I’m alone in a Cessna 172, on my second solo cross-country flight, approaching to land at Rosh Pina (northern Israel).

My hand is on the throttle. Through the engine noise, I can hear my instructor, Yossi, shouting:

“Whatever happens, don’t let the airspeed drop below 72 knots!!”

Except Yossi isn’t there.

I’m alone in the airplane.

400 feet. 74 knots.

I lower the flaps all the way. On my airplane - CDJ -that means 40 degrees instead of the usual 30, and you can feel the difference.

“Forty degrees is like hitting a wall! The airplane drops like an elevator!!”

I can hear Yossi yelling it in my head.

I push the throttle forward to offset the drag from the flaps.

In another moment I’ll pull the power and transition into the glide over the runway. That part is all feel. I’ve done it dozens of times.

Except this time, the airplane doesn’t feel right.

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that.

Instead of gliding straight toward the centerline, the airplane starts pulling hard to the left.

I correct with rudder and aileron, but I know that if I touch down like this, there’s a good chance the airplane will flip.

Before I can even explain to myself what’s happening, I hear Yossi again.

“If there’s any doubt - go around!”

I shove the throttle all the way forward. Full power. Flaps back to 10 degrees. The airplane begins climbing, slowly.

“CDJ going around,” I report to the tower.

My stomach drops.

I wanted to call my mom and ask her to come pick me up from this flying lesson.

But I’m alone in the airplane.

I climb out and fly another circuit, explaining to myself it was a strong crosswind pushing me left.

You don’t get to order crosswinds for flight training, and I’d never practiced landing in one this strong.

I turn final for my second attempt.

A few feet above the runway - and it happens again.

The airplane swings hard left. My correction isn’t enough. We’re crossing the threshold at a bad angle, and I know that if I land now, I’ll wake up in a hospital if I’m lucky.

Full power again. Flaps to 10 degrees.

“CDJ going around. If I can’t make it this time, I’ll head back to Herzliya,” I tell the tower.

But I wasn’t really telling them. I was telling myself.

The fuel is running low.

I’ve decided the landing conditions at Rosh Pina are beyond my skill level. Instead of wasting more fuel trying to force it, I’d rather fly back to Herzliya, where I’d never seen winds like these and where I had dozens of successful landings behind me.

I line up for one last attempt.

This time I point the airplane further into the wind, letting the crosswind correct the drift instead of fighting it at the last second.

Honestly, I don’t remember much about that third landing.

What I do remember is the moment all three wheels were rolling on the runway.

My heart rate was probably 200.

And I felt more alive than I had in a very long time.

A few months later, I passed my checkride and earned my pilot’s license.

After we shut down, the examiner looked at me and said:

“Well... you don’t know how to fly an airplane.

But you fly safely enough to teach yourself.”

I flew to the US and went from bank branch to bank branch, begging someone to open an account for me so we could sell on Amazon too. Eventually a branch in Las Vegas said yes.

The business grew nicely and we were making $20,000–$30,000 a month. Two single students living on a $2,000 monthly budget - we had no idea what to do with that kind of money, so we just let it pile up in the bank.

Then a friend who was building a startup offered us the chance to be his first investors.

The company was called Weissbeerger, and the product: smart beer tables - everyone pours their own from a tap at the table and pays by the drop.

We did our due diligence. We went to talk to bar owners, and every single one of them told us to walk away. Nobody would ever put a thing like that in their bar.

We decided not to invest.

But we set up a meeting with the founders anyway - at least we’d share what we’d learned from the market.

We walked into the meeting to give advice. We walked out with a final decision to invest.

Back to the American bank, where the money from the business was sitting. The most efficient way to move it to Israel at the time was withdrawing cash from an ATM. There was a daily withdrawal limit, so it took a few weeks of daily withdrawals to collect the full investment amount.

When the money was ready, I put the bills in a shoebox and drove to Tel Aviv.

I handed the founders a shoebox full of cash, and became the company’s first investor.

Weissbeerger quickly moved on from smart tables and invented a new category - Beverage Analytics.

Years later, they were acquired by AB InBev, the largest beverage company in the world.

“Babe, I think I’m having contractions.”

The bag had been packed for weeks. We were ready to head down to the car and drive to the hospital.

While Lital got herself together, I called the friends who’d been on standby for a month to take one-year-old Yan.

“Whenever it happens, call us. Any hour. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

He didn’t answer.

I called his wife. She didn’t answer either.

Screaming from the bathroom.

Lital had become a pile of pain and screams.

I realized there was no way we were getting her down to the car.

What do we do?

This is a medical situation, I thought. Call an ambulance.

I explained that I thought my wife was giving birth in our bathtub.

“Check if you can see the baby’s head.”

“Say I see a head - what do you want me to do with it?”

They told me to stay calm. It was a natural process. An ambulance was on the way.

I hung up and tried our friends again.

Still no answer.

The paramedics arrived.

“You’re delivering here at home, right?”

“Absolutely not. We’re taking her to the hospital - a sterile delivery room, all the proper equipment.”

Fifteen minutes later, Tommy was born.

On a stretcher.

In the kitchen.

The idea: take the new AI models that could generate realistic images and video, and build a tool for online influencers. Instead of flying to exotic locations and shooting with a camera, they could make the same content from home, for a fraction of the cost.

It started with needing someone to believe me.

I have a technical co-founder with twenty years’ experience, but the business had to start with me. I had to show enough proof in the idea for him to write the first line of code.

So I went to influencers. Describing the tool in words didn’t work - so I started sending them AI images of themselves in places they’d never been: skydiving, diving with sharks, floating in space. That opened the conversation.

Within two weeks we had a few paying customers - creators paying me to make the AI images by hand. That was the proof my partner needed. He built the product.

We moved those first users onto the real app. We hit $1,000 a month.

And there we stalled.

The AI looked impressive, but influencers kept coming back with the same note: “It’s not 100% me.” Small deviations - the limits of the tech. An outsider wouldn’t notice. But someone looking at their own face does. For an influencer, that’s everything. We were stuck there for months.

