The most sustainable energy is not renewable.

September 13, 2026 — Leave a comment

It’s the energy your building never needs.

A few years back I interviewed an architect for my podcast. He spent an hour on something that should be obvious and somehow isn’t anymore, a building can heat and cool itself just by facing the right way.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

We build homes that ignore where the sun rises, block the wind, and wrap them in glass that lets the sun in all day with no way to let the heat back out. Then we spend fifty years paying to undo it. Air conditioning in summer and heating in winter have both become so normal we forgot they’re solving a problem the building created for itself.

That energy has to come from somewhere, coal, gas, nuclear. Nuclear seemed like the cleanest way to produce electricity until the heat started warming the rivers it depends on. In France, several plants had to cut output during heatwaves this year because the river water was too warm to cool the reactors properly. Grids buckle under demand spikes exactly when everyone switches their AC on at once. The machine we built to save us from bad design turns out to have its own limits too, and those limits are only going to show up more often as summers get worse.

None of this is abstract for the people paying for it. In Albi, a 36 year old named Pauline Paredes describes her own apartment as a kettle after weeks of 40 degree heat, and says flatly she has to be out of it before next summer. She’s one of hundreds of people a French outlet interviewed this year alone about heat pushing them out of the places they live.

A geographer in Lyon estimates around 100000 people already leave French cities every year for the outskirts and the countryside because of it, and expects that number to double as the heatwaves keep stacking up.

Winter runs the same script in reverse. More than five million French households live in fuel poverty, a third of the country couldn’t properly heat their home this past winter, and three out of four households are now rationing their heating just to keep the bill within reach. None of that is a footnote to a design conversation. It’s what happens when a building depends entirely on a machine, and the machine gets too expensive to run or the grid buckles at the exact moment everyone needs it most.

Passive solar design isn’t futuristic. It’s ancient. For most of human history people built with the climate instead of against it, thick walls, shaded courtyards, windows placed on purpose, trees that dropped their leaves right when you needed the sun back. None of that was decoration.

We gave that up the moment cheap energy got easier than good design.

The shift has a start date. In 1952 the United Nations Secretariat went up in Manhattan as the first tower wrapped entirely in glass and cooled entirely by machine, followed a few years later by Lever House a few blocks down. Neither building was designed around the sun. Both were designed to look like the future, and cheap postwar energy is the only reason either one got away with it. Every glass tower built since has copied that template. Offices cooled that way now run about 60% higher in carbon emissions than ones that use natural or mechanical ventilation properly. We didn’t inherit bad buildings. We inherited a look, and we’re still paying the electric bill for it.

Every architect knows where the sun rises and sets. Yet, somehow most buildings are still designed like it doesn’t matter. In the northern hemisphere, your longest wall generally wants to face south. That one decision decides how much free heat you get in winter and how easily you can block it in summer, before a single brick goes down.

In winter the sun sits low. It travels under the roof overhang and warms the floor and the walls, which quietly hold onto that heat all day. Six months later the same window behaves completely differently. The summer sun sits high, the same overhang blocks it, the room stays bright without turning into an oven. Nothing moved. Nothing plugged in. The only technology was geometry.

Get the geometry wrong and inefficient turns into dangerous. London’s 20 Fenchurch Street tower, nicknamed the Walkie Talkie, curves its south face inward like a satellite dish. In 2013 that curve did exactly what a concave mirror does, it focused the sun into a single point on the street below. The hot spot passed 90 degrees Celsius. It melted panels on a parked Jaguar, warped a bike saddle, and set a doormat on fire outside a barbershop. The developers ended up bolting a permanent sunshade onto the building afterward, aluminum fins running from the third floor to the thirty fourth, a fix that cost millions of pounds because nobody modeled where the sun would actually land before they built it.

Cooling didn’t start with a compressor. It started with a window across from another window. Cross ventilation works on one idea, put openings on opposite sides of a space so air has somewhere to go. Wind comes in one side, pushes the stale heat out the other, and the building breathes on its own.

Older buildings understood this without needing to be told. Doors lined up with courtyards. Vents sat high to let hot air escape. Floor plans stayed narrow so every room caught moving air. A lot of modern apartments do the opposite, one glass wall and nowhere for heat to go. So we swap airflow for machinery and act surprised when cities burn through electricity every summer.

Thermal mass sounds technical. It’s actually closer to cooking. A cast iron pan stays hot long after it leaves the stove because it holds heat. Stone, brick, and concrete do the same job inside a building, soaking up warmth slowly, holding onto it for hours, letting it go once the temperature drops.

That’s why old stone houses stay cool through a scorching afternoon. The walls delay the heat instead of handing it straight to the room, then let it go outward once night air drops below the temperature of the stone, which is also why throwing every window open after dark was never superstition, just the last step of the same system.

A light building reacts to the weather. A heavy one negotiates with it. The difference is a few degrees you never had to pay for.

Somewhere along the way we split architecture from the landscape around it. That was the mistake. A mature deciduous tree, the kind that drops its leaves every winter, is one of the oldest climate technologies we have. In summer its leaves catch the sun before it reaches your roof. In winter those same leaves drop and let the light back in, right when you need it.

Compare that to a parking lot, which soaks up heat all day and radiates it back into the block long after dark. Trees do the opposite, they cool the air around them while they’re at it. During a heatwave, tree canopy runs eight to twelve degrees Celsius cooler than bare pavement, and a shaded sidewalk can feel up to 14 degrees cooler than one with nothing overhead. We keep shopping for smarter cooling systems while we cut down the oldest and most efficient ones.

None of this needs a backyard. A fifteen story block can face the right way and breathe on two sides just as easily as a bungalow, because the physics doesn’t care how many units are stacked on it. Sprawl is the real opposite of passive design, not density. Sprawl is what happens when a city spreads instead of stacks, and it only survives on a car in the driveway and a compressor on the wall.

People ask if insulation is the most important feature of an efficient building. Insulation matters, but it comes after the fundamentals. A well designed passive building stacks orientation, shading, ventilation, thermal mass, and insulation into one system where each part is quietly doing the others’ job too. Orientation catches the winter light. Overhangs block the summer sun. Trees add seasonal shade. Windows catch the wind. Walls bank the day’s heat. Insulation keeps all of it from leaking back out. None of this is new. It’s just been sitting there unused for about a century.

Climate change keeps exposing how badly we build. Our answer is always the same, a bigger unit, a stronger system, more electricity. We rarely ask if the building was ever designed with any of this in mind to begin with. Passive design offers something else, comfort you get from understanding a place instead of comfort you buy every month. Latitude, wind, trees, sunlight, seasons.

A building shouldn’t have to fight the place it’s standing in every single day, and for most of human history none of them did. Architecture was an extension of the land before it became a product line.

Pauline Paredes shouldn’t have to leave Albi to stop living in a kettle. The five million households rationing their own heat this winter shouldn’t have to choose between warmth and food. None of that is the weather’s fault alone. It’s the bill for a hundred years of buildings that were never asked to do their share of the work.

