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