Oh shit - I’m getting married! I proposed two weeks ago and it’s still kinda nerve-wracking but it’s also kinda awesome - I love my fiancee more than anything. But the surprise of it all is still kind of sinking in, and that shock isn’t lost on my friends or family who were happy to share their thoughts upon hearing of my impending nuptials. From “Congrats. My girlfriend [of 4+ years] is gonna be piiiiiiiiissed at me” to “I thought you were gonna go the George Clooney route. You know, except for the rich, sexy-at-50, actor thing”, to the simple yet powerful “WHEW” (thanks mom and dad), everyone seemed happy to chime in with some good-natured ribbing and well-deserved relief.

The funny thing about marriage (and death, for that matter) is that it exposes a lot about not only the people getting married, but the people that are in any way involved in the lives of those getting married. I...

When did I start getting old? It shouldn’t be a surprise to me I guess, since I hate just about everything that my generation enjoys: Instagram/Snapchat, Flappy Birds, One Direction, anything on Bravo - you name it, I probably hate it. However, as I’m sure my parents did (and their parents before them), I convinced myself that it was the result of a level of sophistication not shared by the rest of the population. It couldn’t be me that was on the decline, it was the world around me. But then one evening, as I laughed hysterically at the diarrhea scene from Dumb and Dumber during a Friday night at home (during which I was in bed by 11pm, and the day before I was planning to don a power blue Dumb and Dumber tuxedo for a party), I had an epiphany: holy crap (Pun intended - sorry), I am getting old, if immaturably so!

Of course, anyone older than 32 that is reading this will deservedly...

I recently got a letter from the DMV that said “…you may believe that you’re a good driver, but your record shows that you are not a safe as you might think.” Below their friendly “warning” was a summary of the two speeding infractions that had recently been added to my record a month apart. My first thought: “Ha! Little do they know that I had a third ticket erased by driving school.” My second: “Wait a second…how does two tickets in two months equate to being a bad driver? There must be thousands of people getting a letter like this!” A quick calculation shows that a driver who gets a ticket once every 10 years on average - by no means a surefire bad driver - has a 1 in 7200 chance of getting tickets in back-to-back months. Long odds, to be sure, not that rare when you consider that there are roughy 200 million licensed drivers in the US.

Put yourself in my shoes? Would you curse your...

On a recent business trip to Austin, I arrived at the airport four hours early so I could hop on a couple conference calls prior to my flight. While I waited at an airport restaurant, I took particular notice of one of the janitors who was an absolute cleaning machine. She worked quickly to empty the trash bins, clean all of the floors and surfaces, bus all of the tables, and communicate her plans to the restaurant staff. Her pace was frenetic, and she moved from our restaurant to the next place of business without a moment’s break, then to the next, and to the next, keeping the same pace over the roughly three hours that I sat with her in my view.

Recently, VC mogul and Silicon Valley legend Tom Perkins made headlines for uttering the statement that essentially compared the brewing “war” on the wealthy to the Holocaust. While it was assuredly an outlandish and offensive comparison...

Before truly starting this new blog (the Donald and his kooky theories aside), I’d like to introduce myself in a way that will hopefully be informative and interesting to both my current friends and to new readers. I’m not going to give you a typical biography of where I grew up, what kind of work I do, what I do for fun, or explain why my butt is so big – you can find most of that out by searching Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the rest I’ll chalk up to genetics. Instead, I’d like to share with you a brief summary of my personal values so that you can start to understand how I view the world and the context in which I’ll write future posts.

The way I look at the world is rooted in a philosophy called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that our societal and personal efforts should focus on maximizing happiness and decreasing suffering. While the etymology leaves the word “utility”...

Recently, Donald Trump drew ire (and some praise) for the comments he made on Twitter about the recent polar vortex and deep freeze that has ground to a halt a large swath of the United States: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bull**** has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice”. Let’s ignore for a minute that single events do not prove long-term trends, that much of Southern Hemisphere (where it’s currently summer) is having record heat waves, that most climate models predict occasional massive freezes as a side effect of climate change, and that 97% of top scientists believe that humans are the primary cause of the warming trends of the past 150 years. No matter the cause, the effect is indisputable: the earth’s climate is changing (mostly warming) dramatically, and at a rate not seen in millions of years.

While I strongly...