1,647 Notes to Myself

What fifteen years of self-addressed emails reveal when you finally read them all at once

Between 2010 and 2025 I wrote 1,647 notes to myself. Emails, mostly. Some voice memos. Sent from my phone at red lights, from my desk between earnings calls, from my bed at 2 AM when the house was quiet and the distance between the life I was living and the life I wanted became impossible to ignore.

I’ve always been a prolific journaler and chronicler of my own life. Narrating it in something close to real time. Between the notes, nearly 8,000 tweets, 50+ Substack essays, and 8 published interviews with entrepreneurs who left traditional careers... the total output over fifteen years is a bit jarring even to me. No surprise to readers on X and Substack, I’m sure.

A quick note if you’re reading the autobiographical creative project I’m calling the “anti-course” in order... this piece jumps ahead quite a bit. It has to because it essentially covers my entire adult existence. The next several chapters will circle back to those years at RBC and Evercore and then fill in the story of self-employment and then the global lifestyle we’re living now. But these original notes don’t care about narrative order. They happened when they happened.

Until recently I figured the task of compiling and rereading all these notes would be too enormous given everything else going on. Chalk it up to yet another thing that would need to wait until “retirement.” But of course we all know that retirement isn’t real in that sense... the mythical future where you finally get around to all the things you were too busy performing to do. So alas, it would likely never happen. These notes would remain signals sent into the abyss... the Google cloud where they’d get defragged someday into oblivion.

But of course, Claude (Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking) exists now. And I gave it access to those fifteen years of notes... to organize them all chronologically and thematically so I can review them all in one place... and track the evolution of my thinking through early adult identity formation, careers, life, family, travels, reading, observing, and development of my philosophy.

Looking back at the raw notes, especially while writing these anti-course essays... is incredibly revealing. Although not really a revelation as much as a series of reminders, I suppose. You know the answers before you look. You just forgot you already knew them.

What they reveal... and I’ll include some here... is a mind torn between multiple contradictory views seemingly at all times.

The first era, roughly 2010 through 2016, is all seeds. The very first note in the archive is a rescue squad shift-swap email... I’m requesting coverage for a Tuesday night EMS shift because I’m leaving the country for the first time. A trip to Paris. I come back and email my girlfriend a photo collage of Parisian doors with the subject line “An even better version.” The doors were the metaphor before I had a framework. Every door leads somewhere else. A few months later I’m emailing about ski patrol certification... already an EMT, already wanting to expand into more physical, outdoor emergency work. Fifteen years later I’d tweet about wanting to lead a ski patrol unit at 50. The pull was there from the very beginning.

I’m selling brokered CDs at a suburban office park, staring at Bloomberg for eight hours, knowing my counterparties only by voice... then driving ambulances on weekends. Meanwhile I’m living. Vegas trips with friends. Boston for the NFL playoffs. San Francisco with my father to visit his 90-year-old uncle living alone on a sailboat... fell in love with the city, went back twice more. San Antonio with my girlfriend to visit her brother. Vermont ski trips. Penn State football weekends. Jersey Shore summers. We were working to live. At age 24, on that desk, I write the first sustained philosophical note in the archive:

“I may be naive. I think I have all the answers. Do I? At the very least, I hope by the time I’m old and grey and can look back at my life in its entirety and actually know all of the answers.”

Same note:

“Most people don’t even know what the question is, but everyone is in pursuit of the answer whether they realize it or not.”

The Religion of Progress embryo, twelve years before its first Substack post. I’m also searching for Michael Sandel’s Harvard Justice course and “What Money Can’t Buy” from that same suburban desk. In April 2013 I email myself a snapshot of my entire financial life. About $25K in total assets. And student loan debt. That’s the starting line.

I move to Nielsen, get embedded as a client-side data analyst in suburban New Jersey... not prestigious, not even in the city, but the role that becomes the lynchpin of everything that follows. My first day they send a car service to Newark Airport and fly me to Pittsburgh for onboarding. I’d never traveled for work before. Spiked milkshakes, Primanti Bros, hotel drinks with twenty-somethings who had energy and ambition. Then an analytics workshop week in Chicago where I carved time away from training to visit the Art Institute.

By 2015 I’m married, honeymooning in Hawaii, and at RBC covering food and proteins on Wall Street. Through all of it I’m writing Weebly blog posts that function as source code for nearly everything I’ll publish later. “Division of Labor Killed the Renaissance Men.” “Reductionism”... where I randomly arrive at what I’ll learn a decade later is already a well-trodden intellectual exercise called Laplace’s Demon. “Schmeducation”... college as sleep-away camp. “Human Nature < Social Capital”... where I argue a newborn is a blank slate and the cartel kid could have been me. The frameworks aren’t there yet but the instinct is. I’m already circling the same questions I’ll still be circling a decade later.

And the contradictions start early. In 2013 I write:

“The world will not end, but flourish indefinitely.”

Genuine optimism. Same year:

“Human nature hasn’t changed in 200,000 years.”

... meant as liberation, a blank-slate argument that anyone born anywhere could become anything if only the inputs changed.

In 2014:

“We’re all arguing which way we think the train will turn when it’s on a fixed track.”

... a determinist position that essentially says none of this matters.

In July 2015, a note that just says:

“Sailboat cruise serve drinks”

That’s the whole note. I’m a dude writing Weebly essays about determinism and the division of labor who also just wants to pour rum on a boat and feel the sun on his face.

The oscillation in this phase of my life is between compulsive self-education and professional paralysis. I’m reading voraciously, writing on a blog nobody reads, writing about “schadenfreude,” and struggling to build a career that can contain both the intellectual energy and the blue-collar instincts.

One note from 2011 just says:

“Octopi wall street”

One from 2015 says:

“Netflix should buy HBO.”

