My kids are the best

Hey 👋🏼 I'm Greg.

I'm a guy on the internet with too many interests. Most of them orbit around learning and writing and software and kids and books and business. This is the place I come to try to string words and ideas together and hold myself accountable.
Credentials are sooo boring. I like this list better.
  • 3 amazing kids and 1 amazing wife
  • Still goes to church
  • Splits time between Maryland and Delaware
  • 43 and feels like a wide-eyed little kid
  • Wrote software or led software teams for a living for 20 years, including some fun machine learning and model training stuff
  • Bought our 2nd house at the beach 5 years ago and paid it off
  • Drove from Maryland to California and back with the family to see the country and have a blast in a rented RV
  • Runs a lot
  • Will choose a beer and cigar with friends over nearly any other activity
  • Like Erasmus, would choose books first over food and clothes
  • Raced cars and taught other people how to race cars
  • Has 3 half-written messes that look like novels if you squint.. at some point a finished novel will be on this list!
  • Helped build a company from 2 to 250+
  • Loves building things out of (wood | words | code | ideas)

Things I've Written

  • Better Partners

    My wife and I often joke that it’s a good thing we didn’t meet sooner than we did. We wouldn’t have liked each other near as much. Why is that? Well, we were different people before we met. Our…

    September 21, 2023
  • The Myth Of Ramanujan

    Recently I did some reading about Ed Witten. Witten is notorious for being the very smartest person in rooms filled with very, very smart people: namely physicists and mathematicians. Despite being…

    August 31, 2023
  • Low Friction Worlds

    Our RV trip got me thinking a lot about the power of the modern world. By which I really mean: the internet and the smart phone. We were in constant contact with any service we required, including…

    August 14, 2023
  • Email Conversations On AI, Humanity, Virtue, Meaning

    Everyone’s still talking about AI and I’ve had my share of unique conversations. After drafting the idea that English is the new STEM, this one conversation really stood out. It’s the dialogue where…

    August 10, 2023
  • English Is The New STEM

    Every time I sit down with a blank sheet in front of me I’m scared and excited. I’ve usually spent the last day or two grappling with some text or interview or idea in my head. I’ve had some moments…

    August 08, 2023
  • Strong and Weak Problems

    I just read Adam Mastroanni’s piece Science is a Strong Link Problem and my first reaction is: finally! Adam is one of my favorite new writers, ever since he publicly called for the extirpation of…

    August 07, 2023

There's plenty more to read too

Things I'm Reading

That's 39 books so far this year.

  • Projects

    • CollegeValue - Compare colleges and majors based on how much money graduates make versus how much debt they accrue. Based on open-source data from the Department of Education.
    • Technology For Parents - Charting a course for parents to navigate technology for their children - coming soon!
    • Slower Lower Charcuterie - coming soon!
  • Things I'm Wondering

    • How are phones and technology changing the way we grow up?
    • What do people actually need out of college?
    • How can more people enjoy two houses?
    • How can work on small projects drive family revenue?
    • What does it take to write a spy novel?
  • Workouts I've Killed

    • 0 Mile Crossfit, 2 days ago
      30:00 minutes
    • 0 Mile Crossfit, 3 days ago
      30:00 minutes
    • 2 Mile Run, 6 days ago
      17:00 at 8:30 pace
    • 0 Mile Crossfit, 7 days ago
      30:00 minutes
    • 0 Mile Crossfit, 9 days ago
      30:00 minutes
  • Quotes Newly Discovered

    • “We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.”
      -Nikita Gil
    • *“When is the last time that you had a great conversation? A conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture. But when had you last a great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plain, and then fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards.”*
      -John O’Donahue
    • “We have gone from thinking that self esteem comes from achievement to thinking that achievement comes from self esteem. And that is an embarrassment.”
      -Larry Summers
    • “The question about the sources of our knowledge ... has always been asked in the spirit of: 'What are the best sources of our knowledge - the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?' I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist - no more than ideal rulers - and that all 'sources are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?'”
      -Karl Popper