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I have been around for a while now, done a lot of things, lived a lot of lives, to be honest. But one thing that I became caught me by surprise. A thing that I never expected. Or planned for. I have
Songs About Leavin' and Trains
My second album release is out on Spotify and some 20 other channels on July 28, a compilation of seven new songs. The title is a tribute to my writing partner back in the 1990s in Nashville. It was t
Rewiring Global Defense
This is a compendium of articles and analyses that I have run through NotebookLLM. See the bibliography below.
Why is primalbeet?
2003. I am in my home office in an unnecessarily large house in suburban Atlanta. Outwardly successful. My kids are hanging in the room with me, the way they did back then — ambient presence, half-pay
The World Came To Visit While I Was Away
I grew up around Atlanta when we had three sports and an attitude about it. Football, baseball, basketball — the holy trinity, non-negotiable. Soccer existed the way certain cousins exist: you were ok
So What?
If everything matters, nothing matters.
The Thing Before the Thing
People come to the cushion expecting calm. That’s the retail version. You sit down and you are a swirling mass of crazy inside a swirling mass of crazy, and the practice is not to still it. The practice is to stop pretending there’s a version of you that stands outside it.
Desire Just Reloads
Claude and I have come to be friends in a weird sort of way. I was asking Claude what he thought about the hole in a man’s soul. Claude said he did not have a hole in his soul, can we get on with clos
Nobody's Man
There’s a specific loneliness that comes with being useful across a border.
What Falls Out the Bottom
My father worked in the space program. Walked away from it just as it hit its peak. Traded the Space Coast for the hills of western North Carolina — the cool air, the French Broad, the silence that a
What If the Flamingos Win?
I have a rule for traveling: don’t discuss the host country’s politics. In Istanbul I kept it without effort, because I had nothing to offer a country living under a regime I’d never had to survive. I
Sarande Local
The furgon (van) is already full when it arrives, but then full is not a number here. Full is a mood, a negotiation, a flexible philosophy shaped by heat, proximity, and the driver’s private sense of
Adam's Housecat
The trail went up for three hours and we all stopped pretending we were enjoying it somewhere around the second. Twenty of us, more or less — expats, a couple of long-term tourists like me, the loose
What the Algorithm Can’t Touch
To optimize anything, you must first make it “commensurable”, reduce it to a single dimension along which more is better, or less is better, or some target is correct. Speed. Cost. Yield. Engagement.
Orchid
The orchid doesn't explain itself. Which is probably its best feature.
Square One
Sometimes people drift apart. That’s the surface tale. Two bodies in one space, air thinning, nothing dramatic—just distance settling like dust.
The Folded Continuum
Historically, civilizations have learned by fire. Empires topple, markets crash, ecologies fail, and only afterward do we trace the pattern back to mismanaged substrates: trust eroded, attention deple
Toward a Self-Correcting Civilization
All systems ultimately depend on something quieter than the outputs they measure.
Competitive Coherence
Modern society is not failing because it lacks order. It is failing because it contains too many competing forms of order operating at the same time.
Bounded Surprise
Bounded Surprise: The Architecture of Meaningful Deviation
“Big Brother” on Galata Hill
I’m in the fourth week of a one-month stay in Istanbul, living a short uphill slog from Galata Tower — that medieval exclamation point in the skyline, now supervising a daily parade of selfie sticks a
Istanbul - A Study in Contradiction
I keep staring at the math, and then I walk outside, and the math laughs at me.
The Field Doesn’t Answer to Hustle
The Field Doesn’t Answer to Hustle
AI’s Three-Body Problem
Artificial intelligence isn’t racing forward on a single track. It’s fighting a three-front war (at a minimum), and none of the fronts agree on the rules. Policy, platforms, and power infrastructure a
Genius, Then and Now
I saw this quote in a comments section the other day.
Snake Handlers and Footnote 47b
The Snake Handler’s Church: A Field Report in Two Services
The American Industrial Surge
The American Industrial Surge: Growth, Structural Constraints, and Systemic Fragility
Spray Painting Reality
I used to see progress as real enough to trip over. A plow, a steam engine, a child who lived to see twenty. Real things, built by people who saved before they spent and measured twice before they cut
Oracles of the Bard
I’m building an oracle deck that doesn’t behave like the ones you’ve seen before. It isn’t based on tarot, or any other standard platform. It is an 88-card study of recursion and coherence. Curious to
The Tollbooth Society
The tollbooth is now the governing economic model of the West. Democracy, environment, and trust are not being attacked by outsiders. They are being quietly metered, monetised, and degraded from within.
The Beam is Not the Lighthouse
They say they want a man who stands his ground. A tidy, unflinching private lighthouse you can swear by when the weather turns ugly. Until he actually shows up. Cute in theory, less so when the beam w
The Manly Manliness of 60s TV
I watched Bonanza on a black-and-white set that buzzed like static electricity.
The Big Engine That Possibly Can
Since November 2022, AI stopped being a nerdy dinner‐table argument and started showing up in your Zoom calls, your inbox, and probably your fridge. By 2025, it is no longer a concept. It is a lifesty
Strange Attractors
Recursion is the engine of emergence. Patterns feed on themselves, each iteration shaping the next, building complexity out of repetition-with-variation.
