Retirement

Early retirement

This retirement phase of life is just beginning for me in January 2026. I have high hopes that it will be fun. I am still in my 50's, so still have capabilities and can enjoy a lot of activities. I am concerned about later retirement when all the health problems start to rear their ugly heads.

I made it official on New Year's Day. I emailed myself a signed copy of the "Global Employee Exit Checklist," with nothing else in the message except a line I'd been saving: "AI will be just like when cars replaced horses - except now we are the horses." It felt like the right way to start - equal parts serious and absurd, which is about right for how I feel about the whole transition.

Looking back, I feel satisfied with the life I have lived so far. As the cowboy said in City Slickers, the secret to life is "one thing." Life is not a destination; it is a journey. Throughout my life I have had one wife, one career, one primary mental hobby (Go), and one physical hobby (martial arts). Besides Brian and family, the thing that has given me the most lasting satisfaction has been my personal software projects — grown, rewritten, and evolved since high school, and now accelerated by AI.

I get to spend a lot of time at home now. We take BART to different cities and go for long hikes or bikes followed by lunch at a restaurant. We can't go anywhere too fancy because I smuggle in avocados to have with my lunch. For some reason I need to have avocado at every meal. At first there was some reluctance about me retiring — a fear that I would bother people too much — but we are getting along fine so far.

One of my favorite mornings so far was a bike ride around the man-made lakes in Foster City, followed by renting a kayak for an hour. There were pictures. I don't think either of us had ever been kayaking before. It's the kind of low-key adventure that retirement makes easy to just decide to do on a random Tuesday.

Life is much the same as before retiring, except now I work for myself rather than a company. I have endless computer projects to work on. There is more time for doing cooking, biking, playing with Chip (my cat) and working in the back yard. I got a season pass to Great America for the first time.

In the first year of my retirement I played more go, practiced more aikido, and developed more than a dozen multiplayer online games. I have enjoyed using AI to create the games and refactor many of my old software projects. It makes me many times more productive. I use my YouTube channel to announce each game to the world as I release it.

Some of the AI wins from that first year still surprise me. I ported my entire games repo from Java to Scala in a single afternoon — a conversion that used to take me months by hand — and it used up about half my monthly AI token budget in the process. I replaced the Jenkins server I used to run locally with GitHub Actions, also in an afternoon. And I ran my first "/loop" prompt, where I described what I wanted and then just let the AI keep working unattended; it refactored nine different games while I did something else entirely. The AI even wrote its own instructions for how to do it.

In August I put together a potluck pool party at our community pool for both my Go club and my aikido dojo — drinks from me, food from everyone else. I've also picked up some volunteer math tutoring for my nieces' and nephews' kids, and built them a small AI tutoring tool I call Mastery Quest to go along with it.

One recent project that gave me a lot of satisfaction was Into the Singularity. It's a grand strategy simulation that lets players explore what may be coming. Unfortunately, I haven't found many people interested in playing it yet. Some say it is too confusing or overwhelming. I tried it with my cousin Lynette, and she seemed very stressed as she played — almost torturous for her. Perhaps someone reading this will be brave enough to click the link and give it a try.

Into the Singularity came together fast. I pitched the idea to Bill Keese and Brian on January 2nd, worked out the design with Claude that same day, then fed the design doc into Cursor to start building. I had a working tech-tree screen within about an hour. It's still one of the clearest examples I have of what "AI-accelerated" actually feels like day to day.

The ride ahead

Unlike some, I am very excited by the prospects of AI. I think it is most likely going to lead to an abundant future — right up until the point when it ends the human race as we know it. Most likely we merge with the machines rather than simply vanish; other outcomes are possible too. Past the singularity it is impossible to predict anything with confidence. Even if the ride ends in a terminator-style extinction, I think it is going to be a thrilling ride up unti that point.

As Dave Shapiro stated in his youtube channel, there are only 4 possible outcomes:

We might get more than one. Hopefully we can stay in on the hyper-abundance track for as long as possible, since that it is the only outcome that is good. There is a real concern that a totalitarian regim, like China, may reach artificial super intelligence (ASI) and subjugate the rest of the world. That would be bad. Americans need to get over their petty dislike of datacenters so that we do not lose the AI war.

In late 2025 I created this short YouTube video describing my view of mankind's past and future based on this spreadsheet.

I like to debate people on what the future will hold. My predictions tend to be on the optimistic / transhumanist / extropian side. Brian somewhat agrees, but pushes back on how fast it will play out — physical, political, and regulatory friction will slow things down. That is probably true. I still see digital advancements far outpacing the physical and biological worlds. Eventually the digital world will merge with or displace the real one.

I have had deeper debates with friends who do not share my politics. Bill Keese (high-school friend, software engineer) leans more liberal/Democratic; he does not believe in bitcoin as money and is more reluctant to trust AI. John R (college friend, entrepreneur) also leans left of me; ironically he got me started on bitcoin in 2019, yet does not believe in it enough to hold any himself. Brian, John, and I have a text chat where we debate politics and the economy endlessly. We are mostly aligned on technology, though I am the most transhumanist of the three. Tyler Moore, my go partner, is the polar opposite on nearly every dimension. He is incredibly pessimistic about AI and the future — a dystopian nightmare at best — and his only comfort seems to be that he will eventually die. I am a right-leaning libertarian. We argue anyway. That is part of the fun.

A recent example: I built a small model to try to refute economist Mike Green's argument that a bitcoin standard would concentrate wealth more than fiat does. I sent it to Bill, and we spent the better part of a week going back and forth on it by email — him pointing out that most major companies were founded after the gold standard ended, me arguing that's correlation dressed up as causation. Neither of us budged, which is more or less how these debates always go.

On Oct 3, 2026, I published my first novel. Its a science fiction thriller about the near future - available on Amazon.

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