Some things about me:
- Work at @Tatch-AI
- Strong opinions, loosely held
- Previously founded two businesses in the sports betting space
- Left institutional education after ~2.5 years at the University of Florida
- Deeply skeptical of education systems that reward conformity over excellence
- In high school, joined Publix, working on applied ML for search personalization
- Curious by default; dissatisfied with surface-level explanations
- Grew up playing piano: Liszt and Schumann still shape how I think about discipline and expression
- Prefer intensity, risk, and forward motion to comfort and stasis
Some things I believe:
- We have a moral obligation to ourselves to become the best people we can be
- Education should increase agency, judgment, and ambition: not compliance
- Credentials are a weak proxy for competence
- Curiosity is routinely discouraged by systems that claim to value it
- The is–ought problem matters; collapsing facts into values produces bad ethics and worse institutions
- Questioning assumptions is intellectual hygiene, not contrarianism
- Complacency is more dangerous than failure
- Risk is the cost of doing anything meaningful
- Strong beliefs are useful only if they are revisable
- Small groups of capable, motivated people outperform large systems almost by default
- Time is the irreducible constraint, and wasting it is a moral failure
Influences (partial, non-exclusive):
- David Hume — skepticism, epistemic humility, and the discipline of separating facts from values
- Ayn Rand — moral seriousness about individual potential and responsibility
- Classical music that demands commitment rather than passive consumption
- Builders who learn by doing, shipping, and revising
How I try to operate:
- Treat beliefs as hypotheses, not identities
- Update quickly when reality disagrees
- Separate what is from what ought before arguing either
- Bias toward action when caution becomes inertia
- Optimize for learning rate over institutional approval
- Prefer fewer people, clearer ownership, faster decisions
- Avoid performative work and ornamental complexity
Things I’m skeptical of:
- Education systems that punish deviation while advertising “critical thinking”
- Consensus as a substitute for truth
- Process replacing judgment
- Large teams solving non-routine problems by default
- Stability narratives that are really just fear of risk
Questions I return to:
- What assumptions am I inheriting without examination?
- Where is conformity being mistaken for rigor?
- What would this look like if excellence were the explicit goal?
- What risk am I avoiding that I’ll regret later?
Meta:
- I don’t think progress comes from credentials or permission
- It comes from people who take responsibility for their beliefs, their time, and their potential
- And who would rather be wrong and learning than safe and stagnant