Beyond
The stuff that doesn't belong on a resume but probably says more about how I think than the resume does.
Travel
It's hard to stay in one place for long. Some of that is restlessness, but most of it is wanting to see what the same problems look like from somewhere else in the world.
Ten countries so far, spanning the Middle East, Southeast Asia, East Africa, the Caucasus, Western Europe, and North America. Every trip opens up questions I didn't know to ask before. Drag the globe.
Destinations
History
What draws me to history isn't the dates or the dynasties. It's the logic of why things happened, what civilizations were actually trying to build, and why so many of them ran into similar problems.
I keep coming back to the Islamic world from the 7th century through the Mongol period, and to the longer history of how civilizations traded with and borrowed from each other. Baku puts a lot of that in one place: medieval Zoroastrian fire temples, Silk Road caravanserais, and Soviet apartment blocks all on the same hillside.
Fitness
A lot of my time outside of work is spent outdoors: hiking, cycling, open water. Physical effort without a screen is about the best reset I've found.
Kayaking and canoeing take up most of my Ontario summers. The lakes and rivers up here are genuinely exceptional and most people who live here don't use them enough. Gym is a year-round constant, mostly for the mental clarity it buys.
Personal Finance & Investing
I invest in North American equities, mostly in the physical infrastructure layer of the AI buildout: data centres, power generation, semiconductors, the stuff large-scale AI actually needs to run.
AI demand is real, the compute requirements are significant, and most of the near-term bottlenecks are physical. Power, cooling, networking, land. Those things all need to be built before any of the AI ambitions amount to anything. The companies doing that work tend to be less crowded and more durable than the names everyone already recognizes.
I read a lot of earnings calls, utility filings, and capex plans. Less exciting than following the latest model releases, but the signal quality is better.