The most sustainable energy was never going to be the one we invent next. It was always the one we stopped needing the day we designed the building right the first time. We just built our way out of remembering that, one glass tower at a time.

Teekay

Every road leads to the same slaughterhouse

September 7, 2026 — Leave a comment

Why are you vegan?

People ask me why I’m vegan more than almost any other question.

They expect a simple answer, one reason. The animals. The climate. Health.

The truth is less convenient.

A documentary started it. I watched Cowspiracy expecting to feel informed for an evening and come out the other side unchanged. That’s not what happened. Something in me actually shifted, and it didn’t shift back. It’s not a perfect film, a few of its numbers got oversimplified to the point of losing context, but the core of what it lays out is factual and well researched, and it did enough to make me curious.

It was the door. I went down the rabbit hole, and every subject I cared enough to study kept leading me to the same place. Climate change, ocean conservation, water scarcity, public health, colonial exploitation, every one of them led there.

The more I learned, the harder it became to justify participating in an industry that sits at the center of so many crises at once.

Sentience isn’t a seasoning

Everything else comes second.

A cow doesn’t want to be slaughtered. A pig fights for its life. Chickens recognize dozens of individuals and form complex social hierarchies. Octopuses solve puzzles. Fish remember routes, cooperate, and avoid painful experiences. The scientific debate is no longer whether many animals are sentient. It’s how rich their inner lives actually are.

An estimated 80 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for food. That number doesn’t include fish, whose deaths are measured in the trillions because they’re counted by weight rather than as individuals.

Modern language hides this. We say beef instead of cow, pork instead of pig, seafood instead of animals. We call slaughterhouses processing plants and carcasses products. The vocabulary exists to make violence feel industrial instead of personal.

If another being can suffer, the burden of proof should never sit on compassion. It should sit on exploitation.

The net effect

The ocean made me rethink everything.

I dive, and most of the people I dived with aren’t vegan. Ask them and they’ll tell you they love the ocean, and I don’t doubt they mean it. But loving an ecosystem while still funding the industries gutting it is a contradiction worth sitting with, not a small one, and it’s one very few divers ever examine.

We often imagine plastic bottles floating on the surface as the defining image of marine pollution. They matter, but they’re not the whole story. A large share of the plastic mass in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, by most estimates close to half, is abandoned or discarded fishing gear. Nets keep killing animals for years after being lost, a phenomenon known as ghost fishing.

Then there’s bottom trawling.

Imagine dragging a weighted net across an ancient forest, flattening everything in its path, then throwing most of the wildlife back dead because it has no commercial value. That’s essentially what industrial trawling does to the seabed. Coral gardens, sponges, and countless species disappear beneath steel chains because efficiency demands it.

Every year, an estimated hundreds of thousands of dolphins, turtles, sharks, and seabirds die as bycatch. They were never the target. They’re collateral damage.

The ocean isn’t being emptied because billions of ordinary people fish with small boats. It’s being emptied because industrial fleets have turned living ecosystems into extraction zones.

Catch of the day

Fishing is also a story about power.

Countries with enormous industrial fleets don’t limit themselves to their own waters. They travel thousands of kilometers into the waters of poorer nations through unequal agreements, weak enforcement or outright illegal fishing.

In Senegal, fish has long been the foundation of both culture and nutrition. Yet many local fishers return with smaller catches than previous generations because industrial vessels remove fish on an entirely different scale. The result isn’t simply environmental decline. It’s food insecurity, unemployment, and ultimately migration.

When communities that have fished sustainably for centuries start struggling to feed themselves while foreign ships export their catch across continents, it’s hard to call that free trade. It looks much closer to colonial extraction wearing a modern suit.

The ocean belongs to no empire.

Empire and industry run on the same logic. Whoever holds power decides which lives count as resources and which don’t. That logic doesn’t start with the ocean. It starts with the animal on the plate, the first life reduced to a commodity, the template every later extraction gets copied from. Stop treating animals as property and the whole chain of domination loses the argument it was built on.

But soy

People still blame vegans for soy.

It’s one of the most successful and ridiculous myths ever created.

Every estimate lands well north of three quarters of the world’s soy grown to feed livestock, not people eating tofu or soy milk.

Chickens, pigs, and cattle consume astonishing quantities of crops before becoming meat. We don’t destroy forests because humans suddenly developed a love for edamame. We destroy them because billions of farmed animals need feeding.

The Amazon illustrates this perfectly.

Cattle ranching remains the largest driver of deforestation there. Forests are cleared for pasture, while surrounding land increasingly becomes monoculture growing feed for animals. Fire is often the cheapest way to erase thousands of years of biodiversity in a matter of hours.

The images are almost unbearable. Trees burning. Birds unable to escape. Mammals trapped by flames moving faster than they can run. Entire ecosystems reduced to ash so empty grass can replace living forest.

We call it development.

I call it extinction.

Green algae

People often argue over percentages. Was livestock responsible for 14 percent of emissions or 18 percent?

Here’s what the argument over the exact number misses. Whichever figure turns out to be more accurate, both put livestock among the two largest contributors to global emissions, alongside fossil fuels. Fighting over four percentage points doesn’t change which industries need to shrink.

Food systems account for roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock is one of the largest pieces of that share through methane, deforestation, feed production and land use. Methane matters especially because it traps heat far more effectively than carbon dioxide in the short term.

The damage doesn’t stop at the atmosphere. It ends up in the water too.

Industrial farms produce mountains of manure. When nitrogen and phosphorus run into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, algae multiply out of control. As they decompose, oxygen disappears and aquatic life suffocates.

Few places show this as clearly as Brittany, in France. Every summer, vast blooms of green algae cover its beaches. As the algae rot, they release hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas that has been linked to the deaths of wild animals and, in a small number of documented cases, humans. This isn’t a natural disaster. It’s the predictable consequence of decades of intensive livestock farming and fertilizer runoff.

And the warming comes back around to the animals themselves. During recent heatwaves across Europe, thousands of farm animals died trapped inside industrial sheds and trucks before reaching slaughter. They survived neither nature nor the system built to profit from them.

The victims of climate change increasingly include those forced to produce it.

The side effects

I didn’t become vegan for my health.

It became an unexpected consequence.

The strongest scientific evidence is remarkably consistent. Diets centered on legumes, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds are associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. Consumption of processed meat increases the risk of several cancers.

That doesn’t mean every vegan is healthy. French fries are vegan. Some donuts are vegan. Ethics and nutrition are different conversations.

The point isn’t that plants are magic. It’s that our healthiest dietary patterns consistently lean more on them and less on animals.

The next pandemic has a farm address

Humanity keeps building the perfect laboratory for new diseases.

When thousands of genetically similar animals are confined together, viruses evolve more easily. The closer the contact between stressed animals and humans, the greater the chance for pathogens to jump species.

Many of history’s most significant infectious diseases are zoonotic. They originated through animal to human transmission, even if each followed a different path.

Alongside this sits a quieter crisis. Antibiotics are routinely used in livestock around the world, not only to treat disease but often to prevent it in intensive systems. This accelerates antimicrobial resistance, letting bacteria evolve past medicines that once saved millions of lives.

