What Endures,
What Comes Next

I. The Question

I was born in Zurich, I grew up in a small old town in Bavaria where not much changed. I also lived in Berlin and after some stops ended up in San Francisco now, where almost everything changes weekly.

Two instincts have followed me throughout: toward what has endured, and toward what does not exist yet. Toward foundations and toward frontiers.

They seem contradictory but they are dependent.

II. The Foundation

History was my favorite subject in high school, and I am starting to understand why.

I recently traveled to the Balkans because of the layers of history there: Roman, Venetian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav. I wanted to see what lasts throughout.

My favorite writings are Ecclesiastes, Dostoevsky, and Marcus Aurelius. They discuss timeless foundations. The patterns among these works point towards the same question of what is underneath that keeps coming back?

What are the axioms?

III. The Forward

I do not look backward to return. I look backward for a foundation to build from.

If you understand what is fundamental, you can strip away inherited assumptions and everything becomes negotiable. That, in turn, is the recipe for innovation.

When classes moved online in 2020, it raised the question of "do I need to be in Berkeley if classes are online and libraries closed?" So once again, I ended up traveling. This time to Costa Rica for a few months. To explore beyond a typical constraint.

IV. The Faith

But why forward? What is the goal?

Agape. Love that asks nothing in return. Helping the stranger next to you, e.g. smiling to the person next to you on the Bart, and beyond, society as a whole. That is what holds a society up.

The most exciting and promising way I have found to do that is ML. ML should not be designed to replace us, but to help drive humanity forward.

The journey here has not been straight, and it won't be going forward. Faith in agape is the vector that drives me.