Borrowing an audience to grow.

To learn the market, I joined Telegram groups about AI content monetization. One day I saw a creator who taught thousands of people how to earn income with virtual AI influencers. He was recommending a competitor app of ours as an affiliate, for a small commission per referral.

I came back with a different offer: forget the referral fee - come in as an equal partner, a co-owner of the SaaS.

We didn’t know each other, so we started with a two-month trial. We’d see if he could really bring paying customers; he’d see if we could build something people pay for.

Two weeks in, he dropped our app’s link to his community.

Within days, he’d brought in nearly 200 paying customers. I remember watching the payment notifications stack up on my phone, one after another, and understanding that something had just changed.

His audience was the missing piece. We registered a company, the three of us as equal partners.

We also figured out why it suddenly worked: his niche was AI influencers - fully invented personas, built from scratch. Nobody was looking at their own face, so the small inaccuracies didn’t matter. The thing we’d been stuck on for months simply stopped being a problem.

We’d traded a third of the company for an audience that already trusted him. It took us to $30,000 a month.

The climb to $90K.

His community wasn’t just revenue - it was data. We learned which features people actually used, which messages pulled the right buyers. That first audience was the seed; everything after grew from what it taught us.

So we pushed. A referral program - paying our own users to bring in people who trusted them. Paid videos with YouTube creators in the AI space. Same play every time: renting trust from people who’d spent years earning it.

It was fast and a little unhinged. We went from a few thousand image generations a week to millions, server bills climbing, shipping features weekly just to keep up. Less than a year in, we crossed $90,000 a month.

A rocket built almost entirely on borrowed trust.

The part I didn’t see coming.

Then we hit a different kind of dependency: the payment processors.

The first one shut us down one day, no warning. Every subscription, all the revenue, gone overnight. The reason was boilerplate - “doesn’t meet our policy.” What I learned later: realistic AI-generated content scares the whole payment world. The card networks above the processors are afraid of the brand risk of enabling tools that could make harmful content.

A processor moving billions a year has no reason to spend a person’s time vetting a business our size. Cutting us was simply the safe move.

I found a younger, hungrier processor. Did a video call with their CEO, went deep on the business - it felt personal this time, two founders building something together.

Within two months, they cut us too.

Then came an established processor, twenty years in the business. We spent weeks with their compliance team building a system that would pass any check. It worked. The business grew on what finally felt like solid ground.

We only survived all that switching because our users trusted the company enough to re-subscribe every time we changed payment rails.

The collapse.

Half a year later, I got ‘the call’ directly from our third processor’s CEO. Because of our relationship, he called personally to tell me before the automation took over. He was frustrated - he wasn’t cutting us because he wanted to. He was being forced to by the card networks above him. They put it in writing:

We’ve invested significant resources to keep this category compliant. Despite this, fines continue to be issued aggressively by the card networks, often without clear explanation. This has become unsustainable. We’ve made the decision to discontinue support for products involving AI-generated images, videos, and songs, and to suspend such accounts effective immediately.

He said he was willing to fight it, to appeal. I took a day, then called back and told him not to waste his energy.

We could have gone hunting for a fourth processor, and a fifth. But after three of them hit the exact same wall, I stopped blaming the processors. They weren’t the ones making the call. The card networks had decided that businesses like ours - small, in a category they saw as high-risk - weren’t worth the trouble. The big, established players in the space had the size and the relationships to weather it. We didn’t.

$90,000 a month, and within a day, the ground was gone.

What it taught me.

Here’s the thing, though: the growth engine never broke. The way we got to $90K worked exactly as I’d hoped. What broke was the payment plumbing underneath it -
a completely separate problem from how we grew.

And that’s the part I’m keeping.

My last SAAS company, CrazyLister, took three years to pass $90K a month. I built it the slow way - earning my own audience over years. This one took less than a year, because I didn’t build the audience. I borrowed it. I found people who’d already spent years earning a crowd’s trust, and I plugged into what they’d built.

That’s the real lesson, and it’s not a cautionary one: you can skip the slowest, hardest part of building a business by renting trust someone else already earned. Years of audience-building, compressed into months. It’s the biggest shortcut I’ve found, and I’m taking it into the next one.

So now we start by partnering with people who already have a trusted audience - and build from there.

We’re waiting on Lital’s visa (my wife) from the Thai embassy, so we can go home - to Thailand. I got mine a week earlier, in an email that landed at 14:27. Friends we were traveling with got theirs a few days later, at 14:29. We figured out there’s probably an automated system that sends the approvals in a window of a few minutes before three. So every day, just before three, I sit and refresh.

Two and a half weeks have passed. The friends already went back to Thailand. We’re still here - stuck for another weekend because the embassy is closed, waiting for it to reopen Monday. The kids have missed two and a half weeks of school, glued to their tablets. The Vietnamese never did anything to me, but I can’t stand the sight of Vietnam anymore. I just want to go home.

14:30. I keep refreshing, but the hope is draining out. At 14:35 I accept reality - we’re stuck here another day. I let out a breath and book another night at the hotel.

I called the embassy. I went there in person. All I get is “nothing to do, just keep waiting.” A blank wall.

My whole life I’ve made choices to give myself as much freedom as possible. And now, for two and a half weeks, my whole family’s life is on PAUSE. We’re living out of suitcases in a hotel, completely dependent on some random clerk I’ve never met, who’ll sign Lital’s paper whenever it suits him. There’s no arguing with him, no one to call, nothing to do but wait.

How did we get here? Why did we even have to leave our home in Thailand to get permission to come back to it?

Turns out it all started with a Serbian guy with a gun.

When the World Was Open

A little over a hundred years ago, in most of the world, you didn’t need a passport to cross a border. Passports existed - but they were an option, not a requirement. One could buy a ticket in Europe and board a ship to America, or sail from Germany to China, and step off on the other side without a single official asking who he was or why he’d come. No visa issued in advance, no fingerprint, no embassy interview. The closest thing to a passport actually served the opposite purpose to today’s: not a document the state demands to prove you’re allowed in, but a kind of letter of protection a nobleman or merchant would request from his ruler - a note asking the authorities along the way to treat him well and help him out if he ran into trouble. For the ordinary person, it didn’t apply. You just showed up.

