The intellectual work underneath the practice.
The coaching and the consulting rest on a body of reading. Here I think out loud about why the work works the way it does — and why the wisdom traditions, philosophy, and centuries of formation craft are more operationally useful than they look.
The architect framing isn’t a metaphor I picked up. It’s an inheritance.
A consultant is what I do. A reader is what I am.
Recent thinking, framed.
The Garden and the Spark
The question this essay sits on: why does democracy, repeatedly across history, produce charismatic talent without producing the institutions that would shape that talent into something serviceable? Plato saw it in the figure of Alcibiades — the brilliant Athenian who, in the absence of formation, became the agent of his own city’s destruction. The same vacancy is operative in our own moment. The essay is the philosophical groundwork for the argument UPSTREAM makes at length.
Read the full essay →The Education of the Inner Eye
The thread this essay traces: that across Greek, Christian, and Islamic traditions, education was understood not as the accumulation of knowledge but as the formation of a knower — the cultivation of an inner faculty capable of seeing what’s actually there. The essay reads Aristotle’s nous, the medieval Latin intellectus, and Sohrawardi’s illuminationist epistemology as one continuous conversation. The stakes for the present: AI’s arrival changes what information is worth, but doesn’t touch what formation is for.
Read the full essay →The Pearl of Great Price
A conversation with the Catholic University scholar Michael Pakaluk on why Aristotle’s Ethics is still the most operationally useful book about how to live ever written. The piece works as a Logos companion read for the Pakaluk-translated Nicomachean Ethics edition, and as a primer on why the formation tradition Aristotle inaugurated is the substrate beneath modern executive coaching — whether modern executive coaches know it or not.
Read the full essay →The live writing happens on Substack.
New essays usually monthly — some short and timely, some long and scholarly, none algorithmic. If the work above interests you, subscribing is the only way to keep up with it.
Subscribe on Substack →Scholarly projects in motion.
Plato & the Islamic Tradition
A long-form project tracing how Plato’s philosophical inheritance was carried, deepened, and transformed across the Islamic philosophical tradition — from Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi through Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra — and what that long transmission has to teach the present about the conditions under which a coherent intellectual tradition survives across centuries. At bottom, an inquiry into how a civilization keeps the order of a way of life intact.
M.S. Conflict Management & Resolution · USD Kroc School
Graduate work at USD’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies. Conflict is where a group’s formation shows — what a community has actually taught its members becomes visible under rupture, not under calm.
Logos editorial work
As In-House Philosopher and Head of US Operations for Logos Publishing — the philosophy imprint of BARCA — I shaped the North American catalog, hosted Logos Talks (a podcast with scholars on each volume), and wrote the editorial apparatus that accompanied the editions. That catalog runs from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics through Hume’s Enquiry, Leibniz’s Monadology, and Dante’s Inferno.
Coach training & the formation lineage
The Leadership Coaching Certificate at USD’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences, alongside CliftonStrengths coaching certification. The coursework is the bridge between the philosophical work and the live coaching practice — the self-as-instrument, formation-of-the-knower line this Library traces, made operational.
The longer treatments, one idea each.
Why ninety days
The Arc is built on the oldest shape human beings have for a threshold. Here is the shape, where it comes from, and why a defined end is the point.
Read →The science of desire
Socrates claimed to understand one thing. Most people at a threshold aren't short of wants; they're carrying several, and some were put there. Here is how to tell them apart.
Read →Why the old words
A word's root gives a person an image to think with. Five words the practice stands on, taken back to where they came from.
Read →Still to come, in this order.
- Internalizing the sage. Vervaeke’s phrase, the candle that lights a thousand, self as coach as the end state.
- I seem to be a verb. Fuller, anamnesis, the porous self, plus est en vous.
- What it asks of you. Discomfort, the unknown, and the fear underneath.
- Meaning. Frankl in spirit; the why is found, not invented.
- Story, belief, identity. The story you tell and the story that tells you.
- The third. Daimon, muse, grace, field; why the arrival is the point.
- The body and the practice. The ecology of practices, with the physiology.
- The synthesis, and how I use AI. The record, the score-not-report idea, what the tools do and never do.
- The self as instrument. The monochord essay in full.
- The evidence. The notes as a standing, updated page.
- Why I go straight to the root. On intensity: who it is for, who it is not for.
One idea, its sources, laid out to be perused.
Thirdness — the one who is neither of the two
Peirce, Simmel, Levinas, Winnicott, Buber, Jung, Girard, Serres, Ury, Benjamin. Why the third turns out to be the condition for meaning, groups, justice, and anything new — and why the same seat holds the mediator, the profiteer, and the scapegoat.
Open the index →