The Smartest Person in the World

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

There's a part of me that won't be satisfied unless I believe I'm the smartest person in the world.

Do I like this part of myself? I definitely know I'm not supposed to. There are certainly other parts of me that don't like this part of me.

Does it drive a lot of what I do?

Well, I play competitive MTG. Does that answer your question?

How about some things I said about myself almost 2 years ago, back when I was trying to make a name for myself on the PT:

The Magic community is obsessed with status and perceived intelligence.

Of course, most communities are obsessed with status - but as someone who's existed in the competitive scene for over a decade, it's hard to overstate how many interactions, online and in person, are guided by the perceived skills of the players interacting.

Competitive people want to win. Why? In a game like MTG, which mostly tests strategic/cognitive ability, the answer is obvious - They want to feel smarter than their opponent.

I'd be really hard pressed to find a Magic player for whom this isn't the main underlying reason they like winning - either it makes them feel smart, or (more likely), it specifically makes them feel smart in comparison to others.

I will admit this is undoubtedly true for me. I have a very strong desire to be the best Magic player in the world, and at the heart of that is the desire to prove that my brain is more capable of understanding the game than anyone else's. Maybe I'm projecting a little - But I really don't think so, and for something so universal, we as a community hardly ever talk about it openly.

Here's another question: Have I regretted how that desire has shaped me?

Obviously not. It's pushed me to work my butt off to become an expert in something I love, and not only that, but to figure out the "how" of getting better and learning, and share that with others.

I've written before about what it takes to succeed at Magic, but it's basically a monomaniacal focus on your mistakes and only caring about how you can improve, not how good you already are.

Getting better at Magic requires an enormous level of introspection and self-critique. You need to be analyzing not just the patterns themselves, but mapping between your own understanding of them and the discrepancies you find between the patterns in your brain and the results of trying to apply those to the "reality" of the game (itself an abstract world, but one with tangible outcomes). It's endlessly analytical and self-critical. It's beautiful, and difficult, and exhausting. It's meaningful, and meaningfully, work.

Everyone more or less knows what good process looks like in Magic. The challenge is getting yourself to actually do the work. To play consciously, rather than instinctively. To think about what you're doing before you do it. To question and learn and patiently trudge through the experience of ignorance, rather than seeking confirmation of your pre-existing ideas. To give up on any preconceived notions of how good you are as a player and instead realize how short you are constantly falling of baseline competency. To Stop Trying to Win and instead try to find places where you're losing because you're wrong.

This mindset and set of practices is what it means to compete at being right - to seek to understand complex systems at a deeper level than others who are trying just as hard as you are to find patterns in them.

Despite writing about how I've had to learn to exist in other modes to survive my chronic pain, I treasure my ability to practice the process of being right, and I think a large part of why I was able to internalize this process was simply due to the fact that I care about being right, a lot. It's not something I chose to value consciously, it's just something that I naturally crave. Despite what the phrase "the smartest person in the world" might imply, I truly don't think this desire comes from a place of comparison. This is often hard to explain.

Then again, am I satisfied being a PT regular who can sit down in a match with literally anyone on earth and feel like I'm good enough to outplay my opponent and win?

Obviously not.

If I were satisfied with that, I wouldn't have gotten here. I'm not the best player in the world yet, so of course I'm not satisfied. That part of me doesn't want to be "a very very smart person", it wants to be The Smartest Person In The World.

I still don't know how to feel about this part of myself.

I've had a piece titled "The Smartest Person in the World" in my drafts folder for a while now as a reminder to return to this concept and figure out why I seem so drawn to it. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that now feels like the right time to return to it. Writing is the only way I know how to process these things, so here we go.

"And what is it now what you've got to give? What is it that you've learned, what you're able to do?"

"I can think. I can wait. I can fast."

From Siddhartha) by Herman Hesse

In part, I'm trying to figure out what I've spent the last few years of my life doing, and why. I'm turning 30 in a few months, and despite knowing arbitrary deadlines and checkpoints like this are stupid, it's hard to not let it affect you a little. I'm nowhere close to being able to afford to own the place I live in one day. I've never had a romantic relationship that lasted longer than a few months. I was burnt out by the end of my last real job, I left without a plan, and two and a half years later I'm only still financially stable because of my grandparents' help, something I know has given me far more leeway and time to figure things out than most others ever get. My chronic pain is better managed (with medication), but it's still here. And here I am, still trying to become the best in the world at a game most people don't even view as a serious intellectual sport, despite that goal not really furthering anything I want in life outside of, well, you know. Becoming the smartest.