And in my own neighborhood specifically - in the late 19th century, Siam (today’s Thailand) threw its gates wide open. King Rama V wanted working hands to build ports, railways, canals. So he just opened the door and invited everyone in.

Between 1825 and 1910, the Chinese population in Siam grew from 230,000 to nearly 800,000. Thailand almost never closed the door. People just arrived, unpacked their bags, and lived - no passport, no visa, no flying to a neighboring country to sit in a hotel and refresh email like an addict.

Then came 1914. Someone shot an Austrian duke, and half the planet decided that was an excellent reason to kill each other for four years.

And in the chaos, in a short span of time, government after government reached the same conclusion: if we’re in a world war, we’d better know exactly who’s crossing our borders. Maybe this guy’s a spy. Maybe he’s dodging the draft. Let’s make everyone carry a document with a name and a photo.

That’s how the modern passport was born. Not as an orderly plan to run the world, but as a temporary emergency measure in the middle of a war. Britain and France started, and within a few years the whole world had shut itself behind fences.

Thailand joined in 1917 - not out of a desire to control its own residents, but out of necessity. When the whole world suddenly demands passports, your own citizens and merchants get stuck in foreign ports without papers. So Thailand had to build a fence of its own, just so its people could get the key that would move them through everyone else’s fences.

Friend or Enemy?

Passports and visas were supposed to be a temporary fix. After the war, in the 1920s, more than a few leaders and international officials hoped they’d go back to being an emergency measure only, and that we’d return to the freedom of movement of before 1914. It didn’t happen - partly because governments don’t tend to give up tools of tracking and control. A fence is a lot easier to build than to take down. A hundred years later, I’m paying the cost of that fence still standing, in a hotel room in Hanoi.

And this history explains exactly why I, of all people, got stuck.

The passport was born from a wartime mentality, to answer one question: is this person ours or not ours? Friend or enemy? It’s completely binary thinking. And it worked fine as long as people really were one of two things: either citizens who live inside, or tourists who come for a short visit and go back to their “home country.”

Except my family and I are neither.

I’m not a Thai citizen - and I’m not a tourist either. I was born in Ukraine, raised in Israel, and I’m raising my kids on an island in Thailand. I live there, the kids go to school there, we adopted a dog, we fucking learned Thai - but I don’t have a Thai passport. I have an Israeli passport, and Israel is the place every system assumes I “return” to. Except I’m not returning there right now. I live in Thailand. That gap - between the country my paper points to and the place I actually live - is exactly the hole I fall into.

And the problem isn’t that there’s no slot for me. There are visas today for nomads, for temporary residents, for foreign workers - you can find a form. The problem is that all of those slots are built on the same assumption: that you’re here temporarily, and that your real home is somewhere else. Every one of those visas basically says, “we’re hosting you for a while - and then you’ll go back to where you belong.”

Except I don’t belong somewhere else. Thailand is home. This is where I live, where the kids are growing up, where the life is being built. I’m not trying to sneak in, not looking for a loophole - I just want the paper to recognize what already exists: that I live here. A long-term visa, a stable status, without counting days until the next renewal.

But here’s the absurd part: to move into that status - the status of someone who lives here - I first had to leave here. You can’t switch visa types from inside. You have to leave the country, apply from a Thai embassy abroad, and wait there for permission to come back in.

To get the status of “someone who lives in Thailand,” I had to stop, for a moment, living in Thailand.

Once I get this visa, I’ll be stable. I won’t have to leave again. But the transition itself - the moment I officially turn from visitor to resident - the system insists I do from the outside. Because in its eyes, “entering” is something that only happens from the outside, even when you’re already inside. Even when you’re already home. So I packed up the family, left my home, flew to a foreign country, paid for hotels, and refreshed an inbox until my finger hurt.

Early Adopters of a New Way of Living

I’m describing the problems of the privileged here. There are people who cross borders to flee terrible things. My parents fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union in 1990, with no property, no means, with a box of vodka bottles they traded for bananas in Hungary on the way to Israel.

Our choices today come from wanting to build a life that fits us better, not because we’re fleeing something terrible.

So think about who early adopters really are. They’re not smarter or braver than anyone else. They’re just people whose need for something is so strong that they’re willing to suffer for it. They buy the first version of the product - the one that crashes halfway, that’s missing half its features, that has no support - because what it gives them is worth more to them than all the bugs. They pay in frustration now, in exchange for something everyone else will get polished and convenient only years later.

That’s me, with this way of living. My need to live where I choose - without anyone deciding for me where I “belong” - is apparently strong enough that I’m willing to absorb the system’s bugs. And the bugs are big: flying to a foreign country to ask permission to come home, two and a half weeks in a hotel, forms in Thai designed for a tourist from the 1950s. This is the first, janky version of living without one country managing you. It doesn’t have tech support yet.

One day maybe they’ll build a system that fits people like me. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in a hotel room in Hanoi, refreshing email.

And I’d still choose this again.

Inside, I’m panicking. But I fake a reassuring smile for my son — it’s fine, nothing to worry about - while I stroke his head. They push the white anesthetic into his vein. He shivers, says “Dad, it’s so cold,” and goes under.

They wheel him into the operating room, and I go back to the waiting room with the rest of the family.

My mind races. We’re playing with fire. What if something goes wrong? We’re on an island, in a foreign country, and our son is sedated, intubated, and being operated on by a doctor we know almost nothing about - who barely speaks our language.

We’d asked for information beforehand. They told us he’d done six tonsillectomies in the past year. Two of them on children.

I had no idea what to do with that number. Is six a lot, or a little? Does that make him experienced, or not? Back in Israel, “six surgeries last year” would have meant something to me. I know that system from experience. I have doctor friends. I know how to check a specific surgeon, how to read between the lines, who to call. The number would have had context.

