Essays

The writing

One deep first-principles piece every week. The podcast follows when a piece earns the conversation — aiming for one per essay, not a fixed schedule.

  • Pillar essay · Agentic Wealth · Jul 30, 2026 · Live

    The 100-client ceiling is a software problem

    Every good practice stops growing at about the same size, and the industry called that a fact about advisors. The constraint that actually binds is administrative, not relational — which lifts the ceiling for the advisor and three floors underneath it. Read →

  • Pillar essay · Agentic Wealth · Jul 21, 2026 · Essay + podcast · Live

    Agentic wealth: unlocking the agency of advisors

    A client pays an advisory fee, and the advisor keeps a shrinking share of it — the rest goes to layers. Agentic AI doesn't replace the advisor; it replaces the layers between the advisor and their clients, and hands back the time, the economics, and the agency. Watch or listen →

  • Pillar essay · Agentic Wealth · Live

    Agentic wealth — the complexity tax on financial advice

    The industry is short 100,000 advisors and adding them at a crawl. One complexity tax is paid in advisor time; a second, older one is paid by clients who can't tell a fiduciary from a salesperson wearing the same title. Read →

  • Markets & enterprise · Jul 14, 2026 · Live

    The conflicted intermediary

    Every layer between a client's money and where it needs to go is a place a conflict of interest can hide — and a place that boxes in the advisor's own judgment too. Agentic AI is what finally makes removing those layers possible. Read →

  • Civic writing (early corpus) · Jun 26, 2026 · Live

    Oregon economic prosperity: paying down the state’s complexity tax

    How a state lowers its complexity tax and invites builders — the first-principles case for prosperity, jobs, and opportunity, with seven supporting analyses. Constructive and non-partisan. Read →

  • Markets & enterprise · Jun 22, 2026 · Live

    Protection by transparency, not exclusion

    The accredited-investor rule decides who can invest by wealth, not understanding. The deeper fix isn't a better test — it's rebuilding the rails so transparency is native, and access and accountability rise together. Read →

  • Wealth & enterprise · Jun 18, 2026 · Live

    Money is not wealth — and the corporatism we should and shouldn't accept

    What is wealth, what is money, and which corporatism we should accept. A trillion-dollar week is the occasion; the questions are older than any founder. Read →

  • AI & democratization · Jun 12, 2026 · Essay + podcast · Live

    AI lowers the barrier to build

    I shipped a website and an AI agent without writing the code. The democratization of intelligence isn't a forecast — it's something an ordinary person can already do. Watch or listen →

  • Founding piece · Jun 9, 2026 · Essay + podcast · Live

    Why WilliamFrank

    Complexity is the largest hidden tax on human flourishing; simpler systems are the reform; and broadly adopted intelligence is the lever. Watch or listen →