Blog

2026 Goals and Systems

My systems and goals for the year, organized around health, fitness, wealth, and building a life worth living.

2025 Review

Looking back on a year of mixed results, from ditching convenience stores to using a billion tokens in Claude Code.

The Return of Magic

When the world grows too complex to model, it becomes magic. Why modern life exceeds our cognitive capacity and what that means for society.

The New Rules of Building Wealth

An investing guide for young people who want to win. The old playbook is dead; here's how money actually works in 2025.

2025 Goals

From ditching YouTube to finding conspiracies to getting visible abs. Listening to last year's failures and building toward the next ten years.

2024 Review

A good year of growth, but was it transformational? Running every day until June, 1000 pushups in May, and still chasing the wrong metrics.

2024 Books

From Feynman's honesty about the Challenger disaster to Houellebecq's uncomfortable satire, the best of 49 books this year.

Ten Year Goals, Part Deux

Ten years ago I set a goal about summers at the beach with my family. It came true. Now what's next for the decade ahead?

Kids Need Mystagogy Not Pedagogy

The best teachers don't just deliver facts. They lead children through mysteries and kindle wonder. If fathers built libraries instead of man caves, we'd transform the world.

Truth And Forgiveness In The Time Of TikTok

How the explosion of information has replaced truth with trust, and why forgiveness and humility are the things we need most in a world optimized for attention.

Order of Operations

The one trick that works for consistent creative output: do the production part first, before consumption takes over.

RV Trip Part Deux

Three weeks, two families, nine kids, one RV, and 5500 miles. Why traveling resets your personality to its natural state.

Brief New Parent Advice

The best parenting advice I have: 95% of the job is already done because you picked an amazing spouse. The rest is about not screwing them up.

Interesting Prompts, Part 3 (A Prompt Quine!)

Can you create a self-referential prompt that cycles through multiple AI models and returns to the original? An experiment in cross-model prompt ouroboros.

Interesting Prompts, Part 2

Exploring the creative and meta-cognitive capabilities of GPT-4o through unconventional prompts about original writing and self-analysis.

Interesting Prompts, Part 1

Probing the edges of GPT-4o through unusual prompts. Can you make an AI actually think for a full minute? What happens when you ask about its own training?

Beliefs Flock

Tell me your stance on gun control and I'll tell you your stance on abortion. Why encountering someone with orthogonal beliefs is the most interesting thing.

Gentleman Farmers

The professional-managerial class loves the farm but doesn't touch the dirt. What happens when AI makes us all gentleman farmers over our virtual acreage?

Start A Book Club

A non-fiction book club with cigars and a fire. Why the Great Books are Great and how discussion seminars connect us to a tradition dating back to Socrates.

Narnia

When my wife realized Aslan was Jesus, her eyes welled up. Why the simplicity of good and evil in Narnia brings a kind of shame.

The Last Minute

If you wait until the last minute, it only takes one minute. Why Parkinson's Law means you should question whether to plan at all.

The Raytrace Problem

AI builds world models we cannot manipulate. Like old raytracing software, I want to adjust precise details, but all I get is 'make it similar'.

Qua qua Qua

In a world of performance and audience capture, what do you want to do when nobody is looking? The things you pursue for their own sake are where identity lies.

I Want A Lambo

Not all motivations need to be noble. The American Dream is dead, and in our too-easy world, unreasonable desires are what push extraordinary achievement.

A Model of Charity - Time and Treasure

A friend challenged me to think about charity and I realized I don't. Why charity should be high variance, and how to actually change someone's life.

Big Numbers and Natural Theology

Super K is a number so large it dwarfs our universe. Cantor proved infinities come in sizes. What these extremes reveal about the mind of God.

10%

10% of the way through 2024. Running every day, off social media for a month, and finally daydreaming again.

2024 - Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

You must change your life. A dramatic and overserious reflection on yearly goals, inspired by Rilke's Apollo. It's time to get rid of the excesses.

2023 Review

64 books, an epic RV trip, deleting Instagram, and building furniture. Looking at stated vs revealed preferences to relieve myself of labels.

Best Books of 2023

64 books from Invisible Cities to The Three Body Problem. How to find good nonfiction recommendations from techno-elite intellectuals.

Tuesday At 4 PM

I will love you next Tuesday at 4 PM is far more powerful than I will love you forever. Why adverb infinitudes are bullshit and concrete commitments matter.

Empathy Is Not The Answer

Empathy works for interpersonal needs but makes for poor policy. One key lesson of the 20th century: empathy doesn't scale.