We talk about the next pandemic as if it will arrive from nowhere. Often, we’re building it ourselves.

Burning calories to make calories

Perhaps the strangest part of all this is how inefficient it is.

We grow enormous quantities of edible crops, feed them to animals, lose most of the calories and protein during that biological conversion, then wonder why feeding humanity keeps getting harder.

Animal protein is one of the least efficient ways to produce food from land, water and crops. Producing protein directly from plants generally takes dramatically fewer resources while leaving more room for forests, wildlife and carbon storage.

Hunger has never been purely an agricultural problem. It’s always been a political one.

Life, itemized

The deeper I looked, the more one pattern kept repeating.

A forest became timber.

An ocean became a resource.

A river became a waste channel.

A cow became a machine for milk.

A chicken became a production unit.

A fish became tonnage.

Capitalism has an extraordinary ability to rename living beings until they sound like inventory. Once something becomes a commodity, its suffering disappears behind spreadsheets, shipping containers and quarterly profits. Dead bodies cross continents refrigerated inside trucks and cargo ships while consumers rarely think about the individual lives those numbers once represented.

The system depends on distance.

Distance between the slaughterhouse and the supermarket.

Distance between the fishing fleet and the village it impoverishes.

Distance between the burning forest and the burger.

Distance makes almost anything feel normal.

All roads lead to veganism

People still ask why I’m vegan.

I could say it’s for the animals, and that would be true.

I could say it’s for the climate, and that would also be true.

I could say it’s for cleaner rivers, living oceans, public health, or the communities losing their fisheries to industrial extraction. Every answer would be incomplete on its own.

Because veganism was never one road.

It was the destination where all the roads met.

The more I learned about suffering, the more impossible it became to justify taking part in it when another choice existed.

That’s why I’m vegan.

Teekay

Freedom begins by reducing dependence

August 31, 2026 — Leave a comment

Money is not the foundation of civilization.

It’s the receipt.

We spend our lives chasing numbers on a screen. GDP, stock markets, billionaires, inflation, currencies. We act as if money is the bedrock everything else stands on.

It’s not.

Food is.

Without food, there are no people. No workers, no soldiers, no consumers, no billionaires. Hunger has always been humanity’s first enemy, and every civilization was built around solving that one problem.

But there’s a truth hiding underneath it.

You can’t secure food without energy.

For tens of thousands of years, that energy came from human muscle, animals, rivers and wind. Then we found coal, oil and gas, and suddenly one machine could replace hundreds of people. Fossil fuels didn’t invent energy. They concentrated it. They turned power into something that could be owned, extracted and sold.

That’s when the game changed.

Whoever controls energy controls transport. Whoever controls transport controls food. Whoever controls food controls hunger. And whoever controls hunger controls nations. First it’s a national interest. Then a security interest. Then a reason to send an army.

That’s the real ledger. Everything else is cover. Democracy, freedom, human rights, security. Different century, same script, and the resource underneath it rarely changes. Energy-rich regions have a long history of becoming “unstable” right when a great power needs what’s under their ground. That’s not coincidence. That’s the pattern of intent.

The cruelest part is that even those of us who reject that history still run on its infrastructure. I oppose exploitation, yet I fill my tank and charge my phone. I criticize empire, yet I use electricity flowing through grids built on centuries of extraction. I condemn colonialism while still benefiting from resources mined thousands of kilometers away. None of us stand outside the machine, no matter how loudly we object to it.

Since I can’t opt out of the system, the next best thing is shrinking how much of my life it gets to run. That’s the actual reason I became a minimalist, not the aesthetic.

People think minimalism is white walls and linen shirts and empty apartments.

It’s not. It’s about dependence.

Every unnecessary possession draws on that same energy chain. Every gadget needs electricity. Every trend needs a factory, a cargo ship and something pulled out of the ground to make it. The more you need, the more someone else gets to set the terms of your life.

Freedom isn’t earning enough to consume without limit. Freedom is needing so little that scarcity loses its grip on you.

Markets are built to sell people infinite desires, because a person who always wants more is a person who can always be sold something. Minimalism breaks that loop. It won’t dismantle any empire by itself, but it quietly stops feeding it.

Own less. Need less. Depend less.

Because in a world where power runs on energy, the simplest resistance is deciding how much of it you hand over.

Teekay

Life in Kuala Lumpur, Mostly Pros and Some Cons

August 13, 2026 — Leave a comment

Cost of living, weather, walkability, safety, let’s unpack everything.

I first came to Malaysia more than ten years ago, on a family trip to Kuala Lumpur, Penang and the Perhentian Islands. It was the last time my family traveled together like that. I came back alone a few months later, younger, rebuilding after two rough years, right around when my anxiety and panic attacks started.

Ten years later I’m back for the third time: a month in Kuala Lumpur, more time in Penang. I still really like this place. Here’s why, and why I still wouldn’t move here.

Cost of living in Kuala Lumpur

Cheap Food, Expensive Rent.

KL makes everyday life easy. It’s safe, affordable without feeling cheap, and English gets you through almost anything.

Food is where that shows most. A meal at a hawker centre or food court easily comes in under 20myr; 25myr gets you a genuinely good casual meal. You’re not sacrificing quality to save money. KL also has luxury restaurants and high-end malls if you want to spend more. The city runs at both ends.

Rent doesn’t follow the same logic. As a foreigner, budget around 3000myr/month for a decent studio with a kitchenette, more or less depending on neighborhood, building and negotiation (in-person deals beat arranging things from abroad).

That’s the real surprise of KL’s cost of living: you can eat for 10myr and cross the city for pocket change, but your apartment still runs several thousand ringgit a month, because KL’s housing market behaves like the international city it is.

Getting around without a car

The rail network (LRT, MRT, monorail, buses, feeder buses) covers most of the city. For a foreigner staying a month or more, the Rapid Bulanan pass is worth knowing: 170myr (not 150 as advertised) for 30 days of unlimited travel across RapidKL’s network. I bought one and used it every day, though I could have gotten by without it.

150myr isn’t cheap, but it’s one less thing to think about. Shorter Rapid Kembara passes exist for visitors too.

So no, you don’t need a car in KL. The problem is the city wasn’t really built for people who don’t have one.

You can also use Grab, which is relatively cheap, but not the best option for the environement.

Is Kuala Lumpur walkable? Not really

This is my biggest complaint. Around KLCC and the newer developments, pedestrian infrastructure is genuinely good. Then the sidewalk just disappears. You cross a road and you’re suddenly walking beside six lanes of traffic with no clear way across.

A 15-minute walk on Google Maps can feel much longer at 32C and full humidity, next to traffic, with no shade.

So people take Grab, or drive, and the cycle feeds itself. Poor walkability pushes people into cars, more cars mean more congestion and heat, and the city gets even less pleasant to walk in.

KL has invested heavily in public transport, which is great, but it’s not the same as good urban mobility. You still have to get from your door to the station, and from the station to wherever you’re going. What this city needs is continuous sidewalks, real crossings, cycling infrastructure and shade. This city definitely needs shade!

