How it Happened

In March 2025, a couple months into moving to Austin, I attended NatalCon, a conference on Pronatalism. The conference was awash with journalists seeking to get a glimpse at the types of people who would attend such a conference. There I met Emma Goldberg, a reporter at the New York Times. I did one interview with her and another with someone at The Daily.

They didn’t end up using my comments and instead wrote an article about the women at NatalCon, but Emma and I did exchange contacts at the conference. Many months later, in October, I get a text from Emma asking about scheduling another interview related to some of the things we discussed at NatalCon.

I did the interview in two parts, one over the phone and another where Emma visited me in Austin for an in-person interview. It was pitched to me as discussing the issues of young men. I had no clue when the article would come out. The editorial process for these things takes forever if it’s not a timely news story. Originally they said it was gonna be a culture article and then later on they decided it should be a politics story. They even called me to ask about my voting record because of this change.

Ultimately I found out that the article was published from a friend texting me this Thursday night:

The Surreal

The interviews were probably around 2 hours of content, so I was really curious how they edited the article together. I get home, read the article and recognize why they moved it to a politics story, to frame it around the midterm elections and young men as “swing voters.” The majority of the article follows these young men at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin (note Wisconsin is a swing state). So I get the article’s framing and I’m one voice in a sea of many.

So I go to Twitter and make a small post about being in the NYT saying “I made it Ma!!” and linking the article. I text my friends and family and they’re all happy for me and I go on to bed.

But then, I wake up the next morning and little do I know many people also saw my section of the article, and they were talking about it well before I even saw the article myself.

I only knew about this post from someone in the replies to mine:

When I saw the Isi post Friday morning, it already had 500k views and then there were other posts on BlueSky as well. The comments and quotes are all over the place. I didn’t spend too much time in the comments before making my response(s). It was pretty clear that people were making massive assumptions about me from the paraphrase alone.

Without much context it’s very easy to read this section and go “oh this is another dipshit MAGA white guy.” The broader article doesn’t help this at all because every single picture is of white people.

It’s really surreal to think about. Here’s a screenshot with my name in it, divorced from the original article, and a bunch of people have been sitting online talking about me without my knowledge for hours.

No Big Deal

After making my response, I didn’t post or reply for the rest of the day. I had already missed much of the viral opportunity I would’ve gained anyway. The original post was up for over 8 hours before I even knew the article existed. I also truly try not to talk about my politics too much publicly outside of housing, public transit, and energy. I think writing this essay almost a year ago prepared me well for “the hate” honestly

In my personal life, I’ve been thinking a lot about this: to what extent do I be authentically me? Because authentic me will be polarizing. I’m like a flavor of ice cream, let’s say chocolate. Some people love chocolate ice cream, most people are indifferent to it, and some people hate it. I could live my life as some “flavor shape-shifter” being vanilla one day, strawberry another, and for very few allowing my true chocolate self to show. But why do I even want the vanilla and strawberry people in my life? I should just be chocolate and see where the chips fall, just be authentic.

I’m thinking about social media and writing in the same vein. The primary difference is the scale. In real life, if someone doesn’t like you, (most likely) you never have to see them again (exception being someone in your family, workplace, or school). In online life, you can get people who actively dislike you. The closest real world analogy is a bully, who will always try to get on your nerves in your presence. Although online you can mute or block the bully, at a certain scale you have to just ignore it because of the sheer volume. At that scale, you’re in this strange reality where people, without even knowing you, utterly hate you. And that’s such a mind fuck.

It was a really great example of Twitter and the internet being a completely parallel reality to my daily life. In all likelihood, if I had never posted, I wouldn’t even know the “hate mob” existed at all. My day-to-day life was functionally unchanged by this article publishing.

All my friends and family who saw it were excited and happy for me, and were either positive on my section or thought it was just pretty milquetoast. I surprised myself with how lax I was about it too, I had friends come to me and say “so how’s it feel to be the main character of the internet?” I was far more focused on 1) whatever I talked about in therapy that morning and 2) preparing for a game night I was hosting that evening. The extent to which buzz on Twitter and Bluesky crossed my mind was surprisingly little if not prompted (I keep non-DM notifications off on every app).

It feels pretty good to have properly internalized “these people don’t know you, so their opinions of you don’t matter.” This was also such a clear example of “they don’t know you and they don’t care to know you.” Because my full name is on the article, it is very easy to Google me and you’d see that I’m clearly not white. You might not know what a Blasian looks like, but you’d definitely think “oh, that’s some kind of black man.”