Here, on an island in Thailand, the same number is just a number. I have no way to judge it. And that’s the part nobody warns you about - it’s not that there’s no system here. It’s that I lost the ability to read the one I’m standing in.

So the questions kept coming. Would more responsible parents have flown back to Israel for this? Did we take this whole new-life-in-Thailand adventure too far?

Leaving the standard package of life sounds romantic. Cool, even. Free.

And then they put your kid under for surgery, and shit gets real.

He came out fine. Groggy, asking for the promised ice cream, completely unbothered - the way kids are.

And the truth is, I wasn’t shaking. I was relieved, and a little surprised at how relieved. I’m an optimist by nature - I’m the guy who assumes it’ll work out, which is probably how we ended up on a Thai island in the first place. But this one stretched even me. It was the first time my optimism and my appetite for adventure ran right up against their limit, and I felt it.

Back in the 16th century, the currency of choice in West Africa was glass beads. The locals didn’t have the technology to manufacture glass, making these beads a scarce resource that required serious effort to acquire. They arrived via complex overland trade routes, and people traded high-value goods like gold, ivory, and spices- things that took real backbreaking labor to produce - just to get them.

And then, the Europeans showed up.

As soon as European traders hit the African coast, they realized exactly how much those glass beads meant to the locals. So, they did what any enterprising colonizer would do: they flooded the continent with cheap, mass-produced beads made in Venice. Using this practically free “money,” the Europeans bought up goods, gold, and eventually, human beings as slaves.

The result? A whole continent’s wealth, time, and energy were sucked into a product with zero intrinsic economic value. These “Slave Beads” went down in history as the ultimate textbook example of a system where one side manufactures currency with minimum effort, while the other side works themselves to the bone for it - a heist executed without firing a single shot.

Money is Just a Story We All Agree to Believe In

We recently sold our house. The return I got for it is just a bunch of larger digits in my digital bank account. This whole transaction worked for one reason only: I believe that some total strangers in the future will be willing to give me real-world, valuable goods and services just so I can tweak those same digital numbers in their accounts - numbers that have absolutely no real-world value on their own.

If I were to travel 10,000 years back in time with my impressive new bank balance, or even a suitcase stuffed with millions of dollars in cash, I probably wouldn’t be able to buy anything of substance. Unless, of course, someone back then thought my green illustrated papers had nice decorative value.

That’s because 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, the story of money hadn’t been invented yet. People exchanged actual value and physical goods - chickens for sacks of wheat, and so on.

This exact storyline repeats itself throughout history.

Take the Yap Islands in the Pacific Ocean, where giant “Rai stones” functioned as currency. Their value came from the sheer difficulty of carving them out of limestone on the distant island of Palau, and then rowing them 400 kilometers back home across the treacherous open ocean in canoes. The more labor and risk a stone required, the more it was worth. That’s Proof of Work right there - the very difficulty of producing the currency is what protects it from being counterfeited. (By the way, that’s what gives Bitcoin its value too.)

This worked beautifully until the 19th century, when an Irish captain named David O’Keefe showed up with a modern ship. He started hauling massive stones from Palau cheaply and in bulk, effectively “hacking” the currency and making himself the richest man on the island.

In short: When one side can produce the currency for free, commerce turns into polite robbery.

So, What’s Our Situation Today?

Honestly? Not much has changed.

If the Europeans back then actually had to manufacture glass in Venice, and David O’Keefe had to physically haul heavy stones on a ship - today, governments and corporations can manufacture money with zero effort, from an air-conditioned office, with a simple tap on a keyboard.

A global pandemic hits? Need more cash? Click, click - and boom, another $10 trillion is injected into the market.

Meanwhile, the rest of humanity has to trade their life energy, skills, and that most precious, finite resource of all - time - just to earn that same money.

Wait, so the government is basically acting like those Europeans flooding Africa with worthless glass?

Yeah, pretty much - except not out of malice. Governments print money to keep economies from collapsing, to fund crises, to avoid mass unemployment. The intent is usually to help. But the effect on whoever’s holding the cash is the same: their savings quietly lose value, whether the motive was greed or rescue.

Take your average grocery cart as an example. If it cost $100 in 1990, by 2020, that exact same cart cost nearly $200. In other words, your dollar lost half its purchasing power - slowly, quietly, over thirty years. That was the “normal” rate of decay.

And then COVID-19 happened, and the game changed. To keep the economy afloat, trillions of new dollars were birthed in a tiny window of time. The money supply (every single dollar existing in bank accounts and cash) spiked by about 40% in just two years. When you almost double the amount of money floating around but don’t double the amount of stuff there is to buy, each dollar naturally buys less.

And that’s exactly what went down. The kind of wealth erosion that used to take a decade happened in just two to three years. Inflation hit a 40-year high, and purchasing power evaporated by more than 20% in a flash. That grocery cart got expensive again - only this time, it happened at warp speed.

The Africans in the 16th century weren’t stupid - they just had no way of knowing the Europeans could manufacture their currency for free. We, on the other hand, do know.

So, what am I doing with my glass beads?

My logic is dead simple: in every historical script, the people who got wiped out were the ones holding the stuff that was easy to replicate - glass beads, stones, digital numbers. The winners were the ones holding the stuff you can’t fake: gold, land, real assets. So, I try to stay on the side of the fence that can’t be manufactured out of thin air.

So here's what I actually hold:

• Broad Market Index Funds (ETFs): When new money gets pumped into the economy, it doesn’t just vanish; it flows somewhere. A huge chunk of it flows straight into the biggest, most profitable companies in the world through the stuff we all buy and use every single day. Instead of holding onto cash that’s actively melting away, I prefer owning a piece of the companies that the cash is flowing into - assets that generate real value, rather than paper explicitly designed to lose it.

  Tax Optimization: As a tax resident of Thailand, I’m not subject to the Israeli 25% capital gains tax - which is a pretty sweet leverage point.

• Bitcoin: If stocks are a stake in the engines of production, Bitcoin is the direct antidote to the glass bead problem. It’s the only asset out there with a genuinely fixed supply - 21 million, final, hardcoded. No government, bank, or tech breakthrough can print more of it. Unlike gold (which we keep mining) and thde dollar (which we keep printing), Bitcoin cannot be diluted. For the first time in human history, the “beads” are finite.