Weather and humidity in Kuala Lumpur

Heat doesn’t bother me. Humidity does, and KL has plenty of it, the kind that wraps you in a warm wet towel after five minutes outside. Then you walk into a mall and you’re freezing, because electricity is cheap here and air conditioning runs generously everywhere: offices, malls, restaurants, hotels.

Step back outside and you’re sweating again within minutes.

The city cools its indoors to compensate for outdoor heat it can’t control, then adds more heat back into the air through cars and AC units running constantly.

Noise

KL is alive, and rarely quiet. Cars, motorcycles, construction, modified exhausts, air conditioners, honking. It’s less that any one sound is unbearable and more that there are so many of them your brain never fully switches off.

If you’re used to the quiet of certain places, KL isn’t for you.

Malaysia’s multiculturalism

This is what I love most about Malaysia beyond the food. It’s a predominantly Muslim country, but Chinese, Indian and other communities have been part of Malaysian society for generations, and the religious diversity is something you see everywhere. I’ve prayed in mosques with Taoist temples visible from the windows, walked through Little India surrounded by Hindu temples, and seen Chinese churches standing beside other places of worship. It’s not something you have to seek out. It’s simply part of everyday life. This is far from the norm in most countries around the world.

Malaysia has religious and ethnic tensions, like anywhere, and it would be naive to pretend otherwise. But the everyday coexistence, people working, eating and running businesses together across lines that are treated as much more divisive elsewhere is genuinely refreshing.

Women are also highly visible in economic life here. Managers, entrepreneurs, shop owners, decision-makers. Malaysia has a solid reputation as a safe destination for women traveling alone, and ironically, the worst safety stories I’ve heard came from expat circles.

Remote work in Kuala Lumpur

KL is amazing for remote work.

The internet is fast, reliable and widely available, and mobile data is cheap enough that staying connected isn’t something you really have to think about. Wifi is everywhere you’d expect it to be, from apartments and hotels to cafés and shopping malls.

When we landed at KLIA, we bought a CelcomDigi tourist SIM for 60myr. It gave us 30 days of unlimited internet in Malaysia plus 3GB that could be used elsewhere in Southeast Asia, which came in very handy when we went to Vietnam. Also, we paid exactly the same at the airport as we would’ve paid online or at an agency in town.

No contract, no expensive roaming and no worrying about getting connected when you land.

Then there’s the café culture. KL has no shortage of neighbourhood cafés, minimalist coffee shops and places where people can sit with a laptop for a few hours. You can work, get good coffee, eat something decent and stay connected without anyone bothering you.

The city also has a growing technology sector and is becoming an increasingly important regional hub for tech and data centres. So there’s a good fit between the infrastructure and the kind of work many remote workers actually do.

Car culture

Malaysia’s custom car scene is genuinely amazing, especially if you’re coming from Europe. Japanese and local cars, lowered, rebuilt, repainted, personalized. It’s not about owning something expensive, it’s about making the car yours, and there’s real creativity in it. Didn’t expect to love this part as much as I do.

KLIA and getting out of Kuala Lumpur

KL is a fantastic base for exploring Southeast Asia. KLIA reaches Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar easily. From KL Sentral, the airport coach is 15myr one way (as of August 2026); the KLIA Ekspres train is more expensive, still affordable and faster.

The bus takes 45 minutes to an hour depending on traffic. So convenient!

Vegan food in Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia is one of the easier places I’ve traveled as a vegan, mostly because vegetarian food is deeply embedded in several religious traditions here (Taoist, Hindu, and others), so vegetarian restaurants are everywhere.

The catch: vegetarian doesn’t mean vegan. Fish sauce, oyster sauce and other animal products turn up in dishes labelled vegetarian, so you have to ask.

Our favorite joint is definitely RightSide! Burgers, lobster rolls, tacos, milkshakes, matcha, ice cream, all vegan.

Try Vegelicious JR in Midvaley as well, it’s insanely good.

The plastic problem

Bottled water, plastic bags, cups, straws, takeaway containers, everything wrapped in something. Order one drink and you can walk away holding a cup, a bag, a straw and a separate wrapper.

Plastic is cheap, convenient, and works in this climate. Straws, for instance, often exist so you don’t put your mouth directly on a shared can, not just out of carelessness. But a country with this much modern infrastructure could do far more to normalize refill stations, household filtration and reusable containers. They’re there, but nowhere near widespread enough.

For anyone who thinks about waste, it’s hard to ignore.

Why I wouldn’t live in Kuala Lumpur

The weather would wear on me. The noise would wear on me. The plastic would drive me up the wall. And the lack of walkability would frustrate me more with every year. I want to walk out of my front door and just go, not along a six-lane highway, not 20 minutes to the nearest crossing. I want quiet, trees, nature, and an easy way out of the city. KL doesn’t offer any of that, unfortunately. Neither do most cities of this size.

Is Kuala Lumpur worth living in?

KL has almost everything. It’s modern, safe, multicultural, well connected and tech-forward. It’s also not finished figuring itself out, and I like that about it.

Would I live here permanently? I love my life in France, but even without that, KL wouldn’t be at the top of my list. The walkability, the noise, the plastic pollution, the air, the heat, none of them are dealbreakers on their own. Together, though, they add up to the one thing I won’t compromise on: my health.”

Would I come back? I already have, three times, and I doubt this is the last.

Thanks for reading,
Teekay

Every Wildfire Begins with a Sandwich

August 12, 2026 — Leave a comment

France braces for 5th heat wave since June.

France has barely extinguished one of its largest wildfires in decades. An area roughly the size of Hong Kong has burned, and we’re only halfway through the summer. But another heatwave is already here.

People ask how this keeps happening.

I think we’re asking the wrong question.

Every wildfire begins with a sandwich.

Not because a ham sandwich can physically ignite a forest, but because it represents the countless ordinary decisions that build the world in which forests burn.

The sandwich.

The cigarette.

The dairy ice cream we hand to our children without a second thought.

The Shein order arriving tomorrow.

The new backpack and notebooks bought every September even though last year’s are still perfectly usable.

Each decision appears harmless. Each is too small to matter. That is exactly how systems survive. It’s recreated every morning when we choose convenience over necessity, novelty over sufficiency, habit over reflection.

Every purchase is a vote. Not because one purchase changes the world overnight, but because billions of purchases, repeated every day, determine which industries grow, which disappear, and what kind of civilization we continue to finance.

One Amazon order won’t send a billionaire and his friends into space. One dairy ice cream won’t destroy a forest. One unnecessary notebook won’t fill a landfill.

But none of those things happens only once. They happen millions of times, every single day. Eventually those “insignificant” decisions become greenhouse gases, deforestation, polluted rivers, shrinking biodiversity, exhausted soils, expanding infrastructure and ecosystems pushed beyond their limits.

Then comes the heat. Then the drought. Then the spark.

And suddenly everyone becomes an environmentalist.

Hundreds of volunteers leave their homes to protect forests from the flames. They carry water, clear vegetation, do everything they can to stop the fire from reaching nearby villages. Most people see humanity at its finest.

I see humanity desperately trying to repair yesterday while continuing to finance it this morning.

