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I have now probably finished the first half of my life, so I thought I would try to condense the most important lessons I’ve learned so far into a format that may be useful to you as you grow up. My fear is that you’ll make the same mistake that I sometimes made, which is that you will hear advice, believe it doesn’t apply to you, and then a decade or two later realize it actually did apply to you. Maybe ignoring advice like that is part of growing up, though.

The reason I believe that my advice will be useful to you is primarily because I arrived at most of these conclusions by myself through experimentation and trial and error, and have also been able to successfully translate that advice to other people through coaching. Also, anecdotally, I think I have the best life I could possibly imagine, largely because of the lessons I’ve learned. Your ideal life will look different from mine, but I think the underlying principles will hold true regardless.

My first piece of advice, which will undermine all of the following advice, is that you should listen to a large number of people and make your own decisions based on all of the information you learn. So even though I’ll be happiest if you just do everything I say to do, and I’m completely convinced that I’m correct, the truth is that no one is completely correct and you’ll benefit most by exposing yourself to the best ideas of many people and analyzing them yourself.

At your core, your goal should be to be the best version of yourself and to share that person with the world. Almost everyone, at some point or another, makes the mistake of trying to conform to a generic ideal of what a person should be. This isn’t just a difficult game, but it’s a game that’s impossible to win. No matter how hard you work towards reaching someone else’s goals for you, you will never reach your own. Discover what is important to you and work towards that.

Maybe the most direct piece of advice I’ll give in this letter is to never drink, use drugs, or smoke. This is also the piece of advice I’m most scared you’ll ignore, because most kids will experiment with it, and without the benefit of decades of life experience and seeing different paths people take, it’s very hard to understand why it’s bad. In school you’ll be given many reasons not to do these things, but they miss the most important reason not to, in my opinion.

You shouldn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, because these things give you results that you haven’t earned. In the short term this is great, but in the long run it makes you lazy and incomplete. For example, drinking can make you act more confidently. When you act more confidently, you will almost always get better results. But alcohol doesn’t actually make you confident. And, in fact, it can make you less confident because you never build the skill of confidence. Every effect of these drugs is to receive a feeling that you haven’t “earned”, and every time you do it you become less able to create that feeling naturally. When you are young you can’t tell the difference because someone who just starts drinking hasn’t missed out on a lifetime of learning actual social skills, confidence, etc., but over decades the effect compounds and people who casually use these substances often become unable to function normally without them.

The counterargument would be that some people use these things in moderation and receive some of the benefits with none of the downsides. This is true. My response would be that you are still better off not needing them and that it’s very risky to assume that you’ll just happen to nail that compromise. All of the substances I mentioned are fundamentally addictive and there’s just no point in taking that risk. You should take risks in your life, but they should always be risks with very high payoffs and manageable risks. Alcohol, smoking, and drugs are the opposite— they offer very limited upside with nearly unlimited downside.

On the subject of risks, you should take a lot of risks when you are young. In particular, if you’re inclined to start a business you should do so. If you put all of your money into a business and fail, it’s very easy to just start again. Try ten of them with enough diligence and you’ll have one be successful. You’ll also find a lot of peers in the same position, so it’s fun to learn and try things together. As you get older you have more to lose and less time to recover, so you’ll be more reluctant to put it all on the line. When I was in my twenties I assumed I’d have the same attitude in my forties, but I definitely don’t.

I’d like to convince you to invest money young and let it compound, but I’ve found it’s almost impossible to understand why this is important and how well it works until you’ve seen it work for other people. And even more difficult is to convince you that when you’re old enough to enjoy the money that it will still matter. When I was a teenager I remember being totally unable to fathom being forty, and not really caring very much about my forty-year-old self. But time flies and I’m incredibly grateful for the sacrifices I made when I was younger that have paid off in the meantime.

The argument, though, is this: any money you invest at 20, will be worth about 4.5x when you’re 40 and about 32x when you’re 65. It can feel like those ages don’t matter or that you’re so disconnected from them that there’s no point in considering them, but when you reach those ages and the sum of your decisions has shaped your life, you’ll either be very glad or regretful for the decisions you made.

You will find competing pressures to impress different people. You want to seem cool to your friends, attractive to girls, like a good son to your parents, etc. Sometimes these pressures compete with each other. Your friends may think it’s cool for you to sneak out, but your parents may be disappointed if they catch you. It’s best to seek to impress only yourself, mostly because you have to live with yourself 24/7 and it’s hard to fake things to yourself. In the meantime, you’ll probably find that by impressing yourself you end up impressing everyone else by accident, because it’s rare to find someone who seeks only their own validation. This is especially impressive to people who are busy trying to impress other people, which is almost everybody.

It’s hard to imagine what the world will be like when you read this advice. Technological change has been the defining factor of my generation, and with AI just now becoming mainstream, it seems that this change will only accelerate. In a world where technology dominates it’s good to be involved in it and to understand it, but outsized results will be had by focusing on universal skills that others have forgotten. Learn social skills, learn to be an interested and interesting person, learn to have empathy and kindness. Learn technology too, but you’ll find that both in your personal and professional life, these soft skills are rarer and therefore more valuable.

The people you are around will end up being one of the biggest factors in the quality of your life. This is less obvious when you’re young because you’re just around people all the time. As you get older you have to be a good friend for people to want to be around you. Being a good friend and having good friends are the biggest assets you can possibly have in your life. The easiest way to be a good friend is to be interested in your friends lives and to be there for your friends even when it isn’t convenient for you. If you say you are going to be somewhere or do something, follow up and do it. If a friend entrusts you with a secret, don’t share it. If a friend needs your help, offer it without expecting anything back.

I’m the kind of person who can rattle off advice all day, but I think if you just do these things you’re guaranteed to have a great life and to make the lives of those around you better. I’m excited to see the person you become!

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Picture is me and my favorite little guy on his first island trip!

The gear post should come in December this year… I think it’s the best one in many years, with tons of new stuff most people have never heard of!

On the last day of the convention one of Michael’s friends picked us up to show us around the city. I had no real impression of Chicago prior to this. I had been a few times in the past, but only in the winter which didn’t lend itself towards exploring the city. The way he talked about Chicago was how I talk about Las Vegas. He loved his city and was excited to tell us about all of the hidden sides to it that we weren’t aware of.

He took us to Pequod’s pizza. I love pizza, but am generally not a huge deep dish fan. Pequod’s was amazing. I had never had deep dish that good before, and I literally thought about the pizza about five times a week for the next six months. 

After talking about this pizza for half a year, my wife and I finally found some time to go to the city together on a one day layover before another trip. We ubered to Pequod’s (it was good, but not quite as good as I remembered), walked around the city and went to an amazing pinball arcade.

Chicago is a strange city. It’s the third biggest city in the US and no one I know has ever mentioned it. Everyone talks about SF, LA, New York, Miami, Austin, etc… but none of my friends ever seem to go to Chicago. And yet… I think it’s a lot nicer than those cities. The river runs through downtown, with bridges every block or so. The skyline is incredible. The food is great. It’s in an interesting geographic location, not that far from the east or west coast, with great flights to Europe and Asia.

And… the real estate is absurdly cheap. If there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s real estate that is underpriced. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually buy a place there, but either way my wife and I wanted to spend more time so we booked a week-long trip and contacted a real estate agent.

We had a great week in Chicago. The Art Institute is one of the best museums I’ve been to, and the only one that elicited an audible “oh my god”, by both me and my friend as we walked into the Monet room. Qiao Lin was the best hotpot I’ve ever had (and I spend a lot of time in China), and Au Cheval is perhaps tied for best burger. We saw the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia Festival, which is an amazing outdoor symphony hall. The architecture was, to me, more interesting than that of any other US city, especially when seen from the river on an architectural tour. I even met up with a reader (hi Noah!) at Living Water, a surprisingly good tea house that appears to be a boba place when you look it up online.

All of our condo showings were at the end of the week. The night before I started doing the math on it and realized that it doesn’t actually make sense to buy a place there. The taxes and HOA fees are so high that financially it makes a lot more sense to go visit several times a year and stay in a nice hotel. I didn’t want to cancel the showings, but I went into them thinking, “Too bad… I wish the numbers made more sense so that I could actually buy a place in good conscience.” My wife was campaigning for just staying in hotels and said if I wanted to buy an apartment I could do it by myself.

The first three units were okay. If I were actually moving to Chicago I’d be happy in any of them, but in each case I had to admit that staying at a hotel would probably be just as good, if not better. The fourth was better and I felt like maybe I could convince myself it would be better than a hotel, but I knew I was stretching.

The last was a wildcard. The images online made it look terrible, but the location was amazing and so was the price. As soon as we walked in, we saw something that you couldn’t see from the listing— the view. My wife, previously quite uninterested in buying, turned to me and said, “I think we should buy this one together”. I went out on the balcony and realized there was no way I could avoid buying the condo. It was just too good, and with the view it was much better than any hotel room we could get. 

As we returned the keys to the front desk I took a glance at the visitor log. Other units for sale in the building had maybe one visitor, but this one had five. We put in an offer immediately, and were told that there was a competing offer. In my estimation the unit was actually worth about 20-25% more than the list price, so I was worried that we were about to get into a bidding war. I don’t quite know how he pulled it off, but our realtor managed to get it for us for under asking. I looked up historic prices in the building and couldn’t find a single one of this size that went for this price.

The next day I went to do the inspection myself. At first glance many of the systems like the fridge and AC seemed to be broken, but it turned out that they actually all worked fine. I was totally prepared for a major renovation, but it turned out it only needed cosmetic fixes. It was being sold by a trustee of an estate, who I believe never had it inspected or even cleaned, so my theory is that the seller and any other buyer assumed it was much worse than it was.

We closed a few days ago and in a couple days I’ll go to the condo for the first time and start getting to work.

The best part of having properties all around the world is getting to know places in a much deeper way than I could if I just visited. I went to the island twice in the past month and was reflecting on what a unique privilege it is to get to know the community there. When we arrived our neighbors gave us a basket of homemade baked goods and vegetables from their garden. When we went to dinner the waitresses remembered my name and asked what projects we were doing this trip. The lady at the hardware store told me about her trip to Vegas because she knows I live there. 

I’m really looking forward to getting to know Chicago. It feels like a massively underrated city with a ton to offer, and its strengths and weaknesses complement Vegas perfectly. Vegas’ biggest weakness is the lack of fine arts, but Chicago has that in spades. It’s freezing in Chicago in the winter, but Vegas has great winter weather. Vegas has a brand new powerhouse hockey team, Chicago has one of the original six teams and is rebuilding with one of the hottest rookies in almost a decade. Vegas has a very small walkable downtown, Chicago goes on forever. It’s also a ~3.5 hour flight between the two cities, which is just under my threshold of long flights. If I look a month out, round trip flights are mostly under $100, with several days in the $39-50 range. 

I know I’ve said it before… but I think this must be my last real estate purchase. Between Hawaii, Vegas, Chicago, Budapest, Tokyo, and the island… I’m going to need longer years.

Any Chicago recommendations? Do you live in Chicago? I may do a meetup there at some point.

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Photo is the skyline from the First Lady architectural tour. It’s rare that I’d say a tourist thing is a must-do, but that tour definitely is.

