Who this is for
If you’re somewhere in your 40s, 50s, or early 60s, you’ve probably noticed something: the world quietly added a new operating system on top of the old one, and the manual didn’t get mailed to your house.
AI is the obvious example. But it’s also passwords, account recovery, smart-home gear, online banking, family records living in seven different cloud accounts, and the weekly question of whether some new app is genuinely useful or just another thing trying to sell you a subscription.
Most of the advice out there is built for people who already live online — coders, founders, marketing kids, productivity hustlers. That leaves a whole generation of capable men stuck in the middle: smart enough to know this stuff matters, busy enough not to want a second job learning it, and allergic to being talked down to.
This site is for them.
Why it exists
Because the existing options aren’t great.
The senior-tech sites talk to you like you’ve never used a computer. The startup sites assume you want to build a SaaS company. The men’s magazines have opinions about belts and bourbon. The AI newsletters are written for people whose job is AI.
Nobody is writing the practical, plain-English, slightly-irreverent middle. The articles a grown man would actually want to read on a Sunday morning before he gets back to his life.
That’s the gap. That’s what we’re writing into.
What we cover
The lead pillar is AI and modern tools. That’s the urgent thing right now. We’ll write a lot about it: how to use it, what to ignore, how to think about it, how to apply it to second-act careers, side projects, and decisions that matter.
Around that, we cover the modern competence stack: digital security, household systems, the boring-but-important admin layer that keeps life from sliding sideways. As AI becomes table stakes — and it will, in maybe two years — we’ll expand into the next thing. The brand isn’t about AI. It’s about staying useful.
The standard
Three rules.
Useful or gone. Every article has to teach you something, save you time, prevent a mistake, or change a decision. If it doesn’t do one of those, it doesn’t belong here.
Plain English, real opinions. No jargon. No hedging. If we think you should use ChatGPT first, we say so. If we think a tool is overrated, we say that too.
No slop. We don’t publish AI-generated filler dressed up as content. Every article is written by a human who knows what they’re talking about, even when AI is used as a research or drafting partner. The judgment is always human.
Who’s behind it
Brad Kowitz — retired Navy Master Chief, creator of the TrailRecon YouTube channel, and a guy who built one career and is now learning the next set of tools alongside everyone else his age. Modern Man Skills is the publication he wishes had existed when he started learning AI.
If you’ve got a topic you want covered, or a question that bugs you about modern tools, send a note. The best articles usually start that way.