Notes From Novitate

At the first Girardian conference, I watched Peter Thiel look nervous before his speech. Notes on mimesis, scapegoating, and the humility of intellectual giants.

Shower Thoughts

Social media steals all your in-between time. The shower hasn't been hijacked yet only because your hands are busy. Go for a walk without devices and find yourself.

Better Partners

My wife and I joke we wouldn't have liked each other if we'd met sooner. The formula for finding your better half: make yourself better first.

The Myth Of Ramanujan

The internet solved the Ramanujan problem. Finding genius is easy now. The new challenge is building an environment where they can thrive instead of scrolling TikTok.

Low Friction Worlds

The internet made every transaction low friction, tipping the world towards exit over loyalty. What this means for social cohesion and what AI will do next.

Email Conversations On AI, Humanity, Virtue, Meaning

A published email exchange exploring AI, consciousness, free will, and what makes us human. The conversation winds from stochastic parrots to the Tower of Babel.

English Is The New STEM

LLMs are turning English into the programming language of the future. Why the ability to articulate ideas clearly will matter more than ever.

Strong and Weak Problems

Some problems need you to maximize positive outliers, others need you to minimize negative ones. This framework explains most policy disagreements.

A Practical Guide To Glamping (With A Rental RV)

Everything you need to know about a cross-country RV trip: how to pick your rig, route planning, costs, organization, and why you should definitely do it.

Impractical Notes On Glamping

Random musings from three weeks on the road: how travel strips away your sense of self-importance, why you need less than you think, and the difference between east and west.

South Dakota

From the empty roads of Wyoming to boondocking on the edge of the Badlands with coyotes and the Milky Way. The best campsite of our cross-country RV trip.

The Tetons

Breakfast on a private island under the Grand Tetons with the kids. The mountains make you laugh from the sheer splendor of it all.

Week 2!

Zion, a wedding in the Sierras, disappointing Tahoe, and an Idaho hot springs rescue. 1500 miles, temps from 52 to 107, and a flat tire along the way.

2000 Miles Down

Driving through Glenwood Canyon to the surreal Disney-like arches of Utah. Why beauty has no evolutionary purpose and travel is universe-hacking.

Road Trip 2023 - Day 3

Across the endless flatness of Kansas, past Pikes Peak, to the Manitou Cliff Dwellings. 1,650 miles on the road and the kids are still smiling.

Road Trip 2023 - Day 1

Day one of our cross-country RV adventure: 673 miles, kids sleeping in beds while we drive, and everyone still smiling at the campsite.

Howmidoin?

Three weeks into my writing project and facing the reality that motivation isn't a lightbulb moment. It's just a long slow push uphill.

One Week In

One week of daily writing: 805 words per day, my perfectionist held at knifepoint, and the surprising difficulty of organizing ideas into a book structure.

A New Goal and Schedule

If your goal does not have a schedule, it is a dream. Turning my dream of writing a book on technology and parenting into a concrete deadline.

A Random Note on Cost of Living

It's cheap to live where annual income is lower. Why high cost-of-living areas near cities often create more wealth over time.

AI Mood Affiliations

ChatGPT writes surprisingly good poetry. But be aware of mood affiliation: whether you're an AI pessimist or optimist shapes how you interpret every argument.

We Need More Hemp - AI and Curated Internet Gardens

A friend called my blog hemp compared to his former cocaine of social media. Why personal blogs are the antidote to AI-generated content floods.

Anti-Bucolic

Mother Nature includes malaria, traumatic insemination, and mass extinction events. Our bucolic view of nature is a projection of human values onto fitness functions.

Time To Build

Life has seasons and it's time to roll again. Since ditching social media apps, I've started having ideas at random times like I used to. It feels like 2008.

Thiel Answers

My answers to Peter Thiel's contrarian question: important truths very few people agree with. From fossil fuels to healthcare to why optimism is revolutionary.

All The Trappings

We get drawn to the trappings of whatever title we're interested in. But amazing spaces are born from necessity, not admiration. Stop being the Noun. Do the Verb.

AI Grab Bag

A collection of thoughts on ChatGPT and AI: what it means to be human, the scaling hypothesis, prompt engineering, and whether we should trust these tools with truth.

Generative Conversations

The best conversations happen when neither person cares about being right. Why letting your guard down and blurting out wrong ideas leads to the most generative thinking.

Sharp Edges

ChatGPT outputs what humanity perceives as truth. In this Performative Age, the only real solution is to exit the systems that smooth away your edges.

Let's Go 2023!