(Note: It looks like some people have actually done this after I responded, seems like the “white man” posts have been largely deleted, go figure)

I polled some of my friends for fun on this, asking them if without context they would think I was a white man and how they thought I voted:

Thoughts on the Framing

So what do I think of what the NYT actually ended up writing? Well, I recorded the first over-the-phone interview (I said I would). Listening back, the interview isn’t the best on my part, it’s honestly pretty rambly and all over the place. The headline quote “Both parties kinda get it wrong” is from the in-person half, I don’t have the recording of that.

Reading my portion of the article though, it largely reflects what I said in the first interview. I can understand why my words are framed as they are. They overemphasize my listening to/watching “manosphere” content and downplay any affinity I may have for the Democratic Party. I don’t think anything they wrote was factually untrue. They did a decent job of taking my rambles and making them succinct. It honestly shows in the recording that it’s half a year ago. I don’t sound particularly firm on my positions listening to the interview, so the framing matches the energy that I gave them more than I initially thought.

There are only two legitimate gripes I have with their framing. They say “recently” when referring to my issues with the manosphere, which makes it seem like it only dawned on me during Trump 2.0. That isn’t accurate. Also my focus was largely on the center-left when I was referring to the academic nature of Democrats. From the recording, I explicitly say center-left and refer to figures like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway.

Like I said earlier, I did tell them my voting record. I said they were free to say who I voted for in 2024, they chose not to publish it. If you read the article, the only time voting habits are mentioned is when the interviewees voted for Trump. Here’s some more context about things I said in the interview and I’ll let the audience decide whatever they wanna hear (they do that anyways). These are some of the things I was willing to have published anyway so no big deal saying now:

1. I was born and raised in Chicago to a very progressive family, my mom is Chinese and my dad is Black American, I’m the youngest of four kids

   1. OG Weeb, went to anime conventions as a kid

   2. Watched RuPaul’s Drag Race growing up

   3. Still some traditional values, owing to my parents being Baptist Christians

2. I was in a gay-straight alliance in middle school and a feminist group in freshman year of high school

3. After Trump’s election in 2016 I started listening to whatever right-leaning content I could find because it broke my priors on how I thought America worked

   1. Podcasts I mentioned in the interview: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool

4. I was aware of “Gamergate” as it was happening

5. After Dobbs (2022), it was clear that the right-leaning pundits that were getting people into their movement via “anti-wokeness” were actually more conservative than they’d let on

6. I first discovered the manosphere from a Quora post when I was in high school. There was some YouTube channel mentioned in the comments of a post I was reading. I consider the mainstreamization of the manosphere to be from figures like Andrew Tate and now Clavicular, it’s largely more shallow than the original PUA and OG red pill stuff

7. I had my “conspiracy” phase in 2020-2021 with the covid lockdowns, pretty much broke by the time Jan 6 happened in 2021 (note I was 19 years old when this happened)

8. A large amount of my volunteer time and political advocacy is on housing and “urbanist” issues, you can see that I’ve testified in Denver and the Texas Capitol and City Hall in Austin on such issues.

Looking back at the interview, I totally get why they didn’t emphasize any left-leaning aspects of my views lol. Because I didn’t emphasize it enough myself. It genuinely sounds like I just drifted right-ward from “the podcast bros” then never came back. So yeah, their framing is more apt than I initially gave it credit for. Again, I’m actually not too public about my politics so the interview is a reflection of that same tepidness to declare it. I’m much more open about it in private though.

I lived in Colorado for two and a half years and went to Iceland for 10 days last May. I still have my 60 liter backpack and “ultralight” camping gear. I went to a YMCA summer camp in Michigan where we lived in cabins in the woods (RIP Camp Pinewood). Soothe to say, I don’t think it’s a “lack of trying” that makes me averse to nature. It’s gotta be some psychological thing. There’s this thing that other people get where they look at a cool rock or mountain, landscape and it sparks awe in them. They’re just awash with beauty and it’s overwhelming them with emotion. I don’t really get this, the difference between seeing the Google Images photo of the landscape and being “actually there” is marginal.

I jokingly say that I would be perfectly comfortable just being a pod person. That’s not entirely true though. I realized when visiting Osaka, Japan that you can indeed “go too urban.” Concrete blocks everywhere and minimal greenery, a deathly combo for me. But if you have one curated park with nice grass and some trees, I’m a happy camper. I’d imagine that the awe that I get from looking at beautiful urban design: buildings, bridges, parks, etc is what these nature lovers get from the natural structures of their mountains, hills, and rocks. Literally every time I’m back in Chicago, I’m in awe of the it’s man-made beauty. I’m like, “how lucky am I to have been born in one of the great world cities.” I get the same feelings traveling to any great city really. Boston, Montreal, Tokyo, Paris, I just love cities man.

