The Book Universe
Every book here makes the same argument from a different angle, for a different reader, through a different domain of human life. The gap between what human beings are capable of and how most are actually living is not a moral failing — it is an architectural one. And the architecture can be changed.
Book 1 · Self
Tricked
How your mind gets hijacked — and what you can do about it
Manuscript complete · editorial reconceptionYour evaluative memory is ancient hardware running in an environment it was never designed for — and the most powerful forces in that environment have studied the research. They know exactly how it works and they've built their systems around it.
Organized around four attack vectors — Confirmation, Availability, Conformity, Present-Bias — Tricked names the mechanism, shows the exploitation, and offers the first response: the four principles arrived at as the natural answer to each vector. Never announced as a framework. Earned through argument. The widest entry point to the series.
Editorial reconception needed: current ~38,000-word manuscript reorganizes by attack vector rather than domain; demo material migrates to Glitch; exploitation economy sections added. Target 55,000–65,000 words.
~38,000 words existing · Series Book 1 · Primary Principle: Personal Agency
Book 2 · Relational
Book Two [Title TBD]
Why you can't think — or live — alone
Everything Book One established about the individual mind is socially constructed. Your evaluative memory was calibrated by community. Your ability to interrupt it requires community. Tribalism is the automatic default of social hardware built for a world of 150 people.
The supertribe — coordination across genuine difference around shared principles — is what becomes possible when Personal Agency (Book One) is extended to the hardest relational problem: genuinely seeing people unlike yourself as equally real. Working title candidates: Among Others · We Think · Made of Others · The Social Mind.
Book 3 · Civilizational
The Examined Life
What humans need to flourish — and what you owe the future
The ceiling book. A small set of capacities — not personality traits distributed at birth but developable skills — reliably produce human flourishing when present and practiced. When absent or systematically undermined, they produce suffering, manipulation, and collective failure at every scale.
Five parts: the science of four foundational principles; what five traditions independently discovered about the same principles; how they perform under political pressure (American Founding, Civil Rights, authoritarian dismantling, democratic recovery); and what deliberate communities must do to cultivate them. Closes with the generational bet. Note: vocabulary pass needed — replace "capacities" with "principles" throughout draft.
Book 4 · Integration
The Common Life
How to build and inhabit a life that practices what the first three books established
The examined life is not a private achievement. It is a community project. Every scale at which human beings organize themselves — family, team, institution, community, civic commons — is either a holding environment that develops the four principles or a designed environment that suppresses them.
Five parts: Designed Environments · The Intimate Scale (family) · The Collaborative Scale (teams, institutions) · The Civic Scale (community, commons) · The Integration (daily practice and the communities you can build). Closes with the Common Wager. The four principles are explicitly named here for the first time, having been earned across three prior books.
Companion Volume · Political
Where We Stand
Navigating the political landscape through shared principles
Not Book Five — a companion that stands beside the series and applies the full framework to the hardest available contested terrain. The Green/Blue-Gray/Red zone framework. The up/down (reality vs. fabrication) axis as more fundamental than left/right. Cannot be written credibly before The Examined Life is in production.
Field Guides — holistic framework in youth voice, independently conceived from the Markers Library · Ages 10–12
Field Guide · Book 1 of 2
Your Story
A field guide to running your own life · Ages 10–12
You've been awake for about an hour, and you've already written a hundred sentences. Not on paper. In your life. Your decisions are sentences, your patterns are chapters, and your life is a story you're either authoring or letting be written for you. The individual authorship book: Personal Agency and Reflective Thinking in field guide format. Companion to the adult-facing Tricked and The Story You're In — the same argument in a younger voice, not part of the 78-marker delivery system.