This is not to say that I regret any part of the past two years.

If you'd taken early 2024 me and flashed her forward to today, she'd be completely thrilled at how far we've come.

It is nothing short of a life-saving miracle to the version of me who spent the weeks after quitting their job miserable in bed after a bad pain flare-up that my pain is better to this degree. The fact that I have hours, even full days where I feel something close to how I assume "normal" feels is something I couldn't even allow myself to conceptualize just a few years ago, because it would have been too hopeful. That version of me would have been overjoyed to hear that I found a therapist who actually helped, and that working on the parts of myself that were still treating the pain like a problem to solve and hoping for a cure were exactly what was keeping me from being able to live with it and manage it.

That version of me would also be in awe of the fact that I've become teammates with folks like Jason Ye, Nicole Tipple, and cftsoc and earned their respect as a player. More than that, I'd be blown away by how I've come to value these people (and many others) as more than just "Magic Friends" (my previous classification which was very different from "Friends"), and have continued to meet so many others who keep dissolving that distinction.

I'd be so proud of my writing, and the fact that it's led to people reaching out to express things like "[Your essays] were some of the only things I've read on chronic pain and fatigue that actually left me with a sense that i really understood what experience was being conveyed", and PT opponents sharing that they liked my "I Want to Play a Fair Game" piece as we were getting ready to play a match that could give one of us a win-and-in for top 8 the following round.

I'd feel so good about my work for Sanctum helping to better organize the RC team and start to lead the PT team in things like limited process, and happy that I've been able to offer free coaching hours to marginalized players and share my strategy articles privately with Sanctum teammates who couldn't afford to buy them.

And yeah, I'd be incredibly happy that I've reached, and succeeded at, the highest levels of a beautiful and stupendously challenging game that I've wanted to be the best at since I was 12 and my friend Ned showed me how tapping lands worked. I'd be so satisfied to know how I accomplished this: I realized that there was a reason I had never broken through to the top level before, and I was going to have to patiently lose, and learn, and seek out critical feedback, in the hope, not the guarantee, that I might eventually really believe I belonged there and hadn't just gotten lucky one time. That feeling, to know that I'm here because I did the work, is irreplaceably special to me.

I've gained so much from how I've chosen to spend my time these past few years.

I can sit with my pain. I can express my inner world in ways others find helpful. I can know when I'm wrong and patiently figure out how.

All of these things help me experience life in a happier way, share myself with others, and work towards long term goals.

At the same time, I did stop seeing that therapist, partially because I didn't think I could justify it as a recurring expense with my income being so uncertain, so... things haven't exactly been perfect.

There are many issues with wanting to be the smartest person in the world. The most obvious one is that it's an unrealistic goal -- literally only one person can achieve it, and it's probably not you.

In fact, the more I've tried to become the best at Magic, the more I see how it may not even be true that a person CAN meaningfully achieve that goal. The concept of a linear scale of intelligence breaks down quite a bit when you actually spend time developing expertise in a topic.

Here's a fun fact: since I've started competing on the Pro Tour, my Arena Premier Draft winrate has gone down. It's only very slightly, but it's about a -0.3% change. You could make the argument that this is because I'm less focused when I do it because it's a more casual form of Magic than I typically play, but you could also make the argument that because more of my time is spent in lower tiers of the ladder against worse opponents, I should expect a higher winrate if anything.

Would I say I've gotten better at Limited in that time? It's a tricky question, because "Limited" is not one thing -- Arena bo1 Premier Draft differs from MTGO Single Elimination drafts, which differs from Arena Open Sealed, which differs from Team Sealed. I've undoubtedly learned new things, and gotten better in some areas -- but whether I'm an overall better/smarter limited player is, to some degree, just a poorly formed question with an unsatisfying answer. I've acquired new specialized knowledge and lost (or let rust) other specialized knowledge.

It's pretty easy to see how this applies to all human pursuits. If the knowledge/intelligence that it takes to succeed in a specific subformat of a specific broader format of a specific trading card game (for a specific set... in a specific archetype... etc) can be so meaningfully different from the knowledge required just a few steps away in similarity, imagine how meaningless the concept of "general knowledge" in any human pursuit starts to be. This is partially why I've always been annoyed at concepts like "EQ" or "other forms of intelligence" -- they inherently grant the premise that there is something real and specific we refer to when we talk about IQ or general intelligence, when the whole thing is just very deeply contextual all the way down.

