Hi I'm Anson!

Past

In past lives, I...

• grew up on a blueberry farm
• led a charity to raise $200k for kids with disabilities
• started a beekeeping club
• tinkered my way to the podium at 8 hackathons
• worked on open source software for non-profits
• hired teams and built software tools at Contrary
• worked on pricing, safety infrastructure, and made noise about protected bike lanes at Culdesac
• produced media for Notion

I haven't listed everything, but my favorite experiments of whimsy include...

• livestreaming a run wearing 62 t-shirts
• playing We're Not Really Strangers with actual strangers
• making AR filters of family members for my grandma
• writing letters to friends
• taking 400 photos of bread for an online shop
• making 3 pun videos (cringe warning)
• running a campaign for campus shops to sell chicken (I'm pescatarian now)

Present

I'm currently...

• studying systems design engineering & philosophy at Waterloo
• chasing the tail of my reading list
• making a feature length documentary on a cautiously pro-growth, resilient, pragmatic, optimistic, and bipartisan approach to climate change (a mouthful!)
• doing engineering at a fusion company

I'm embarassingly active on Curius, where I save my favorite articles. I also log all the books I've read. Aside from that, I think a lot about...

• the climate cinematic universe, particularly electrification and resilience (history, energy policy, batteries, etc)
• throwing life-changing events, match-making, cultivating the potential of people around me, raising baby ideas
• engineering/design that makes your heart flutter
• theories of civilizational collapse/prosperity, institution design

If any of those excite you, please reach out! I'm always looking to befriend people who are as kind as they are ambitious, and as thoughtful as they are optimistic.

Future

It's quite random that I dropped everything to make this documentary. We really have no business documenting factories, interviewing politicians, and producing a feature length film(?) More than anything, we just really wanted answers for ourselves - I'm excited to finish it/share with the world. It is long and a lot of work.

Through that work, emerged an unexpected clarity about how I want to spend my time. I'm excited to do more hard engineering. It will resemble my current work, at a higher level of intensity.

I'll probably also try to write more substantively. There's a lot of thinking lost in the sands of iMessage group chats. I should archive more.

Who we end up becoming is largely influenced by those we spar with. Here are a couple people that I owe a lot to

Jacky •Joss •Liam •Jennifer •Jasmine •Cam •Henry •Lyn •Morgan

And people that I've absorbed much from

Hank & John •Bret •Devine •Linus •Rob•Vannevar•