My next sentence was originally, “now is one of those times for business”, but the opportunity is actually much broader than that. Now is one of those times for… almost anything.

Right now you can multiply your individual effort by at least 10X in many different fields, and very few people actually realize this or are doing it. You can get ahead right now, but that window will close over the next year as everyone one else catches on (or hires/subcontracts people who have caught on).

A few months ago when cohesive good quality video generation first made it to my feeds (and I assume I was late to it since I don’t really care about video generation), I called a friend in a panic. In high school he made a pretty awesome documentary about us camping out for Star Wars, he went to USC to study film, got an internship at a major TV show, etc. Then… nothing, even though he always wanted to make movies.

Hey, I said, you can make your own movie now! He’s technical, so he could easily figure out how to make an entire movie, or at least a short. Invest a little bit of money and a lot of time, and he could have made the first AI movie! The bar for making a movie now is ostensibly pretty high… but the bar for making an AI movie is probably pretty low. I’d make a movie, release it everywhere online for free, hype up the fact that it’s the first fully AI movie… and now you are a famous filmmaker. What doors does that open?

Almost exactly one month ago I tried Claude Code for the first time. It’s software that can interact with your computer and your codebase to complete tasks for you all on its own. I typed in something like, “Make a visualization of a cruise ship’s path over the year”. I figured it would ask me some questions and then make a table that showed what port the ship was in each day. Instead it found the credentials to my database, went in and looked at my data, and built a site where you could choose one of the ships and it displayed its path on a map with a color-coded trail and detailed information below. My jaw literally dropped and I just kept saying, “Oh my god…”. Even being technically savvy and already using AI for some coding, I had no idea it was this good.

Since then I have made the same amount of progress that a dedicated Tynan would have made in 1-2 years, and probably more progress than I’ve actually made in the past 8 years. 

One month ago, CruiseSheet was still running on bootstrap and jquery. I had been wanting to move to tailwind and native javascript, but it was a daunting task. If you don’t understand what that means, the gist is recoding every single part of the site that the user sees. The few times I started ended up being so frustrating that I tabled the project. With Claude I completed it in a week and also redesigned almost every single page in the process. Oh, and while I was at it I optimized every aspect of the site for both SEO and speed. 

Not only would that one job take me months… I just didn’t want to do it. It’s a slog, won’t immediately improve the business, and frankly I don’t have to do it so I didn’t. That’s one of the magic parts of AI— it does the parts that you really don’t want to do, so work feels like only doing the parts that you enjoy. I’ve worked 12-16 hours most days over the past month but my memory of that is mostly watching YouTube videos, browsing the web, hanging out with my friend on a cruise, and checking in on Claude every 5-10 minutes. I’ve also spent hours just thinking about what I want to build, rather than worrying about how difficult it would be.

Work is also much more satisfying because every single day CruiseSheet can really become whatever I want it to be. I’ve always wanted to have a port guide that I would actually use… three days later I had one. I wanted to make a cool visualizer to see where all of the cruise ships were at any given time. Done. I can’t even remember all of the things I’ve done in the past month because I’m moving so fast. Maybe more than anything— I’m proud of the site again. I’ve always been proud of making a site that shows the best deals, but the look and feel and performance of the site had become dated and atrophied over the years. Not any more!

I’m not too focused on competition or even on making money, but… has any other cruise site made this much progress in the past month? I doubt it. And I’m going to keep working on it every day because there’s really nothing I’d rather do. By the time other companies figure out that they could be doing this too… I think I will have lapped them. As I write this post Claude is working on generating deck plans for every single deck on every single cruise ship. 

I use coding as an example because it’s what I’m doing, but there are opportunities in really every field. You can generate images, video, text, and automations using n8n. You can have ChatGPT or Claude come up with strategies to use those tools. You could literally go from having an idea to making your first sale in a day.

My guess is that people reading this will fall mostly into two groups: people who are already doing it who will think, “Yeah, obviously… I’ve already been doing this for months” and people who aren’t doing it who will think, “Yeah, but its probably not actually that good”. I was in the latter camp a month ago. If you’re there, you should at least spend a day and see what’s out there. It’s wild.

Not only are these tools powerful, but they’re actually usable by normal people now. Up until a month ago every line of CruiseSheet was hand coded by me. In the past month I have maybe coded 50 lines total out of thousands of lines that have been made. Some technical understanding has been helpful, but you really don’t even need to know the code anymore. There are other tools like Lovable and Replit that require zero knowledge.

There are very few moments in a lifetime with opportunity this extraordinary. The last one was Bitcoin/crypto (which I also happened to write about very early https://novasync.top/bitcoin/), and the one before that was probably the internet boom, which also changed my life. Even if you don’t think AI can help you… you should look into it because I bet you have no idea what it’s capable of.

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Photo is Shoshone falls in Idaho. My wife and I did a road trip from Vegas to Seattle a couple weeks ago. First time in an RV since I sold mine!

I made a bunch of blog-like posts on my X account with the idea that I might post blog posts there instead of on the blog. My first post got a ton of traction and I was encouraged… subsequent ones got less. We’ll see. Follow me there just in case.

If you’re new to my annual gear post, I travel indefinitely (often 30+ days at a time) with a small backpack, and I maintain a list of everything I travel with every year. I’ve been doing it since about 2008, and people on onebag have said that I was the first one to make this format.

A lot of my items are tea related, which is a specific hobby I have. However, almost everything else (maybe not the shoes…) is something I think you’re crazy not to have if you’re a frequent lightweight traveler. Many of these items have been refined and tested for 5-15 years and represent a lot of experience and consideration.

A quick word about how I choose my items. My criteria are generally the best possible item that is as light and compact as possible, with little regard for price. I carry so few things and each one is important enough to me that I find it’s easy to get the value from them. When I look at other peoples’ gear posts, I’m often surprised at how many slots are filled with items that have obvious superior alternatives. If you find one of those in mine, please let me know! Every year or two someone finds something that is a real improvement

I do get affiliate commissions from some of the products here, but it does not affect my recommendations. If you look year over year you’ll see that I often replace commission items with non commission items. Sometimes companies give me things for free, but that also doesn’t affect my evaluation. I think integrity is important and my reputation is far more valuable to me than free products.

Wool and Prince Merino Henley Perfect

This is my third year using the Henley instead of a more traditional button-down. I like both, but the Henley is so soft and comfortable that it makes a big difference when trying to sleep on planes or curl up and read a book. It also has a lot more stretch, so it’s better for active things. It also seems to be totally indestructible. I’ve never replaced it and it looks exactly as it did new.

Buy at Wool and Prince

Wool and Prince V-Neck T-Shirt

New year, back to gray! This might be the longest running item on the gear list, though I’m not sure. Maybe I should start tracking how many years everything makes it and it would be like a competition. As always, I love this shirt but wish it had a pocket for folded up boarding passes.

If you’re new to the gear post, this is probably a good time to say that the only reason I’m able to keep my packing so light is because I wear wool. I routinely wear this shirt 7-14 days in a row without washing it, and it stays fresh. Wool and Prince is my favorite wool company, but there are other good ones out there, too.

This is literally the only shirt I wear all year, even when I’m at home, unless I have to go to a wedding. I generally switch colors every year, which shocks the people in my life because they’re so used to seeing me in one color.

When I became the godfather to my friend Noah‘s daughter, he got a Wool and Prince V-Neck embroidered with “El Padrino” for me.

The v-neck is now less deep than previous years. I wish it was the old depth, but overall it’s about the same.

Buy at Wool and Prince

Wool and Prince Stretch Canvas Pants

These pants made it another year! They look like black jeans, have a really good amount of stretch, and are comfortable and durable… except the pockets!

I got a beta pair with redesigned pockets, and a few months later they started to break too. I’ve been going back and forth with Wool & Prince and they are going to replace the material next year. I have a large phone with much pointier corners than average, and those corners start wearing out the pocket material. That said, Wool & Prince has never had another complaint about them. Do I use pockets wrong?

These are 55% merino wool, which is higher than most wool pant blends. You need some material besides wool to keep it durable, but despite these being a higher amount they have been extremely durable. I’ve put them through their paces, worn them every non-warm day, and they’re in perfect shape.

These pants were gone last year, but apparently they were just out of stock. Phew!

Buy at Wool and Prince

Faherty All Day Shorts 9″ New

A year or two ago a reader (email me for credit if this was you) suggested Faherty shorts, and I was lucky enough to remember the name as I was looking for a new pair. And… WOW are these shorts great!

What makes shorts like these special is that they look good enough to wear every day as shorts, but they dry quickly and have a draw string. The draw string doesn’t serve a huge function if the shorts are the right size, but by tying it together and popping it over the waistband I feel like the shorts look like a bathing suit enough that you don’t look out of place swimming in them. All of the pockets have a mesh portion to drain.

The material is even better than rip curl, they look much less casual, and they seem to dry just as fast (I swam in a cold swimming pool in late November just to give them a full test).

I removed the “perfect” on these because the fabric started pilling after a couple years of moderate use. I still wear them, but it’s annoying that they don’t stay in better shape.

Buy at Faherty

Wool and Prince Boxer Briefs

The Icebreaker merino briefs are finally gone! I decided to try Wool and Prince again last year, and have made the switch back to them. I found that the Icebreaker ones would last a year (~180 wears), but no longer. A year later the Wool and Prince ones retain their stretch better and look brand new.

My one complaint is that the waistband wrinkles/folds over, unlike Icebreaker. Wool & Prince is trying to figure it out and thinks it may be due to laundry habits. I have a brand new pair that I’m being careful with and will figure out what causes the waistband to have issues.

I switched to trunks because every once in a rare while there’s some reason I need to be wearing my underwear in mixed company. This year I found myself jumping into the ocean in Greenland to swim to an iceberg in front of some bewildered cruise passengers.

Buy at Wool and Prince

Montbell Plasma 1000 Jacket (Japanese Version) Perfect

Earlier I said that my t-shirt might be the longest running gear item in the list, but this has been around for longer if you don’t count upgrading from the 800 fill count to 1000 fill count years ago when they started making it.

This is simply the lightest and most compact jacket that will actually keep you warm in any normal situation. Don’t be fooled by all of the marketing hype for synthetic down— they just don’t work as well. Neither does lower fill power down. Having a small jacket is such a key piece of being able to travel with a tiny bag, and this is the only one that I consider to be good enough.

This jacket has lasted for many years now, is nice and warm, and looks decent. If you buy it in Japan it will have pockets, but if you buy it in the US it won’t.

Adam Ruggle let me know that you can order it from the Japanese webshop (linked below) and it’s even cheaper than buying the US one at current rates.

Buy at Montbell or in Japan

Rab Cinder Phantom

I loved the idea of the windbreaker as a shell until I found myself running through a storm in Riga, soaking wet, desperately trying to find a working ATM so that I could get cash to get to the airport.

What I’ve learned about waterproof shells is that the lightest ones are made for bikers. This makes for a slightly shorter cut (in the photo it’s folded over, not super short), but they look normal enough for regular use. After a ridiculous amount of research I ended up on the Rab Cinder Phantom.

This is the second year I’ve had this, and I’m surprised every time it actually keeps me dry. It’s as light as tissue-paper, but has never worn or ripped despite a lot of use.