Field Guide · Book 2 of 2
Our Story
A field guide to building things together · Ages 10–12
You woke up on a team this morning. You probably didn't think of it that way. Groups are not just contexts for development — they are the mechanism. The companion to Your Story, turning the lens outward: group norms, the neuroscience of social pain, the dependency paradox, healthy and unhealthy group dynamics. Mutual Respect in field guide format.
steamHouse Markers Library — one book per domain, each delivering a specific cluster of the 78 Development Markers · Ages 11–19
T5 · Markers Library · Learning
Better Student
The science of how learning actually works
Schools teach subjects — but almost no one teaches students how to learn. Neuroplasticity, retrieval practice, desirable difficulties, deliberate practice, sleep and movement, attention management, grit and process orientation. Reflective Thinking applied to academic life. The metacognitive approach to being a student. 12 primary markers.
T5 · Markers Library · Thinking
Think Clearly, Decide Well
Scout mindset, bias, and better decisions
Your brain is not lying to you maliciously — but it is lying to you constantly. The soldier mindset defends what you already believe; the scout mindset seeks what's actually true. Four parts: scout vs. soldier; tools for finding truth (baloney detection, statistics, AI-era reasoning); decision-making (WRAP, pre-mortems, probability thinking); calibration. 11 primary markers.
T5 · Markers Library · Relationships
Connect
Real relationships in a lonely world
We are more "connected" than any generation in history — and somehow more lonely. The richest book in the series by marker load: 17 primary markers covering self-awareness, reading others, attachment, communication, repair, conflict, and vulnerability-based trust across five parts. The goal is genuine relational depth — the kind that makes a human life feel worth living.
T5 · Markers Library · Habits
Good Habits Free Your Mind
Master the autopilot; liberate consciousness
Roughly 40% of daily behavior runs on autopilot. Good habits don't limit freedom — they create it. By mastering the automatic, consciousness is liberated for what actually matters. Eight primary markers across four parts: emotional regulation, habit design, focus and environment, organization systems, and the judgment layer. Not willpower management — system design.
T5 · Markers Library · Money
Your Money Story
Rewrite the money beliefs you never chose
Before you knew what money was, you had beliefs about it. Those beliefs came from what you saw, heard, and absorbed in your family of origin — and most people spend their financial lives making decisions based on a story they've never actually read. 18 chapters from psychological foundations through compound interest, spending psychology, automation, debt, credit, investing, and the concept of "enough." The goal is consciousness.
T5 · Markers Library · Body
Your Body
Nervous system, interoception, and safety as body literacy
Your body is not a vehicle for your brain. It is a cognitive organ — gathering information, making decisions, storing experience. Five parts: nervous system states and the window of tolerance, body signals and the felt sense, co-regulation as the mechanism of mentoring, safety as body literacy (boundary-setting and threat assessment), and the designed body environment. Absorbs the former Stay Safe material. 8 primary markers.
T5 · Markers Library · Digital Life
Your Digital Life
Algorithms, attention capture, AI, and narrative manipulation
Every major platform you use was designed to capture and hold your attention as long as possible — not as a side effect, but as the business model. Nine chapters mapping the specific mechanisms: recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles, five manipulation techniques (false character identification, manufactured urgency, omission, emotional misdirection, authority costume), environment design, and the scout mindset as the culminating posture. 3 primary markers.
T5 · Markers Library · Safety
Stay Safe
Calibrated awareness — not fear, but competence
Most people are good. And some people want something from you. Both statements are true simultaneously — and the failure to hold both produces either paranoia or naivety, each dangerous in its own way. Threat assessment, the manipulation playbook, relational safety, coercive control, digital spaces. Knowledge is protection. Personal Agency applied to situational awareness for young people navigating real-world risk.
T5 · Markers Library · Curiosity
Stay Curious
Keeping wonder alive in a know-it-all world
A typical four-year-old asks between 200 and 300 questions a day. By high school, most students have stopped asking questions in class almost entirely. Somewhere between four and fourteen, something shuts down. Curiosity reframed not as a technique but as a stance — a way of standing toward the world. The contrast between "I already know" and "I wonder" is the central distinction. Objective Reason applied to intellectual openness.
