Most people introduce themselves by listing roles.
I don't really know how to do that.
Not because I haven't held titles—I've held plenty—but because titles have never felt like the thing that explains me. They're coordinates on a map, not the terrain itself. And I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that life happens in the terrain.
If you're looking for a clean narrative arc—a ladder, a straight line, a progression that makes sense at a glance—you probably won't find it here. What you'll find instead is a mesh: biology and artificial intelligence, national security and biotechnology, mountains and manuscripts, policy rooms and muddy bivy sacks. A life built not for efficiency, but for resilience. Not for polish, but for density.
Optimize for experience before optimization makes experience impossible.
That, more than anything, is the philosophy that animates my work and my life.
The Resume Is a Poor Proxy for a Life
We are taught, almost from the beginning, to treat life like a document.
Fill the lines. Avoid the gaps. Make it legible to strangers with power.
The resume becomes a proxy for worth, continuity becomes a moral good, and deviation becomes risk. Somewhere along the way, we start optimizing for economic capital so aggressively that we forget there are other currencies—currencies that compound more slowly, but matter far more in the end.
I call those currencies Experience Capital.
Experience Capital is not adrenaline or novelty for novelty's sake. It's judgment earned under pressure. It's competence that survives context shifts. It's the quiet confidence that comes from having been cold, tired, afraid, and uncertain—and learning that you don't break.
Resumes track what you are worth to the economy. Gaps track what your life is worth to you.
The tragedy is that most people don't realize this until the resume is full and the gaps are gone.
The Asset Class of Chaos
Early in my life, I learned something counterintuitive: chaos is an asset class.
Not reckless chaos. Not gambling. But chosen uncertainty—situations where the outcome isn't guaranteed, where comfort is absent, and where your internal systems get stress-tested. These experiences create a surplus of capability that cannot be credentialed but can always be spent.
That surplus is what allows you to walk away from jobs, from identities, from paths that no longer serve you. It's what creates sovereignty.
A resume creates a fragile identity. If you lose the job, you lose yourself.
A life rich in experience creates a sovereign identity. If you can survive the mud, the mountain, and the unknown, you can survive anything else.
This philosophy didn't emerge in a vacuum. It was forged through a series of deliberate, sometimes irrational choices to step off the script when the script promised safety but threatened stagnation.
Build a Mesh, Not a Ladder
The dominant advice of modern life is to build a ladder.
Specialize early. Optimize relentlessly. Remove redundancy. Become indispensable in one narrow way.
Ladders are efficient. They're also fragile.
A single point of failure—a market shift, a reorganization, a health event—can snap them clean in half.
Instead, I've spent my life building a mesh.
Biochemistry alongside policy. AI alongside ethics. National security alongside fiction. Mountaineering alongside executive leadership. Each strand reinforces the others. Each creates optionality. Each allows for reinvention without collapse.
The mesh is messy. It's harder to explain. It doesn't fit neatly into forms.
But it's unbreakable.
This way of living isn't about being unfocused. It's about being anti-fragile—about constructing a life that gains strength from stress rather than being destroyed by it.
Technology Without Humanity Is Just Bits and Bytes
Professionally, I live at the frontier of emerging technology—particularly where AI, biotechnology, and complex systems collide. I've worked in government, academia, and industry, often at moments of transition, acceleration, or institutional stress.
What I've learned is this: technology is never the hard part.
The hard part is people. The hard part is culture. The hard part is legitimacy.
Technology without humanity is just bits and bytes. Humanity without stories is just echoes. And stories without purpose are just noise.
That belief shapes everything I build—whether it's an AI transformation strategy, a policy framework, or a piece of speculative fiction. I'm less interested in what a technology can do than in what it does to us when it arrives faster than our institutions can metabolize.
Acceleration without reflection doesn't create progress. It creates instability.
My work, across domains, is an attempt to close that gap—not by slowing innovation to a crawl, but by learning how to go fast responsibly.
Partnership Is the Real Unit of Endurance
One of the most important lessons of my life has nothing to do with technology at all.
It has to do with partnership.
Romance dies quickly under pressure. Partnership hardens.
Whether you're riding bicycles down the Dalton Highway with no money, living in uncertainty, or standing at the edge of a massive life decision, the question is never "Is this fun?" It's "Can we endure this together?"
Endurance is a shared property.
This belief informs not just my personal life, but how I think about teams, organizations, and institutions. The strongest systems are not the most optimized; they are the most cohesive under stress. They know why they exist. They know what they will not compromise. They can take a hit and stay aligned.
Resilience and Sovereignty as Filters
In recent years, I've become increasingly explicit about the filters I use to make decisions.
The primary ones are resilience and sovereignty.
Resilience asks: Does this make me—or us—harder to break?
Sovereignty asks: Does this preserve the ability to choose differently later?
These filters cut through noise. They expose false prestige. They reveal when an opportunity is really just a more gilded cage.
They also reorder priorities. Family first. Fitness second. Finances third—not because money doesn't matter, but because it's a tool, not a purpose. Its highest function is to purchase optionality, not status.
Why Adventure Matters
Some people see adventure as escape.
I see it as calibration.
Mountains don't care about your credentials. Weather doesn't negotiate. Fatigue doesn't respond to reputation. In those environments, truth is immediate and unforgiving. You learn quickly what matters, what doesn't, and who you really are when systems fail.
Adventure strips away abstraction. It reminds you that you are a physical being in a physical world, subject to limits and consequences. That reminder is grounding—especially for people who spend much of their time in conceptual or digital spaces.
I don't pursue difficult objectives because they're impressive. I pursue them because they are honest.
Fiction as a Systems Test
Writing fiction may seem, on the surface, like a departure from science and policy.
It isn't.
Fiction is a simulator for futures that institutions are not yet ready to discuss openly. It allows us to explore ethical collisions, unintended consequences, and human responses before reality makes the experiment irreversible.
I write stories not to predict the future, but to stress-test our assumptions about it.
In that sense, fiction is not an escape from responsibility. It's an extension of it.
Be Interesting—But for the Right Reasons
There's a phrase I return to often: be interesting.
Not in the performative sense. Not as branding. But as a life strategy.
Interesting people are hard to automate away. Hard to replace. Hard to collapse into a single function. They bring perspective, synthesis, and narrative coherence to complex environments.
But interest isn't manufactured. It's accumulated—through risk, curiosity, failure, discomfort, and time spent in places where there are no spectators.
The Point of All This
This site is not here to convince you I'm successful.
It's here to explain how I think, how I move through the world, and what I'm optimizing for.
If you're building something—an organization, a technology, a life—and you feel the tension between speed and meaning, between safety and sovereignty, between resumes and real experience, then we're probably aligned.
I don't believe there is such a thing as failure—only not-yet success. Every challenge is just a point along a longer arc.
At the frontier of technology, humanity is the experiment.
I intend to live like it matters.
—Titus