I have no idea what the future holds, and I’m certainly no financial advisor - but I don’t want to be the one holding the glass beads.

Me getting dengue is like Elon Musk crashing a self-driving Tesla.

For four years I was the Founder and CEO of Diptera.ai, where we built technology to fight dengue, malaria, and other mosquito-borne diseases. Then I left - and less than six months later, a mosquito put me in bed for two weeks.

It started small. I felt weak, figured I was dehydrated. The next morning it was worse, and a blood test came back with the answer: dengue. High fever, body aches, and in the bad cases, real complications. Even death.

The irony stings, because at Diptera the whole point was stopping exactly this. We developed technology to fight mosquitoes with mosquitoes - an approach called the Sterile Insect Technique. We’d mass-produce sterile male mosquitoes (males don’t bite), release them into the wild, and they’d mate with the females, whose eggs then never hatch. The local population collapses. No pesticides, no poisons - the mosquitoes end the mosquitoes.

It was the most fascinating company I’ve ever worked on. Brilliant people, backing from the Gates Foundation, and a mission I genuinely believed in: mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on earth, killing hundreds of thousands of people a year - most from malaria, most of them children in Africa. The technology we built is deployed there now, fighting exactly that. It’s hard to imagine work that matters more.

And still - after four years, I couldn’t turn it into a business. The science worked; the business didn’t. I left, a new CEO took over, and then the disease I’d spent four years trying to stop came for me personally.

Day after day my blood levels dropped. I got close to being hospitalized. There’s no treatment and no cure - you wait, and hope your body wins. I also learned that a second case is usually worse than the first, which is a strange thing to sit with: the next bite could be the one that lands me in a hospital.

What got to me wasn’t the fever, though. For months I’d already been frustrated that I hadn’t built anything that worked lately. Being sick made it concrete - lying in bed, useless, unable to even help with the house or the kids while everyone else carried the weight.

Somewhere in the recovery, that frustration turned into something sharper. Not a grand idea about purpose - I wasn’t there. Just a plain need to feel useful again. To pull my weight. So once I could stand, I got back to building something new. I didn’t know if it would work, or if it was even the right thing. I just couldn’t stand still.

A note from now (June 2026):

Reading this back, what stays with me isn’t the dengue - it’s that last part. At the time I thought I just needed to get back to work. To feel useful, to stop being a burden. That’s all I could see.

It took a while to understand what was underneath it. The thing I threw myself into worked for a bit and then ended. So did a couple of things after it. And somewhere along the way I realized it was never really about staying busy, or even about building a business. It was about wanting the work to mean something - not just to make money or free up my time. I didn’t have the words for that yet when I wrote this.

In 2015 I co-founded CrazyLister, software that helps eBay sellers build professional-looking listings. We made every mistake in the book - including raising venture capital, which in hindsight was the biggest one. We grew it to $2M a year in revenue, swimming hard against a declining market the whole way.

Here’s the thing about $2M ARR: for the founders, it’s life-changing. For a VC, it barely registers. We’d accidentally built a micro-SaaS - a small, niche software business that doesn’t fit the venture model because the market’s just too small to ever return a fund. We spent years trying to force a small-but-great business to behave like a rocket ship. It was never going to.

But that “modest” business did something the rocket ships often don’t: it gave me my freedom. CrazyLister is what funded my pilot’s license. It’s what let me spend four years building a crazy deep-tech company - Diptera.ai. It’s what made it possible to move my family to Thailand on nine hours’ notice. The money was modest; the freedom it bought was not.

That’s why, years later, I’m still a believer in micro-SaaS as a tool for freedom - for the people who can build it.

A micro-SaaS can be run from anywhere, by a tiny team, with low overhead. It throws off income without eating your life. In a world where more and more people want control over their own time, a small software business that quietly pays the bills is one of the most direct paths there is to getting it.

The catch is in that phrase - for the people who can build it. This isn’t passive income or a side-hustle fantasy. Building software that strangers will pay for, month after month, is hard, and most attempts don’t make it. I’m not selling the dream. I’m saying that if you have the skills to build one, a micro-SaaS is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with them - not because it’ll make you rich, but because it can buy back the one thing you can’t earn more of: your time.

And if you’re wondering how much you’d actually need to be free, here’s the sobering math - and why you can’t save your way there.

In short: the average monthly expenses for a Western family with two or three children run between 200,000–300,000 THB a month - roughly $6,000–9,000.

The hardest part of living here isn’t the cost, though. It’s earning the money in the first place. Broadly, I see three ways people make a living on the island:

Digital nomads - working on a laptop for a company that pays a Western salary, or running their online business from here.

Local earners - making a living on the island itself, usually through tourism or real estate.

The retired - pensioners, people who’ve sold a business, inheritors. Essentially, those who don’t need to work anymore.

Here’s where the money actually goes, for a typical Western family:

Housing: 70,000 THB (~$2,150) / month
International school: 20,000 THB (~$615) per child / month
Food (groceries + eating out): 50,000 THB (~$1,540) / month
Car: 20,000 THB (~$615) / month
Health insurance (whole family): 10,000 THB (~$310) / month
Activities (kids and parents): 10,000 THB (~$310) / month

On top of that come the smaller things - electricity, water, fuel, household shopping, the occasional massage, a babysitter, day trips. And the schools here have a lot of holidays, which quietly turns into real money: camps, trips, and activities to fill the weeks the kids are off.

What surprised me most wasn’t any single number. It was the contrast. An average Thai family here lives on around 30,000 THB a month - about $900. You’ll see five of them on one old scooter, and they seem genuinely happy with their life. I don’t want to romanticize it - 30,000 THB is tight, and “happy on less” is easier to admire from the outside. But it has stuck with me as a question I keep turning over: how much of what we spend actually buys us anything that matters?