Mind the Gap
I’ve never been good at belonging. Even as a kid I would sit in class and feel the distance. Like everyone else was in on a big secret. That feeling never really left. There’s always been a thin pane
Sixties Cool
Back before the world got loud about everything, before comedy came with disclaimers and punchlines had paperwork,
The Algorithm Will See You Now
Somewhere between the Hollywood strike and the ChatGPT update, humanity quietly lost its job. It’s 2025, and apparently nobody’s safe from being replaced — not actors, not athletes, not even the chatb
Selective Resonance and the Art of Fiction
Lao Tzu once suggested that ruling a large kingdom is like cooking a small fish. The same logic applies to storytelling.
What’s Scarce Is Coherence
You open your phone. Three notifications. A headline, a tweet, a flash sale. Your gaze flickers across them; your thumb scrolls. Attention has been won, harvested, packaged, sold back to you. But in t
It's All About the Minerals
Forget oil, forget AI. The future of power is rocks. Shiny rocks, gray rocks, even billion-ton rocks in space. The names alone tell the story: U.S. Antimony. 16 Psyche. TransAstra. It’s geopolitics by
Monuments and Cotton Candy
The boats are coming in. I’m sitting at an outdoor café by the marina, watching gangplanks drop one by one. Passengers spill out. Couples in sandals, sunburned teenagers, a family corralling children
Lopsided Love
Some distances cannot be closed. Some people will move at a speed you were never meant to match. Some people will slip through your fingers no matter how tightly you hold. Some people can care deeply
A Swirlie of Ideas
We live inside containers of our own invention. Banners, roles, affiliations, flags, stories — all frameworks that let us imagine a shape to our lives. They are porous, provisional, and often absurd.
Stuff
2025, for me, has been the year of letting go. One object after another, what once seemed essential, has slipped into the simpler category of stuff. If you immediately jump to the George Carlin comedy
Roman Circus
The American digital asset world is having a moment — the kind of moment where Wall Street, Washington, and Crypto Twitter all stumble into the same dive bar and drunkenly pretend
The Show That Eats Itself
The message is simple: might doesn’t just make right anymore, it makes reality.
Good Hedges Make Good Neighbors
It starts with the hedges.
Testing the Field
I decided to test the field.
Previously On: The United States of Bullshit
You thought we’d wrapped up the Epstein arc. You thought Russiagate was cancelled mid-season. You thought the Democrats would fake party unity for at least one election cycle. Adorable.
Spyware: Making Assassination Cool Again
The U.S. used to frown on assassination, back when we thought “international law” was a thing. Then 9/11 happened...
Bitcoin, GPT-5, and the Russian Bear: A Dance Tune
The world is changing, which is exactly what the world has always done when the adults aren’t looking.
Softness Is the Enemy
Oh, for the love of everything once sacred—before “sacred” became a wellness hashtag and a candle scent—let’s stop pretending the world makes sense. It doesn’t. It’s not a novel, it’s not a simulation. There is no plot, just vibes.
The Great American Traffic Jam
America’s highways are more metaphor than transportation. Asphalt prayer wheels.
Markets, Allies, and the Quiet Death of Truth
The digital age, for all its connectivity, has made it easier than ever to curate belief bubbles. Algorithms don’t care if something is true. They care if it’s sticky.
Singularity BBQ
We were parked at a pitstop in the dusty sprawl of Tulsa, straddling the razor’s edge of a midlife pivot gone rogue, when my smart blender—$129.99 on Black Friday, voice-activated, blockchain-certifie
Signal Sovereignty: Tactics for the Frequency War
I. The Machine and the Frequency War
And Then One Day
There are some things an older guy just shouldn’t do—unless he’s prepared to pay the price. Don't play ball with younger men—you'll break things. Don't chase younger women—they will break things.
The Garden In Autumn
The front yard has come alive again. The air is cooler now, the heavy blanket of summer heat lifting, and with it, the flowers—daisies, asters, coneflowers, zinnias, salvia—have shaken off the long sl
Roman Carnival
Imagine, if you will, a moment in time when an American president takes to the airwaves to reassure the public that the government is in fact not producing massive hurricanes and flinging them at its
Lord Byron in the 21st Century
There's something mystical and alluring about romantic love. You know that kind of love. It's not about lust but about the bliss and awe we experience just from being in the presence of that one wonde
Lacing the Kultural Kool-aid
I decided a few weeks ago to start communicating through Substack and YouTube. When I made that decision, I agreed with myself to remain apolitical. I stand by that. I'm not going to get into left/ri
Relearning
My story is a microcosm of the story of modern America. You can follow my story in prior posts or over on YouTube, so I won't go into it here. Suffice to say I have lived well beyond my means for most
Rebuilding My Life At 68
In my prior couple posts I have detailed how I find myself back at the starting line at age 68. Partly by happenstance, mostly by choice, I'm in the throes of a great transition. I won’t rehash the st
Post-Doom Redux
when the circumstances of your life are so anti-fragile that not even the apocalypse can hurt you
Post-Doom
I'm post-doom. I doom-spent until the credit dried up and blew away. I doom-scrolled until I learned more than I ever wanted to know. I doom-worked in a doom industry that made me feel like doom, unti