Goals for 2023: Get off social media, take smaller bets, go pseudonymous, do an epic RV trip, and remember that introspection and comparison are different things.

2022 Year In Review

A year of big changes: boats, schools, schedules. Some goals hit, others missed, and a messy workshop that proves the work is never done.

2022 Books!

Best books of 2022: From Vaclav Smil on physics and fossil fuels to Jaron Lanier on deleting social media to Mark Greaney for beach reads.

Our Dumpster Fire Record

Things look twice as bad now because we record everything. Child mortality was 43% in 1800, now it's 3%. Denominators matter.

Where Tigers Live

Google tells us India has the most tigers. But what about captive tigers in Texas and China? Political truths vs technical truths are baked into our search results.

Intentions and Power

You can do anything if your intentions are good. That's why the FDA gets a pass and charities grow forever. Intentions matter for judgement, but not for impact.

Consumption Is Still Consumption

Even high-quality sources are still consumption. You're still regurgitating what someone else learned. If you want to find out what you think, write it down.

The Talent Trap

Some want to be the best. Others just want to look like a gifted natural. Talent is a trap that lets you wiggle out of doing the work to get better.

Judgement

If you constantly judge others, you'll constantly worry about being judged. Want to stop caring what people think? First stop caring what people do.

Luxury Beliefs

We got a hybrid to save money, not the environment. Luxury beliefs are held only by those who can afford them. Make people richer and they'll adopt them voluntarily.

The Educational Value of Copywriting

Writing things down forces you to slow down and think. Going slow for a long time pushes your ability to go fast. A surprising amount of learning happens in the reps.

Why I Run

I went to Disney with my family earlier this year, and it was not my best moment. There was some extended family drama leading up to the trip that need not be rehashed; suffice to say the trip wasn’t originally my idea and I felt a little forced. We were supposed to fly down. I don't like flying at all and I haven’t done it in about ten years. <br/><br/> The week before the trip turned into a self-torture session for me. I was an anxiety-driven mess for a bunch of unrelated reasons, but my brain decided to build a downward spiral from all of them that crystalized into a fixation around flying.

Read What Those Around You Write

I read both your articles twice. That sentence was so satisfying. New rule: if someone you know writes something longer than 3 pages, read it.

DALL-E - Your Kid's Directed Drawing Will Never Be The Same

Kids can now short-circuit years of artistic practice with AI. Kurt Vonnegut's advice on becoming and making your soul grow matters more than ever.

We Are All Cyborgs

Take a look around the next time you’re out in public and you’ll see lots of cyborgs. Every single person you see that isn’t actively talking - and some that are - is looking at, swiping, scrolling or tapping on a device. It’s usually a phone, but occasionally a watch, a tablet, or a FitBit. Every dead space or silence in your day can now be filled by the small light of a screen. If you’re in line at the store and the check-out clerk is working, that’s a solid 15 seconds of phone time. At a stop light you've got a good 30 seconds at least, and that guy honking and yelling behind you acts as an alarm. Commercial breaks during the big game get filled with your very own customized feed of information 12 inches from your eyeballs. <br/><br/> And let’s talk about the holy grail of phone time: the bathroom. Everyone takes their phone when they go to take a dump. And we always find something interesting, so a bathroom trip becomes 15 minutes instead of 3. Here’s an odd side effect: imagine the number of hemorrhoids caused by smartphones!

WLI5

Write Like I'm 5. No shame, no abashedness, no concern for what others think. Just one squiggly line after another, enjoying every second like my daughter does.

Hyperbolic Discounting and Cashflow

Is a year of life worth the same at any age? I care more about my year at 65 than at 90. This changes how I think about saving and capital allocation.

Constraints For Kids

Patrick Collison had no internet until 16 and it probably helped. Kids are antifragile. What they need is time, imagination, and effort, not more resources.

China and Incommensurability

The Chinese concept of shi can't be translated to English. Learning about it reformed my Western view that all roads lead to democracy, freedom, and markets.

2022 Systems

You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. This year is about building systems for writing, working out, and making things.

2021 Review

2021 was nothing like expected but still a wild success. Plantar fasciitis killed running goals, but becoming CEO was enriching and decidedly outside my comfort zone.

Best Books of 2021!

Best books of 2021: From Pappyland's meditation on legacy and bourbon to Galileo's Middle Finger on science and activism to Old Man's War for the sixth time.

The Value of Immigration

Unusual Books For Teenagers

Goodhart's Law, Optionality and 2021 Goals

2020-is-suddenly-over-whahappened?!