When an AI makes an image, it doesn’t start with a blank canvas and draw. It starts with the opposite: a screen of pure noise, random meaningless pixels. Then you give it a prompt - “a cat playing piano” - and it works backwards, removing the noise in stages. Each pass wipes away a little more chaos, and the parts that match the prompt slowly sharpen into focus. It knows what to remove because it was trained on millions of real images turned to static and back. It’s not building the picture. It’s uncovering it - pulling the signal out of the noise, one step at a time.

I think building a new life works the same way.

We started with total noise. We landed in a new country with no plan, knowing no one and nothing. New places, new people, new ideas - all of it random, all of it static.

The prompt: “When I’m old, I want to look back with as little regret as possible.”

And then the noise removal. The noise is the decisions I’ll regret later. Some I can already name because I’ve lived the regret. I skipped the big trip after the army - and I’ll never get to see the world as a young person with nothing to lose. That one’s fixed; it’s developed. I can’t re-shoot it.

The one I’m working on now: I don’t want to miss the short window where I get to be my kids’ hero. And honestly, most of the time I’m bad at it. It’s easier for me to sit at the computer or talk to friends than to get on the floor and play. But I’ve made one rule for myself - whenever they ask, I put them on my shoulders. Because every day they get a little heavier, and my back gets a little weaker, and one day they’ll stop asking. I don’t want to regret not carrying them while I still could, and while they still wanted me to.

Getting closer to the image. I’m trying to remove the noise using my own regrets and other people’s. I regretted not traveling young, so at 40 I moved my family across the world. Older people, near the end, tend to regret the same thing - not enough time with the people they loved. So I borrow their hindsight, because my own default is to work without stopping, driven by the pressure to provide.

Someone who’d been reading what I write put it better than I could: he said he wanted to raise his kids by being with them, not just by providing for them.

That’s the whole prompt, really. The rest is just removing the noise, one pass at a time, and hoping the picture that emerges is one I won’t regret.

Think about it from evolution’s point of view. When you’re asleep, you’re defenseless - blind, slow, oblivious, easy prey. For a third of your life, you’re a sitting duck. Any mutation that let an animal skip it, or cut it down, should have been a massive survival advantage. And yet sleep is everywhere. Every creature with a nervous system does it, and the ones that try to skip it die.

The only way that adds up: the benefits of sleep must be so enormous that they outweigh spending a third of your life helpless. Evolution ran the cost-benefit, over hundreds of millions of years, and sleep won every time. There isn’t a system in the body or brain that doesn’t depend on it.

Which makes what I’ve been doing kind of absurd.

For about two years, I’ve had the same problem. I fall asleep fine, then wake at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t get back down - lying there for hours, turning over every problem in my life, watching the next day get ruined before it starts. If you’ve been there, you know how lonely 3 AM is.

So I did what I do - I went and learned the subject. There’s a whole field called “sleep hygiene”: same bedtime, dark room, cool room, no caffeine, no screens before bed. I did all of it. It helped a little, then the problem crept back. I was up before five most mornings, running on less than six hours.

Then, on a day I’d completely unplugged - no work, no phone - I slept eight hours straight for the first time in ages.

I almost missed why. It wasn’t the dark room or the caffeine; I’d been doing those for months. The only thing different was that I hadn’t worked right up until I closed my eyes. Normally I’m on the laptop or phone until the second I get into bed - then I lie down and wonder why my brain won’t switch off.

The next night I tried it on purpose: work and phone away two hours before bed. Slept well again.

And that’s the part that got me. Evolution decided sleep was worth being eaten for. And I’d been treating it as the first thing to sacrifice - borrowing against the one mechanism so vital that no animal on earth has been allowed to skip it, just to squeeze in a couple more hours of email. Work had quietly expanded to fill every waking minute, and then leaked past that, into the night, keeping my mind running while my body tried to shut down.

I’m still working on it; I haven’t solved it. But I’ve stopped treating sleep as a luxury I can borrow against. Evolution spent hundreds of millions of years deciding it wasn’t optional. The least I can do is stop scheduling work right up to the edge of it.

I told him I’d never understood why office chairs rock at all. I’m sitting at a desk to work - if I wanted to rock, I’d buy a rocking chair.

He said he likes to lean back and rock while he thinks - while he plans out his work before he does it.

That stopped me, because I realized I don’t really have a planning phase. I never have.

I don’t plan my work. I start doing it, and figure out what it’s supposed to be while I’m in it.

Take these posts. I don’t outline them. I don’t jot down the message I want to land or map the structure first. I sit down and start writing in whatever direction feels interesting in the moment. Then I read back what came out, a few times, and that’s when the actual point starts to surface - what this is really about, how to make it land. The thinking happens after the doing, not before.

I build companies the same way. I don’t start with a plan; I start with curiosity about some field. Then I rush to sell something to someone in it as fast as I can. And only once real paying customers show up do I start figuring out who they actually are, what they’re really paying for, and where the thing wants to go.

Turns out I’m in reasonable company with this. It’s roughly how SpaceX builds rockets - not by planning the perfect rocket on paper and launching once, but by building one, flying it, watching it blow up, learning, and doing it again. Iteration over planning. (Granted, the stakes on my version are slightly lower than an exploding rocket - but the wiring is the same.)

For years I half-assumed acting-before-planning was a flaw - that real, serious people plan first, and I was just winging it. I’ve come to think it’s not a flaw. It’s just a different wiring. Some people think their way to action. I act my way to clarity. Neither is better; they’re just two different engines.

My friend needs the rock to think before he moves. I need to move before I can think.

Do you think first, then act? Or act first, then think?

He’s right. This is one of the best places on earth to be very young or very old. Children grow up secure, barefoot, and free, without a care in the world. And retirees who come to spend their last years get an endless reel of breathtaking views to watch as the credits roll. The bookends of life are beautifully served here.

It’s the middle that’s the problem.

Because if you’re in mid-life - still building a career, still earning a living, still trying to become something - the island works against the very thing that’s pulled at me my whole life. There’s almost no FOMO here. People drive at 50 km/h, and life moves at the same pace: not much happens, and what does happens slowly. There’s little of the comparison and achievement pressure I grew up swimming in. No matter how much money you have, everyone ends up at the same café and the same supermarket. There are fewer signals, fewer reminders that you should be doing more, climbing more, proving more.