As humanity has gotten better at efficiently sharing information through technologies like oral history, writing, culture, and computation, individual people pursuing knowledge have gotten more, and more, and more granular in the capabilities they build throughout their lives. This is good, because for our social system to function, we need many different kinds of tasks to be completed and roles to be filled! It's like asking who's the best "hunter-gatherer", the hunter or the gatherer. The skills are simply different. The relation between the different types of work is what makes the work productive.

A disagreeable sort might argue that intelligence isn't about how much knowledge you have, but how generally capable you are of acquiring and deploying knowledge. I think this is maybe a more useful definition, but how separable are these things, really? How do you know someone is good at acquiring knowledge? You look at the knowledge they've already acquired, and predict that they'd likely be capable of acquiring... similarly-shaped knowledge. Chicken and egg. How do you know someone is good at applying knowledge to produce meaningful outcomes in the world? You see the outcomes they've produced in the context they were in, and you can predict that they'd likely be capable of producing similarly-shaped outcomes in similar contexts.

How do you answer the question "who is the most generally capable of acquiring and deploying knowledge?" If the answer devolves to "whoever has acquired the most knowledge and deployed it the best", then you are left with the question of how to define "the most" and "the best". Even in places like Magic with objective-seeming outputs, does a player winning the tournament with the largest cash prize mean they are the best? They certainly performed the best in that format, on that day. Does that mean they are smart?

All you have are specifics and context. There is no abstract ranking metric. The best way to answer the question "who is the smartest?" is to reject the question.

Why have I spent multiple years of my life so focused on improving at Magic?

The only answer I'm capable of giving is that I love Magic. A more useful way of explaining it is that I love what Magic brings out of me - specifically, competitive Magic.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't drawn to competitive Magic specifically because it is a way to rank my own skills against other people's and come out the winner. (It would be silly to lie about this given, well, the rest of this piece). Magic has clear rules and defined outcomes, while being as deep as any game can be. It's the perfect measuring stick if you are obsessed with intellectual comparison.

In other words, I like competitive Magic because it makes me feel smart, and to some degree, I've held the (I now think incorrect) belief that becoming the best Magic player in the world would say something about my being one of the smartest people in the world.

Unfortunately, this part of me has been disappointed as I've gotten better at the game and realized that the majority of the reason I succeed at it is not that I have some pure and innate talent or generalizable intelligence, but that I'm simply more willing to devote large amounts of my time and my short life to acquiring the specialized knowledge it takes to win at this particular game.

This part of me wanted to believe that successfully figuring out how to win at Magic would let me genuinely believe that I was smarter than other people. It was wrong -- the better I've gotten at the game, the less I believe my success at it has anything to do with my inherent abilities and the more I believe it has to do with my choices, interests, and preferences.

However, I don't think this desire is the primary reason I love Magic. Yes, it's an important part of what has drawn me to the game. But even though I no longer believe winning at Magic shows I'm smarter than others, I still love competing at Magic.

Why?

The game refused to give me what I wanted. That's why I love it. To get better, I had to let go of the desire to be right, to be smart. I am challenged when I play this game.

Challenged to change my beliefs and to think about myself and the world in new ways. Challenged to work with other people and figure out the things they know more about than I do. Challenged to communicate my own complicated thoughts and specialized knowledge in a way that translates for others. Challenged to stop believing process always translates to results, and challenged to stop believing that you can ignore results when they cast doubt on your intuitions and process.

I love Magic because it has the capacity to change me. Deeply. I think this is, to a large extent, what loving something or someone actually means - allowing yourself to be shaped, remade, transformed through your relationship to another.

So, yeah. I still love Magic.

It would be great if I could leave it there, but there are still some issues to be discussed.

A big part of why I returned to this piece sitting in my drafts was my exchange with Nile (who is great!) earlier this week. I've been having a hard time coming to terms recently with the fact that "being a PT regular who can sit down in a match with literally anyone on earth and feel like I'm good enough to outplay my opponent and win", an impressive specialized skill, isn't resulting in an ability to pay my bills.

The two posts I'm showing here aren't actually speaking to each other directly, but Nile and I went back and forth on this a bit, and I also discussed it with someone else named Soph who I know less well. I think both of them made some very good points, and I think the whole discussion raises some things I've been uncomfortable really admitting to myself.

Being extremely good at Magic is not well-compensated because being extremely good at Magic is not that valuable to others.

