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 products. I spent sixish years doing that, then burned out somewhere around the pandemic.

The essays here, tend to start somewhere specific like a conversation on a patio, a BUD/S documentary at 2am, a bike ride in Costa Rica. They usually end up somewhere I don’t expect. That’s mostly the point.

The podcast, Robert Meets World, is a similar impulse but outward. psychologists, musicians, philosophers, whoever’s been or doing something interesting with a curious view 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. According to Claude’s analysis of all the things I do, I seem to engage the practice of what Paul Ricœur called “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion” (fancy).

More plainly, I like to explore the stories we tell ourselves in psychology, culture, and business and where the holes show. Sometimes that leads to Jungian alchemy. Other times exploring the incentive structures of why we fund particular projects. But always a venerable amount of self indulgence. I don’t have anything to sell you (yet!) but when I do I hope you’ll buy it so I can keep doing this crazy thing.