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Lessons from Wudang: The Cradle of Daoism
A canceled flight rerouted through a Tashkent layover, then a week of tai chi and Daoist philosophy at the Wudang Taoist Wellness Academy — on why the answer to burnout is to balance out and simplify, not push harder.
Project “Safety”
It was a windy Sunday evening in San Francisco, filming my Tai Chi routine on a rooftop, when I realized I couldn’t bring myself to approach the glass barrier — not fear of heights, but of myself. That moment forced me to confront twenty years of quietly accumulating overstimulation and a lack of safety, both internal and external. From two derailed PhDs to launching a company right before a pandemic, to standing at forty caught between building a business and building a family, I trace the “unequal race” that led me to burnout. What follows is my personal codex — eleven rules for redefining safety in 2026.
My Brain and Me
After my second trip to India, an Ayurvedic doctor told me something that stuck: my body is young for my age, but my mind is old. That single line unravels into a candid dissection of my own mind, which I describe as clogged, fatigued, and running at a fraction of capacity — despite my PhD in neuroscience, which, I admit, taught me surprisingly little about how to actually live better. From being gaslit by AI chatbots to designing my own “brain gym,” I map out the specific quirks of my mind and the practical, sometimes strange, fixes I’m testing to restore it.
The Buffet
San Francisco turned out not to be a place but a psychological interface — a mirror reflecting whatever I carried inside. I arrived with fear, scarcity, and a head full of second-hand narratives about a broken, transactional city, and that is exactly what I experienced. The shift began with a small act of unexpected kindness and deepened after months of inner work, when I realized that in a place this intense the signal you send out comes back amplified. The same streets that once felt hostile became a playground of authenticity, creativity, and belonging. In the end, it wasn’t the passport, the architecture, or the opportunity that determined where home is — it was cultural fit, mindset, and the courage to choose your filters deliberately.
What Every VC Should Know about Academic Research and Academic Culture.
Academic research looks like a perfect innovation pipeline for investors: clear rankings, measurable impact, elite institutions, Nobel-style rewards. In reality, it operates under a high-pressure incentive system that often favors publishable narratives over reliable signal. Practices such as p-hacking, selective reporting, post-hoc storytelling, and jargon-heavy “impact framing” make breakthrough claims hard to evaluate from the outside. For VCs, the challenge is not access to papers but translation—separating genuine, transferable technology from career-driven knowledge marketing. Red flags include missing limitations, fuzzy language, and “novelty” already known in adjacent fields. Reading science with informed skepticism turns deal-flow noise into a true competitive edge.
Which Domains of Knowledge Work Will Remain Dominated by Humans in 2026?
As we approach 2026, the most important question about AI and work is no longer what machines can do, but what humans will refuse to give up. While AI excels at speed, scale, and pattern recognition, it fails precisely where responsibility, trust, and judgment matter most. The future of knowledge work will not be decided by technical capability alone, but by human preference.
From executive decision-making and thought leadership to sales, education, and entrepreneurship, the roles that remain human-dominated share a common trait: someone must stand behind the outcome. In an AI-saturated world, visibility, accountability, and agency become scarce—and therefore valuable. The real advantage in 2026 will belong not to those who compete with AI, but to those who command it while remaining unmistakably human.