Magic, as a game, is very hard to entertain people with. Watching other people play Magic is a relatively niche interest, because to really engage with a game of Magic, you have to have a full grasp of ALL the details of what's going on. No small piece of information is irrelevant. Your full focus has to be on the game at hand, and moreover, you have to know enough about the game to even be able to process all the information accurately.

It's entirely possible for a very enfranchised player, even someone as experienced as me, to be watching a match on coverage and get extremely basic properties of the game, things like "who is ahead" or "what is the player trying to do here", wildly wrong, even if I'm paying pretty close attention. This is not a property that other sports have, even other popular e-sports. In basketball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer, you name it, there is a pretty universal criterion for who is ahead -- the score.

Magic is beautiful because "the score", life total, is itself a resource that can be used in the game. The entire ruleset is the game itself, the battlefield being contested. To understand what's going on in a game of Magic, you first have to understand the game each player is trying to play, how their opponent can prevent them from playing that game or assert their own game, and how the clash between these two competing assertions will play out.

In my totally unbiased opinion, this makes Magic the most beautiful game yet created. It also makes Magic almost totally inscrutable for any casual viewer who wants to know the current "status" of the game they're watching.

Can I let you guys in on a little secret? ** I don't even enjoy watching **Magic coverage all that much. I know many of my friends who are high-level players do, but I've always been pretty unable to get invested in the stakes of a game without being the one playing in it. I have never made much of this, but recently I realized it's probably something that is going to necessarily have an extremely major impact on the trajectory of my life. Oops.

A really important part of what I've spent the past few years doing is that it's mostly things that help myself.

"And what is it now what you've got to give? What is it that you've learned, what you're able to do?"

"I can think. I can wait. I can fast."

In this passage, Siddhartha is being asked by a wealthy merchant what skills he has to offer. Setting out from his childhood home, Siddhartha first followed a group of ascetics, who renounce all worldly possessions in order to seek spiritual enlightenment. He has learned a great deal from these mentors, but leaves because he doesn't believe it's the right path for him personally, and thinks he needs to learn more directly from the world.

When he returns to the "real world", most of the people he encounters do not value the skills he has acquired, and rightly so, because his skills don't serve any direct purpose in their lives other than as an amusement. What ultimately convinces the merchant to accept him as an assistant in his business is his ability to read and write.

I am not claiming that I have been seeking spiritual enlightenment, but I have definitely been seeking a similar kind of self-knowledge as Siddhartha, and the same thing is true about this kind of knowledge -- it is self-directed and not of much material use to others.

I have spent much of my time over the past few years reflecting on how I can have a better relationship with my body and my pain, understanding what I value in life, learning the many ways that I am bad at Magic, and doing the time-intensive work of improving my skills at the game.

These are all worthwhile endeavors! They are also not activities that, generally, help other people directly in any way or materially make the world better.

Of course, this is very meaningfully a generalization about how I've spent my time. I like to think I'm a caring and conscientious person, and I think my friends and teammates would very kindly say that I've made their lives better in the past few years.

I'd also like to think that my writing has made some people's lives very marginally better who I don't know very closely -- and it is definitely not a coincidence that this is some of the only "work" I've been compensated for during this period!

But fundamentally, what I've spent a large portion of my time doing over the past few years is becoming world-class at playing games of Magic, and that activity, on its own, doesn't help others. It's definitely helped me, in ways that go far, far beyond skill at the game, and to some extent I've been able to create outputs of that journey that are valuable to people who aren't myself. In many ways, I'm frustrated that others don't see the value of this game as a serious competitive endeavor that helps people become better versions of themselves, and instead, most see it as a trivial entertainment product.

Despite these frustrations, it's still important for me to realize that I've mostly been on a self-focused mission. Trying to become the smartest person in the world is only valuable to one person. What you do with what you've learned matters a lot more.

So, what to do with it?

Obviously, I don't know. I didn't know what I was going to write when I sat down to write this -- I've barely figured out the problem, let alone the solution.

Interestingly enough, there is a very big deal currently being made about whether we are actually about to create, for lack of a better term, The Smartest Person In The World.

Can you tell I've been spending more time on twitter? I don't feel great about it, but it's been a demonstrably effective way to promote my writing to the Magic community, so I'm choosing to do it, for that reason along with the unavoidable dopamine-seeking loop it's good at trapping me in.

You can't spend time on twitter these days (at least not on my feed) without running into people making genuinely apocalyptic claims about the future of the world. Yes, them being the direct material beneficiaries of one of the biggest waves of capital investment in a generation relies on the accuracy of these claims.

