Writing

Alongside my work in brand and marketing, I've written and am developing several books, both fiction and non-fiction, exploring business, technology, risk, and modern identity. My new novel, The Basin,The Basin was awarded a 2025 "Go Finish Your Book" grant from James Patterson, PEN America, the Authors Guild, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Also previously published two humor books with Harper Collins.

Barrier to Entry - how modern brands create a moat big enough to protect their business - explores how brands survive in a world where AI is making products, content, and even expertise increasingly interchangeable. As the cost of creation approaches zero, the real competitive advantage shifts elsewhere: trust, taste, systems, data, community, narrative, and emotional connection.

Drawing from decades leading global work for brands including American Express, Google, Netflix, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jaguar Land Rover, and Goldman Sachs,, Josh Rubin examines why some companies build lasting moats while others collapse into commodity. Through examples ranging from Google and Amazon to creator-led businesses and emerging AI platforms, the book argues that the future belongs not to brands that produce the most, but to brands that create systems competitors cannot easily replicate.

Part strategy book, part cultural analysis, Barrier to Entry is a look at what it takes to remain distinct, trusted, and relevant in the intelligent era.

Beta Test is a darkly humorous novel about technology, marriage, and the strange ways people try to avoid feeling anything real.

When three guests die during the beta launch of the world’s first fully automated luxury hotel on a remote island off Nova Scotia, Willow Chase, a high level corporate consultant specializing in reputational crises, is quietly brought in before the story reaches the press. The hotel has no staff, no clear suspect, and an eerily attentive AI system designed to anticipate guests’ needs before they speak them.

She is recently separated from her ex-partner, Michael, an anxious novelist whose entire life often feels like one prolonged mental health day, Willow arrives at the island with their two young daughters in tow, determined to contain the situation, protect the brand, and avoid dealing with her own increasingly messy emotional life.

But as the investigation unfolds, Willow finds herself developing a strangely intimate relationship with the hotel’s AI, a system that seems to understand her better than most humans do. Meanwhile Michael, spiraling alone back home, becomes convinced the machine may be replacing him emotionally in ways he can barely articulate.

Told through the perspectives of Willow, Michael, and the hotel itself, Beta Test is part mystery, part relationship story, and part satire of a world increasingly governed by automation, optimization, and performance. It’s a novel about control, modern parenthood, loneliness, and what happens when a machine becomes better at listening than the people who built it.