Arch+Morality

The Dallas City Hall may be torn down and replaced with a sports arena and entertainment district. Good. I used to work in this building. The brutalist architecture and horrific, anti-human urban design surrounding it sucks the life out of a huge swath of downtown. I don't care what famous architect designed it. It's a bad building set within a bad plaza. Tear it down for something that actually contributes to the City.

My politics can at least be partly explained by the fact that my baseline is to be surprised that everything is working as well as it is. It’s all amazing, really. A leftist thinks, “there are so many homeless people, homelessness is out of control.“ But I look at the world and what I see is that almost nobody is homeless. There are 350 million people or whatever in this country and, like, almost none of them are homeless. And have you met people? Do you see what people are like? So many of them are irrational, unpredictable, impatient, lazy. And yet most of them have jobs and houses and stuff. And it all works. It all just keeps working. You can have an industrial revolution and everything just kind of keeps working. You can invent the automobile and everything just kind of keeps working. You can invent the computer and everybody just goes on having a job and living in a house. It’s amazing. I don’t know how all these people are doing it, but you just look out at the world and see that they’re doing it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve spent a decade telling people to do what I do: "Buy and Hold." Now I've decided to list my entire real estate portfolio for sale and walk away. It started slow. The bills, the maintenance, the tax increases... but the final straw was when I tried to develop an ADU to do exactly what the city of LA claims it wants investors like me to do: Create more housing. You'd think they'd make it easier, but after two delayed inspections, a sewer pipe replacement that needed 75 days advance notice, and a city-owned tree that became my responsibility, I'd had enough. The identity of being a real-estate guy is very hard to walk away from, trust me. For a long time, I stayed just because real estate was my "thing." It’s how I started. It’s what I’m known for. It led to every good thing in my life. But that blinded me to the fact that just because something served me in the past, it doesn't mean things haven't changed in the present. The reality of 2026 finally stripped the emotion away. My LA rentals are netting about 4-5% after the constant background noise of taxes, insurance spikes, and repairs. Meanwhile, a risk-free Treasury pays 5%. The trade-off just doesn't make sense any more. I’m reallocating to a liquid portfolio that actually lets me focus on the work I love. I published a deep dive on my Substack about the ADU nightmare that broke my patience, the exact numbers behind the exit, and where I’m moving the money next to buy back my sanity. I'll drop the link here in a bit.

On this day in 1994, Timothy Dalton announced he would be stepping down from the role of James Bond. A brief time as 007, but an undeniable impact 🍸

I'm leaving Germany | Brutally Honest Review

I'm leaving Germany | Brutally Honest Review

It would be a good thing for Western conservatism is Orban loses in Hungary.

The Beatles are one of the most important bands in modern music history. That is not the same thing as being one of the best. A lot of the reverence around them comes from historical position, not actual listening experience. They arrived at the right cultural moment, shaped the industry, influenced everyone after them, and became canonized so completely that people now confuse influence with superiority. Nonetheless, being an early inspiration is not the same as being unmatched. The Beatles get treated less like a band and more like a civilizational achievement. People do not merely enjoy them; they feel socially obligated to defend them. Their status has become self-reinforcing. Every generation is taught that they are the gold standard, so many people inherit the conclusion before they even examine the music. And once you strip away the mythology, what is left is often a catalog that is clever, catchy, and historically innovative—but not necessarily emotionally deeper, musically richer, or sonically more compelling than what later artists would go on to do better. A lot of Beatles praise is really praise for innovation in the historical context. Fair enough. But context cannot do all the work forever. “This was groundbreaking in the 1960s” is a different claim from “this remains the pinnacle of music.” Plenty of artists since then have written more complex lyrics, built more ambitious albums, pushed production further, and explored darker or more interesting emotional terrain. And they actually sound better without Yoko Ono screaming in the background. So no, saying the Beatles are not that good is not a ragebait. It is just refusing to confuse historical importance with permanent artistic supremacy.

"Mental Load" is imaginary. Men don't "get it," because when they have a task to do, they just do it... They don't start contemplating it weeks in advance and divide it into as many tiny details as possible, making it more 1000x's more complicated than it needs to be...