Don’t be tempted to get pullovers. You can save a tiny bit of weight but they are really annoying and have fewer options for temperature regulation.

Besides keeping you dry, a shell is critical for the coldest weather, as it traps the heat when worn on top of the Mont Bell plasma. Between the two you have a range of warmth ranging from unzipped plasma in the spring and fall to zipped plasma with shell for winter and snow.

The Rab Cinder is 3.5oz, which is a full 25% lighter than the last one, and it is definitely waterproof. The only thing I don’t like about it is the stuff sack is tricky to use and the hood doesn’t follow your head very well when you turn it.

Buy at Rab

FarPointe Alpha Wool Beanie New

I bought this because last year readers tried to convince me that Polartec Alpha is better than down. I did the research and it’s nowhere close, but I thought it might work as a hat. And… we’ll see how long this hat lasts in the gear post.

I keep it in my bag now because it truly weighs almost nothing (21g) and underneath my rain shell hood it provides a reasonable amount of warmth. I’m not convinced that the warmth/weight ratio is actually better than just getting a thin wool hat, but I do find myself putting it on all the time when it’s cold.

Buy at Farpointe

Relwen Flyweight Flex Blazer New

A European airline offered me an upgrade… and then took it away when they saw my t-shirt and shoes. I asked what exactly I needed to wear to get an upgrade, ran back through customs and security, bought the cheapest blazer and shoes that I could find, and then got on the flight.

And then something funny happened. I landed in Chicago and a Nigerian family struck up a conversation with me on the tram. No one ever randomly talks to me. I checked into my hotel and asked if I could borrow a phone charger (mine was broken), and then check-in guy said, “You know what… I trust you. I’ll just give you mine.”

I had a wedding coming up in Japan and I thought, “maybe I’ll buy the lightest blazer in the world”. Sure enough, people do treat me better when I wear the blazer, and it looks good enough that the bride didn’t complain about me officiating in it.

I like that it’s lightweight, looks good rumpled, and if the buttons are all buttoned it looks like a hunting jacket, not a blazer. It’s just bulky enough that I can carry it in my fully-loaded bag, but it makes things pretty cramped. My guess is that it will end up only coming with me when it’s either cold enough that I can just wear it all the time, or when I need to have a blazer.

Buy from Huckberry

Merrel Hydro Moc Next New

These shoes are similar to those I wore in prior years, but they have a real sole made of harder rubber. I tried them on a lark because when the other soles wear out they become very slippery. Unfortunately they’re already discontinued, so I guess other people don’t think they’re as great as I do.

I love these shoes and was tempted to label them as perfect, but I’m not sure that label can be applied to shoes that look like this. Then again… I did wear them to a wedding this year and wasn’t kicked out.

The point of wearing shoes like this is that you don’t need to wear/pack/wash socks, which is a hard requirement for me. Most shoes like this (e.g. Crocs) don’t quite have enough ventilation to never smell bad. These do. Unlike normal shoes, they can also be used as water shoes and they dry quickly and easily.

Buy at Amazon

Roav Eyewear Lennox Sunglasses with Transition Lenses New

These are the smallest folding sunglasses you can get. They look really good, weigh almost nothing, and have survived years of use without issues.

The only thing I don’t like about them is that the nose pads flop around too much.

I’ve always hated the case that these came with, since it seemed too big for the small amount of protection it provided. ROAV also sells a fake leather pouch that looked similar. Ever since I got them I wanted to make a custom pouch.

A couple years ago in Madrid some friends organized a leather making workshop where we all got to make our own projects, so I made this little case.

This year I switched from carrying glasses and sunglasses separately to carrying just one with transition lenses. It’s a compromise, but one I’m happy to make given how infrequently I wear sunglasses. If I was more of a sunglasses guy, I’d probably carry both.

I chose Transitions XTRActive lenses because they will darken even in a car and they seemed to be the darkest. I’d say in reality they’re just barely dark enough to make a difference. As normal glasses they work perfectly, so having sunglasses in a pinch is a bonus.

Buy at ROAV + Lenses at Lensabl

Seiko Astron GPS Watch Perfect New

Wow, the Breitling mechanical watch is gone after eight years of horological dominance! I wrote an entire article about this watch, but here’s the gist of why I switched:

I used to be enamored with traditional watchmaking (and still am, to an extent), but this watch really shattered some illusions. I believe this is the watch great watchmakers would make today, given that back in the 1800s they were using all current technology.

This watch syncs the time every day via GPS so that it’s always correct, can find your timezone and set the time anywhere in the world, remains charged via solar (and can survive two years in the dark), and looks and feels like a normal analog watch. It’s even titanium, so it’s very light.

I’d consider getting the newest model that has a stopwatch now, but I prefer how mine looks and don’t need a stopwatch badly enough to switch.

I linked to Chrono24 below which has ALL GPS Astron watches. My specific one is an SBXC117.

Buy on Chrono24

Minaal Daily Backpack

I’ve been back on the Minaal back for a couple years now, and the pros and cons still remain. The quality is a step better than you can find anywhere else, it’s light, and it looks great and unimposing. On the downside, it has truly terrible organization and despite everyone telling me the same thing and being close friends with the founders, I can’t get them to change it.

Buy at Minaal

Sea to Summit Ultra-sil Packable Daypack New

I had something like this years ago, stopped carrying it, and then went on enough cruises in a row that I really wished I had something I could easily take to the beach or on a hike. The bag is so small and light that it’s really a no-brainer if you ever use it at all. It’s perfect for a towel and for hiding your wallet, or for stuffing jackets into as you hike. Stuffing it back into the sac is very annoying, but given that I use it a dozen times a year or so, I like how compact it is.

Kem Vintage WWII Playing Cards New Perfect

These were made during WWII for US soldiers. You can’t tell very well from the picture, but the cards are tiny, maybe 1/3 the size of normal cards. I used to carry these around everywhere when I was practicing memorization, but then I stopped.

Now my wife, friends, and I are obsessed with this three-player Chinese card game called “fight the landlord”, so we carry these around to play.

Finding these cards is impossible now. I have a couple decks, but only one that has the jokers (necessary for our game). A reader once offered me a few decks he had collected, but I didn’t take him up on it. Huge regret!

Can’t buy anywhere…

Philips One Toothbrush

I like having an electric toothbrush, and this one is good enough. I wish it was more powerful, but this one is a big enough improvement over a non-electric that I’m happy with the compromise. Get the rechargeable one. I got the one that uses batteries but it’s very hard to replace them, so it sort of defeats the purpose.

My toiletry bag is from Swiss Air business class. A pro tip— search ebay for business class amenity kits. A lot of them are stupid, but in general they are the only toiletry bags that are small. I bought five of these on ebay and gave a couple to family members.

Buy at Amazon

Scissors and Nail Clippers Perfect

The nail clippers are my trusty Henckels Ultra-Slim Nail Clippers. This is the same pair I’ve had for six years and they’re still just as sharp and effective as ever.

The scissors are Tweezerman GEAR Scissors. I think that I actually bought some fancier Dovo Solingen ones when I thought I lost these, but to be honest I can’t tell the difference from a practical standpoint, so it’s better to just buy these.

Make sure you get the rounded tips. Most places don’t care, but I went through security three times in Australia recently and they were militant about checking to make sure the tips were rounded.

Keith Titanium Travel Tea Set Perfect

I know the portion of people reading a gear post who actually want tea gear is vanishingly small, but this is maybe my favorite item on the entire list. It’s an absolutely perfect tea set, made of titanium, and the next best alternative is SO much worse that I have a spare set just to make sure I never have to go without. I also bought an extra cup so that I can serve three guests instead of only two.

I modified the set by anodizing the titanium and cutting off the handle of the fairness pitcher. The titanium imparts no flavor and is virtually indestructible. If you love tea and you travel, you should have this.

The cups and gaiwan are double walled so they are never hot to the touch, and the shape and edges are ideal.

Even though I marked it as perfect, I wish there was some way for the interior of the cups and gaiwan to be white to better sea the color of the tea. I think it’s just not possible with titanium, though.

Buy at AliExpress

Kanpai Titanium 350 Thermos and 3D Printed Tea Containers Perfect

This is the lightest double wall water bottle you can get. I love the extra-wide mouth and the no-taper design that makes it easy to clean and to store things inside. It comes with three tops but I just use the hot water one. It’s absolutely perfect for keeping boiled water in. I replaced the noisy rubber seal with an o-ring, and it works perfectly.

As soon as I got my 3D printer I designed and printed a set of stacking tea containers designed to take up about 95% of the interior volume. I can now hold 50% more tea than I could before. They were hard for me to make, especially because they were the first time I tried to make screw threads, which took a lot of trial and error.

The tea containers hold NFC tags and made a script using Tasker so that I can use to electronically label the teas. You can download the files and print your own here.

Buy at Amazon

300W Immersion Water Heater

In case it’s not obvious, I put this in the Kanpai Thermos and use it to boil water. Often I’ll put the top on and wait until I’m in the air before I make my tea. You can also ask for hot water on the airplane, but it’s sometimes not very good because of mineral buildup.

The model with the switch is no longer available, but I might go without it anyway. I once had someone turn on the switch when it wasn’t in water and we almost burnt an airbnb down. Now I unplug it every time anyway.

It’s very important to get a model that can run on 120v or 240v. I suspect that all of them can and that some manufacturers just don’t bother to label it, but I don’t take the risk. In Europe (or on cruises) you can use 240v to boil 4x faster. 300W is a good compromise between size and speed of boiling.

Buy at Amazon

Carbon Fiber Money Clip Perfect

I still have my rather expensive Koolstof carbon fiber money clip, but there are cheaper options on Amazon now that seem to be identical, so I’m linking one of those instead. I can’t imagine why someone would use any wallet other than this. It’s super compact and light, doesn’t set off the metal detector, and is very easy to use. Mine has retained its springiness for over a decade now.

Buy at Amazon

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 NEW

Folding phones are just so good that I feel bad for all non folders out there. You have to get over the “but it’s thicker” factor, and have to fight against the Apple blue-bubble brainwashing, but once you do you’ll never go back.

I thought that I wanted the bigger screen for watching movies on the plane, and while it is noticeably better than a regular phone for that, it’s not the main draw. My favorite thing to use the big screen for is reading (it’s bigger than a Kindle’s screen) and web browsing. I barely prefer a kindle over it, and read way more while traveling now.

I used to hate browsing the web on my phone, but now I do it all the time because the size and shape feels like a normal screen. If I need to copy information from one app to another I just open them side by side and it’s like having two phones.

Everyone predicts that they will hate the crease in the middle of the phone, but you really don’t notice it. The inner display has no notch or even a punch-out (or, *cough*, a dynamic island), but instead has a mini screen that covers the camera when it’s not in use. If you look directly at it you can tell that it’s not like the rest of the screen, but when you’re watching a movie or something you forget it’s there.

When the phone is closed it is narrower than a normal phone but thicker. While I would obviously prefer a thinner phone, it’s a very manageable size and fits easily in tight jean pockets.

I’ve had every Fold from the 3 to the 6, and I tend to upgrade every year because they make it very inexpensive to do so and I’m happy for a brand new screen and battery. That said, there’s not much improvement in the 6 vs the 4, except that it’s a little bit smaller.

