Interests

I inherited Hawthorn at about four or five from my stepdad's side of the family. Went to games, had a membership, the whole thing — and this was during a genuinely bad era, with the club sitting near the bottom of the ladder. Then, over a few years, the devotion just drained out of me. By the time they built the list and made the finals in 2008, the euphoria wasn't there any more. Them losing me broke something, and I wasn't a faithful supporter after that.

Then I didn't watch football for about twenty years. Which, writing it down now, is insane.

I got back into it last year after returning to Australia, watching games with a mate. I'd played AFL at school, and that was the thing that had embedded it in the first place — so it came back faster than it had any right to.

What's different this time is that I love the game rather than a team. I can name players across most clubs and I don't play any more, but I've got a big heart for the sport itself. A lot of supporters are loyal to a club and only really acknowledge good plays when their own side makes them. I just love a great play, wherever it comes from.

If you want the honest answer on players: my favourite going around right now is Nick Daicos. There's something about how he plays that feels genuinely once-in-a-lifetime — I think we'll go decades before someone matches what he's done in the time he's been in the game.

But my favourite of all time is Nat Fyfe. Same category of once-in-a-generation player. And if I ever did take a second club it'd be Fremantle — my dad's side supported them when I was young. Harder to get into these days, but it's there.

I love the game rather than a team.

What holds me is that weather is a system you can actually watch running in real time — pressure, moisture, shear, all interacting to produce something visible out the window. Most complex systems are invisible. This one isn't.

The current thread inside it is severe weather — supercells, storm structure, how a rotating updraft organises itself into something that produces a tornado. I'm not chasing storms. I'm reading about them, which is a different and much drier hobby, and I'm fine with that for now.

Most complex systems are invisible. This one isn't.

Two traditions pull at me and they turn out to be closer than they look. The contemplative side — Buddhist and mindfulness-adjacent — is mostly about attention, and about how much of suffering is self-generated. The stoic side is about ego, endurance, and the gap between how things are and how you'd prefer them to be. Both are ultimately arguing the same thing: you control your response and very little else.

Naval's is the bridge. It's the only one on the list that takes wealth and happiness seriously as a single question rather than two competing ones, which is why it's the one I'd hand to anyone.

You control your response and very little else.

There's just something about engineers building genuinely cool machines, putting them in an arena, and finding out what survives. The mechanical engineering is the appeal: the sheer force and power involved, and what can physically take it.

What I find most satisfying is the selection effect. The things that survive are the ones with raw power and structural soundness. The gimmicks — flamethrowers, anything decorative, anything clever but fragile — get taken apart. Substance beats showmanship, on camera, repeatedly.

It's also complete escapism. I feel pleasantly disconnected from my own reality watching it, and that's part of why I like it.

Substance beats showmanship, on camera, repeatedly.

It's where I first got properly interested in compounding, in second-order effects, and in the difference between activity and progress — three ideas that ended up shaping how I think about everything else, business included. Most of what I believe about long-term thinking came out of this rather than out of anything entrepreneurial.

It's also the quietest interest I have, in the sense that doing it well mostly looks like not doing very much.

Doing it well mostly looks like not doing very much.

This is the interest I most consistently underestimate the timeline on. I've come to think of it as a five-to-ten year project rather than something to finish, which paradoxically makes it easier to keep doing. Chinese is the longer-term one and I've barely started.

The main thing I've learned is to resist over-systemising it. I build systems for a living, and every time I've tried to turn language learning into a tracked, optimised process I've killed the thing that made me want to do it.

It's a practice, not a pipeline.

The appeal is that it's the exact opposite of the work — it's physical, it's immediate, and the feedback is completely honest. You either make the move or you don't. There's no version of climbing where you talk your way through a problem, and after a day at a desk that's genuinely restorative.

It also happens to be a problem-solving sport dressed up as a strength sport, which is probably why it caught me in the first place.

You either make the move or you don't.

Specifically the older, slower styles — static thumb pressure, myofascial work, the nervous-system-first approach rather than the tourist-strip version. It appeals to me because it's a genuinely rare embodied skill, it doesn't scale, it can't be automated, and none of that is a problem.

Almost everything else I do is leverage-shaped. This is the opposite and I think I need one of those. There's a three-day introductory course in Chiang Mai that's the obvious first step. I haven't done it yet.

Almost everything else I do is leverage-shaped. This is the opposite, and I think I need one of those.

I just came to genuinely appreciate spiders. It started around 20, from a YouTube channel called The Den, and I got my first at 22. In Australia I kept native species — Selenotypus and Phlogius, two or three at a time. Australian tarantulas are beautiful and not remotely friendly.

When I moved to Thailand I picked it back up, largely because it's so easy here — no licences, no permits, you can walk into a shop and pay a couple of hundred baht. Some were given to me for free.

The Old Worlds — the Thailand Black and the Cobalt Blue — were exactly what you'd expect. Genuinely aggressive, and genuinely stunning to look at. A Cobalt Blue in the right light doesn't really look like an animal that should exist. I got lucky in that both turned out to be females, which matters more than non-keepers realise: females live for decades, males often less than a couple of years.

The Chaco Golden Knee was my favourite. She was a New World species and about as gentle as a tarantula gets — the only one I'd handle. Also female.

I don't keep any at the moment, but this is the one interest I've already restarted once, so I'd bet on it coming back.

What I actually miss is the state it put me in. Hours would disappear. It's one of the few things I've done where I wasn't measuring anything.

I stopped, and I'd like it back eventually. Two things I've worked out: it needs to be around other people rather than alone in a room, and it can never be a business. The moment I try to make it produce something, it stops working.

The moment I try to make it produce something, it stops working.

The original idea was to make lo-fi and monetise it, which was probably viable a few years ago and isn't now — AI has flooded that particular pond and standing out has got much harder.

So the business angle is dead, and honestly that's freed it up. It sits here as a creative outlet I'll come back to, with nothing riding on it.

It started with Pokémon — the GBA and DS generations — which was most of early childhood. Then Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the first game I played competitively rather than just played. Then the Call of Duty era, four or five years of it, running until around 2016. After that Warframe and Path of Exile, and finally Rocket League, which was the last game that really had me.

Then it just stopped, around twenty-one. I'll still put a few hours in every now and then, but the chapter itself is closed.

The obvious thing it gave me is hand-eye coordination, and I don't want to undersell that — it's a real, physical skill built over thousands of hours, and it doesn't go away. The less obvious thing is the willingness to be bad at something in public for a long time before being good at it. Every one of those games involved months of losing. I'd be lying if I said that pattern hadn't carried over into everything since.

The willingness to be bad at something in public for a long time before being good at it.