The credit I give nature is that backpacking, camping, and having to shit in a hole give me a greater appreciation for modernity. After a long trip away from home in the great outdoors, damn do I love plumbing. There’s a part of me that wants to believe that all the nature-lovers are simply coping. That it’s so obviously that city living is just better.

Modern camping is literally nothing like what our ancestors did. Your gear is made in a factory for fucks sake. It’s like the Disneyland of “experiencing nature.” And thank god for that, much safer than the alternative (another win for modern technology). I just hope that people are actually going for the amusement park-like fun of the journey and not to post it to Instagram for clout. Do things that you actually enjoy and not things that you think you’re suppose to be enjoying. To this end, I’m very upfront about my indifference to nature. If you invite me to a camping trip, I’m game, but it’s because I like you and know it’ll be a fun trip with friends.

I also love to see the joy on others faces at the sight of nature. That Iceland trip would’ve been totally lost on me if I were to go solo. My friend planned the most ideal trip for nature-lovers and she was near tears seeing all of it. It’s like when a parent gets inspired by seeing their child experience the simple joys of life for the first time. That’s what makes it all worth it to me.

I grew up in Chicago and went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for college. My first full-time job after graduating was in Fort Collins, CO. Safe to say, Colorado was a radical change from what I grew up with. Even though Fort Collins was home to Colorado State University (CSU), it didn’t feel like a college town in the same way that Champaign-Urbana was.

The Food

The first striking thing about Fort Collins was the food. I didn’t realize that I had been so spoiled by my time in Illinois. I went to this place called Yung’s Chinese. It was the blandest Chinese food I’ve ever had in my life. The only thing that gave those potstickers flavor was dipping it in soy sauce. I had the same experience going to a sushi place near my office, same blandness, no flavor. I’d eventually found places that were decent, but I couldn’t believe that restaurants with food worse than the frozen brands or other home cooked options could even survive.

I’m not even comparing Fort Collins to Chicago; that would be completely unfair. I’m contrasting with Urbana-Champaign. Fort Collins has a population of 170k and Urbana and Champaign have a combined population of 130k. The difference? Demographics.

Fort Collins is ~77% white with the predominant minority being Hispanics at ~12% whereas Urbana and Champaign are ~50% white with Asian and Black minorities being predominant at about ~16-18% each. Totally changes the food dynamic. When I was a student at UIUC, there was an abundance of Asian, Hispanic, and standard American food options, even fusion places could be trendy. Fort Collins? The most reliable food option was the fast food (thank god for Raising Canes). I had to be more active in my search for local food options because I couldn’t trust it’d just be “good enough.” Denver had some good places, but that was an hour (assuming no traffic) south. To give a sense of what I felt, this was probably the most I ever ate at McDonald’s in my life.

Restaurants in Fort Collins close early with lots of places only being open until late afternoon (closing 3pm oftentimes). Most places were open until 10 at the latest. Talking with the locals, a lot of coffee and tea shops weren’t open later because of COVID and staffing issues (Fort Collins housing prices skyrocketed, so when the pandemic happened, many people chose to move out.)

The Nature

There is nothing that has made me more certain that I’m an Urban, city boy than moving to Colorado. I’ve gone hiking, camping, backpacking, climbing, skiing and yet I’m still pretty indifferent to nature. There are people in Colorado who yearn for the mountains and any opportunity to get outside and have the fresh air and see the beauty that is Mother Earth. Me? None of that. If anything, it reminds me how awesome modern civilization is. The greatest thing about going on a backpacking trip is coming back and realizing how good toilets are.

I had a trip to Iceland back in May, further solidifying this point for me. The difference between seeing a Google photo of the thing and actually being there, honestly very small for me. Again I don’t hate nature, I’m just indifferent to it and wouldn’t seek it out unless for a social occasion. And nature and the Rocky Mountains are a huge reason to be in Colorado. I think if you live there and don’t experience that part you’re wasting a lot of the benefit. There are states that don’t have amazing nature but have cities that I think are miles better than Denver (cough Chicago cough.)

The People

I honestly think I could’ve lived with a little less quality food and going on more hikes and camping trips than I'd prefer. But ultimately the thing that made moving a must was that I needed to find my people. I don’t know how to phrase it other than "Coloradans are too chill.” They want a balanced life where almost every weekend they go on a hike or go skiing with a relevantly small group of friends (like 4-5 people). Seems like a great place to raise a family, but that's just not where I am in my life.