I didn’t switch to the Pixel Fold because Samsung DEX is a seriously underrated feature. It’s hard to explain, but it essentially runs a virtual computer and sends it to a screen. It’s not just mirroring your phone— you can use both independently at the same time. I mostly use it to play shows on TVs.

The only reason I didn’t label this as perfect is because I wish it had a 5-10X zoom. It’s close, though.

I use T-Mobile service with the Global Plus add-on, which gives me free LTE/5G everywhere. I happened to add it on during the <7 days where it offered unlimited LTE rather than a 15GB cap. Project Fi can be a bit cheaper, but T-Mobile includes free voice calls to and from every country with Global Plus, and I’ll definitely get a lot of use out of that.

Buy at Amazon

Lenovo X1 Carbon 11th Generation Perfect

The main story here is that the X1 Carbon is a perfect laptop. It has the best keyboard of any compact laptop, has a touchpoint (and a trackpad, but once you adjust to the touchpoint it’s SO much better), and has a great screen and other specs.

The X1 is very high performance, has a trackpoint, an excellent screen, the best keyboard, and plenty of other benefits.

Despite having a bigger screen, the X1 is 15% lighter than a Macbook Air. It can also have twice the RAM and a better OLED screen. I think if more Macbook people saw how good this machine is, they would switch.

The screen I chose was the 2800×1800 OLED that can run at 90hz. I’ve never had a laptop that can run at 90hz before, and it really makes for a buttery-smooth experience. I don’t miss 4k at all.

I run Arch Linux on my machine and all of the hardware works perfectly out of the gate. I stopped getting a laptop with a built in modem because It never worked perfectly with Linux and it’s easy enough to hotspot these days.

The port selection on the computer is perfect (2 USB A, 2 USB C, HDMI).

If I were buying today, I’d certainly buy the newest one (13th generation). It’s the first one in many years that is smaller and lighter (now under 1kg!)

Buy at Lenovo

Mogics Adapter MA1 Perfect

A couple years ago a reader recommended this travel adapter to me and it’s incredible.

It’s just a tiny cylinder that can convert any plug to a US plug. Unlike previous iterations, I don’t think that this could get any smaller.

It is slightly difficult to get. The only reasonable way is to buy a combo pack with a weird travel power strip on Amazon. It’s worth doing just for the adapter.

Buy at Amazon

Anker 30W Charger New

The new charger I got last year was amazing… until it just randomly stopped working. I bought another one, same problem. Then they came out with a newer model, which I assumed must have been to correct this issue… and it broke too.

The problem seems to be that when used on 240v it sometimes just stops working for a while (but then may later start working). I’m not sure if it’s overheating or shoddily made, but I need for my power source to be reliable.

Now I carry around two of these. I find 30w to be plenty for laptop and phone, and the second one just rattles around in the bottom of the backpack in case I lose the main one. I’m generally not big into redundancy, but I had just one too many issues this year.

I ordered a bunch of USB C cables and the best one by far was the Anker Powerline II. The newer III is worse. The II was the least bulky and easiest to coil. I would love recommendations on thin and easy to coil 2M cables. I have bought so many of them and don’t think any are great.

Buy on Amazon

1964 Ears Custom IEMs With AliExpress cable

Last year I tried to switch to something that’s easier for people to buy (Samsung Bud Pros), but these are just so comfortable that I keep going back to them. Because they are custom molded to my ears they don’t push on my ears at all, so I can wear them for a whole flight and barely notice that they’re there.

The audio quality is predictably excellent and better than I really need. The custom fit blocks a lot of noise.

They were originally wired, but you can buy all sorts of replacement cables on AliExpress that convert them to bluetooth. I like this style, which allows me to drape them over my neck so that they hang there when I have them out.

Buy at 64 Audio (Realistically mine are a totally different model that they don’t make anymore, so you may have to do your own research)

Incharge 6 Keychain XL Cable New

For those who aren’t familiar, this can connect any combination of USB A, USB C, micro USB, and lightning (or USB-C to USB-C). I use it for transferring files and for charging my phone while my laptop is plugged in.

I got a bigger one this year because the small one is just annoying enough to use that I find myself avoiding it. The only thing I don’t like is that the microUSB is shared with lightning, and it’s a little bit finicky. It always works in the end, but I’d rather get rid of lightning and just have a normal microusb.

Buy on Amazon

Summary

The only thing I got rid of this year was the Rokid Max. I loved it, but it felt like my vision was getting worse from wearing it. I actually assume this is not true and it’s just that dry air on planes + eye strain + being tired compound to give that effect, but it’s enough that I stopped wearing them.

The point of optimizing gear isn’t to nerd out about all of the items, but to enable me to have a small and light backpack that never gets in the way of doing the important stuff— traveling and having experiences with people who are important to me. It’s never a burden to carry, even if I have to hike up a mountain with it, and I’m prepared for anything.

As always, I’d love to hear if you have any suggestions. One thing that I strongly suspect exists is a good USB C-C cable. My favorite is the Apple 1m cable because it is very thin and easy to coil, but the 2m isn’t as good.

###

Keep an eye on my YouTube. I’m in China now, but will try to do a Tea Time with Tynan soon! I can’t believe the last time I did one was a year ago.

I store my tea in identical metal tins. Years ago I went down a rabbit hole of designing custom labels for each one, which I would apply to a flexible magnet. A bought two label makers, calculated the perfect size, and made a template. The result was great, but making the labels was just one or two steps too annoying for me. I couldn’t type in the information directly on the label maker, so I had to find it, plug it into my computer, load up the template, change the data, and print.

Then I had to precisely lay the label on top of the magnet. I always felt bad about wasting old magnets, so usually I would peel the old label off and reuse it.

But because this process was a bit cumbersome, half of my tea just stayed in bags. This was especially true if I had some tea that I knew I probably wouldn’t restock, and even more so if it was a small amount. So the little counter in my tea room was always littered with bags of tea.

Then one day I thought— this is exactly what e-ink is for. There must be some way to make e-ink labels. Around the same time I was partitioning half of the space I used for tea for a pinball arcade. What if I put in a bookcase that held all of my tea, had e-ink labels, and was also the secret door into the pinball arcade?

The door itself was much easier than I expected. I bought an IKEA bookcase, some lift-off hinges, some casters to support the weight, and it basically worked the first try thanks to very careful measuring. I trimmed out the bookcase and it looked like it was just part of the wall.

Now for the hard part.

After a lot of frustrating conversations with commercial eink vendors, I found a project called Openepaperlink which repurposes old e-ink price tags from stores. I bought a hub and just enough tags to make the project work, and brought them on a month-long cruise with me. By the time the cruise was over I had designed nice labels, made software to manage them, and had the hub sending them to the labels. I also designed some 3D printed mounts to put the labels in front of each tea tin on the shelf.

Project done, right? It could have been, but I realized that if I ever accidentally swapped two tins, or took two down and brought them to the tea table, I would have no idea which is which and wouldn’t know where to put them back. I needed to have a way to have the labels follow the tea tins. I tried to think of some clever way to do it without putting a sensor in every single space, but couldn’t come up with anything that made sense.

So I bought some pn532 NFC sensors, and designed a little “mount” for each tea tin to slot into. Metal interferes with NFC, but luckily I had some “on metal” NFC tags from a previous project, and after 4 or five revisions to get the tags the exact right distance from the sensor they worked.

My shelf could comfortably hold three rows of eight tags, so I did a small run of 4 to test and they worked perfectly. I didn’t have any software written yet, but if I hooked an ESP32 up to the NFC sensors (and a multiplexer), I could read each tag reliably. I ordered more tags to make more tins, since I only had a few from my previous project.

And… none of the new tags worked consistently. They would sometimes read, but not usually. I ordered 5 other similar ones from different companies and they didn’t work either. I found my 5+ year old order and reached out to the company where I bought the original tags and they told me they sold “very similar ones”. I bought them and they also didn’t work. When I peeled off the backing and held the tags up to the light I could see that none had the exact same antenna layout as the original ones.

After an infuriating stretch of weeks trying to fix this, I finally came across a solution. I could 3D print an insert that fits into the recess under each tea tin and put the tag on it. That gave me just enough separation from the metal that some of the new ones worked. I probably printed 10 different thicknesses as well as 5+ new mounts for the tins to get the positioning to where it would work every time.

I printed out another four mounts and completed my first row of automatic tea tin scanning. It worked most of the time. If I left it running overnight it often wouldn’t scan properly the next day, but rebooting it would work. I switched to a raspberry pi zero and then to a full sized raspberry pi, and I that finally fixed it. I made new fronts out of black plastic for the e-ink labels (so that they didn’t look like price tags), made mounts for different angles depending on the height of the shelf, and assembled the whole thing.

Three rows of fully automated tea labels! It seemed like it would crash more with the three rows, but generally if I just set the raspberry pi up to reboot every morning, there wasn’t a problem. I was pretty happy with myself and loved moving tins around to watch the labels change automatically.

Where I sit when I pour tea for people, I face the tea shelf. And one day while we were having tea I looked at my labels and thought, “All of these little e-ink labels run on batteries. They last for years, but at some point I’m going to have to replace them all. The batteries are also most of the thickness. I have power running to the NFC reader behind each tag, why don’t I just power them directly and make a super thin new mount for the label so that it actually looks like paper?”

I had no idea the pain I was signing myself up for. Each NFC reader has four small wires running to it. That’s eight soldering points (not counting the interconnects behind the shelf). I was adding another four to add the two power wires, bringing my total up to 288 soldering points. I actually like soldering, but it’s very awkward doing it inside of a shelf or with wires dangling from behind a bookcase. At one point I unsoldered everything behind the bookcase and crimped on connectors so that I could move sensors around to test whether it was the board or sensor that wasn’t working.

I did my first one as a test and it worked great. I did another few and it worked as well. I finished up the whole row and… nothing worked anymore.

One of the problems I had run into months prior was that one poor soldering joint on a multiplexer seemed to throw off the whole row. I assumed this was the problem again, so I resoldered the whole thing. It still didn’t work.

Then I thought that maybe it was a power issue, so I got a separate power supply for the NFC reader / eink tags instead of running it from the raspberry pi. That worked! I took down the other rows of the old style and put in the new style and… it didn’t work again. Oddly the multiplexers seemed to sometimes randomly disappear or show up empty.

The NFC reader and multiplexers can run off 3.3v or 5v, so I decided to try 5v instead. You might be thinking, “do the eink tags run off 5v?”, which is not at all what I was thinking. It sort of worked, I left it on, and by the next morning I noticed that several of the eink panels were fried.

The guy who sold the panels didn’t have any more, so I started using a heat gun to salvage panels from units with bad boards and putting them on fried ones. This was a very annoying process and got me 1-2 more working panels, but still not enough to finish the project.

I considered a different brand of panels (which would mean I’d have to redesign all of my mounts), but my will to live, let alone continue this project was waning. I finally found someone on discord who, in a very hush-hush way, offered to sell me all the panels I need. I bought way more than I needed.

I got the new panels, installed them, and… I was back where I was before I fried the panels. Then I thought, “I have no idea how much power these are even pulling. Let me put an ammeter on them and check”. I did the math and my power supply was definitely enough. At this point I was really about ready to give up and switch to coffee.

