What I Think
I'm old in body, young in mind. I've been paying attention.
Here's what I've concluded.I spent most of my career in institutions that rewarded careful, measured, defensible positions. The Navy. The federal government. Small businesses where the customer is always theoretically right. I was good at all of it. But I also kept a running internal monologue for five decades that never made it into a fitness report. This section is that monologue. Organized, mostly civil, occasionally stubborn, and entirely my own.
I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm trying to be honest about mine.
I took a graduate-level Artificial Intelligence course at NC State in 1973. The professor was serious. The computers took up an entire building. The ideas were already enormous. I've watched this field go from academic curiosity to civilization-altering force over fifty years, and I have opinions about where it's going that most people aren't ready to hear yet. I also run Ollama locally in retirement, which tells you everything about how I spend my Tuesdays.
Growing up poor, working all my life, learned DROOM (Don’t Run Out Of Money), still had to learn most finance the hard way. I invested in crypto when it was clear that politicians would eventually make the US Dollar very sketchy. I have a philosophy about this — about sound money, about institutional trust, about what happens when a generation that grew up with the 2008 financial crisis decides to build an alternative — and I'm happy to lay it out in detail for anyone who's genuinely curious rather than reflexively dismissive.
I'm 77 and I intend to be intellectually useful at 90. That's not wishful thinking — it's a project with actual inputs: what I eat, how I move, what I read, what I track, and which emerging science I'm betting on. Longevity is the most underdiscussed revolution happening right now, possibly because the people most skeptical of it are the ones who haven't done the math on their own actuarial tables yet.
Liberal by conviction (grew up poor - so all 7-kids worked - we still needed help), independent by temperament. I believe in institutions, scientific evidence, and the uncomfortable truth that history rhymes loudly if you're paying attention. I spent a career defending a Constitution I took an oath to support — which means I've thought harder about what it actually says than most people who argue about it on the internet. Fair warning: I have receipts.
I am not a religious man in any conventional sense, but I am genuinely fascinated by why humans need the stories they tell about meaning, death, and what happens next. I've read more theology than most believers and more philosophy than most atheists. What I've concluded is complicated, occasionally comforting, and impossible to fit on a bumper sticker — which is probably why I built a website instead. In short: Please practice what you believe, just don’t harm others nor make it the law.
Not celebrities. Not influencers. People — some famous, most not — whose thinking changed how I see something important. Teachers, officers, writers, scientists, one or two politicians, a handful of people I've met exactly once who said something I've never forgotten. This is my attempt to put them on record before I forget which story goes with which person.
New pieces appear here as I write them. No schedule. No algorithm. Just when something is ready. If you’d like me to stay in touch, just tell me. I’m always happy to engage with intelligent thinkers. With facts. Friendly debates when warranted. Learning is forever.