I was born in Rio de Janeiro — the Los Angeles of Brazil, sorta.

I like to say I grew up in Rio, then grew up again in New York City, where I spent most of my twenties. After that, I spent two years in London before moving to LA.

Venice. I think Venice chose us, really. We wanted to be near the beach but still have some character and texture around us. We fell in love with it right away and haven’t left since.

After New York, I always had this feeling in the back of my head that I’d never be able to be as happy as I was there. But I love LA as much as I love NYC, and that says a lot. It’s where I first moved after getting married, where we had our kids, where we bought our first house. In other words, home. It feels like home.

Treat your first week like vacation. Find local friends (or friends of friends). Spend a day biking around Venice, drinking coffee and some beers later. Drive to Malibu another day. Check out Silver Lake. Drive Sunset. Spend a little time in each neighborhood. Bar hop, window shop. If you see a bunch of tourists toting selfie sticks around you, you’re doing it wrong. Follow the locals.

And then, on your second week, it’ll be easier to deal with everything else. Don’t let your first impression about LA be about house hunting, work or paperwork. Spend some time falling in love with it first.

Don’t rush into a long commitment. Take the pressure off by Airbnb-hopping week to week, checking out different neighborhoods until you find something you love.

A lot. Most people think LA is a pretty one-dimensional place from the outside, but it’s such a diverse city, exploding with culture. There’s this energy of possibility that hovers over the city, and it’s contagious. Maybe it’s the magic of the movies; it makes you feel like you can do anything.

For instance, last year, alongside eleven other idiots, I took part in a relay run from LA to Vegas. It’s so incredibly stupid. But we were all like, ‘Yeah, that sounds awesome. Let’s do it.’ And it was awesome.

Learning to figure shit out on your own, over and over again. Being exposed to radical change is humbling, exciting and inspiring all at once.

I write a lot on planes. There’s this study that claims we’re at our most vulnerable state when we’re inside a metal box flying at forty thousand feet in the air, and I find that it just opens up all the right nooks of the mind, and the thoughts just pour out.

WTF. I never thought I’d find a proper translation for ‘Que porra é essa?’ but trust me, WTF is perfect.

It was a dream project. It’s not often you get to be part of helping bring the Olympics to the city you live in. LA feels so relevant to modernizing the Games. This idea of reinvention is perfect for the Olympics right now. And the local support for it was overwhelmingly positive, so we got to work with some incredible talent in the process.

It’s energizing. I truly believe contrast creates gold, and LA is so full of contrast. The timeless magic of Hollywood with the new energy of tech. The mountains and the flats. The concrete and the water. There’s something disorientingly awesome about standing smack in the middle of all these polar opposites living in total harmony. It gets you in this making-cool-stuff mindset. It really is contagious.

I’ll often bike to Deus on the corner of Venice and Lincoln. They make a mean flat white, everything on the walls looks amazing, the people are always super interesting and all the vintage bikes and cars are the cherry on top. The combination of coffee, design and characters is hard to beat. The galleries at Bergamot Station are a close second.

There’s this silly little funicular train Downtown called Angels Flight. All it does is climb these steps to the top of a hill, and come back down. Nothing special, but it’s whimsically weird. The train itself is like a steep staircase. And it’s across the street from Grand Central Market, so it’s worth crossing the street for.

Magnus Walker (also an expat) keeps his vintage Porsche collection in a pretty awesome garage near the Arts District. If you ever have a chance to check it out, do it. It’s breathtaking, if vintage Porsches are your kind of thing.

We’re at Superba all the time, so I’d be lying if I didn’t pick it.

I was at a kid's birthday party once, and an In-N-Out truck pulls up. It almost made up for the fact that we were at a kid's birthday party.

Bergamot Station.

Hike to the original set of M*A*S*H, at Malibu Creek State Park. It’s pretty cool.

Pão de Queijo. It’s like a cheese-bread-dough thing, and it’s awesome. I found a little Brazilian supermarket on Venice Blvd that sells it.

Aisle. I’m a control freak. I need to be able to come and go as I please.

Heartwarming.