Then on a lark I thought that maybe the wires I was running power with weren’t thick enough to power all 24 tags initializing at once. And sure enough… they weren’t. I ran thicker power lines to each shelf and it immediately solved all of my problems in life. Now the tags can be on for months without every crashing.

I honestly couldn’t believe that I had gotten it working. There were several other home projects I wanted to start, but I wasn’t letting myself start another one until I finished this one. I was free again! I looked through my photos to see how long I had been working on the project and the first photo I had taken of a test rig on my desk was almost exactly a year prior.

In reflection I realize that for some reason my favorite things to do are things where I don’t actually enjoy a single step of the process very much. I don’t really like soldering hundreds of points inside shelves, I hate debugging things when I have almost no insight into what’s going on, waiting hours print new batches of mounts / sensors isn’t very fun, etc. And yet… I’d do the whole thing again. The island is sort of the same… I absolutely love when we’re just sitting around drinking tea or walking through the woods, but I don’t actually enjoy most steps of construction/building. And yet… every day as we’re drinking tea I can’t wait to get to work.

Maybe it’s just that I love the results in the end. It’s hard to resist moving a couple tea tins as I walk past to play pinball, just to see that it still works.

There’s also something very satisfying about knowing that I certainly have the absolute best tea labeling system in the entire world. And that’s not because I’m a genius, it’s because I’m willing to dedicate extraordinary amounts of time and effort into very small things that I care about. The only real way this could exist is by me building it. And as a result I’ve gotten better at a lot of things and learned a lot.

###

Top photo is the tea shelf in the context of the tea room.

In case it’s not clear… I worked on this over a year but in spurts. It wasn’t actually a year of work, obviously.

You can see in the final one that some of the e-ink labels don’t have the best contrast/red color anymore. That’s because some of the “fried” ones still worked. I replaced the worst of them. I may solder in new ones at some point but for now… I need a break.

Anyway, life is amazing. On most days I think, at least once, “I can’t believe how good my life is”. I really can’t believe it. I didn’t write my gratitude post this year because I feel like I’m just a broken record and it’s a bit awkward going on and on about how good my life is. I’m so grateful for the people, places, and things in my life, and grateful to be healthy enough to enjoy it all to its fullest.

I feel a little bit bad about not blogging more. I imagine the impression is that I don’t care anymore, but actually just about every day I feel a little bit of guilt that I haven’t written recently. I also think a lot about why I don’t write more, and sometimes I think about writing a blog post about that, but what’s more disappointing than a post about why I don’t post?

I’ll just write a bit about it here instead. I’ve been blogging for twenty years. When I started, it was novel and unusual to put oneself on the internet. That was part of the appeal, I think. I also like that I had a lot of ideas that were controversial or at least very unconventional, and I was confident enough that they would work that I wanted people to be able to follow and see. I think there’s something a lot more appealing about “hey, I’m figuring this stuff out, come along!” versus “look how great my life is!”.

Anyway, maybe there will be some other phase of my life where I’ll write more. For now, here are some highlights of my year:

Trips with my wife

Most of my trips end up not being with my wife, but her schedule was much more flexible this year, so we got to do more together. We went to Yellowstone, which really exceeded all expectations except that there’s no good food anywhere in the park. My wife wanted to see “one baby buffalo, a herd of 30, or 40 individuals”. We went on a quest and saw hundreds. Mostly it was just really great quality time. We also did a great trip through Yunnan in China and a Hawaii trip. Her first trip to Hawaii was 24/7 rain and she almost died scuba diving on the second, so it was good to have a third that really turned around her impression of the place.

Island progress

Our first trip to the island this year was absolutely brutal work that left me in pretty serious pain, but boy was it satisfying. And then our second trip was like a victory lap where we got to finish up the details and reap all of the rewards. I really enjoyed working with my friend Brian on a tough project, and having my friends Ben, Mai, and Todd come on the second trip and get involved too. We also got internet on the island thanks to our incredible neighbors, so now I’m counting down the days until I can go back and build on our progress.

Finishing projects

I finished some big projects! The sauna and steam room are basically done (still finishing up the ceiling in the changing area) and the tea label system is totally done (and I need to write a blog post about it). Both of those projects dragged on way too long, so it felt good to wrap them up. I also did some other cool projects like rebuilding a 150″ electric projector screen and creating a mount for it, learning to use a table saw (I was terrified for years), rebuilding my virtual pinball machine, and rebuilding my desk.

Japan trip with my dad

I took my dad to Japan! He’d never been to Asia before and I honestly had no idea what to expect. Would he be interested in eating Japanese food? I’d never seen him eat sushi before. Would he be okay walking all over the place? Would he be jet lagged? The trip went as well as it possibly could have. He loved it, probably wanted to walk around even more than I did, and ate everything. It was so much fun to get to show him one of my favorite places to visit. I go on so many trips, but this is one that I will always remember.

I spent more money

This is a weird one, but I read Die With Zero and it was one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. A lot of why I’m successful is because I’m incredibly frugal. I lived on essentially poverty level income for many years (and had a great life and even bought an island). Die With Zero made me realize that this isn’t always the best way to be. Some examples: I bought a $6500 pinball machine I really wanted, I bought a $2200 projector that I didn’t need but really wanted, and I helped a family member financially. I think I’m actually still way too averse to spending money, but I’m proud to make some progress here.

Lots of cruises

I went on a bunch of cruises, mostly with my friend Michael. On one of them we got upgraded to a huge suite for no reason. It happened to be a Norwegian Fjord cruise (amazing itinerary), so it was awesome to hang out on our couch and work while we looked out at the fjords. I’m obsessed with Virgin cruises now and went on five of them in 2024. My Kazakh friends who showed me all around Central Asia came on one, too!

CruiseSheet

I made some big progress on CruiseSheet (more on the business side than the technical side), and removed about 95% of the stress of it. I also really became settled on just keeping it as a lifestyle business where I can tinker and make the site I want versus the one that is the most profitable and the best business. That realization has made me enjoy working on it more.

Quality Time

When I really think about what I care about, it’s quality time with people I care about. In some ways that feels like a small life— I have friends and see public people who have huge goals and want to change the world, and I respect that… but what moves the needle for me is quality time with people I care about. I feel so lucky to have such great family and friends, so spending time with them is what’s most important to me.

I was scrolling through this year’s photos to remind myself what happened this year, and it brought back so many happy memories to see all of the cool things I did with my friends and family.

Random Highlights

• A friend had a wedding in Japan, which brought a bunch of friends who don’t normally travel that way to Tokyo. It was fun to share that experience with them.
• We did a trip to Seoul, and I really liked it there. I hope to spend more time
• Lots of family members visited in Vegas. I loved that
• I continued to do steam/sauna/cold plunge most days
• The boat finally got fixed and it was nice to be able to go out on the lake whenever we wanted
• I did one Superhuman event and it was great! I should do more

2025

I don’t have any huge goals for 2025. I have a few house projects I’d like to do, some CruiseSheet stuff I’d like to implement, people I’d like to spend more time with, etc., but it’s all things that are fairly certain to happen. I have two pretty wild ideas of things to do, but I haven’t researched them well enough yet so I’ll save them for if I decide to do them. I also toy with the idea of doing Youtube or a podcast but I haven’t quite figured out whether I actually want to do it or not and what format I could do that would create something that isn’t already out there.

Every year I ask my readers to send me recaps of their years along with their goals. If you wrote me last year, just reply to the email so I can see what your goals were. You can also leave it here in the comments if you want to share with everyone. Otherwise email 2024 at my name dot net. If there’s anything you’d like me to write about in 2025, let me know. It’s a good way to get me to post more!

###

Title is goodbye in Bosnian! Bosnia was probably the coolest new country I visited in 2024. Photo is from Yellowstone.

Progress at the island is best characterized as two steps forward, one step back. So when we weren’t able to go to Canada for three years due to Covid, we just took three steps back. The most urgent issue was that a hurricane destroyed the dome cap of our yurt, but it wasn’t the only problem. The even bigger problem, one that had been brewing for a long time, was that the vinyl roof of our yurt was failing. Small holes had appeared, which the wind whipped into small gashes. Every storm poured gallons of water into the yurt.

The most fun island trips are where there are lots of projects to do, but none of them are urgent. The most stressful are the ones where something absolutely has to get done, because there are always unexpected roadbumps, and being on an island makes everything more complicated.

Earlier this year Brian and I decided that the roof project couldn’t wait and we had to come up with a plan for a rigid wooden roof. As far as I could tell, no one had ever done this on a yurt, or at least no one had explained how they had done it, so we were on our own. We tried to rally other island owners, but no one volunteered to help us. Luckily Brian’s friend Andy volunteered, and even better, decided to drive from Montreal with a bunch of tools.

Brian and I met in his apartment to sketch out a plan. The yurt is about thirty feet in diameter and has thirty-two rafters. We determined that with a bit of clever cutting, we could fill each “pie wedge” with an upper and lower piece of wood, and we could cut those two pieces from just one piece of plywood. Easy! We ordered the wood as well as many gallons of rubber roof coating, and felt ok about the trip. To make things even easier, we would just leave the existing vinyl roof underneath the wooden one, so at no point would we have to expose the interior to the weather.

Roof Trip 1

It took a few days to get the lumber over, prep, clean up the yurt a bit, remove the old (now very moldy) cotton lining, and get ready. We had a big argument over the best way to do things. I wanted to figure out the average dimensions for a wedge, and assembly line build them. Then we’d move each rafter into position to form that size wedge. At the end we’d probably be off by a bit, so we’d do a custom one.

Brian wanted to do custom ones for every single wedge (though he also wanted to move the rafters somewhat to make them even). I convinced him to just try my way, since it would be the fastest if it worked, and we pretty immediately realized that it wouldn’t work. First, we have framed windows and doors and we can’t put rafters on top of them. So that limits the placement of several rafters. But it also limits the placement of rafters between the windows and doors because you want things to be roughly equal in those spaces. We divided the yurt into sections (door to first window, first window to second window, etc) and came up with standard sizes for each of those. But then as we began to move the rafters into place we discovered another problem— we couldn’t just place rafters wherever we wanted to. The rafters latch on to an aircraft cable that circles the yurt and is rested on the lattice that forms the walls, but the lattice sticks up and you can’t put a rafter directly on it.

So we had to measure each one individually. You would think this wouldn’t be THAT hard, since you really only need a couple measurements, but after putting up a few we realized that the bottom edges weren’t lining up. It turns out that the top ring disaster from the year before had skewed the top ring relative to the bottom ring, so now the wedges were no longer isosceles triangles, but actually had different dimensions on each side. To make an extremely long story a bit shorter, we ended up having to get on the roof and measure five dimensions for each panel, and then we made a cad model so that we could plug those numbers in and get our cuts. Then we had to make those cuts basically perfectly because we didn’t have any extra wood (it’s hard to dispose of pressure treated plywood and annoying to carry).

As you can imagine, this took forever.