I was in Fort Collins from ages 21 to 23, about 2.5 years total. In that time, it became clear that I wanted more from my life than to “just chill.” I felt so out-of-place there, constantly trying new things (parkour, pole dancing, swing dancing, yoga, climbing) and looking for my tribe. My coworkers were great but didn’t have the same level of passion for tech that I did. The level of intellectualism felt lacking outside of theological debates (the Christians in Fort Collins were great to chat with.)

My city-brained, college-educated self had gotten used to constantly being around people who were working on or engaging in unique and interesting things. People you could talk to for hours debating over what would make society better/worse or stupid stuff like “is a hotdog a sandwich?” In Colorado, I felt like I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It just wasn’t gonna work.

I had to Leave

It really dawned on me that I couldn’t stay in Colorado long term when every time I traveled, I dreaded returning. I’d feel great meeting strangers in Chicago, Boston, Tokyo, back at UIUC for career fair recruiting, but Fort Collins? I just couldn’t find people I fit in with very well, despite my best efforts. That’s not to say that I didn’t find any joy in Fort Collins though. I had a core group of coworker friends, and we’d do stuff all the time together (badminton, hiking, basketball, renn faire, movie nights, etc). I'm even going to one of their weddings later this year.

The issue, those small wins in friendship weren’t gonna be enough. I needed more. I wasn’t a chill Coloradan, I was and still am an ambitious young Chicagoan looking to make his mark on the world. In order to do that, I have to be in a place that can feed my ambitions. I need a wide network of ambitious, brilliant people also going after it as proof that I’m not the only crazy guy.

So, last September I tried to see if I could become a remote worker at my Fort Collins job (I did like my job there). When that didn’t work out I applied to new jobs hoping to move either to the Bay Area in California or Austin, TX. In November, I visited friends in Santa Clara to assess whether I’d like living in South Bay (I would not). I found a promising opportunity in Austin at a start-up. Now I’ve moved my life to Austin, and I’ve never felt better.

The solution to YIMBYism is to have all these closet Republicans move to Texas where people will appreciate their deregulation and trickle down economics.

And I read this thinking “wait Texas has been great on housing legislation, this post is just wrong.” So I quote tweet saying:

Why can’t the left just believe in markets, please!!! The tech-bro (me) can live anywhere, we’re rich enough. Building more housing is so people that aren’t me can live in the city.

Little did I know, I had entered Leftist Twitter and I’m flooded with all these replies on how I’m stupid and “there’s more housing than homeless people!” etc, etc. And, as someone with little to no following, it is the most interesting experience psychologically. I felt the urge to respond to these anons, to clarify my position. “They just think that I’m someone I’m not. Surely they’d understand if I just responded with my real beliefs?”

I did end up replying to a few users but for the most part did not take the bait. Ultimately I had to realize that, truly, Twitter replies are not the place to be trying to convince people of your ideas. But nonetheless, that psychological urge was strong. The thought that I’d be misrepresented or quoted out of context was such an internal nightmare. This is why normal people don’t post on Twitter… they’re cowards. I was a coward.

Jokes aside, I really am someone who will overthink. It’s to the point where uncertainty prevents any action. This is my third attempt at being a blog writer. Why? The fear that one day I would become (gasp) an influencer and the fame would be too much for my psyche. I’ve preemptively said “well if I do write stuff online, and people read it, some of those people will hate it, and I can’t handle the hate, so I just won’t be a writer” (cause what’s the point of writing without sharing it with people?) Given my reaction to a few negative Twitter replies though, I don’t think I’m too far off. It really is fear that’s kept me away from doing anything in public. My social media profiles are barren landscapes, only there as an open channel for DMs from friends.

But then I saw this tweet from :

i have negative respect for anyone who gets salty because I didn't give their multiple-paragraph cold DM the attention they thought it deserved

imagine having so little going on that you can't even comprehend that other people might be busy

Continuing with:

like yes, i probably would have responded to you at some point if you weren't clearly a weirdo

at this point you can actually smell it from a mile away, people who give compliments bc they're good natured vs the ones who feel entitled to a response

And that spawned a memory of this other tweet from her:

The best writers I know don’t spend much time writing.

In fact anyone who spends most of his time writing is going to be a shit writer - good stylistically, maybe, but lacking substance.

Good writing comes primarily from a full life. It’s an outlet for experience, is as natural as respiration

People to whom it doesn’t come easily don’t get it. They often assume, for example, that prolific tweeters spend a big chunk of their day tweeting.

