Stoic Backgammon is Live The dice choose the numbers. You choose the move. Stoic Backgammon is now available on Amazon. Hardcover is live now; paperback and Kindle coming in June. This book is not a strategy guide with philosophy sprinkled on top. It is not a Stoicism book with dice metaphors. It is both, and it is neither. Nine chapters, each built around a backgammon concept and a Stoic principle. The anchor. The blitz. The prime. The bear-off. ...
Subject: The Pause “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.68 There’s a moment between stimulus and response where everything lives. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Your chest tightens, your foot tenses toward the brake, your jaw clenches. That’s the stimulus. What happens next is up to you. Most people don’t know the pause exists. They move straight from event to reaction—anger to horn, frustration to sharp word, anxiety to scroll. They’re not choosing; they’re being pulled. ...
I did not set out to use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process. Like most things in my work, it began as a practical response to a problem. I was trying to clarify an idea—tighten an argument that felt structurally sound but poorly expressed. The tool I was using responded with something unexpected: not just a rephrasing, but a reframing. It wasn’t always correct. Often it wasn’t. But it forced a different question: ...
Eight books. Different subjects, different tones — but the same underlying preoccupations: clarity, proportion, and the work of living well. Browse below, and if something catches your attention, the cover image will take you to Amazon. Unstuck Unstuck is not a gentle book. It is a direct challenge to the habits of delay, justification, and self-deception that keep capable people from moving forward. Drawing on Stoic discipline and decades of lived experience, it argues that most obstacles are not external — they are internal negotiations we have learned to accept. ...
🪞 A Reflection The clearest high point of 2025 was finally giving my writing the honesty it had been waiting for. I stopped circling the truth and began trusting it. Pages that had stalled for years moved once I allowed myself to write without self-protection or apology. Writing became less about producing and more about listening—staying present long enough for the right sentences to surface. Much of that work is finding its way into Misaligned, a book I plan to publish on June 10, 2026, shaped by questions I’ve carried for decades. The year didn’t resolve my story, but it helped me tell it more truthfully. ...
🪞 A Reflection “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.” — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World REFLECTION — THE CANDLE AND THE MIRROR Carl Sagan never treated science as an escape from the world. He saw it as an act of service — a disciplined way to honor the fragile miracle of being here at all. When he called Earth a pale blue dot, he wasn’t indulging in cosmic poetry; he was issuing a moral reminder. Knowledge carries responsibility. Understanding obliges care. ...
I always knew the universe was enormous — at least in the abstract. But it took Carl Sagan to make me feel it. Not as trivia, but as orientation. Not as a chapter in a book, but as a posture in life. Sagan didn’t say, look at the stars. He said, look at us because of the stars. There’s a difference. One informs. The other transforms. As the world gets louder and more certain of itself, I return to Sagan — not for nostalgia, but calibration. He wasn’t offering escape. He was offering proportion. ...
Three firms dominate the discount brokerage world: Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard. All three deliver low-cost investing, but each has its own identity. Before we dive in, a note: this is simply my opinion, shaped by my own experience as an investor. I do have an account with Fidelity, but I am not affiliated with any brokerage, nor am I compensated for mentioning them. My goal is to share a straightforward comparison of the three largest discount brokerages to help you see their differences more clearly. ...
🪞 A Reflection on Risk Management The Balance of Risk Life is a series of wagers. Every day, we stake time, energy, trust, and money on outcomes we can’t fully predict. Some bets are small — trying a new café or changing our route home. Others carry heavier weight — a career shift, a relationship, a relocation. What they all share is uncertainty. Risk management isn’t about eliminating risk. That’s impossible — and truthfully, undesirable. A life without risk is a life without growth, discovery, or meaning. The task is not to hide from uncertainty, but to face it wisely: to ask not only “What might go wrong?” but also “What might go right?” ...
I used to believe investing was something you did while you worked. You built a nest egg, retired, and lived off it. Simple. But when retirement arrived, I quickly learned the story doesn’t end there. Retirement isn’t the finish line—it’s the start of a new chapter. And in this chapter, investing takes on a different purpose. For me, Social Security is the backbone of retirement. It’s steady, predictable, and deeply reassuring. I also receive book royalties, though they’re so modest they don’t change the math. Still, those checks remind me that something I created lives on, even if only in small ways. ...