Which sounds like paradise - and mostly is. But I’ve spent my life running on exactly those signals. The drive, the FOMO, the constant low hum of “you should be building something bigger.” Take that away, and you find out how much of your motivation was actually yours, versus how much was just the current you were swimming in.

In the West it’s a rat race. Here it’s more of a sloth crawl. The rat race is exhausting. But the sloth crawl has its own quiet danger: it’s very easy to stop moving entirely, and feel completely fine about it.

I don’t think the answer is fast or slow anymore. It’s choosing your pace on purpose, instead of just absorbing whatever the place around you sets.

Say you started from scratch and saved $1,000 a month at a 6% return. You’d reach that $2.2 million in roughly 40 years. You’d be in your eighties. So much for “early” freedom.

Let me show you how I got that number, because the math itself taught me something.

Financial freedom, the way I think about it, is when your income stops depending on your hours. Instead of trading time for money, the money comes from assets that pay you whether you show up or not - investments, real estate, profitable businesses that run without you. At that point, your time is yours again.

The cleanest way to size it is the 4% rule. It came from a financial planner named William Bengen in the 1990s: he studied decades of market history and found that if you withdraw 4% of your savings a year, the portfolio keeps generating enough to refill itself, so you don’t run dry. It’s become a standard rule of thumb in retirement planning. Put simply: if your yearly cost of living equals 4% of your savings, you’re free.

So I ran it on my own life. A Western family in Koh Samui spends roughly 250,000 baht a month - about $7,400, call it $90,000 a year. For that to be 4% of my savings, I’d need around $2.2 million invested.

(For this rough math I’m assuming the returns are tax-free. In reality, the tax picture for a foreign resident is more complicated than a clean exemption - that’s a post of its own. Don’t take the tax-free assumption as advice.)

And here’s the part that actually landed for me. Saving $1,000 a month, $2.2 million is 40 years away. Double the savings rate and you’ve still got decades. Even with a serious head start - say you’ve already got a few hundred thousand invested - you’re still looking at the better part of a couple of decades of waiting, because compounding is patient in a way most of us aren’t.

The honest conclusion is unavoidable: you can’t save your way to freedom on any normal timeline. Passive saving is too slow. The numbers don’t bend.

Which reframes the whole thing for me. If freedom is the goal, slow saving isn’t the path - it’s the floor, the safety net underneath. To get there in years instead of decades, you have to build: businesses that throw off income, assets that compound faster than a savings account, things you put real time and risk into. The 4% rule didn’t show me how to save my way out. It showed me why I can’t - and why the real work is building, not saving.

That’s exactly why I keep building small software businesses instead of just stacking savings - I wrote about why micro-SaaS is my actual path to freedom.

Let me make that concrete. Say the goal is to generate enough passive income to cover a comfortable life without working - pick a number, say $7,000 a month. There are very different ways to get there, and each one trades money against time and risk in a different ratio.

1. Passive investing - most money, least work. Park enough in a diversified portfolio and live off a safe withdrawal rate (the rule of thumb is around 4% a year). For $7,000 a month, that’s somewhere around $2 million invested. Maximum capital, near-zero time, lowest risk. The cleanest path - if you happen to have $2 million.

2. Real estate - less money, more hassle. Income property gets you there with less capital, because the asset works harder (and so do you). A rental might return 6–8% net instead of the market’s long-run average, but now you’re buying, managing, maintaining, and carrying real risk - vacancies, downturns, the tenant who floods the bathroom. Less money in; more of your time and attention out.

3. Buying a small business - less money still, more involvement. You can acquire an existing, profitable small business instead of building one from scratch. Software businesses, for instance, typically sell for somewhere around 3–4× their annual profit. So a SaaS business throwing off $100,000 a year in profit would cost you roughly $300,000–400,000 to buy - and that $100k/year is most of the way to our $7,000-a-month goal. Far less upfront than the ~$2M you'd need for pure passive investing. The catch: you're not buying a hands-off asset, you're buying yourself a job - you now have to run the thing (or pay someone who can), and carry the risk that its revenue erodes, a competitor shows up, or the platform it depends on changes the rules.

4. Building a business - least money, most time and risk. The far end of the scale. Instead of buying that $100k/year business for $300–400k, you build your own version from scratch - for the cost of a domain, some software tools, and months (often years) of your own labor. I've started software businesses for under a couple of thousand dollars that went on to make multiples of that. But for every one that works, several die quietly - the financial cost of each attempt is tiny, but most attempts simply don't reach paying customers. That's the trade: the money barrier is almost zero, so you pay almost entirely in time, effort, and the very real chance that the thing you build never earns a cent.

Look at the line that forms: ~$2 million → ~$400k → ~$300k → the cost of a domain name. Same destination - about $7,000 a month in income that doesn’t depend on your hours - at wildly different price tags. And every step down in money is a step up in time and risk. That’s the whole thing. There is no path that’s cheap in money and cheap in effort and low in risk - if there were, everyone would already be on it. Freedom has a price; you only get to choose the currency.

Which is oddly clarifying. If you have the money, buy your freedom with money - park $2 million and never think about it again. If you don’t, and most people don’t, then you buy it with time, effort, and a willingness to bet on things that might not work - you build the $100k business instead of buying it. Knowing that stops you from waiting for an option that doesn’t exist, and gets you choosing which currency you’re actually willing to spend.

For me, the honest answer is a mix - some money invested passively as a floor, and time spent building on top of it, balancing what I can put in financially against what I’m willing to put in with my hands. And one quiet rule underneath all of it: if the entire point is buying back my time, I’d rather not spend the years getting there doing something I hate.

Electricity on Koh Samui is expensive and unreliable. It’s generated on the mainland and piped over through underwater cables, and it cuts out regularly. And since the household water runs on an electric pump, a power cut usually means sitting in the bathroom in the dark, with no water to flush. That’s the part the brochures leave out about island life.

