About Me

I like my music loud and my books classic. Well, not really.

I like my music loud, I like my music jazzy. I like them nothing but a solemn piano, playing the classical hits by long-gone composers. I like them full-blast in a reggae party with friends that I’ve just met.

I am an adventure junkie who love to explore the world, blend in with the locals, and taste almost everything at least once. I’m a student of history, a half-baked social activist, who blend Graham Hancock’s careful approach on research with Pramoedya’s uncompromising quest for truth. Indeed, if I was living in the 1960s I’d probably be a tree-hugging hippie.

A financial market guy, I altered my life to finance after reading Jim Rogers’ book Adventure Capitalist. And I see the world through a trader’s eyes ever since: through cause and effect, through global inter-connected-ness, through boom and bust and their triggers. I believe that although the world is chaotic and complex, we can eventually find the order out of chaos, even in the most Black Swan moments, by following the money and looking at the incentives for power or the struggle for it.

Most comfortable with the progressive ideas of social liberalism, I also believe that every economic idealism from communism to Keynesianism to any form of laissez-faire are all sound in theory. But each can only be successfully applicable at specific stages of economic growth (best described in Ha-Joon Chang’s analogy of raising a child from a fragile baby into an independent adult). And thus we cannot force any one of them as a one-ideology-fits-all model for every country in the world.

I worship God on Fridays, interpret religion through the eyes of Karen Armstrong, and practice it according to the wisdom of a 12th century Andalusian renaissance-man Averroes. Like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Martin Luther before him I believe that religion is a private matter, and thus religion and state should be separated. And I view those who exploit sacred religion for their dirty political or financial gains as the lowest of the low.

I am a borderline OCD, freakishly systematic, and have a theoretical basis for every habit that I do. I wake up everyday at 5 A.M., Jocko Willink’s style. I’m a Gladwellian runner who train with Jeff Galloway’s methods for the 1st 20-20-20, and I practice “School of Dan Harris” mindfulness exercise. I take Scottish showers like James Bond does, and use Wim Hof Method for the cold. I implement 16:8 intermittent fasting on weekdays using David Zinczenko’s formula, and apply Michael Pollan’s approach for the 8-hour window. I live my days seeking serotonin optimisation based on Dr. Robert Lustig’s neuro-scientific findings, with a no bullshit attitude like my absolute fucking idol Anthony Bourdain. And I close my day off with Daily Questions as inspired by Marshall Goldsmith. But above all, I found my true sanctuary in Minimalism and I live my life in accordance with Stoic principles.

I am also a horrorphile, no wait, a halophile? Horophile? Yeah that’s the one. I’m a horophile who prefer the subtle shield over the mainstream crown, who is obsessed with A Man and His Watch, who is still in a quest to find the perfect vintage Soviet timepiece, and who once brought along my rare Toki back to visit its Kurono salon in Tokyo. I am sentimental like that.

I am a football fan since the moment Robbie Fowler scored 27 seconds after kick off, in a match between Liverpool 5-1 Middlesbrough on 14 December 1996. I am a through and through Bill Shankly leftist, even made my high school final thesis on the history of Liverpool FC. And the happiest day of my life was Istanbul 25 May 2005, when I ended up jumping up and down hugging with complete strangers forming a huge circle, in a pub in England. It beats 2x winning the Premier League ever since, and heck it was even a better day than my wedding day or the birth of my kids (love you guys).

I like my books classic, I like them fresh from pre-order. I read them mainstream books, I read the banned ones too. I love my history and my current affairs, my philosophy and my economics, the self-help and the literature. And everything in between religion and science, the health stuffs and the vices that make life more interesting.

Indeed, I am curious by default, where I live on the borderline between being enthusiastic and just plain weird. I learn a lot of my life lessons from South Park episodes, I follow world current affairs like a juicy soap opera, and I read a pretty diverse range of topic interests: from Plato’s cradle of civilisation to Laos folktales, from global criminal underworld to a [brilliant] book that analyses poo.