Getting the panels onto the roof was also a challenge. Our first method involved leaning a ladder against the side of the yurt with me pushing the wood up and the other two guys supporting on the side. We failed to consider the lever action that would take place when the wood flopped down onto the roof and lifted my arms up. In an instant I realized that if I didn’t let go I was going to be pushed backwards off the ladder so I pushed the wood to the side and let it fall in the woods behind me. It nicked me in the neck. Brian and I, used to these sorts of janky setups, just started thinking about our next try. His friend Andy, who is a bit more safety minded than us, took a walk to decompress because, as he said, “I think I just saw you almost get decapitated”. To be fair, I think it looked a lot worse than it was, but I get it. Eventually we got climbing gear from Halifax and hoisted each panel up.

Over the course of our ten day trip we were making progress, but also slipping behind every day. When we first arrived we had grand dreams of installing skylights. Then we settled on just coating the roof with the rubber. Then just getting the panels up, and finally just getting most of them up.

I have never been more tired in my life. My whole body ached with every movement. We’d take a bit of time for a quick tea in the morning and lunch around noon, but besides that we were working all daylight hours and some evening hours if there was stuff we could do inside. By the last day we had gotten the whole bottom ring of panels installed but still had to do the top ones. I was pretty defeated and suggested to Brian that we work until 11pm and then just call it. He agreed, but then said that he’d stay up a bit later and try to get some more done by himself. By the time I woke up the next morning and got to the yurt I could see that he did almost all of the top panels. He had stayed up until 4am and then woken up at 7am again to put up a few more. The main reason he couldn’t do the last four is that our cell service at the island had degraded over the past couple years, and the CAD software we were using was online. He couldn’t even connect to it.

We were happy with our progress, given the difficulty, and felt like we were a bit out of the woods. We left the yurt in total disarray, as we hadn’t allocated time to cleaning in 4-5 days and had been using the main area to cut the smaller pieces of wood.

Some of my enthusiasm evaporated when I reported my progress to my dad and uncle, and both of them told me that pressure treated wood really shouldn’t be left to the elements. I thought that was the whole point, but had never actually looked it up. I was nervous about we’d find when we returned.

Roof Trip 2

We marshaled a bit more help for the second trip. Fellow island owner Ben and his wife Mai came to help as well as my good friend Todd. Neither Ben nor Mai had much experience with construction, but I know Ben to be a relentless hard worker, and Mai seemed very eager as well. Todd is a frequent island visitor and is both competent and very hard working.

The nice thing about having more than two people is that you get quality of life projects done as well as urgent ones. Several steps of the roof only needed 2-3 people, so we would split into groups and get other things done as well.

Brian and I had framed walls for the indoor shower a couple years prior, but had never paneled the walls, even though we had already brought over the plywood. We got those paneled, even though an insane colony of carpenter ants had made a tunneled nest in the stack of wood, which was quite a shock.

We cleaned and organized the entire yurt, rewired some of the electronics, reinforced all of the rafters with vertical studs of the same length, so that the roof would be level, rebuilt parts of the outhouse and added a pee diverter, tiled the bathroom floor, and a ton of other projects. But… I’ll tell you about the one that made the biggest difference.

As I’ve mentioned before our neighbors on the mainland are truly the most kind and generous people I’ve ever met. It’s no exaggeration to say that every time I go to the island I am inspired by them to be a better person. They have helped us in so many ways over the years, and when we thank them or try to do anything to pay them back they act like we’re crazy because they’re just “doing what anyone would do”. Despite them constantly telling us to ask them if we need anything, I try to only ask if something’s important, because I don’t want to bother them.

Our cell service was excellent for years, but as far as I can tell the closest cell tower was removed during covid, and now it’s basically unusable. We looked into starlink but it was expensive to keep it on all year for the 2-3 weeks we’re at the island, and it uses so much power that we’d have to upgrade batteries significantly. I knew that point-to-point wireless links existed and seemed to be good, and when I mentioned it to the neighbors they said, “Oh yeah, of course you can do that”.

I ordered a set to bring to the island and they were way bigger than I thought and there was no way around drilling a hole through the side of the house to install it. I almost gave up on the idea because it felt like a huge ask, but I figured I’d at least show the setup to them and make it very easy for them to say no.

My pitch went something like, “I think this is a crazy big request, so please feel totally ok saying no, but here are these internet…”

“Whoa! You could get internet at the island? We can definitely do it!”

Such is their kindness that I think they may have been more excited for us to get internet than we were… and we were very excited.

Because of line of sight, we actually had to install the transmitter on a two-family house occupied by their parents and cousins. I know the parents well (and they have similarly saved us / helped us many times), but had only met the cousins once because I had lumber shipped to their driveway.

The parents were completely onboard with the idea. I was nervous about drilling a hole in their house, but the father found a long drill bit and drilled the hole before I could even say anything about it. They had an old pole mount set up for some antiquated internet system, so I mounted the transmitter to it. We went inside, cut some ethernet cables, and connected it to the router and power injector.

I sped the boat back, hooked up the receiver and… it didn’t work. The interface was clunky so it wasn’t completely obvious what was going on, but as best I could tell the transmitters could see each other but the sender didn’t seem to be connected to the internet. After exhausting every solution that didn’t involve driving the boat back over, I was left thinking we probably made a bad cable from the router to the transmitter.

I knocked on the door and the cousin who I didn’t know answered the door. He wasn’t home when I was doing the install earlier, so I didn’t know if he even knew about it. He let me in, and I saw that I was interrupting his family watching a movie together. I apologized and replaced the cable, and he came outside with me while I was checking some settings on the transmitter.

“I’m so sorry again to bother you guys. We really appreciate everything you and your family do for us and I wish that there was something we could do to repay you guys for all of your kindness.”

“Oh, you guys are like family to us! You’re a big part of our community here, and our house is your house. You can sleep here if you want! We’ll be out later but we’ll leave the back door unlocked in case you need to do anything else.”

Months later I’m still in awe of how he treated me, someone he’d only briefly talked to once while I was using his driveway as a staging ground.

I got back to the island and the internet was incredibly fast, as if we had a wired connection directly. Super low ping and about 35 megabit download speed. That night we ate in the yurt and all relaxed on the couch catching up on all of the stuff we hadn’t been able to do all week. When we went back to the mainland the next day every family member asked us if the internet worked and celebrated with us as if they were the ones getting internet for the first time.

My cabin is about 250 feet from the yurt and couldn’t receive the wifi signal. The next day we didn’t need everyone on the roof and Mai asked if there was anything she could do. I said if she wanted to she could blaze through the woods in a beeline for my cabin and run an internet cable for me. She put on a full body rainsuit she got at walmart and headed out to the wet forest. Up on the roof I forgot about her, so I was surprised when I saw her emerge from the woods an hour later looking like she’d been in a fight with a velociraptor. Her suit was shredded from the thick forest and she had a big smile on her face from accomplishing the mission. That night my tiny 5 watt router broadcast the second wifi signal on the island.

The last two days were mostly sunny, and we needed the roof to be dry to put on the rubber coating. We seam taped all of the 64+ seams and came up with a system for applying the goo. Two people would be on the roof with climbing harnesses and gri-gris. The person on top would have the big five gallon bucket of goo and would pour it onto a panel. The second person would have a roller and would roll it evenly across the panel. A third person would sit on top of the ladder poking out of the circle at the top of the yurt and would relay supplies to the people on ropes.

And… it worked. The wind got the goo everywhere, the sun had damaged some of the panels so it was hard to get even coverage, and we tried to mostly stand on the rafters, which was difficult. It was impossible not to paint oneself into a corner by the end, and as soon as the goo got on your shoes, they were like ice skates. The rollers we got sucked and would randomly break. We barely had enough parts by the end to combine them to have one that worked enough to paint the last two panels. In the end, we got a pretty good coating on there and we still have enough goo to do one more coat next year if we want to.

It rained a couple days before the coating, and water absolutely poured into the yurt. It got between the untaped seams of the wood and was concentrated by the old vinyl roof into several interior spouts. It rained the morning after we got the coating on and not a single drop got in.

For the first time since Covid, the island is at an all time high. It’s waterproof, we have internet, and we can take hot indoor showers without flashing everyone in the living room. I dreaded the first roof trip, was nervous about the second one, but now I’m fired up an can’t wait to get back to the island. Now that the critical stuff is done we can work on better power, running water, interior walls, and upgrading the kitchen.

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Photo on the top is the finished roof!

I just finished a truly epic and absurd project today after over a year (!) of intermitent work on it. It’s so ridiculous that I’m thinking about making a little youtube video about it as well as a blog post.

I really like Chinese food, specifically Sichuan food. Our first couple days had been in Sichuan, so I was eating a huge amount of food. The first thought that begins a whole two hour train of logic is, “wouldn’t it be amazing if when I ate the amount of food I wanted to eat, my body needed and could use all of that food?”.

Next I think, “but if that were the case, I would just adjust and overeat.”

Growing up I was always very skinny. I would eat a lot at times, but I was a picky eater so I didn’t eat a ton of calories. When I went to college my friend Terry (similarly skinny) and I had a contest to see who could gain more weight in the first year. I gained seven pounds, mostly by eating ice cream sundaes every breakfast. It was funny to me to eat a lot of food, because it didn’t affect me.

I’ve never been overweight, but I notice now that my natural inclination is to gain weight while I’m away from home, but then when I’m back I naturally settle back in to my daily routine of nuts and warm and brown, and I start losing weight again.

To be fair, I’ve always been a healthy weight. During the pandemic (no travel), I settled around 150lb, which is probably a bit light for my height, and I’ve never been over 170. One seventy is apparently a healthy weight for my height, but it I start feeling a bit soft around the edges when I get near it, so I tighten things up.

If I would just adjust to eating more, I think, why couldn’t I just adjust to eating less? What’s so magical about the amount that I’m currently adjusted to? I bet I could adjust to less.

Then I have what is, to me at least, a huge epiphany. The first bite of every meal is both the most enjoyable and the best for my body. The last is the least enjoyable and damages my body. Why am I eating those last bites?

If I just eliminate the last 20% of whatever I eat, I am still probably getting about 95% of the enjoyment from the food, but I’m no longer damaging my body. Maybe I will adapt to eating 80% as much as before and it will feel equally satisfying, be almost as much fun, but will also serve my body rather than be at odds with it.

And… wait a minute… why is eating a lot of food fun anyway? Is it really fun? When I think back to good meals I’ve had, it’s always the quality of the food that was enjoyable, not the quantity. Even when I’d eat 16 lobster tails on a cruise, I didn’t actually enjoy the last few.

I decide that I will eat only 80% of what I would have otherwise eaten, and I’ll stick with it until Christmas. I want to make sure it has time to have an effect, but I don’t want to feel trapped forever if I hate it. I think about the most difficult meals and decide in advance how I will adjust. I’m heading from China to Japan, where there’s a lot of food I like, so I plan those meals.

I love Tonkatsu from Katsukura Shinjuku and I always get the biggest one. That’s easy, I’ll just get the one that’s around 20% fewer grams. I’m not going to worry about the cabbage or miso soup. Sushi and Gyoza are easy, I’ll just eat fewer. I love Japanese ice creams from convenient stores, and I used to eat one or two per day. I’ll eat a maximum of one and make sure I eat none some days. At Savoy I’ll eat one little pizza instead of one and a half.

