The intellectual work underneath the practice.
The coaching and consulting pages tell you what I do. This is where I think out loud about why it 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. This page is the inheritance, made visible.
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 what Upstream Foundation is trying to build.
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 informationis 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 Ethicsis 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 →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.
MASI · University of San Diego
Beginning a Master’s in Social Innovation at USD’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies in Fall 2026. Coursework framed around the institutional question: what kinds of structures actually form people, and how do we build new ones for the present civilizational moment. The Upstream Foundation work develops in parallel.
Logos editorial work
As In-House Philosopher and Head of US Operations for Logos Publishing — the philosophy imprint of BARCA — I shape the North American catalog, host Logos Talks (a podcast with scholars on each volume), and write the editorial apparatus that accompanies the editions. The current catalog runs from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics through Hume’s Enquiry, Leibniz’s Monadology, and Dante’s Inferno.
Coach training & the formation lineage
Pursuing certification through the Hudson Institute of Coaching — the methodological tradition most aligned with the self-as-instrument, formation-of-the-knower line this Library traces. Coursework is the bridge between the philosophical work and the live coaching practice.
David Hume & the Enquiry
A long-form essay-in-progress on Hume’s life, philosophical method, and why the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is still the most readable and dangerous book of philosophical skepticism ever written. Written as a companion to the Logos edition.
Open the essay →More essays-in-progress will appear here as they reach a readable state. The Library is structured as a slow-publishing archive — not a content calendar.