Best Books of 2020

Curation and The Middle Path of Contrarianism

The Untranslatables

Raggedy and Bloody and Screaming

Boggle vs. Ruzzle

Twitter Is The Coworking Space of the Internet

The Problem With Voting - Subsidiarity, Parties, and Overton Windows

The Power of Cincinnatus

The Options

Stripe Press and Curation

Warm Pools of Light

Exponentials and Revolution

Vacation vs. Travel

The Power of Dreams

The Life of the Mind

Story - Straight and Narrow

Formative vs Performative

2020 Predictions

2010 Predictions Review

Think About Being Old

2020!

2019 Reviewed

My Top Books of 2019

Education - Working Backwards

This started out as a simple idea: to work backwards from the adults we hope our children will be and use this to think about how we raise our kids now. 9,000 words later it turns out there was a lot to say: <ul> <li>It’s never too early to think about high school, college, or even what kind of adults we want our kids to be.</li> <li>Everyone focuses on thinking about education because it works as a sort of proxy for thinking about the kinds of people we want our kids to be. We want them to be smart which translates into good grades. We want them to be successful which translates into focus on a career; in college, that’s a major. We want them to have a family and a good life which translates into stability and a set of credentials so they can always make enough money.</li> <li>Most people think about the outcomes they want but not the processes that will get them what they want. So we just take things one day at a time.</li> <li>“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear</li> <li>We imagine our children’s futures as a straight line from here to there because we think backwards about our own lives this way. In hindsight, it’s easy to diminish all the complexity and imagine it was a straight path too, but it wasn’t. All of our paths have meandered and wound around time in interesting ways, and serendipity has played her role too.</li></ul>

Greta vs. Mann (and the Lessons of Julian Simon)

Keyboards vs. Long Form

The 50% WR Rule

My desk

Outrage Theory of Opinion

Our Modern Lifestyle Makes Entrepreneurship Harder

Beringia, Climate, and the Problem with Experts

A few months ago, I stumbled on a description of a place most of us have never heard of: Beringia. This is the name for a vast swath of land that connected Asia to North America until only about ten thousand years ago. A little further back - around 25,000 years ago - it was huge, over 1.5 times the size of Alaska today and spanning 620 miles from north to south. <br/><br/> Learning about this place made me say “Whoa”. When most people, including me, think about the Bering land bridge, we don’t think of a giant landmass. This was right in the middle of the Ice Age, and so we usually think of glaciers and ice. But there was no ice here (the glaciers were further east over top of Canada), just endless miles of grasslands and steppe with a climate slightly cooler than, but otherwise similar to, the Alaska of today. Our perspective is biased by what we know about the world of today, and so we think of a literal bridge possibly covered in ice. <br/><br/> After Beringia, I started digging even more and exploring other parts of the prehistoric Earth. As I did, it made me ask even more questions about the somewhat tenuous status of our Earth today and the concerns over climate change. The Earth has changed very dramatically and many times since just the last Ice Age, and while all of those changes were caused by nature and the last hundred years of change have been mostly caused by humans, there’s still a lot we can learn. <br/><br/> Science is the process we use for this kind of learning. We propose theories, evaluate them, and then either uphold or falsify the theory. Climate science seems to have a somewhat unique place amidst the pantheon of scientific fields. Nowhere else does the public constantly hear the refrain of scientific consensus. Nowhere else are lines of certainty drawn so tightly around future predictions. Nowhere else does the scientific evidence directly construct public policy so clearly in the public eye.

Fart Crowds

Resetting the Mortgage Calculator

Three Frustrations

Artistry

CarMax - The Biggest Pivot Story Nobody's Ever Heard?

Signal and Noise While Thinking

zOMG 2019 and Why Write Goals?

2018 Wrapped

I Am Nicer Here

Fat People Drink Diet Coke

Federalist 51, Ocasio-Cortez, and Yeats

One Night Of Vacation Was Enough

Some Podcasts

Write For Your Legacy

I'm Building Three Instances of General AI

Change Is The Master Key

The JAMStack is PRPL at Build Time

The Personal MBA

Crap, We are the Joneses

Principal Payments

Nuclear Efficiency and The Wins In Front of Our Faces

The Best Test

What Does Your Place Whisper?

