About

My Story

I moved to San Francisco in my mid-twenties to learn how tech companies get built and to try to build my own. I spent four years doing that, burned out somewhere around the pandemic.

That’s the short version. The longer version involves a $10K DJ course that didn’t work, several hundred hours of Jung, a podcast I started because I kept meeting people worth talking to, and a persistent inability to leave a question alone once it’s found me.

The essays here, tend to start somewhere specific: a conversation on a patio, a BUD/S documentary at 2am, a bike ride in Costa Rica with no hands. They usually end up somewhere I didn’t expect. That’s mostly the point. I’ve read enough Dostoevsky to know you don’t find the real thing until you throw out what you thought you were writing and start over.

The podcast, Robert Meets World, is the same impulse but outward. psychologists, musicians, philosophers, whoever’s been somewhere interesting and come back with something honest to say about it. I’m less interested in credentials than in whether someone has actually had to sit with something difficult.

If I had to draw a line through all of it: I’m interested in what’s going on underneath the surface of things. In psychology, in culture, in business, in the stories we tell ourselves to keep moving. Sometimes that leads to Jungian alchemy. Sometimes it leads to a post-mortem on my failed courses. Both feel like the same investigation to me.