The same people who volunteer their time and energy to protect the forest are then handed tables full of ham and butter sandwiches, soft drinks, sometimes cigarettes.

Volunteering is great. These people are giving their time to protect their homes, their communities, the forest around them. That matters. What bothers me is how easily we separate the emergency from everything that preceded it. We celebrate the person who runs toward the flames while treating the quieter forms of prevention as optional, eccentric, even ridiculous.

Refusing unnecessary consumption isn’t celebrated.

Reusing old supplies isn’t celebrated.

Eating less meat and dairy isn’t celebrated.

Living with less isn’t celebrated.

Those choices rarely earn applause because they happen long before the crisis, when there is no fire to fight and nobody watching. Yet they may matter far more than the dramatic moments that make the evening news.

We have confused loving the way nature makes us feel with caring about nature itself.

We hike through forests while eating products that contribute to the destruction of ecosystems. We photograph mountains while wrapped in disposable consumption. We defend a burning forest while continuing to finance the industries that place increasing pressure on forests around the world. We rush to fight the fire while throwing fuel onto it for the rest of the year. Economic fuel. Cultural fuel. Political fuel.

None of this means every choice weighs the same. A handful of industries and a handful of governments make decisions that outweigh what any individual could do in a lifetime, and no amount of reused notebooks cancels out a pipeline. But that asymmetry is not an excuse. It’s the reason our purchases are also our politics. Every dollar we hand to an industry is a small vote for its continued expansion, and the industries we’re describing don’t grow without millions of us feeding them first.

People often ask who is responsible for ecological collapse. The government? Corporations? Consumers? The uncomfortable answer is that there isn’t a single culprit. There is a chain, a chain in which every link seems too small to matter until the whole thing snaps.

That’s the butterfly effect.

A civilization is not destroyed by one catastrophic decision. It’ss destroyed by millions of ordinary ones.

And every wildfire begins with a sandwich.

Food for thought.

Teekay

Small changes to improve life

April 24, 2026 — 1 Comment

An interconnected system that made me healthier and more aligned.

You can’t expect your body to function properly if everything you expose it to works against it.

What you touch, what you eat, what you breathe in, what you surround yourself with matters.

Most of these changes didn’t come from theory. They came from small moments of doubt. Something feels off, you look into it, you adjust, and then you don’t go back. Over time, those adjustments start forming a pattern.

Plastic was the starting point

Once I started paying attention, plastic was everywhere. Not just single-use items, but containers, cutting boards, utensils, bottles. Even when it’s thick and reusable, it still degrades over time. Microplastics are already present in food and water, so adding more exposure through daily habits made little sense. I removed plastic containers, replaced cutting boards, and shifted entirely to glass, wood, and metal for anything that comes into contact with food. I now store and consume food exclusively using stable, non-degrading materials.

Water isn’t neutral

Tap water is often treated as a given, but once you look into what it contains, it changes how you approach it. I invested in a proper filtration system and regret not having done so earlier. Before that, I went with a basic pitcher, the Brita type, then moved to something more advanced (and more expensive) to remove a wider range of contaminants. That said, I also started being more intentional with how I drink water. In the morning, I’ll often have water with cucumber and lemon, and I’ll leave cucumber slices in the bottle throughout the day. Given how much of the body is made up of water (60%, vs 73% for the brain), it doesn’t make sense to treat it casually.

Cookware and daily exposure

Cooking used to be about convenience. Non-stick pans, plastic utensils, quick cleaning. Once concerns around certain coatings and chemical residues became more visible, that convenience started to feel like a trade-off. I replaced everything with stainless steel cookware and switched plastic utensils for wood or metal. It requires more attention, but it removes a layer of uncertainty.

Eliminating plastic in hygiene products

The same pattern showed up in the bathroom. Most hygiene products come in plastic packaging, and beyond that, their composition raises lots of questions anyway. Shampoo, shower gels, toothpaste, it’s all part of the same system. Moving away from plastic bottles was supposed to be difficult, till it wasn’t. Toothpaste remained the hardest to replace due to cost and availability, though totally doable. Plus, you can make your own, if time allows.
As for shampoo, it’s been close to a decade since I’ve reduced it drastically, once a month on average, and even less in the summer when I’m regularly in the ocean or rivers. When I do use one, it’s always a natural, oil-based, plastic-free option. The rest gets washed with regular, natural soap.

Perfumes and what goes through the skin

I used to collect perfumes. At one point I had around thirty bottles. It was part of how I presented myself. Over time, I learned more about what actually goes into most fragrances. They’re not just alcohol and plant extracts. Many contain compounds that interfere with hormonal systems. Applying them directly on the skin, especially around the neck, didn’t make sense anymore. In fact, it became a health hasard. I still use what’s left of my collection, but only and exclusively on my clothes.

Body lotions and absorption

That same logic extended to body lotions. At first, plastic packaging was the issue. Then I realized the formulations themselves raised similar concerns. Long-lasting scents rely on chemical stabilizers that don’t just sit on the surface, they penetrate well into our body and weaken our nervous system. I replaced them with simpler alternatives like coconut oil, jojoba oil, and monoi stored in glass bottles. They do what’s needed without unnecessary complexity.

Sound, stimulation, and the nervous system

There’s also what we expose our brain to. I used to listen to music at maximum volume for hours every day. Looking back, it’s surprising there wasn’t more damage in my inner ear. More recently, I started questioning constant exposure to wireless ear devices as well. It’s not easy to step away from, but I’ve made adjustments. I use wired earphones more often, reduced how much I listen to anything overall, and capped the volume so it never exceeds 85 decibels on my phone. Silence has taken a bigger place too, especially through long walks.

Food as a baseline

Diet was one of the earliest shifts and it stayed consistent. Processed sugars and ultra-processed foods were removed and haven’t come back. The focus is on whole foods, fiber and stable energy rather than spikes. Fermented foods like homemade kefir became part of daily intake to support gut health. Supplements were added with specific purposes. Creatine for performance and recovery, cordyceps and lion’s mane for energy and cognitive support, vitamin D in winter, omega-3 for long-term brain health, turmeric for inflammation. Fruit is eaten whole rather than juiced to avoid unnecessary glucose spikes. Alongside this, I fast intermittently throughout the year, supporting deeper internal regulation. And of course , everything 100% plantbased and palm oil-free.

Sun exposure, corrected over time

Sun exposure is another area where I had to adjust. For a long time I approached it carelessly. I even used coconut oil thinking it would protect my skin, when in reality it was doing the opposite. I rarely burned, but that doesn’t mean there was no damage. Over time, I learned to be more controlled. Less direct exposure on the face, protection when needed, and no more chasing tans.

Living closer to nature

One of the biggest shifts didn’t come from removing something, but from changing the environment itself. Living closer to nature makes everything easier. Movement, silence, exposure to natural elements. Practices like grounding or earthing stop being abstract ideas and become part of daily life. Walking barefoot, touching the ground, spending time in natural surroundings. There’s a noticeable effect on stress levels, posture, and overall balance. Even something as simple as leaning against a tree or staying still outdoors changes how the body settles. Oh yeah, and tree hugging FTW!

