About
When adults would ask little-kid Carlos what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer was always the same: pro baseball player. I would hold up my right arm, look at it, and tell my parents, "this is going to pay for your retirement."
That dream didn't get completely squashed until I was somewhere in my mid 20s (what can I say, I'm an optimist).
So I had to come up with a new answer, and the best I could do was this: "I'll be a writer."
I loved to read. I knew words. It was a tool I thought I already had in my toolkit, so off I went.
In my early career I covered sports, money, advertising, and a pinch of philosophy. I got a cover story in Time Out Chicago. I wrote a feature for Baseball Prospectus. I ran a personal finance blog for a long time that taught me more about SEO, analytics, and reader psychology than any course ever could (I also made a little bit of money with it).
Then I moved into digital product — agencies, startups, the full spectrum — and somewhere in that decade I fell in love with data. Some credit also goes to Michael Lewis and his Moneyball book…that had a huge impact on me. I realized combining something you love (baseball) with something you're trying to learn (data) was a recipe that worked.
Outside work, I like to build things. Oracle is an AI investment research tool trained on every Warren Buffett shareholder letter ever written. The Dialogue is a retrieval model trained on 640,000 words I've published — you can ask it anything and it answers in my voice, with citations. There are a few more in the lab.
I'm based in Royal Oak. I follow the Cubs. I have been using em dashes for 20 years before ChatGPT came along.