T5 · Markers Library · Purpose & Values
What Matters
Gratitude, purpose, values, and the season you're in · Ages 15–19
The book for the questions that don't go away: What am I doing this for? What kind of person am I becoming? What does a well-lived life actually look like? Nine chapters for Hero-Ideals readers across six primary markers: Gratitude, Wonder, Knowing My Why (two chapters), Living My Values (two chapters), Give First, and Life Seasons. The goal is not to answer the questions but to help young people hold them more honestly.
T5 · Markers Library · Systems
How the World Works
Systems thinking for young people — the shortest book in the series
Most of the things that affect your life — your school, your neighborhood, your economy, your climate — aren't events. They're systems. And systems have patterns you can learn to read. Three primary lenses: Stocks and Flows, Cause and Effect vs. Coincidence, and Feedback Loops. 12 chapters organized around three primary markers. Sharp, focused, revelatory. The adult companions are The Understory and The Household.
T5 · Markers Library · Creativity
Curious + Creative
Wonder, curiosity, how ideas grow, making things, sharing them
Creativity is not a talent you either have or don't. It is a posture. Merges the former Stay Curious and Make Something manuscripts into one coherent arc: the open stance → how ideas actually develop → the practice of making → the production dimension of storytelling. Five primary markers: Wonder, Curiosity, How Ideas Grow, Making Something, How Stories Work (production). The reception dimension of How Stories Work lives in Your Digital Life.
T5 · Markers Library · Teams
Team Work
The human dynamics that make or break projects
Most teams don't fail because the task is too hard. They fail because nobody addressed the human dynamics. Team Work follows the natural arc of a team's life from formation through completion: purpose, formation, the work itself, conflict, failure recovery, and completion. Four primary markers. For the Artist-Tools / Hero-Ideals reader who spends significant time in team-based learning, projects, athletics, or extracurriculars. Assess relationship to THE ZONE before final scope decision.
T1 · Deep Roots · Book 1 Foundation
The Unfinished Animal
What evolution built, what consciousness added, and what imagination makes possible
The deep evolutionary foundation for Tricked. Where the series asks "here is what's being exploited," this book asks "why are you built this way at all?" The three-layer architecture — evaluative memory (automatic), deliberate thought (conscious), episodic future thinking (purposeful) — as an evolutionary sequence. The deepest version of the claim that you are genuinely unfinished. That is not a problem to be solved. It is an invitation to continue. Sapolsky-register. Reads like Sapolsky meets Frankl.
T1 · Deep Roots · Narrative Companion
The Story You're In
How meaning gets made — and hijacked — and reclaimed
First draft complete · March 2026You are a story creature. Your brain builds meaning compulsively, constantly, from whatever material is present — turning photographs, headlines, and overheard conversations into narratives before you have a chance to evaluate them. This is not a flaw. It is the operating system.
The narrative companion to Tricked. Where Tricked focuses on evaluative memory exploitation, this book focuses on narrative capture — how the meaning-making process itself is targeted. Maps the outrage vector, the personalization engine, the identity trap — and develops tools for creating a gap between the story arriving and you becoming it. The second half turns from diagnosis to construction: what a well-made life story requires, how purpose develops, what it means to examine the stories you share with others as rigorously as the ones you tell yourself.
~42,000 words · 13 chapters · most accessible entry point to the library
T1 · Deep Roots · Practitioner Companion
True and Compelling
The craft of stories that are both compelling and true
There are two distinct things a story can be. A compelling story speaks to experiential truth — it makes you feel something real about the human situation. An objective story tracks descriptive reality — it commits to revision when contradicted by evidence. Most people conflate them. Most manipulation in the current information environment depends on that conflation.
The practitioner-depth companion to The Story You're In. For journalists, educators, writers, and communicators who want to develop both crafts rather than just defend against their exploitation. Part II (~16,600 words) drafted; Parts I, III, and IV to write.