They've also been right in ways I didn't anticipate. I've long been a skeptic of the idea that what we call "AI" actually has any chance of being intelligent. I'm still very skeptical, for reasons I've outlined a bit in this piece (the idea rests on a discrete, scalar concept of "intelligence" that I believe is somewhat meaningless and misleading about how solving problems in the world actually works).

But... I probably would have told you that I didn't think this technology would ever be able to code autonomously a few years ago, and since then I've used it to build code, that I was paid for, that I never would have been able to produce without it.

I definitely would have told you last year that I didn't think this technology would be able to independently solve the kind of problems that professional mathematicians think about. Literally yesterday, an LLM found a counterexample to a long-believed-to-be-true theorem that has been an open, and somewhat famous/important, problem for 80 years. Professional mathematicians, undoubtedly smarter than me in this area, have said things like "the fact is that the AI was able to do here what lots of excellent human researchers tried and failed to do". (They have also given more sobering commentary, if you're interested in seeing the full thing, here it is!)

I still believe that these models wouldn't be able to play Magic as well as the best humans can (and I do think I have some pretty mathematically sound reasons for believing this), but it's getting to be a more and more compelling case that this belief is just a result of motivated reasoning and that the crazy AI people are right about more than I want to admit. Some of them, people who seem like reasonable, careful, intelligent people, are saying things that genuinely sound crazy.

I've been fascinated by "these people", and weirdly adjacent to them, for a long time. No, really, I have the receipts. I was a very early listener of 80,000 Hours, like all the way back in 2017-18, before they were explicitly AI-obsessed. After graduating college, my plan was to attend Horizons School of Technology in SF, an intensive coding bootcamp in the style that was popular at the time. Literally the only reason I didn't spend my first 2 years post-grad there was that the program got unexpectedly canceled a few months before I was going to move across the country for it. They said they didn't have a good enough financial plan to pay for even what would have been extremely cramped housing in downtown SF. I moved back home to Boston instead and started looking for jobs.

My parents, who are wealthy enough to give a meaningful portion of their money (~10%) to charity and still live comfortably, hold a family meeting every year where each of us get to have a say in where they give their money. Back around that time, I remember explicitly advocating for some of their money to go to this fund, which is mainly focused on mitigating "existential risks" from "artificial intelligence". The rest of my family pushed back on this pretty hard, saying it was too theoretical of a concern and the money would be better spent on direct aid to the poor and helping progressive politics (I still mostly agree with them!).

Back in 2021, early in the pandemic, I remember listening to The Alignment Problem on audiobook and finding the problems in it fascinating and cool. I talked about it with my parents, and their reaction was more positive - they encouraged me to think about grad school for ML if I found this stuff so fascinating.

I was never confident enough that it was the right decision to spend thousands of dollars and years of my life to find out.

I've always been scared and skeptical of my motivations for following this path. I know a big part of why this kind of stuff appeals to me is that Tech, EA, and communities like "The Rationalists" are like catnip for smart people with flexible moral compasses who are very capable of constructing elaborate rationalizations for whatever beliefs are materially or spiritually convenient for them. I know I am also a person like this, and it would be pretty easy for me to convince myself I'm living life in the best way I can when I'm actually just engineering my social and economic contexts to feel good about giving myself a comfortable life.

I love my friends in New York. Their jobs are things like:

• HR IT analyst

• Game Store Employee

• Massage Therapist

• Paramedic

• Software Engineer

• Professional Magic Player

• Unemployed/Disabled

• Research Scientist

My Sanctum teammates, most of whom aren't in my in-person friend circle, are some of the smartest, kindest, and most hardworking people I've ever known. Lots of them also struggle with executive function, mental health, professional communication, difficult family situations, and the fact that our society is generally horrible to people who look, sound, and act like them and denies them basic needs like gender affirming care and respectful recognition of who they are.

I think if I lived in SF and worked in tech or "AI"-adjacent things, that job list would look a lot more like

• Software engineer

• Startup founder

• ML Engineer

• ML Engineer

• Software Engineer

• Quant trader

• HR Manager for an AI company

• Token poor friend (only makes $100K/yr working a normal data analyst job)

I'm sure all those engineers, entrepreneurs, and rational effective altruists my alternate-timeline self is friends with are kind, interesting people who care about the world, live complicated lives, have struggled at times with similar issues, and genuinely want to do good. I think there is a meaningful differentiator though -- they are people who have, ultimately, been able to move through the world smoothly, for whom the friction of life hasn't dragged them down far enough not to be paid well over six figures and be materially comfortable.