Reconnecting with natural signals

Some changes are harder to explain in purely scientific terms, but still feel real in practice. Hair is one of them. There are older ideas about hair acting as a kind of antenna, a connection to the environment. Historically, cutting hair has sometimes been used not only for hygiene but also as a way to strip identity, control individuals, or disconnect them from something deeper, which is why you often see it done immediately in contexts like slavery or imprisonment. Whether or not that idea can be measured, I’ve noticed a difference since growing it out and stopping the use of chemical-heavy products. There’s a stronger sense of awareness and sensitivity, so keep your hair, guy, unless you’re balding, of course !

Positive thinking and internal dialogue

Not everything is physical. The way you think shapes how you experience all of this. I’ve always been confident, but intentional self-talk is something else entirely. It requires awareness, especially when you’ve been exposed to environments where things don’t always go well. I’ve been working on reinforcing more constructive internal patterns. At the same time, I’ve developed more understanding for people who lean toward pessimism. Most of the time it’s not a choice. It’s conditioning. Repeated negative experiences shape expectations, and those expectations shape perception. A lot of people judge that without understanding it, don’t be one of them.

Interconnectedness

At some point, all of this converges. What you eat, what you drink, what you wear, what you apply to your skin, what you listen to, where you spend your time, it all feeds into the same system. None of these changes exist in isolation. Each one reinforces the others. Once you start seeing that, it becomes difficult to go back to unconscious habits. So, approaching one’s environment and lifestyle as one interconnected system is the key to all this.

Across all these changes, the pattern is consistent. Remove what is unnecessary, reduce synthetic exposure, and replace it with simpler alternatives. When something can’t be avoided, create distance between it and the body. Over time, those small decisions compound, and life gets better.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

How to sleep better

March 27, 2026 — Leave a comment

Small changes, big difference.

This was supposed to be a simple blogpost about a few changes I made to improve my health. Nothing deep, nothing structured. But once I started writing, one thing became obvious. Sleep wasn’t just one habit among others, it was the foundation behind them all. So instead of burying it in a longer piece, I pulled it out entirely. This is a focused breakdown of how I reshaped my sleep and nervous system.

Sleep isn’t just rest. It’s not just recovery. It’s something far more subtle, almost something we’ve forgotten how to experience properly. The french refer to sleep as “la petite mort”, or “the little death”. Nas, the legendary rapper also referred to it as “the cousin of death.” We all know something deep takes over when we’re asleep, we just don’t know how deep.

Whether you see that as spiritual, neurological, or both, one thing is certain. Sleep isn’t passive. It’s something you prepare for, something you enter, something you either respect or disrupt.

Heart rate is the real gatekeeper

Most people focus on how tired they feel, but that’s not what determines sleep quality. Heart rate does. If it’s elevated when you’re about to fall asleep, the night is compromised before it even starts. You might still pass out, but the depth, recovery and continuity won’t be the same. What’s interesting is how many things influence heart rate. Late meals, drinking too close to bed, blue light, mental stimulation, these are all factors. Sleep doesn’t start when you lie down, it starts hours before.

The four-hour rule

One of the most effective ways I found. Simple in theory but harder in practice: Stop eating and drinking about 4 hours before sleep.
When I stick to it, the difference is immediate. My heart rate drops more easily, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and my sleep stays uninterrupted. It also extends my fasting window naturally, which supports recovery and deeper cellular processes during the night. I now aim to stop all intake at least 2 to 3 hours before bed, 4 feels long at times..

Warm extremities, faster sleep

Another overlooked factor is temperature distribution. If your hands and feet are cold, falling asleep becomes harder because the body struggles to shift into a resting state. I don’t like sleeping in socks, so I use different workarounds to keep my feet warm, like heating pads.

Deep pressure and a sense of safety

Sleep is also psychological. The nervous system needs to feel safe enough to let go. One thing that helped more than I expected is using heavier covers or even placing a pillow on top of my torso. That pressure creates a grounding effect. It reduces restlessness and makes it easier to drop into deeper sleep. It’s the same principle behind weighted blankets.

Spinal alignment in side positions

Posture doesn’t stop mattering once you’re asleep. I often fall asleep in a fetal position, and adding a pillow between my legs made a clear difference. It keeps my hips aligned, reduces strain on my lower back, and prevents tension from building overnight.

No pressure around the waist

I also became sensitive to anything compressing my stomach. Elastic bands started to feel intrusive once I paid attention. So now I have this black pair of very loose shorts with worn-out drawstrings that barely apply any tension. It’s the only piece I can tolerate consistently. Everything else feels restrictive.

Sleeping without layers

I didn’t always mind sleeping fully clothed. However, at some point I started waking up overheated and restless. So I adjusted gradually. First to go was the top, then the pants. My body regulates itself better without unnecessary layers.

Never sleep in plastic

For some mysterious reason, I used to think fleece was an ideal material. Light, warm, comfortable. But a friend pointed out that it’s just polyester. Plastic. That changed how I looked at it completely. Since then, I’ve moved away from synthetic fabrics in bed. I still own a few fleece items, but only as outer layers. Never directly on the skin and never in bed. So now I mostly sleep in cotton or nothing at all.

No charging by the bed

I always knew having devices charging right next to the bed wasn’t ideal, but convenience has a way of creeping back in. Thankfully, my wife reminded to reset that boundary, and I have. Since then, phones charge outside the bedroom. Simple.

Sleep as a system

Once all these pieces come together, you stop seeing sleep as a single action. It becomes a system. Timing, temperature, posture, materials, stimulation, all interacting at once. Change one variable and you might feel a difference. Change several, and the entire experience shifts. I don’t see sleep as something I “get” anymore. I see it as something I build, night after night.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Winter knows something we forgot

March 18, 2026 — Leave a comment

You don’t hate winter, you hate how we live through it.

I’m such a winter person. I resisted that idea for years because I don’t particularly enjoy being cold and I absolutely hate humidity, but I’m done arguing with it now.

Winter is my favorite season, the one that makes me feel most alive. Fall comes close behind. Maybe I’m really a fall-first person who only settles once winter arrives. Fall feels like a threshold, a kind of preparation, while winter is the place it all leads to.

Most people say they hate winter, but I don’t even think that’s true. I think they hate winter under capitalism, which is a very different thing.

Winter isn’t simply December 21st to March 20th like we’re taught in school. December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the deepest point of darkness. In many ways, that’s peak winter. It’s both the heart of it and the beginning of its slow release.

If you look at older seasonal systems, especially the Celtic calendar, winter is often understood differently. It begins around early November, with Samhain, and transitions toward spring around early February, with Imbolc. I’ve always intuitively aligned with this rhythm, a rhythm that feels more real in the body.

Winter always makes me nostalgic about my childhood. Where you grow up shapes your relationship to it. Below the equator, winter falls during what we call summer months. It’s shorter, less harsh. It’s still winter, but it doesn’t carry the same weight. Above the equator, winter has a presence. It changes everything.