Now the money, because that’s where it gets interesting.

A Western family here, in a house with a pool, burns about 60 kWh a day. At 6 THB per kWh, that’s roughly 11,000 THB a month - about $325 - just for electricity.

We put in a hybrid solar system: panels to generate power, batteries to store it, all tied into the grid. It runs the house off the sun by day, off the batteries at night and during outages, and only pulls from the grid when it has to.

It does three things. It keeps our lights and water running when the rest of the street goes dark. It cuts the electricity bill by about 90% - roughly 9,000 THB a month. And it feels good to run the house on clean power. But that last one is a bonus. It’s not why I’d do it again.

This is why I’d do it again: it’s not an environmental decision, it’s an investment - and a better one than most things I could put the money into.

The system cost 500,000 THB. It saves about 9,000 a month, call it 108,000 a year. That’s a 21% annual return, and it pays for itself in under five years. After that, the savings are pure yield for the 15-to-25-year life of the equipment. I don’t know many assets that reliably return 21% with almost no risk.

And it asks for nothing once it’s up. No moving parts. The panels last around 25 years, the batteries 10 to 15, the inverter 10 to 15, all under warranty for a good chunk of that. The rain washes the panels for free. You install it and it quietly pays you back for two decades.

Here’s what changed how I see it - a roof is just dead space - until you realize 2,500 hours of sunlight a year are landing on it, free, whether you use them or not. Solar is just the decision to stop letting them go to waste.

I look at it the way I look at anything else I’d put money into: what does it cost, what does it return, how long until it pays for itself. By those numbers, the sun is one of the best deals on the island.

It had a list. But the one that landed was this: I’m a story chaser, at the expense of being practical. I’m always reaching for the big, exciting story, and it pulls me away from the boring work that actually gets things done.

It didn’t sit well with me - because I knew it was right. And instead of fixing it, I did what I always do: I rationalized. I told myself it isn’t a flaw at all, it’s a strength. I should keep chasing the stories that light me up.

Then, this morning, my younger son gave me the whole thing in miniature.

I asked him to help unload the dishwasher. Instead of just doing it, he grabbed a toy monkey, decided the monkey was unloading the dishes, gave it a voice, and turned a two-minute chore into a fifteen-minute adventure. He took something boring and practical and wrapped it in a story, because the story was the only part worth doing.

Watching him, I thought: that’s all of us, really. We’re children who want experiences and excitement, wearing a layer of practical adult on top - the adult who makes us delay the fun, do the chore, save the money, so the party can keep running tomorrow.

For most of my life, my practical adult ran the show. The kid sat on the sidelines, allowed out to play now and then. And a few years ago, that kid started complaining, loudly, that none of this was fun anymore.

So I got a pilot’s license. I built a company that fights mosquitoes with mosquitoes. I moved my family to Thailand on nine hours’ notice. The kid was thrilled - adventures, stories, the whole thing.

And then the adult started to panic: you can’t keep the party going forever. There are bills, there’s a family, there’s a future to fund.

So now the two of them are at the table, trying to negotiate a new balance. I don’t have the answer yet. I’m not sure the negotiation ever fully ends.

“I thought about studying agriculture. Or marine biology. But it’d be a waste of the high score I got - so I’ll do software engineering instead.”

Every time, I watched a smart, capable kid quietly trade the thing they were drawn to for the thing that paid better. And I never said much, because I’d done exactly the same thing.

Here’s the idea I keep coming back to. Everyone is born with a real aptitude for something. About almost anyone, you can say: “even as a kid, you could see they had a gift for X.” But here’s the catch - the world doesn’t reward all gifts equally, and which gift it rewards changes from era to era.

In the 21st century, the best-paid work is in senior management, tech entrepreneurship, medicine, and finance. So the prized talents are mathematical ability, leadership, building things, financial fluency. If your gift happens to be one of those, lucky you - the era you were born into pays for exactly what you’re good at.

But rewind to the Renaissance. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the money and the status went to artists, scholars, merchants, teachers. Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael - and the dealers who sold their work - got rich. Clergy and educators were honored. A brilliant financial mind in 1500 had far less to monetize than a brilliant painter. Same gift, different century, completely different payoff.

So generation after generation, smart and gifted people end up living lives that don’t fit them - not because they failed, but because they optimized for what the era rewards instead of what they’re actually built for. They pick the field with the higher salary, the better odds, the family’s approval. Not the one that actually speaks to them.

And not everyone has a passion for numbers or a knack for inventing technology. Some people could move the world through teaching, or art, or history - fields the 21st century mostly shrugs at. They get the message early that their gift isn’t the valuable kind, and they quietly set it down.

I’m not going to tell you to “follow your passion” - that’s cheap advice, and chasing something like studying jellyfish migration patterns is genuinely scary when it pays nothing and no one understands it. I’ve spent my own career in the lane the world rewards, and I won’t pretend I’d trade the freedom that bought.

But I’ve started to wonder about the quieter cost. Not whether I succeeded - I did fine by the era’s scoreboard. Whether the scoreboard was ever mine to begin with. That’s the question I didn’t ask at twenty, when I was busy not wasting my high score. I’m asking it now.

From the moment we met her at the airport, a clock started ticking toward the next goodbye - and suddenly every minute with them mattered. Every smile, every hug, every small ordinary moment carried weight, because we all knew it was running out.

It made me think there’s almost a formula for how much we treasure time together:

distance × time apart ÷ length of visit = quality of time together

The further apart you live, and the longer you’ve been separated, and the shorter the visit - the higher the value of the time you do get. You notice it more. You remember it longer.

It’s strange, because the distance is something we chose. Moving across the world means the kids see their grandmother once a year instead of every week - that’s a real cost, and I feel it. But the same distance that takes the everyday closeness away seems to hand back something else: an intensity, an attention, that people who live down the street from each other rarely get to feel.

Watching them this week - grandmother and grandchildren soaking each other up, treasuring every small moment, storing memories to live off until the next visit - I couldn’t tell whether what I was seeing was the cost of the distance, or the gift of it. Maybe both.