The Ultimate Luxury

This Isn't Vacation Living

Urgent and Important

Leaf Nodes

The Tribalism Answer

The Two Graphs That Made Me Stop Worrying About Impostor Syndrome

Book Review - Conspiracy

A Sense of Place

Introverted Idea Thievery (Listening)

The Most Important Skill You'll Ever Teach Your Kids

The Captain of The Ship

Math for Theologians

Think for a second about the most beautiful ideas you've ever run across. Beauty is not the usual characteristic you use to group ideas. I know I hadn't done it before, until I ran across this delightful little blog entry. <br/><br/> Take a quick breeze through that list. It's an incredible - and beautiful - list of ideas, and a good number of them would be on my list too. The ones that aren't on my list are my own fault; I haven't delved into them as much as I should. But some of them - like the different types of infinity, and Decidability - when I learned them, they moved me on a fundamental and spiritual level. <br/><br/> Which is a striking thing to say. Notions of decidability and infinity are mathematical. And yet the entire world and all it's beauty is built on mathematical models. Our bodies and senses are so attuned to how the universe uses math, that we hardly ever think about it consciously. We simply enjoy the sunrise or we admire the swirling flight of a bird. <br/><br/> Theology is the study of the divine, and to some extent, the concept of belief itself.

Pro-Imagination not Anti-Technology

Why It's Insane To Consider Snow When Buying A Car Below The Mason-Dixon Line

Hello Trello

Photos Are Better Than Video

Being Wrong for Leaders

Golf and Baseball

The Mailman - Why Introverts Should Write

Asymptote Towards Truth

Gatsby Tumbld

Wanna look good? Focus on Surface Area

On the Dangers of Potential Energy

Two Weeks, Over Ten Pounds

Mulatsag

Car Washes and Girl Scout Cookies

Alright 2018, What You Got?

2017 Review

The Kid Rules

Pushing Too Hard

The Wire and Illiquidity

Weekend Schedule

That First Lunch

All My Big Purchases Are Done

Your 30s - The Most Important Decade

Three Girls

Bacon as a Health Food.

Evergreen News

Words

Two Signs You Might Be A Bad Driver

Steve.. Jobs?

Welcome to 2017

Some Haiku

Freaking Out.

Proprioception

Weather Needs An API

The Year's Goals

Things They Don't Teach You In School

Career Goals

Three Kinds of Wine

An Inspiration

The (Re-)Privatization of Big Dreams

Two Kinds of FOSS

2 Month Check-In

The Incredible Shrinking Man

It begins, now.

Voting With Your Pocketbook?

We Need More Scientist Saints

Corbusier Fucked It All Up

Speed Traps Are Dangerous

Constitutionalism

Money - Bullet Points

Money - Psychology

Money - Income, Expenses, and Value

Money - Wealth

Money - Intro

How I Use GMail

The Importance of Crowds

I'll Never Own a Ferrari

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Why Robert Reich is Both Right and Wrong

Pandering

Scarlet Tanagers

Public Insurance

A Review of the Skeptical Environmentalist

Church Music

Buying Power

Oeuvre

Picasso

Living Memory

Why Everyone Should Write

The Optimist's Dilemma

Statelessness

Going Forward, Why Apple?

Remarks from a Newlywed

Discuss Disqus

Against the Grain

Git - The Next Filesystem

My Evented Life - Why Asynchronous I/O Does Not Work Everyday

The Long View on Fossil Fuels

Apple Computers, Microsoft Keyboards (Keyboardists, Mousers, and Tapists)

Reflectivity

Knowing How to Not Know

Some Predictions

An Interesting Property of Champernowne's Number

Wikiracing

A Note On Post Length

Standard Keyboard Shortcuts for Text Navigation

Letter to the SEB - 2009 Nationals Courses, Thoughts, and Thanks

Sensible Hire Defaults

The Age of Methuselah

Customer Service Matters

Denouement

See you in a month!

Six Rules for the Most Important Part of Your Software - Installation and Upgrade

Absentmindedness and Smart People

A Contrarian View - Why Should I Vote?

An Automated Method For Making Your Writing Suck Less

Apple's Recent Missteps

Everything's A Library

Coda

The Weekend

Thursday

A Surprise (actually, two)

First Day in London

A Brief Introduction to Britain

Driving to the Cliffs of Moher

Aran Islands

Arrival in Galway

A New Travelog Begins!

Six Relaxing and Enjoyable Things You Probably Already Do But Could Be Done Better

You've Got To Be Kidding Me

Real Work Happens in Dark Rooms

Eat Flaming Death. Hehe.

Knight's Tour, Take Two

Not much to see here yet..

Knight's Tour, Take One

Post

Antecedents

Remarks on the First Anniversary of Catholicism

Misnomers in Solo2

(Flat) Taxes