Literally none of the good accounts I know personally spend much time on it at all

And this tweet reminded me of a post from on writing:

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

What I’ve Learned After Three Years on Substack

Read more

a year ago · 521 likes · 11 comments · Rob Henderson

Most good writing happens beyond the page. Gathering experiences, observing the world, letting ideas take shape. By the time you sit down to write, you’ve already lived through the material. Even if the exact words have yet to come.

Amazing really, thoughts about writing more publicly had been brewing in my mind for months. And it took a strange, somewhat unrelated tweet to bring it back up, front and center. This “negative respect” tweet prompted my sincere response, sparking this conversation:

Me: I'd like to think it's the parasocial thing, like they genuinely think they know you... but then I see dating app DM screenshots and I lose my respect for humanity.

Divya: the parasocial thing is not benign. it is by far the worst thing about being well known in any regard, worse than people simply insulting you it is deeply creepy and disturbing in a way that only becomes clear when ur on the receiving end

Me: Fair point. And social media fame can outstrip your resources to deal with it (e.g. security). You don't decide when you're "too famous." Like being a 10 follower twitch streamer with 1 stalker. Famous actors/singers (presumably) have some protection built-in by the industry.

Divya: yeah but creators don't which is one big disadvantage of building your own platform. my favorite creator growing up had to stop because of stalkers

It dawned on me that Divya was the perfect person to ask about my writing conundrum. So I sent her a DM:

Me: Moving discussion to DMs since it's a more personal question (no obligation to respond ofc):

I'm currently thinking in these exact terms on whether to write/post more publicly (honestly inspired by one of your threads on writing). I already make enough of money from my career as an engineer, so it's more about potential for impact. Would you say, all things considered, it was still worth building out a public platform?

Divya: 1 million percent

it's worth doing even for me and as a young girl i probably get it worst

And that was when I knew… that I was being absolutely pussy, and I just needed to start writing. Like I said in my tweet, you don’t get to decide when you become “too famous.” And the upside to being public can be so large before I ever reach the “too famous” downsides. So as far as my life is concerned now, the downsides literally don’t exist.

I’ve been afraid. To the extent that I care about privacy, it’s just an attempt to be able to curate my own image. If I meet a stranger in passing, they don’t know me, and I can be infinitely people pleasing. My friends and acquaintances? They only ever know what I explicitly tell them. I have the most control over my image as a private person.

But a public profile on social media, it’s a bit of a forcing function. Because the image is presented to everyone, and there’s a persona that gets built up (intentionally or not) over time. From my vantage point, there’s a decision to be made, do I curate my image for the sake of others, or for myself?

In my personal life, I’ve been thinking a lot about this: to what extent do I be authentically me? Because authentic me will be polarizing. I’m like a flavor of ice cream, let’s say chocolate. Some people love chocolate ice cream, most people are indifferent to it, and some people hate it. I could live my life as a some “flavor shape-shifter” being vanilla one day, strawberry another, and for very few allowing my true chocolate self to show. But why do I even want the vanilla and strawberry people in my life? I should just be chocolate and see where the chips fall, just be authentic.

I’m thinking about social media and writing in the same vein. The primary difference is the scale. In real life, if someone doesn’t like you, (most likely) you never have to see them again (exception being someone in your family, workplace, or school). In online life, you can get people who actively dislike you. The closest real world analogy is a bully, who will always try to get on your nerves in your presence. Although online you can mute or block the bully, at a certain scale you have to just ignore because of the sheer volume. At that scale, you’re in this strange reality where people, without even knowing you, utterly hate you. And that’s such a mind fuck.

And that’s why I’m a such a wuss. Cause I don’t have the self-assurance to say “ok, that guy just hates chocolate ice cream.” Instead I’d be groveling on the floor like “I take it back! I take it back! Hey look I’m vanilla now see? See? Or strawberry if you’re into that. It’s all good now, right?” I’m letting myself be shaped by my haters, and this is prior to even having any true haters!

What a ridiculous way to live. The real questions should be:

Do I like writing? Yes

Do I think others may benefit from my writing? Maybe (Yes, hopefully)

Do I write as myself or someone else? Myself

Am I willing to accept the potential consequences (positive and negative) that come with writing publicly? I don’t know.

The last question isn’t really a thing I can “game out.” Things will just happen and I have to respond accordingly, so for now my answer has to be yes. Because I’m here right now, accepting the consequences. And for now, nothing will happen because no one is watching… phew.