I'm sure a lot of that, and the fact that they've been right about things I was wrong about, is due to their intelligence, hard work, and intellectual humility. I also don't want to trade my current friends for them. I like being close to people who are different from me along these axes, and I think it's a good thing that my social world is full of people who don't find making lots of money an easy goal to accomplish, either practically or morally. Being around people who are different from me, good at things I could never imagine doing and bad at the things I'm good at, makes me into a better person, I think. At least, this is one of the rationalizations I've made about why I haven't pursued this path.

It's equally possible that I've made this choice because I enjoy feeling like the smartest person in the room, and didn't want to actually push myself into areas where I'd run up against the limits of my own abilities, being surrounded by lots of people who were, in fact, a lot smarter (or more capable in the world/our society as it exists) than me. I don't know.

Here's what I do know:

I'm in a great place with managing my pain. I've gotten very good at solving difficult abstract problems, communicating my thoughts in writing, and working as part of a team. I love working with smart, humble people who care about more than money or status. I also happen to be able to play a game, a game that I love, very very well.

I still want, very badly, to become the best Magic player in the world, but I think I need to come to terms with that goal being fundamentally self-serving, and with the fact that I've already been given more time to pursue it than in some senses is "fair". A better goal is to figure out how to use what I've learned to actually do something that helps others, and hopefully lets me support myself materially instead of riding out the buffer given to me by my privilege and past labor.

So, if anyone has any ideas......

Was this the longest "I need a job" post in history? Damn, I really am pretty self-absorbed. And you're paying me to read it? I'll probably make it free, because it would be kind of silly to make people pay for me waxing poetic about how I need a job.

In all seriousness though, for a long time the idea of leaving my Magic "career" behind to return to an "actual" career was terrifying, but I think I'm starting to genuinely want what I only wanted to want before: something I can work very hard on that isn't just winning Magic tournaments. Something that challenges me in new and different ways. Yes, something that is more financially sustainable, hopefully as a result of actually doing things that make other people's lives better, even abstractly (I've never had a problem with high levels of abstraction, as you can probably tell).

I don't expect that I'll find this right away or with minimal effort, but actually wanting it means that the prospect of spending time and effort on figuring this problem out is much less daunting than it's felt ever since I started down the road of high-level Magic.

Oh, I should probably clarify a few practical things. I'm not joking or using a writing gimmick when I say I didn't know how this would end when I started it (even if everything here is stuff I've been actively ruminating about), but here are some things I definitely know:

• I definitely don't plan to stop writing, at least until I'm busy enough with something else that I have to stop. Like I said, my writing is one of the parts of my life the past few years that I'm most proud of, and I hope I can continue to say things here that people get something out of reading. For example, I'm planning to finish the "Limited Fundamentals" series with the gameplay piece as my next project.

• I definitely don't plan to stop competing in Pro Tours until I am no longer qualified for them. This includes trying very, very hard to do well in them, to the point where I might put aside some other life priorities for at least a week or two leading into them -- but I hope to no longer be putting my life on nearly full pause for a month or more.

• I hope I never have to stop being involved with helping organize and lead Sanctum! But I do think I am going to have to reflect a bit on exactly how much I'm able to put into this while trying to figure the other stuff out. In part, I did all the work getting the RC team more officially up and running because I knew that the weight of leadership was being carried by too few people, and needed to shift to a wider base. I'm very proud to say that I think that's now happening, and I trust the folks leading the RC team to do a wonderful job without needing to always defer to me, Jason, or more "historical" Sanctum leadership like Noor.

Outside of that, I am genuinely extremely open to different ways I can solve this problem. I assume that my Patreon audience and my broader Magic community is full of extremely smart, kind, and capable people, some of whom might have ideas about how a person like me can be useful to others while supporting themselves! If that's you, dear reader, definitely feel free to reach out, I'd really appreciate it. I guess it's probably important to mention that most of my work history is being a data analyst & data engineer for internet-based businesses -- I can tell you more about that if it's relevant.

I'm also not just saying "reach out if you can think of a job for me". I'd be happy to hear from anyone who feels like they can help, even if it's just having a conversation, sharing what they did in a similar situation in their life, etc. Even if you are just having similar problems and think we can help each other by talking through them, I'd love to do that!

In the meantime, I'm going to thank the version of myself who wants to be the smartest person in the world for getting me here, but kindly suggest that it might be time they take a backseat and let the other parts of me get behind the wheel for a bit. I think that might be good.