In June 2014 I write one word and a question mark to myself:

“Takersclub.com?”

A domain name idea… a hat tip to the Glengarry Glen Ross scene, “coffee is for closers,” which I love. The proto-Junteau, nine years before the first Substack post. Something is trying to get out of my mind.

The second era, 2017, is a sort of awakening. 90 notes. The early years had produced occasional ones... 2017 was a fivefold jump. The food industry work at RBC opens the floodgates... not the industry itself but the act of primary observation, of looking at how things actually work instead of how people say they work. Now I’m seeing systems everywhere.

“People live in a bubble not just proximately geographically but also chronologically.”

“The true window into a human being is what they do when shit hits the fan.”

I draft a resume positioning myself for exit. I write the first version of "this site is for takers." The Junteau and Goods Group are both embryonic in these notes, unnamed.

July 19, 2017 is the first eruption day. 16 notes. I talk about a “food jockey” concept in the afternoon, then spend hours downloading observations about brand association, sugar biology, stated versus revealed preference, supply chain opacity. Consumer analyst ideas at noon, human nature philosophy by dinner. The oscillation within a single day would become the defining pattern of the next two years.

And the contradictions deepen. Same year I write:

“The only truth is that there is no truth...”

…having read Harari, having realized that every structure I once admired was a shared fiction resting on nothing but collective agreement. Four years earlier I’d believed the world would “flourish indefinitely.” Now I’m not sure it’s even real. One evening I write:

“Same income all else equal, if my dad was fancy rich I’d have a Mercedes and a gold watch... but I want a tool box and a motorcycle.”

I was telling myself who I was. I just wasn’t ready to act on it yet.

That pull toward direct, physical work never stopped. Years later I'd write:

"Dream at 50: sales manager at a large lumber yard."

The third era, January through June 2018, is the pressure cooker. 838 notes in a single year. Our first son is born. I’m reading Woodard, Harari, Gaddis. I’m flying to investor conferences, taking notes on McCormick’s cereal bag innovation and BJ’s e-commerce strategy, living inside the Wall Street consumer-sector machine while privately dismantling it in my inbox every night. The notes oscillate between raw self-coaching (”KICK IT INTO HIGH GEAR BITCH!”), structural critique of the systems employing me, and the philosophical fragments that will eventually become these Substack essays.

But there’s a third track running underneath both of those that I haven’t talked about publicly. Across roughly 170 notes... mostly concentrated in 2017 and 2018 but resurfacing as recently as last year... I was building an entire fictional universe. Coherently.. not at random. An imagined future set roughly 150 to 200 years out... a scene placed in “Nairobi 2167,” characters operating in “2217.” Mars colonized but contested, more Jerusalem than utopia. Humans living as tribes on moons like Titan and Ganymede. America fragmented into faction nations along the cultural fault lines I was reading about in Woodard. Companies larger than governments. Africa featured prominently.

The technology I imagined… AR layers so thick that people live in different perceptual realities simultaneously... a man cave with bottles and posters visible only in augmented reality, walls bare when you take the glasses off. Teens putting hologram graffiti everywhere. Kids at parties asking each other “What level?” Deepfakes so advanced that video and voice are worthless, so physical presence becomes the only trustworthy medium again. Memory implantation. CRISPR printers that let you design creatures. Germ-line editing that splits humanity into subspecies the way dogs diverged from the grey wolf.

The philosophy baked into the world was the same philosophy I was emailing to myself at 2 AM: free will abolished, no punishment for crime because all behavior is deemed synaptic. Birth rates collapsing because nobody can articulate a reason to exist. Suicide at record highs despite material abundance. The Religion of Progress proven right on every material metric... and completely unable to answer the questions “why are we alive? why here?”

I had two villains... Pilot, an environmental terrorist leading humanity to the stars, and Anvil, a simulation theorist who tried the senate and then pivoted to nuclear war. I had a character named Marcus who dies mid-narrative... “MARCUS IS DEAD. Blank pages then return to story.” I had a self-portrait character named Calvin Brix... EMT, paramedic, guitar, Spanish, National Guard, finance. I wanted a Watchmen-style structure with news reports between chapters. Green Day’s “Are We the Waiting” as the soundtrack.

I had a story about twins adopted and separated at birth... one becomes a banker, the other a gang member. The banker turns negative, the gangster turns positive. They meet and aim guns at each other. Screen goes blank.

The fictional universe was the eventual Junteau’s ideas stress-tested in a speculative future. And I didn’t realize this until I read everything back... but most of the philosophical frameworks I’d later publish as essays were born inside the novel first. Experiential Parity started as a scene-setting note:

“Nairobi 2167. World suffering but also prospering. No average, never was.”

Pigeon Counting started as a satirical novel scene about a government employee counting robot errors as a third-order derivative job. Farm vs. Forest started as a future economic schism between digital creators and people who wanted “real food and real things.” The Religion of Progress endgame... what happens when all problems are solved and meaning still hasn’t arrived... was the novel’s premise before it was the Eye in the Sky argument. Even the Fantastic Mr. Fox essay... the piece I think might be my favorite... appeared first as a novel scene: a VR classroom in the future teaching students the meaning of the wolf scene from the film. The fiction predicted the essay by five years. The novel was the laboratory. The essays were the published results.

And maybe the most meta self-aware note in the entire archive is a premise about a crazed preacher on a street corner who screams the random thoughts I email to myself... who turns out to be a professor experimenting with whether hearing a profound thought shouted in earshot has any tangible effect on a person’s behavior. I was writing about myself writing about myself. The recursion goes all the way down. Something I would end up doing with a Twitter account a few years later. I ended up running the experiment.

January 2018 is when the pressure cooker ignites.

On January 9, at around 5:58 PM, I write: