Retired future poker player, current nomadic uncle, aspiring intentional liver.

In an even earlier lifetime, I was a data scientist and quit my corporate job to play poker. But then, I realized all I did was swap my corporate treadmill for a competitive-gaming exercise bike, and that I hadn't actually solved the incongruence of driving to the gym and taking the elevator to get on an exercise machine to work off all the processed foods I stress ate. So now I'm walking outside instead, constantly checking how much longer it'll be until I've reached my step goal for the day.

(To be clear, this is all strictly a metaphor. I've never actually been motivated to go to the gym consistently; I have a very high metabolism that tricked me into thinking I was healthy even when I wasn't. And I now believe health to be a lifestyle rather than a checklist, so the part about the prior paragraph that wasn't just metaphorical was the part about enjoying outdoors activities--especially those with boat-like apparatuses. Also, my metaphors may need work).

In case the past few paragraphs were extraordinarily confusing, I quit my corporate job as a data scientist in 2019 and spent the next few years studying (running programs/developing strategies/memorizing decision trees) and playing poker because I wanted to see how good I could be at something that better matched my skillset. At the same time, after becoming aware of how much my achievement mindset had driven my life for so long and how I no longer wanted that, I've decided that poker will likely just be a way for me to offset costs going forward and not the primary focus of my life. So I've become interested in traveling and seeing the world, and I was on an roadtrip across the US (primarily through National Parks and secondarily through art museums) for 2 years from the fall of 2022 to the fall of this year. I spent September of this year in Peru and absolutely loved it, so my intention for the foreseeable future is to take more international trips. I tentatively am planning to go to Europe next summer and take a long cruise afterwards around Africa to SE Asia.

Longer term, I know that I'll likely want to be geographically flexible or nomadic. I'm not sure for how long I'll want to travel and/or if I'll eventually want to establish a more permanent base. I'll likely be interested in having children at some point, because I find children to be wonderful learning beings and I'd like to help with and be a part of that process, but as I've learned over the years, I never truly know what future me wants. No matter how convinced I am at any moment that past me was wrong but that this time, present me is completely right, I know it's all a trick. I think.

A somewhat ordered list of a few (/many?) more things about me:

I'm 34, 5'8, 150 lbs, and Chinese American

I'm passionate about learning in general (especially about how/what/why people think) but am even more passionate about sharing everything I learn with other people (but having to tone it down because no, my friends don't always want to read 500-word essays on obscure niche topics, since no one is as excited about the brain's default mode network, the viability of gift economies, or basketball analytics as me. But in the one-in-a-million chance that you are... you know what to do...).

Some of my favorite TV shows have been The Good Place, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Sex Education, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, As We See It, and Atypical. I usually read non-fiction (i.e. Antifragile, Civilized to Death, How to Change Your Mind), but one piece of fiction I particularly enjoyed recently is Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (related: if you like to teasingly mock everyone and everything, I will like you).

I both practice time-restricted eating (usually a 6-7 hour window) and routinely eat 60 pieces of sushi at AYCE sushi.

I love sharing stories, but also, I'm an especially confusing story-teller. There's often really no sensical reason to the order in which I say things. And my sentences will often have way too many clauses, because I both get distracted way too easily and also feel a need to finish my original thought.

I'm in a constant battle with people's names, so I've been known to refer to people by descriptors until it becomes too cumbersome to say "my friend's sister's boyfriend" repeatedly in a story. Especially if he also has a sister.

One could probably play bingo with the catch phrases I routinely utilize. Some of the words one might include on said bingo card: "incentivized", "societal", "status goals", "evolved", "midwit", "right-tailed"/"left-tailed", "zero-sum", "subconsciously", "threshold", "confidence-level", "update [one's] priors".

I will consistently refer to the difference between the absence of evidence and the evidence of absence. As a result, I am open to the possibility of most things. Similar to my prior point about how I've always been wrong in the past about myself so I'm likely still wrong now, the same would apply to humanity as a whole and whatever the currently accepted consensus "truths" are. Recently, that openness has led to an interest in energy healing, spirituality, and plant medicine.

Anyways, if any of this seems interesting to you, please send me a PM/chat! While I'm hoping to find someone that I connect with longer-term, interesting conversations are always very treasured.