shadows of the early baryonic universe, just translucent enough for light to travel through. As light passed unevenly through this dense "baryonic forest," much like the branches and leaves of the Christmas tree, it left clues about the universe’s early structure.

But the universe didn’t pause. It continued inflating everywhere at once, carrying the baryons with it. A vast baryonic sphere of unknown shape and dimension emerged, giving rise to the observable universe. We’re made of those baryons and live within that sphere. Looking around, much like a squirrel inside my Christmas tree, we only see the distorted shadows on the wall—the light warped and twisted by countless occlusions.

I marvel at how astronomers make sense of the fascinating chaos of the CMB. How difficult it must be to draw conclusions from the shadowy fragments of the universe’s earliest light!