Winter in New York, for example, is unmatched. But to understand it, you have to start with fall. Fall is special in a way that’s hard to replicate. The air sharpens, the leaves start falling, the temperature drops just enough to wake you up. School starts again. People return from summer scatteredness with a sense of purpose. There’s motivation, a quiet hope that something new can begin before the year closes.

Then come the holidays. I don’t celebrate them myself, but I can’t deny the atmosphere. Halloween, with kids everywhere. Thanksgiving, massive in New York. Then the Christmas season, with its films, its smells, its food. Cinnamon, baked goods, warmth. Fall is about getting cozy. It’s about preparing, consciously or not, for winter.

And then winter arrives.

One of my favorite childhood memories is hearing on the radio that a blizzard had shut everything down. Schools closed for days. Travel discouraged. The world paused. I remember the feeling of going back to bed, diving under the blanket, watching the snow fall outside. There was a kind of collective stillness. Everyone was home at the same time, in the middle of the week, which almost never happened.

Winter meant snowball fights with family and friends. Building snowmen. Coming back inside after hours in the cold to drink something hot, cinnamon-heavy or just a simple hot chocolate. Winter also meant shorter days, which I’ve always loved. There’s something honest about darkness arriving early. It forces you inward, and you simply sleep better. At least I do.

Now that I live in a coastal town, winter has taken on a different form. The place empties out. It becomes a ghost town. Only a few locals remain. I can walk through the streets, along the beach, into the forests, and not see anyone. Not hear anyone. Just space, and peace.

Fall here is also the perfect time for mushroom picking. There’s something deeply satisfying about finding your own food, bringing it home, cooking it. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but when I do, it reconnects me to something older than all of this.

Winter also brings unpredictability. Storms, floods, strong winds, snow.

I’ve always been fascinated by storms. There’s something humbling about them. They remind you how small you are without humiliating you. Just placing you back in proportion.

And this is where my relationship with winter becomes more than just aesthetic.

Winter, to me, is supposed to be a time of slowing down. A form of hibernation. Not complete inactivity, but a reduction. A softening. A withdrawal from constant output.

But winter under capitalism is the opposite of that.

It’s when everything accelerates. Black Friday. Christmas consumption. New Year’s, January sales. Valentine’s Day. It becomes a concentrated period of economic extraction. A time where people are pushed to spend more, move more, produce more, exactly when their bodies are asking for less.

I don’t adhere to that. I reject it.

Because biologically, intuitively, winter asks something else from us. Even illness patterns reflect that. People don’t just get sick because of viruses. They get sick because they keep pushing at summer pace in a winter body. They ignore the signal to slow down.

Historically, people understood this. They worked through the year, harvested their crops, prepared for winter. Around the end of October, they gathered, celebrated the end of harvest. And then life shifted. Maintenance replaced expansion. Survival replaced growth.

Nature does the same. Animals retreat. Bears hibernate. Bees cluster. Even plants withdraw into themselves. Winter is not death. It’s conservation.

I sometimes imagine a different life. A cabin. A cycle where summer is for harvesting, fall for preparing, winter for resting. Wood gathered. Food stored. Time spent simply maintaining what’s already there.

Life, at its core, is that simple. But systems built on constant expansion don’t allow simplicity to survive.

Winter, for me, is also about people. Not crowds, but closeness. Seeing friends, family. Sitting together, drinking tea, sharing time without urgency. There’s a different quality to connection in winter. It’s slower, deeper.

Even sports feel different. The air, the light, the coziness of it all. Everything sharpens.

And if I’m honest, part of why I love winter is personal. I’m introverted. I need that inward space. But it’s also something else. A fatigue with what humanity has become. The constant noise, the endless movement, the destruction of everything around us.

Winter feels like a counterforce.

It slows us down whether we like it or not. A storm doesn’t ask for permission. A blizzard doesn’t negotiate. When it hits, everything stops. And in that moment, we’re all equal. No one is above it.

There’s something powerful in that.

To me, winter restores balance. It interrupts the illusion that we can operate at maximum intensity all year long. The shortening of days, the stretching of nights, the way time itself feels heavier, slower, none of that is accidental. It’s a form of design.

Fighting that rhythm has consequences. You see it in people who try to live winter like summer. They burn out. They get anxious. They get sick.

I haven’t had a cold in years. That’s not just because I’m active or because of my diet, though those matter. It’s because I try, as much as possible, to align with that rhythm. To accept that winter is not the time to push.

Winter is about gathering. With nature, with people, with yourself. It’s not about peak productivity. It’s not about consumption. It’s not about proving anything.

It’s about remembering.

And maybe that’s why I love it so much. Because despite everything, despite the systems we’ve built to override it, winter still imposes itself. It reminds us, quietly or violently, that we are not in control of everything.

That there is a rhythm beyond us.

And that we’d probably be better off listening to it.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay.

Why I misunderstood sprinting for so long and why most people still do

January 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

Insights from a former student-athlete.

I started sprinting in 2004. I made my high school teams, then college teams and for a long time I thought I understood speed. I trained hard, I listened to my coaches, I did what was asked.

I hit my ceiling at some point, then one thing led to another till I completely stopped running. I went into boxing in the meantime, then bodybuilding, and slowly but surely stopped training altogether. I played football here and there, surfed for a brief moment, but it wasn’t sustained. Hiking became my favorite thing. Great for cardio, makes me happy and snappy. I felt right where I belonged.

In 2025, after years of just living and many injuries later, I came back to sprinting as grownup. But this time, I noticed something uncomfortable that became obvious. For most of my early career as a sprinter, I was running fast without truly understanding why or how.

That realization is frustrating because it feels like wasted time, and wasted potential.

In hindsight, I now feel like I never went beyond 80% of my capacity. It wasn’t because of my coaches, I simply didn’t understand what my sport was all about, so today, I want to make sure whoever reads this does, because sprinting culture rarely helps.

What sprinting isn’t

Speed is constantly explained using endurance logic. Even the gadgets we use, however technical, aren’t really designed for sprinters. Not at the highest level anyway.

Sprinting, for the longest time, was explained through running more, working harder, suffering more than the competition. That mindset, aka hustle-porn, comes from the fact that long distance running dominates the athletics scene. Endurance events shape how people think training works, even when it doesn’t apply to their sport.

One of the first myths I believed (and most people believe) is that sprinters run a lot. We don’t, at all. I used to, but not anymore. I always assumed volume built speed. Matter of fact, many coaches still believe that, and end up frying their runners.

What sprinting actually is

Research has shown that elite sprinters accumulate very little true sprinting volume. Max velocity running is neurologically brutal. You can’t repeat it endlessly without dulling the signal from the brain to the muscles. When the central nervous system is tired, coordination goes first, technique collapses, ground contact times increase and speed vanishes. Running more just teaches you how to run slower. That was the first realization I made when I went back into it. Never again!

Next, I believed gym work was mandatory and that strength automatically meant speed. Lift heavy, get powerful, get fast. Not true! Sprinting happens in time windows so short that slow strength barely matters. What matters is how fast you can apply force and how well you recycle it through tendons and stiffness. I’ve seen athletes with modest lifts run incredibly fast and others with impressive numbers never move well on the track. Strength only matters if it transfers.

