Professional Interests
Here are a few areas I’ve worked in past or present:
Community Leadership – I’ve had the chance to start clubs, be a teacher, gather groups of friends, volunteer at the neighborhood level, organize online communities and mobilize a disaster response project at the county level. When I was younger, I always had a knack for rounding up all the neighborhood kids to go on adventures together. I’m generally interested in assembling groups of people around shared goals for the benefit of the many.
Computing, AI & Machine Learning – When I was a kid I liked building computers, had a summer job modelling gold nanoclusters with super computers and took a machine learning course by Andrew Ng in 2018. I’ve generally followed developments in the space since then, and have played around with AI tools since the launch of ChatGPT. Now the capabilities grow more amazing by the day. While working at Reciprocity we adopted agentic coding frameworks to move faster and since then I’ve had a chance to interface with agentic search and coding tools every day. I’m enjoying the process of learning about computing every day now.
Upgrading Government & Nonprofit Services – In March 2020, I became a co-founder of www.mycovidresponse.org. This humble little website grew into a grassroots disaster response effort that has, at the time of this writing, helped coordinate bulk movements of ppe, grassroots public health campaign, over a dozen smaller programs, and in partnership with Lighthouse of Michigan, Oakland University, Pontiac Community Foundation, and dozen other partners. In September 2020, we incorporated Reciprocity, to bring our software development approach to others. Along the way we connected with Civilla, Connect211, Open Referral, NeighborLink, HelpLink, and many others. Now Agentic coding tools like Gemini, ClaudeCode, Cursor, etc make it so that we can do the software deployment work that used to take us months in hours or days.
Climate Change – Because of Temporal Comparative Advantage, it seems likely that Climate Change is one of the most important issues to be working on. Project Drawdown has a good macro-level view for climate solutions. There are useful breakdowns of CO2 Emissions, The Costs of CO2 Capture and info in Jeremy Rifkin’s description of The Green New Deal. If you are a founder, investor, individual or organization working on climate, I’d love to hear what you’re working on. If you’re interested in career opportunities look at Lowercarbon Capital, Work on Climate, ClimateBase, and MCJ. Chris Wedding also runs a great newsletter covering different environmentally conscious CEO’s
The Circular Economy – How do we outsmart waste? How do we reuse resources infinitely? How do we build the infrastructure to enable more sharing? Planned obsolescence is a moral failure and should be ended immediately. I am starting to see companies form to address this by selling clothing, furniture and tires for EV’s according to a more eco-friendly, circular economy model. Rheaply is a fantastic example of a company that’s using software to actually build a circular economy.
Better Food Supply Chains – 40% + of food gets wasted before it gets used. Food waste cumulatively in the USA alone is a $400B / year problem. Methane from cattle production, pesticide & herbicide use, runoff, and massive inefficiencies across the food supply chain lead to all sorts of negative effects. I am in favor of the low-tech solution of buying from your local farmer. Supply chains as they are, represent a massive business opportunity for improvement. Noteworthy solutions include Hazel Technologies, Forgotten Harvest, Spoiler Alert, Thought for Food, and Imperfect Produce.
BioTechnology, BioReactors, and Microbes – I became obsessed by practical applications of bacteria and microbes after reading ‘I Contain Multitudes‘. There’s a case study in that book where a hospital eliminated MRSA infections by simply opening the windows occasionally. It turns out that bacteria from outside can out-compete superbugs for resources. MColin Lennox is building a company called EcoIslands inspired by wetland ecology. AI-Powered Biotech companies are excited to make novel molecules, but the world already has billions of biological species with novel applications. I’m interested in organizations that are using biomimicry and metabolic pathways found in nature.
Mycology, Mushrooms, & Fungi – There are exciting nutritional, psychotropic, immunological and microbiological applications that we are just beginning to discover. Lion’s mane and Chaga are being used to promote focus, turkey tail for immune support, to the research at Hopkins on the longterm psychological benefits of Psilocybin. And those are just a few out of millions of known fungal species! Paul Stamets has many interesting thoughts based on his primary research applications. Fungi created the first internet millions of years ago to communicate with plants and animals using chemical signals. Mushrooms may also be useful in providing low cost, scalable bioremediation as well. Mushrooms could even be used to feed the world in case of a nuclear winter!
Net Zero Buildings and #ElectrifyEverything – In 2016 I stumbled upon an academic journal article concluding that homes in the UK could cut their fossil fuel consumption substantially by insulating and sealing their homes better. How can this be? It turns out that most homes, particularly older ones leak heating and cooling. I later learned from The Zero Energy Project and The Thousand Homes Challenge that the payback period for doing low energy retrofits is fast (3-7 years), because the insulation is so cheap and houses are so leaky. Retrofitting homes represent work opportunities for millions of Americans, emissions reductions, and cost savings for homeowners. Then you can run a house electrically, using home-scale solar + storage.�?Retrofits represent an opportunity for contractors, homeowners, equipment manufacturing companies and startups.
Renewable Energy, Smart Grids and The Internet of Energy – The electrical grid is dumb. Here’s why. Coal or Natural gas is burned and covered to electricity. For every lump of coal, you get .35 lumps worth of useful energy out. Then you transmit that .35 lumps across high tension wires where you lose 30-50%. Then it gets transformed multiple times, carried to your home, and finally used by you. Plants have to run 24/7 because they are too big to rev up and down, and excess electricity does not get stored or used. The grid is connected has little capacity for routing, storage, or redundancy. Innovations to make the grid better are: locally installed solar panels, battery backups, ‘routers’ for the electrical grid, ‘grid-scale storage’, smart metering, nuclear power, and predictive generation. These problems are unsexy but important. Carbon pollution aside, there are massive negative externalities associated with the extraction of oil, coal, and natural gas. Coal in particular releases more radioactive waste than a nuclear accident since it turns out that there are traces of radioactive metals in coal. It appears that the cost of installing new solar infrastructure is cheaper than buying coal, but we can’t wait for market forces alone to scuttle coal plants.
Healthy Environments – Industrial chemicals are in everything. I am always on the lookout for companies that make products without anything harmful in them. In general artisanal soaps, and personal care products, clothes, and products made with simple ingredients are great. If you know of any companies that make products without shelf stabilizers, vitamin enrichments, flame retardants, phthalates, teflon, etc in them I’m interested.
MIDS, Guilds, Consumer Unions, and Engineering Co-Ops – Kevin Kelly & Jaron Lanier make compelling arguments in favor of digital co-operatives getting paid revenue streams or equity for their work. What if digital collectives granted members a share economic value? The concept of a consumer union would work similarly, but would unite asset holders or customers so that they could vote with their purchasing power towards changing company behavior.
Organization Design – How do we design organizations, civilizations, and collective groups of people to accomplish goals large and small?