About
I live inside
the loop.
Writer, founder, father — the human in the loop. The back-and-forth between what a machine can make and what only a person can mean.
Writer, founder, father — the human in the loop. The back-and-forth between what a machine can make and what only a person can mean.
The loop is one idea: a machine that can generate almost anything, and a person deciding what any of it is for.
And I follow all of it. The practical — how to actually use these tools, how to build a website that holds together — and the useless, which is usually the point: an essay on memory, on love, on the quiet weather of a workday. Family, past and present. Philosophy. A character I made up. I contain multitudes; so, now, does the machine. The difference is that mine are wired together — every subject a node in the same loop, and the connections between them are where the creativity, the insight, the meaning turn up.
I feel it most before the house is up — the coffee, the quiet, a blank page on one side and a model waiting on the other. My oldest will pad in soon and ask what I'm making. The model could hand me a hundred answers before the question is finished. Not one of them would know why that question, from that kid, at that hour, is the best part of my day.
Here's what that looks like. I don't know how to write code. And still, in one recent week, I launched a website, scoped a build, fixed what was broken, and pushed it live — from home with my son on my arm, from a sushi counter, from the back of a car in Boston, once from a movie theater during Minions. None of it at a desk. What I know how to do is describe what I want — clearly, out loud, over and over — and stay in the room while the machine does the part I can't.
The machine does the part I can't. I do the part it can't.
My company is Campbell Learn. We build story-led growth.
We help companies and institutions find the true story at their center and move real people to act. Story isn't decoration on top of the channels; it's the substrate the channels run on. The whole practice runs on one durable idea — the other person is always the hero. The student, the founder, the reader. My job is to hand over the map.
The method has three sources.
The craft came from journalism — and an MFA at Florida International University: years of learning how to make a stranger feel something on the page, on purpose, and not by accident.
The proof came from my years as a partner at Circa Interactive, later acquired by Archer Education, where I watched a sharp story quietly outperform a bigger budget, over and over, until I couldn't un-see it. The newsroom taught me the craft; Circa taught me the craft was infrastructure.
The third source is the code. These days I build with the tools as much as I write with them, and the two crafts keep teaching each other — the writer sharpens the builder, the builder keeps the writer honest.
When production gets cheap, whatever can't be produced gets precious.
I know the reflex is to be afraid of all this. I'm not. Taste, judgment, the nerve to cut a good line because it isn't a true one — the tools don't replace the person in the loop. They hand that person a bigger instrument and ask what they want to do with it.
So I keep both hands in: one on the keys, one holding someone smaller. The machines change the how. They don't change the point, which was always to make another human feel less alone. The human's still in the loop. He's just got a kid on his arm.
Campbell Learn — story-led growth & AI transformation.
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