T1 · Deep Roots · Neuroscience Companion
Wired Together
The neuroscience of co-regulation, mentoring, and growing up in community
The deep neuroscience foundation for Book Two. Where the series argues "you cannot think alone and here is what genuine community requires," this book asks "why are you biologically constituted this way at all?" Polyvagal theory, attachment as neural architecture, the adolescent social brain, co-regulation as the actual mechanism of mentoring — the full biological grounding for the relational argument.
Written for mentors, parents, program designers, and educators who want to understand why the relational approach works at the neurobiological level. Natural reading pair with THE ZONE.
T2 · Domain · Sport & Performance
The Zone
What sport teaches us about developing young people · Mentor / Coach / Parent Edition
First draft complete · ~63,000 wordsYou've watched it happen. Your most talented athlete at the line with the game on the line — and something changes before they even move. The Zone is a practitioner's guide for coaches organized around a deceptively simple question: what is actually happening in the five seconds before a missed free throw?
The answer unfolds through three levels: the automatic level where trained skill lives, the deliberate level where athletes can notice and choose, and the purposeful level where sport stops being about winning and starts being about who they're becoming. The four principles emerge from the sport content — discovered, not announced. Sam Okafor-Reed, a 16-year-old mid-level player, carries the narrative thread through both seasons. Sam's story moves not toward a perfect ending, but toward a more honest one.
The highest-leverage new publishing move available. The front door to the largest organized youth development ecosystem in the country. Every coach or parent who reads this becomes a potential steamHouse ambassador. Each chapter includes a "Give This to Your Athlete" section previewing the youth edition.
~63,000 words · first draft complete · 2027
T2 · Domain · Family & Parenting
A Principled Parent's Guide
The Home Team: Intentional Family Life
Families shape everything — and almost no one gets explicit guidance on how to do it intentionally. The parenting application of The Common Life: family as holding environment, developed for the parent reader at full depth. 26 chapters across eight parts covering physical foundation, household systems, time and attention, autonomy and authority, family culture, and development across four stages from ages 0 to 20. The parent's primary job is to gradually transfer authorship to the children themselves.
T2 · Domain · Parents & Digital Life
What Are You Installing Instead?
A parent's guide to media, screens, and raising kids who can think for themselves
This isn't a willpower problem. Every major platform your kid uses was designed by some of the most talented engineers in the world to be as engaging as possible for as long as possible. The question isn't why your kid can't put the phone down. The question is: you've set the limits — but what are you installing in their place?
Ten chapters from how persuasive design works through platform-by-platform guidance, family media agreements, mentoring over monitoring, modeling, and collective action. The organizing argument: the difference between compliance (following the rule) and capacity (not needing the rule).
T2 · Domain · Generosity
The Giving Calculus
What generosity actually costs — and why your brain lies to you about it
Most people want to be generous. Most people also don't give as much as they intend to. Not moral exhortation — an honest look at the psychology and economics of generosity. Part One maps the psychological obstacles (proximity gradient, temporal fade, the numbers problem, loss frame, identity trap). Part Two introduces the "Yummy Unit" — subjective value, the currency everyone spends without tracking. Part Three looks honestly at what giving actually costs and what it returns. The goal: people who know what they're doing when they give, and why.
T2 · Domain · Habits & Daily Practice
Good Habits Free Your Mind
How to build a life that doesn't require constant willpower — Adult edition
Roughly 40% of daily behavior runs on autopilot. Most people experience their habits as constraints. This reframes the relationship entirely: good habits don't limit freedom — they create it. By mastering the automatic, consciousness is liberated to focus on what actually matters. The Book One / Common Life argument applied to habit and practice. Not willpower management but system design — building the conditions that make good choices automatic.
T2 · Domain · Personal Finance
Your Money Story
The psychology of personal finance as conscious authorship — Adult edition
Before you knew what money was, you had beliefs about it. Those beliefs came from what you saw, heard, and absorbed in your family of origin — and most people spend their entire financial lives making decisions based on a story they've never actually read. Personal Agency in the domain of economic life. Covers compound interest, spending psychology, automation, debt, the Enough Curve, and writing a money story that reflects your own values rather than inherited reflexes.
