High Profile

December 10, 2025

It appears that we're going to have some international visitors in Seattle next summer for some kind of sporting event.

And so I built these SEA 2026 pages over the weekend -- not just for visitors, but for anyone who's curious about the rest of the world. Pick a country and you'll see related restaurants.

It's a work in progress, and I'll be filling it out with more trails and more categories of content over the next few months. For now, it's a demo project to show what I do, but I'd be thrilled to work with local organizations to make it something really special.

Let me know what you think.

SEA 2026 Trails by Convention City Seattle

A couple months ago, I spoke as a panelist at a CFO Leadership Council event. This was the event flyer:

Article content I'm the only one not smiling. What's up with that?

It's a photo from 2019, taken between meals by a photographer on a cruise ship.

Since then, I've had other photos taken, but nothing I really wanted to share as a professional headshot for speaking engagements.

I mean, there's this one from 2020, when the barbershops were closed.

Article content How was YOUR pandemic?

I got a haircut for this illustration.

Article content The Illustrated Ivan Since I'm interested in giving more talks and presentations in 2026, I figured it's time to update my profile picture with a real photo from this decade.

And even though I often write about AI, I know enough to hire an actual photographer (Kozue Photography) for something like this because I'm not a total monster.

No matter what they may say.

I recently had an encounter with an artist whose livelihood was destroyed by AI and who blamed me, at least in part, for the exponential growth of a water-guzzling technological juggernaut created from the uncompensated labor of the collective works of humanity. I pointed out that I don't own a car and I live in a city and therefore should enjoy the occasional, if not regular, indulgence of the use of an artificial brain. That argument was dismissed out of hand, and the conversation ended abruptly before I could continue with my econometric analysis of AI coding systems, including an emerging hypothesis that innovations in data structures and content delivery are poised to eliminate entire categories of software yielding order-of-magnitude efficiency improvements, pace Jevons Paradox.

Or let me explain with a simple example: If 750,000 visitors to Seattle each search for a restaurant three times per day using an AI chatbot, that's 2.25 million queries per day, all using similar expensive queries to look for different subsets of the same core group of restaurants. So why not just do a few hundred searches in advance? We can use AI to answer the query: "I'm looking for an Egyptian-style restaurant in King County" and share that information widely so that those expensive chatbot searches never happen. Modest estimate: 1000x efficiency gain.

But from now on, if anyone asks, I'm a baker.

Anyway, here's my new profile photo.

Article content Ivan, smiling Or, for when the shrug emoji is more appropriate:

Article content "Total monster? How about fractional monster? Is that a thing?"