Another point, for years I misunderstood elasticity. I thought plyometrics were optional extras or warm up games. Coming back to sprinting made it obvious that elasticity is the bridge between strength and speed. I’m not saying I never heard this beofre, I’m saying I wasn’t mature (or smart) enouigh to understand it.

Tendons storing and releasing energy, joints staying stiff at the right moments, rhythm staying intact under high speed. Bounds, hops, wickets and short accelerations teach the nervous system timing. They turn power into something usable. Without elasticity, power stays trapped.

Speaking of stiffness, it is the mother of all improvement in sprinting, another aspect we hardly talk about, or train.

Body composition myths confused me too. Being muscular doesn’t make you slow. Being lean doesn’t not make you fast. Non functional mass is the issue. Muscle that can’t be expressed within sprint specific contact times is dead weight. Leanness that compromises force output is just as useless. Speed only cares about force, timing and coordination.

Drills were another blind spot. I used to see them as filler. Now I see them as low cost technical rehearsal. Drills allow you to practice posture, front side mechanics and rhythm without frying the nervous system. When speed is high, there is no thinking. The body falls back on patterns. Drills build those patterns.

Last but not least, the biggest lesson I learned in all these years is how important rest is, and I don’t just mean sleep, which is the obvious one. When I was younger, stopping early felt lazy, like I wasn’t hustling enough. Now I know it’s intelligent, the right thing to do even. Speed doesn’t improve inside fatigue, it improves when the nervous system is fresh enough to adapt. That’s why we take long breaks between sprints, to rest the nervous system. Adding sets instead of reps, ending sessions before speed drops, spacing high intensity days and protecting sleep are not soft choices, they’re performance choices.

Looking back, it wish I understood all these things earlier. But sprinting is misunderstood because endurance logic dominates sports in general. Distance runners train more and win more medals overall, so their methods are treated as universal. Well, science and elite experiences say they’re not. Speed lives in a different world.

Sprinting rewards intelligence. The faster you want to be, the smarter you have to train.

Cheers!

Tee

Reasons why we don’t eat honey

May 12, 2025 — 1 Comment

Besides the fact that we don’t “need” to.

Honey comes from bees. Bees are tiny creatures who play a huge role in keeping our planet alive and healthy, I’ll explain how.

Bees are born in beehives, where they grow up, work together, and take care of each other. While most people think bees are just busy flying around, they’re not! They actually have specific “jobs”, or tasks if you will. In fact, each bee has a specific role: some clean the hive, some feed the baby bees, and others go out to find food. Basically, they’re like us, except more advanced, because they don’t pollute, fight over nonsense and hate each other for no reason.

Bees are also pollinators.

When bees buzz from one flower to the next, they’re doing something extremely important known as pollination. Here’s how it works: As bees collect nectar for making honey, they carry pollen from flower to flower. This simple act helps plants grow fruits, veggies, seeds, and even more flowers. Without bees doing their thing, a lot of the food we rely on wouldn’t exist.

Let that sink in for a second.

Case in point, 75% of the food we eat depends on pollinators like bees (WEF). 75 freakin’ percent! Apples, strawberries, cucumbers, almonds, and even coffee all need pollination. So, losing bees would mean most of these foods would disappear, or become extremely rare and expensive.

Besides, pollinators also help plants that grow in the wild. These plants give food and shelter to animals and help keep the air clean. So, pollinators help whole ecosystems survive, not just farms and gardens.

While bees are the most famous pollinators, they’re not the only ones. Butterflies, hummingbirds, bats, moths, beetles, and even some types of ants and wasps also help pollinate plants. However, bees are the most effective because they focus their energy on flowers and carry lots of pollen.

This year (2025), we’ve had the worst honeybee loss in recorded history in the US. In fact, 80% of honeybees died suddenly. We still “don’t know” why (pesticides, it’s pesticides).

So, why don’t we eat honey? Simple: bees make honey to feed themselves and keep their hive alive, especially through the winter. When humans harvest honey, they’re taking away the bees’ own food (and heat) source. To make up for it, beekeepers sometimes replace the honey with sugar water, but that doesn’t give bees the nutrients they need to stay healthy. In fact, just like in humans, too much sugar can weaken their immune systems and make them more vulnerable to disease.

Worse still, to harvest honey, beekeepers often use smoke or chemical fumes to force bees out of their hives. This disorients them, causing stress, panic, and confusion, sometimes even leading them to get lost or die as they flee.

Even though it might not seem harmful at first, stealing honey puts a lot of pressure on bee colonies. It is in fact one of the reasons we’ve seen millions of bees die in recent years.

This is why many vegans consider honey as part of animal exploitation. The more we take from bees and damage their homes, the fewer bees we have, which in turn puts entire ecosystems, and our own food systems, at risk. In numbers, honeybees pollinate a worth of 15 billion dollars of crops in the US only, yearly.

If bees disappear, many plants won’t be pollinated. This means fewer fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Animal species that eat these plants will struggle, and so will the animals that eat them. It’s a chain reaction that could cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Eventually, the extermination of bees would entail food shortages even for us, humans, and thus our death as well.

Humans have long seen themselves as sitting at the top of the pyramid, a concept known as speciesism, but in reality, we’re just one part of a vast, interconnected family of living, sentient beings.

Fascinating facts about bees

Here’s where things get interesting: Plants, being rooted in the ground, carry a small negative electric charge. Interestingly, this charge increases the higher up the plant you go, creating an electric field around the flower itself.

Bees, in contrast, acquire a positive charge during flight due to friction with the air, which causes them to lose electrons. So, as a bee approaches a flower, the opposing electric fields of the bee and the plant begin to interact. This interaction subtly changes the flower’s natural vibrations or signals, imperceptible to humans, but detectable to bees.

When the bee lands on the flower, the positive charge from the bee and the negative charge of the flower neutralize each other almost instantly. This leads to two remarkable outcomes:

The negatively charged pollen from the flower is attracted to and effectively “jumps” onto the positively charged bee;
The flower’s electric field is altered, signaling to other approaching bees that it has already been visited. This change communicates that the flower likely has no nectar left, prompting bees to move on and return later. Mindblowing!

So, flowers use electric fields not just to attract pollinators, but also to communicate whether they still have nectar. They have their own language of electricity, completely imperceptible to us.

Other interesting facts about bees: They can also recognize human faces, communicate with each other through a little dance, and even show signs of emotion. Scientists also suggest bees can count and they might even dream.

What can we do to protect the bees and our soils?

Ban pesticides.

Plant flowers that bees love, like lavender, sunflowers and wildflowers.

Replace honey with the million other alternatives in existence: maple syrup, agave nectar, date syrup, molasses, and even fruit-based syrups work great. Why participate in the extinction of a whole species (and many other would follow suite) when you can avoid it?

Bees may be small, but they are mighty. Taking care of them is not just about saving one species, it’s about saving the world we all share.

Thank you for stopping by. This post was inspired by a conversation with my wife ❤

Peace!

Teekay