T2 · Domain · Decision-Making
The Action Calculus
A diagnostic framework for understanding human action
Manuscript complete · v3Why do people fail to do what they say they want to do — not occasionally, but systematically? Action only emerges when three factors align: Can I do it? (Capacity.) Is it worth it? (Value.) Do I want to? (Motivation.) When any factor approaches zero, it blocks action regardless of the others — just as any number multiplied by zero yields zero.
Thirty chapters across three parts. Part One builds the three-factor model accessibly. Part Two formalizes it for researchers and organizational designers. Part Three maps the Action Calculus onto the steamHouse developmental framework, addressing the question the model deliberately leaves open: not whether to act, but what is worth acting for. What looks like laziness is often blocked capacity. What looks like resistance is often failed value calculation. What looks like weakness is often a motivation system responding rationally to a broken environment.
~95,000 words · the largest manuscript in the library
T2 · Domain · Organizational Design
Organization Design: Not Nag
Design environments, not discipline — for parents, teachers, and mentors
Your teenager can spend four hours building an intricate digital world but can't remember to bring their homework home. You've tried the planners, the apps, the color-coded binders, the talks. Nothing sticks. Here's why: you've been starting in the wrong place.
Organization capacity isn't a character trait — it's a developmental achievement. The teen who "won't" get organized often "can't" — yet. This book replaces impose-systems-demand-compliance with a science-based sequence: understand the developing brain, design environments where organized behavior is the path of least resistance, connect effort to identity and purpose, then introduce systems. From punishment to scaffolding. From nagging to designing.
T3 · Relational · Cross-Tradition
The Five Henrys
What five traditions discovered they share — and why that convergence matters
Five people named Henry — a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a secular humanist, and a spiritual seeker — enter a cave for an extended conversation. Their default instinct is to argue differences. But their time is limited, and problems wait outside. What if they focused on what they share? What they find is not compromise or syncretism — it is convergence: the same four practical commitments arrived at independently through five distinct traditions that disagree about almost everything else.
The epistemological argument: when radically different starting points arrive at the same conclusions, those conclusions are tracking something real about human nature. 17 essays plus an epilogue. Natural companion to Book Two after it establishes the supertribe audience.
T3 · Relational · Adult Companion
Connect
A guide to real relationships in a lonely world — Adult edition
We are more "connected" than any generation in history — and somehow more lonely. The tools designed to bring us together often leave us feeling more isolated. Six parts: naming the problem honestly (structural, not personal); attachment styles as the operating system; the dispositions that enable deep connection (genuine curiosity, the illuminator orientation, ubuntu, non-anxious presence); concrete communication skills; repair and rupture; vulnerability-based trust. Drawing on Gottman, attachment theory, nonviolent communication, and the Arbinger Institute.
T3 · Relational · Framework Core
You Are the Author
Writing the story of your life on purpose
You are a story creature. Your brain doesn't store life as data — it stores episodes, scenes, and narratives. Memory, identity, decision, connection: all structured as story. And most of the stories you're living in, you didn't write. The foundational framework text: what consciousness and purpose and agency actually are, the developmental methodology (recognition → interruption → reflection → direction → training), and what living as an author actually looks like across time.
T3 · Relational · Series Capstone
Together
Building teams, finding community, creating change
You've diagnosed the problem. You understand the mismatch, the exploitation, the gap between the life you're living and the life you want. You've read about authorship and consciousness and purpose. And you're still alone with your phone at midnight. Together is for that gap. The series' most explicitly relational book: bridging individual to collective, navigating teams and projects and community, arriving at the generative turn — the point at which development becomes not just personal but outward-facing, and you begin developing others.
T4 · Civic · Systems · Book 1
The Understory
Beneath what you notice — systems thinking as perceptual skill
The world has an architecture you can't see — not because it's hidden, but because your brain wasn't built to perceive it. Three dimensions most people never see: the entity move (where you draw boundaries determines everything you observe), scale (the rules change when you zoom), and time (reality operates on multiple timescales, and the ones you can't perceive are usually the ones that matter most). The governing principle — structures produce behavior — reframes everything from personal habits to institutional dysfunction.
