A fully loaded wooden cart moves with a quiet, heavy hum. The weight absorbs the shock. An empty one rattles. It bounces. It makes noise. My grandmother had a proverb for this: 빈수레가 요란하다. An empty cart rattles loudly. She deployed this phrase not as an insult, but as a diagnostic tool. The noise was…
June 2025. I had just joined Favorited, brought in to think about something most companies still weren’t taking seriously: what happens when your engineers start talking to machines that learn from everything you give them. A few months earlier, I’d been at a cybersecurity conference in New York. Not the marketing kind—the kind where the…
The Threshold Problem: Why the Best AI Safety Framework in the World Still Isn’t Enough
Shortly after midnight on September 26, 1983, warning sirens erupted inside a Soviet military bunker outside Moscow. On a bank of glowing monitors, the system reported the unthinkable: the United States had launched a nuclear strike. The alert came from a newly deployed early-warning satellite system designed to detect American launches within seconds. According to…
The Case for Structurally Independent AI Governance The Problem: We govern AI using election-cycle logic, but AI risk compounds on an engineering horizon. This structural mismatch makes catastrophe increasingly probable under current structures. The Solution: We must move beyond “bolted-on” political compliance and toward Structurally Independent Governance. This means an oversight body modeled after the…
Launch my health and fitness travel show, HIIT Me. Roadblock: finalizing the pitch deck for networks. To-do’s: lock in a strategic PR partner for the show; find sponsors; schedule shoot dates. Why: to inspire others to take control of their own health; this is essentially the start to my NYC mayoral campaign. Launch my health…
From time to time when I would get into a situation where I couldn’t avoid a conversation with my Dad, he would ask me what I was doing with my time, if I was being “productive”. He had some nerve. It would absolutely shame him to know how hard I work, day in and day…
Dear Senator McCain: I am a fan of yours and aspire to someday follow in your footsteps to the Senate. I was saddened to hear the recent news of your diagnosis. However I believe that not only is there is a clear path to victory over your illness, there is a tremendous opportunity to show…
This 90-second pitch turned into a speech… 18 years ago, I approached a VC for the first time and said, “I have an idea that can take down AOL.” I was 20 years old, a junior out of NYU and working as the lead web developer at a media startup. Paul Graf–I met him at…
My life is series of bad B-movies. At least that’s what my first acting teacher told me. I’ll never forget those first six weeks at William Esper Studio, my first real go at acting after years of odd IT jobs. Deb always seemed so vexed by me which I couldn’t help but internalize; it consumed me…
The rumors are true–the robots are coming to Gotham. And apparently I’m rolling out the welcome mat for them. Of course, I wasn’t told this when I was hired, but it’s two months into this 6-month contract, and it’s fairly obvious what my role is shaping up to be at this behemoth of an investment…