Then I have another realization. Over 80 percent of Americans are overweight, obese, or severely obese. Restaurants serve us all the same portions. Sure I don’t eat breakfast or lunch, but still… why am I accepting this standard portion as the correct amount of food when it’s making everyone fat? This makes me decide that when appropriate, I will leave behind extra food rather than accept this default portion size and avoid “wasting” food.

Also, some part of me thinks that it’s cool to eat a lot. I think it comes from when I was a kid and couldn’t gain weight so it was a novelty that I would eat a lot of food and still not gain weight. My parents fed us healthy food in appropriate portions, so maybe it was some small act of rebellion. But IS it cool to eat a lot? Have I ever once thought it was cool when someone ate a lot? In this moment I realize that eating a lot of food is sad, not cool.

Our first dinner after my realizations comes, and I eat a lot less. I’m shooting for 80%, but Chinese food is communal and I want to err on the side of less food. It’s hard to know for sure. Everyone notices and tries to give me more food, but I just say I’m full. I’m actually a little bit hungry, but the satisfaction of enacting this change makes me feel good anyway.

The next meal I eat the same amount and it’s even easier. After a few meals the amount I’m eating feels totally normal. I adapted much faster than I expected, though I’m wary of it just being wishful thinking.

I’m known for liking ice cream, so someone brings me one. I’m at a hotel with no freezer, so the options are to eat it or to let it melt. I have never once turned down an ice cream that was handed to me, but I let it melt. The weird thing is that I don’t even want it. I’ve brainwashed myself.

In between China and Japan I have a one day layover in Hong Kong. I’m craving non Asian food and I pass by a Shake Shack. Normally I would order a double cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake. I resolve to throw away 20% of whatever fries I get, and not get a milkshake. I waver between a double burger and a single, but it’s my only meal of the day so I get a double.

When the burger comes, I take a generous 20% of the fries and put them on the tray. I won’t eat those. The burger is great. This is the first time I’ve really had unhealthy food since deciding to eat less, so I’m anticipating being very tempted by those extra fries, but I know I’ll resist. Something strange happens, though. As I eat the fries, I end up putting more and more of them on the tray. I eat one, put two on the tray. Eat one, put another on the tray. I left half of them.

Japan is easy. I eat the smaller Tonkatsu and feel just as satisfied. I eat about half the gyoza I would have eaten. At every meal I think about which part of the meal I care the least about and I don’t eat it. Normally I’d eat some of the rice that comes with gyoza, but I don’t eat any. One day I cut an ice cream sandwich in half and split it with a friend. Another time I just eat 80% and throw the remaining 20% away. One day I eat the whole thing, but another day I ate none. In the past when eating sushi I’d feel compelled to eat a huge amount because it’s so good and such a good value. I go two or three times and probably average 60% of what I used to eat.

I get home and weigh myself. In just under three weeks I’ve gone from 165lb and 19.5% bodyfat to 157lb and 17.7% bodyfat. The weird thing is that I don’t feel deprived at all. The meals in the second half of the China trip are as memorable as those in the first. My memories of the great food I ate in Japan are the same as any other trip. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything.

I intend to eat the same amount of warm and brown as before, but I can’t finish it. I put some away for the next day, anticipating being really hungry, but I feel the same as usual. For future warm and browns I eat a third of the batch instead of my usual half. I reduce my luxury nuts by 10-15% as well.

I was hesitant to write this post, because I think if I read it I might think, “yeah you ate less for a few weeks… who cares?”, but I’m posting it because a simple line of logic has had a profound effect on me. I think the amounts I’m eating now may be too little and I will have to carefully adjust up, but I predict that I will never go back to eating as much as I did before.

Something I’ve learned about myself, and maybe about other people, is that lasting change often comes from a new perspective. Usually it’s from a book, in my experience. Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Difficult Conversations, and Die With Zero, instantly created long lasting effects in my life. Sometimes that change can come from within, though, taking time to think about things from a different point of view and digging to find a more accurate perspective on something.

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The boat is finally fixed and has been running great. We had a little cookout on the lake the other day and I made 1/3lb burgers instead of 1/2lb and had salad on the side instead of chips. I wanted to post a picture of the food, but I didn’t have any in landscape mode.

The reason I felt so comfortable marrying my wife was because it felt like she was on my team as soon as we started dating. First, I’ll set the stage with a personal story that really exemplified to me just how good of a teammate my wife is.

I can’t remember the exact timing, but we had either just recently married or were engaged. I had to go to Hawaii to buy our property there, and I asked a bunch of friends to see if anyone wanted to come. One of my close female friends agreed to join last minute. I know that it sounds a little bit weird to go to Hawaii with a woman who is not your wife, but we had been platonic friends for a long time with zero ambiguity, and I even ran it by my wife to make sure she was ok with it.

On our layover I get a call from my wife, and she’s really upset. She was talking to someone who never met me, told them that I was going to Hawaii with another woman, and the person basically said, “Yeah, obviously he’s having an affair.” Our relationship was new enough that it planted a seed of doubt in my wife’s mind. And I don’t blame her— zooming out and looking at the situation, I agree that it looks sketchy. To make things worse, my wife and I didn’t live together yet, and my friend had been visiting me a lot in Vegas. My wife had never even met my friend, so she had no read on her character.

It was an awkward few days in Hawaii. I was excited about buying our property and trying to have a good time, but it was hard to resolve the issue remotely and I knew that my wife was suffering.

We got back and had a long talk about it. I agreed to never travel solo with my friend or any other woman she hadn’t met, and I asked in return that she try to remain unbiased when she meets my friend, and that she be open to me traveling with her in the future once she meets her. Based on my experience with other women, I assumed she would not actually be able to be objective.

But I was wrong. She proactively set up a lunch with my friend, met her, and realized that she was no threat at all. My friend visits us all the time, and I’ve traveled with her many times since then.

To me this is the perfect balance of being a teammate. She wanted to protect her relationship, but also cared about my friendship and was looking for ways to help me rather than punish me. It gave me tremendous confidence in our relationship and frankly inspired me to be a better partner too.

Being a teammate is so important that I think it’s universal to all relationships. Through friends and coaching I’ve been exposed to the inner workings of a lot of relationships, and this one factor is almost entirely prescriptive of whether or not the relationship will work. I also have other ideas on what makes a good marriage, which I’ll share below, but not all of them are universal.

Maybe the next greatest factor to our marriage’s success is that we have made our marriage what we want it to be, not a cookie cutter typical marriage. The biggest example of this is that we probably spend about 50% of our time apart. I’d say she comes on about a third of the trips I go on, and is in Vegas about 80% of the time I’m there. We obviously enjoy time together, but we also value independence and autonomy. It makes time together feel more special, and honestly I sometimes find it even easier to appreciate her in her absence. We also don’t usually eat dinner together (we cook separate meals and eat at separate times), which made one relative think our marriage was fake, but it’s just how our schedules and preferences work.

We keep our finances mostly separate. The primary reason is we both have enough that we don’t need the other’s money, and we both like having the freedom to buy whatever we want. I don’t want to ask when I’m buying pinball machines or random stuff for my next project, and she doesn’t want to ask me when she goes shopping or sends money to family members. We both invested enough money to cover house expenses and the interest goes into a joint account that pays the bills every month. Of course if she needed some of my money for some reason she’d be welcome to it, and vice versa, so it’s more like we have combined finances that we manage separately.

Overall we have fairly traditional gender roles (except I’m the flower arranger and interior designer and she kills bugs). She cleans my clothes and dishes, I maintain the house and build and fund most of the improvements and tend to lead most big decisions. She’s also a much better host to guests than I am, and even though our finances are separate, most of what she’s invested in has been initiated by me. I don’t think everyone needs to have traditional gender roles (and I think it’s much more important to build the unique marriage you want), but it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s a reason that they are traditional and that they probably work better more often than not.

In that same vein, we both contribute everything we can to the marriage without trading or keeping the score. Throughout our lives there will probably be phases where each of us can contribute more than the other, and we certainly contribute different things. But we’re building a marriage, not trading favors. This leads to a virtuous cycle because she does so much for me that I’m inspired to do more for her, and vice versa. When you see people trading favors and arguing about “what’s fair”, it’s a bad sign. Either one person is contributing so little that the marriage should end, or the two parties are too focused on themselves.

We didn’t sign a prenup. It never really crossed my mind until she proactively offered to sign one. In my mind if I don’t trust a woman to treat me fairly in the case of divorce, I definitely shouldn’t be marrying her. I don’t mind a disincentive to divorce, and I’m very happy to have a strong incentive to choose a good partner. If I am such a bad judge of character that she’s not who I think she is and she wants to divorce me and take half of my money, then I’d say I deserve it. On the other hand I have a friend who got married and he made a provision for his wife to get a certain amount per year in the case of divorce, because the plan was for her to quit her job and be a mother. I thought that was a really fair way to take risk off the table for her.

We argue VERY infrequently, maybe once per year or so. Our biggest “fight” was the one I opened the blog post with, and it was resolved really well as soon as we could. I can actually only think of one or two other arguments, and they were like an hour long or so. Over time our conflict resolution has gotten much better and now I’d say that on the rare occasion we do have a conflict we leave optimistic and motivated. So many couples argue every month, week, or day, and I just can’t imagine it being healthy. People justify it by saying “marriage is tough and it takes work”, but what they don’t realize is that the work should be 99% on building the relationship, not repairing it.

When my wife and I first met, it was obvious that we have very aligned principles. To me that was an absolute prerequisite for a serious relationship. We agreed on finances, kids, where to live, priorities, etc. We’ve never argued once about any of those things. We didn’t have that many activities in common, though. Something I’ve found useful is when I find something we both enjoy, I go all in on it. For example, we enjoyed playing pinball so much at my friend Noah’s house that I came home and built a virtual pinball machine primarily because I knew it would be a fun thing to do together. Now we have an arcade room with five pinball machines and we have a tournament together every night. She enjoyed learning to ski, so we get season passes every year and go out as much as we can. Principles are really hard to change, but finding hobbies to do together is pretty easy if you put in the effort.

While I think it’s beneficial that we don’t spend all of our time together, I also think it’s important that we have a good default routine that we share. In Vegas we tend to do our own things until afternoon, and then we play pinball together, swim and use the spa together, and sometimes watch an episode of a show. The swimming and spa time in particular is a nice opportunity to make sure we get to talk about anything on our minds every day.

I’m grateful to have such a good wife and such a good relationship with her. These are my perspectives on it, but I do also believe I’m playing on easy mode because my wife has such a great character and puts a lot of effort into our marriage. I can’t imagine being married to anyone else.

If you’re thinking about marriage or are in a marriage that needs work, focus on partnership, building a unique marriage that suits both of you, make sure your principles are aligned, and put everything you can into the relationship with blind faith that your partner will do the same.

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Photo is our pet Tortoise, Daisy. She’s around 53, has three legs, and my wife reports that she is 30% happier when Daisy is not hibernating.

I thought about not writing about this until next year’s gear post, but I want people to understand how deeply I research to find the right items. Sometimes when I read other people’s gear posts I get frustrated because they’ve obviously just chosen something that’s “good enough”, and then written about it like it was the best. I’ve made that mistake in the past (I recommended the wrong all-in-one USB cable, for example), but I generally do enough research that it doesn’t happen.