T4 · Civic · Systems · Book 2
The Household
Ecology, economics, and the collision of two households
The Greek word oikos — household — gave birth to both ecology and economics. The two disciplines then forgot they shared a root. That forgetting produced a civilization running on structurally incompatible assumptions. Turns the perceptual tools of Book One toward the largest systems its readers inhabit: nature's economy (solar income, zero waste, resilience) vs. humanity's economy (perpetual growth, excluded feedback loops, engineered Mediocristan). The series closes where it began: in the one household you share with everything alive.
T4 · Diagnostic · Tricked Companion
Glitch
What your brain does when you're not looking — experiential companion to Tricked
Your brain is going to lie to you in this book. Not maliciously — because that's what brains do, and the lying has a very good reason behind it. Every section opens with an experiment the reader conducts before encountering any explanation. A judgment made, an image examined, a decision rendered. Then — and only then — the science of why it went the way it did. Where Tricked argues, Glitch demonstrates. Ten parts anchored to evolutionary timestamps: Senses, Attention, Memory, Body as cognitive organ, Numerical intuition, Judgment, Beliefs, The social self, Crowd behavior, and Working with your brain.
T4 · Diagnostic · Reassessing Position
Hooked
How they got you — and how to get free
Every major digital platform is designed to capture and hold attention as long as possible. This isn't a side effect — it's the business model. A tool-by-tool breakdown: smartphones, social media, Instagram and TikTok, YouTube, news environments, games, AI tools, and shopping platforms. Each following the same structure: here's what the tool does to your brain, here's the specific mechanism, here's what using it intentionally looks like.
Reassessing position against v4.0 architecture: best positioned as (a) companion to Tricked focused on digital/tech exploitation, or (b) source material for Book Two's exploitation-of-social-wiring chapters. Decision pending Tricked editorial reconception.
T4 · Civic · Interfaith
Convergent Wisdom
What humanity's traditions share — and why it matters
The cross-tradition validation argument from The Examined Life, developed at full book length for the faith community, interfaith educator, and comparative religion reader. Five traditions — Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Secular Humanist, Seeker — independently arriving at the four principles through their own paths. The Five Henrys narrative at book length. For religious families, interfaith educators, faith community leaders — anyone for whom "these aren't Western inventions" is essential to being able to trust the framework.
T4 · Civic · Planetary
Globe Team Planetary Portrait
Planetary-scale engagement through principled contribution
The globe-scale application of The Common Life's civic chapters. What it means to contribute to problems too large for any comfort tribe. Thirteen collective action domains — human basics through social fabric, institutional architecture, planetary challenges, epistemic/tech, meaning/culture, and meta-reflection — with the Globe Team as the outermost ring of the Care Space, organized around the same principled cooperation that Book Two and The Common Life develop at smaller scales.
Program Design · Residential
Trek-Quest
Complete Operational & Philosophical Documentation — Camp Chronicles
Documentation completeCamp Chronicles is a six-week summer experience that develops young people who can both understand reality and shape it responsibly. Trek-Quest is the complete operational and philosophical documentation for steamHouse's flagship residential program — consolidating program overview, two-year curriculum sequences, character development framework, cross-cutting design elements, and addenda into a single reference.
Three phases: Trek (weeks 1–2, wilderness immersion, "Be Real" — brain, body, and relationships), Home Gap (weeks 3–4, integration at home), and Quest (weeks 5–6, studio and maker space, "Think Big" — story, persuasion, evidence, and production). Year 1: Signal Trek and Artifact Quest. Year 2: Assembly Trek and Mission Quest, with pathways into Globe Team and junior counselor roles.
Assessment is non-competitive and non-graded. The design philosophy is direct: vision without grounding is fantasy; grounding without vision is mere survival. The most fully operationalized expression of the steamHouse program design.