As I always do when looking for gear, I decide what matters most to me and search as widely as possible (by the way, this is also how I decided who to marry, where to live, and which house to buy). Here were my criteria:

• It must be totally self powered. I hate having to keep track of charging things while traveling and I don’t want to have to go find a new battery on the other side of the world. This eliminates any smartwatch. I did consider some of the high end solar Garmin watches, because they have really good battery life, but they are absolutely enormous.
• It must be very easy to tell the time where I am and at home, and possible to tell the time elsewhere. The Breitling allows you to tell the time anywhere at a glance… but that glance is really more of a scan and stare because the names of the places are so small. I found that I used that feature less than I expected.
• It should be lighter than the Breitling. I have small girly wrists, so the Breitling really hangs and I feel it. It also looks a bit too big.
• Ideally it would look decent. I don’t need the most beautiful watch in the world, but it is something I look at dozens of times a day, and when traveling lightly I aspire for my gear to work in a range between informal and formal.

At first I gravitated towards automatic self-winding watches. They’re totally self powered and I love the craftsmanship of them. There are a lot of good GMT watches (two time zones at once), but nothing that seemed to be a big improvement over the Breitling. I looked at every smart watch, and none of them had long enough battery life. I think I would be willing to charge once every 90 days, since I never travel for that long.

My friend Todd has a Seiko solar digital watch that sets itself over radio. It was just ugly enough that I wouldn’t consider it (sorry, Todd), and I prefer analog watches, but I went down that rabbit hole as well and searched to see if any looked okay, mainly because the functionality is so good.

As I was searching through these digital watches, I learned that Seiko made analog solar radio watches as well. Wow! I looked at every single model, most of which I found to be overdesigned and ugly. I also learned that some of them could set themselves over GPS instead of radio. At the time I thought I preferred radio, especially because the radio watches were a bit thinner, so I focused on those.

Seiko Astron Radio Watches

Confusingly, Seiko calls both its GPS and radio watches Astrons. At first I thought that all Astrons could do both, but it turns out that they can only do one or the other. These watches are only sold in Japan, so I went to a Seiko watch store in Tokyo to look at them. They actually looked a lot better than they did online.

The best Seiko Astron Radio watches use the 8B63 calibre movement. It’s solar powered, has a day of the week display, a date display, and also a 24 hour dual time display. I looked at all of them and bought the SBXY049 because I thought it looked the best. I liked that it had the names of the cities on the bezel rather than the UTC offsets that some have, and the dial looked less cluttered than a GPS one.

While I was in Tokyo it worked great. Every night at 2am, 3am, and 4am, it would try to set itself by radio. The signal is better at night, but still tough to catch, so it tries three times. In the morning you can press one button and the second hand will swing to the tiny Y or N on the dial under the 2 or 4 hour marker to tell you whether it was successful. It was fun to check every morning to see if it had set itself. Most mornings it had.

The titanium made it feel very light on the wrist and I thought it looked good. Not as good as a Rolex, but good enough. There are radio signals in Japan, China, the US, and most of Europe, so I figured that even if it couldn’t set itself every night while I was on a cruise or something, it would set itself frequently enough based on my travel patterns.

Accuracy was another downside of mechanical watches. I wear a Rolex in Vegas because I like how it looks and it’s very light and comfortable, and the Breitling when I travel. Because one would necessarily sit on a winder for weeks or months at a time, it would gradually drift by a few seconds and even by minutes eventually. I wouldn’t reset it unless it was noticeably off, but I never trusted it to be totally accurate.

When I got home to Vegas, though, the Seiko wouldn’t set itself! I have five radio clocks above my desk and they set almost every night, but I couldn’t get the Seiko to set itself anywhere in my house. I used a phone app to broadcast the US timecode locally and it did set to that, so the watch wasn’t defective. Maybe it’s because Vegas is in a valley and the watch is too weak to pick up the signal.

Either way, it was too annoying to be my new watch. The radio Seikos also can’t do fractional time zones, which I was hoping to have covered.

Citizen GPS Watches

Next I looked into Citizen GPS watches. They are much cheaper than the Seiko ones and have more functionality. They have a stopwatch feature, an alarm, and even a light meter. In my testing they set the location about 30-40 seconds faster than the Seiko, even though a simple time sync is about the same.

They have three movements, the F900, F950, and F990. The F900 is almost the same as the F950. The F990 is the newest but every watch made with it is huge and ridiculous, so I got one with the F950. Most were ugly, but I liked the one I chose which had a dark blue dial and both the city names and UTC offsets around the dial.

GPS watches have two ways to sync. They can get the time from just one satellite, or they can get their position and time from four or more satellites. If they get their position, they use it to set the time zone and time, though you sometimes have to manually choose whether you are observing daylight savings time or not.

The Citizen has the best reception of any watch I tested. With one button press it found its location and set the zone and time from within my office, away from the window. I was blown away at how well it worked, especially compared to the Seiko radio watch which couldn’t set from my office.

The basic functions like setting the watch, swapping the second time zone subdial with the main one, and getting location were easy, but setting alarms and daylight savings were complicated enough that I kept referring to the manual.

For someone with a larger wrist, the Citizen is probably the best choice. It works flawlessly, gets the best reception, and has every feature you’d want.

However, I have a small wrist, and even though it was light due to the titanium, it looked a bit big. So I started researching the Seiko GPS watches.

Seiko GPS Watches

Seiko has four main movements the 8X53, 5X53, 3X62, and 5X83. Easy to remember, right?

The 3X62 is perhaps the most elegant. It only shows one time zone and date so it really looks just like a normal analog watch, but it can set itself automatically just like the rest of them. It looks the best, but despite being less complicated, it’s still almost the same size as the other options. If you didn’t travel much and cared more about what your watch looked like, this would be a great choice. I think they have the best designs of all Seiko Astrons.

The 8X53 is the older version of the 5X53. It does the same stuff but it’s bigger and slower to move the hands. I found all of the 8X53 designs to be ugly, but if you had a bigger wrist and wanted to save some money, maybe that’s a reason to buy one. Ironically the SBXB123 is the cheapest 8X53 and I think it’s the best looking.

The 5X83 is the newest one, only out for a couple months. It is the same as the 5X53 but it moves the hands even faster and has a stopwatch. I found the designs to all be pretty ugly, and even worse it was bigger than the 5X53.

The 5X53 is the one I chose. It is the smallest and thinnest, and while it doesn’t have a stopwatch, it does have day of week, date, and a 12 hour second time with an AM/PM indicator. The Citizen had a 24 hour second time zone, which wasn’t as easy to read because of its tiny size.

I bought the SBXC117, which I think is the best looking of the options. From a distance it looks identical to the Seiko radio watch I bought, so I guess you could say I have a type. I almost bought the SBXC149, a limited edition Japan Airlines watch. For the AM/PM indicator it has a tiny spinning airplane, which I love, but I decided I’d prefer a neutral metal colored watch versus a black one.

The 5X53 is the best watch for me. It’s almost the same size as the radio version, and feels noticeably smaller than the Citizen, at least on my small wrist. It doesn’t look quite as good as the radio one, but still looks very good. I couldn’t get it to sync GPS from my office, but it easily does it outside and can sometimes get time from the office. Both the Citizen and Seiko will wait until they see bright light (sunlight) and will try to sync automatically. I think I go outdoors enough that the watch should stay in sync.

I particularly like the 12 hour home time zone subdial. It makes it much easier to glance and see what time it is back home versus the 24 hour one on the Citizen.

Are GPS Watches the New Mechanical Watches?

I’ve had a mechanical watch for over twenty years. What I love about them is the ingenuity. It’s incredible to me that watchmakers in the 1700s figured out how to make a totally self contained device that required no outside power but could keep accurate time.

And now… isn’t that what a GPS watch is? If those watchmakers in the 1700s had access to our technology, wouldn’t they use every environmental force (solar, GPS, radio, etc) to make the most accurate watch possible? I still absolutely love mechanical watches and will wear one when I’m not traveling, but in my mind these GPS watches are a continuation of the same principles.

GPS watches can do even fractional time zones where they are offset by partial hours, and they support 39 time zones around the world. They also keep a perpetual calendar and will skip days that don’t exist, like February 30th. Mechanical watches tend not to do this, so I found that I never trusted the date on my watch because I wasn’t sure if I had set it or not.

Buying a GPS or Radio Watch

Annoyingly, these watches are only available in Japan! Even if you order online, the chance you’re getting it from Japan is very high. I bought two on Chrono24.com and one on Ebay. Despite being intended for the Japanese market, they work perfectly in the US and manuals are available in English. If you order from Japan and the watch is over $600 (which they all are), your package will be delayed and you may have to pay extra taxes.

If you’re in Japan and can buy the watch tax-free, you may as well buy a new one. The prices are almost identical to used prices for the newer models.

If you’re interested in my Seiko radio watch, Citizen GPS watch, or Breitling, email me and I’ll give you a good price.

More Watch Information

I’m trying to include a lot of information here because it was very difficult to get comparisons between these watches, and I probably wouldn’t have had to buy three if I had more information.

The way all three watches handle power is ingenious. If they don’t see light for a few days they go into sleep mode and use very little power. Once they see light again they spring back into action. With regular use they can all last for months or years without being charged. Once they get low, the seconds hand starts showing the time in two second or five second increments to indicate to you that the battery is low. I think that’s really clever.

Both GPS watches show power reserve. Seiko shows it at all times, Citizen shows it when you press a button. In reality you never actually need to know what it is since they only need a few minutes of charging per day.

Citizen has another mode that sets the second time zone to UTC. I don’t know if I’d ever use this, but it’s neat. In general the design philosophy of the Citizen seems to be maximum functionality, and Seiko seems to be elegance and simplicity.

While searching for the time zone, Seiko moves the second hand to the number of satellites it is locked on. It’s really fun to watch this, and it gives you a better indicator of whether or not it’s going to work. That said, the Citizen seems to be better at finding satellites.

The solar panels are hidden behind the dial, which lets some light through. Unlike digital solar watches, there is no way to visual indication that these are solar powered. Before getting one I assumed that if I looked closely I’d be able to see what part of the watch was actually a solar panel.

The finish of the Seiko dials is very good. It’s rumored that they are made in the same factory as Grand Seiko dials. The Citizen is also very good, but doesn’t have texture on the dial.

On both GPS watches you can press both buttons at the same time and it will swap the main and “home” time zone. I’m not sure when this would actually be useful, but it is fun to watch. On the Citizen it makes a quiet beeping noise while doing it, which I didn’t like.

All three have a neat feature with their clasps where you can adjust by small amounts without having to remove links.

You can also switch time zones manually with easy clicks. In fact, you could easily never use the GPS time zone finding feature and just manually switch every time you get on a plane. I was initially worried that I would be fighting my watch when I was on a cruise because sometimes in the middle of the ocean the ship will be on its own made-up time zone. In reality neither watch will change your time zone without you doing it manually or telling it to do it automatically.

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Photo is all three watches on my wrist. Big high five to anyone who knows why I took that particular photo.

I might make a YouTube video about these watches, so please leave any questions in the comments. I searched for info on YouTube and there wasn’t much, except random stuff from watch dealers.