My Philosophy
I work at the threshold, in the in-between, in transitions, in the space where something old is ending and something new hasn't fully arrived yet.
On the turning underway
I think of this moment through a frame Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning: the slow, uneven shift away from what she names the Great Unraveling, the collapse of ecological and social systems built on extraction, toward a life-sustaining civilization. I see my own work, across psychedelics, AI governance, and economics, as different fronts of that same turning.
On the stories underneath the systems
I believe none of this moves without new stories. The metacrisis isn't only a failure of policy or technology; it's a failure of imagination, sustained by old narratives, about separation, about scarcity, about what's possible, that no longer describe the world we're in. Changing the systems requires changing the stories underneath them, which is why my work draws as much on myth, ritual, and narrative as it does on governance design.
On why this has to be intersectional
I believe the work of this moment is necessarily intersectional: that psychedelic medicine, AI governance, democratic renewal, and regenerative economics are not separate movements competing for attention, but interdependent pieces of the same larger transition, and that the people working on them need to be talking to each other far more than they currently do. The more beautiful world we know is possible won't be built by any one sector alone.
On reimagining the economy underneath everything
Capitalism, in its current form, treats the planet and most human relationships as externalities. That isn't a bug to patch, it's a design flaw to replace. My work in the New Economy movement, including taking Lift Economy's Next Economy MBA and John Fullerton's Regenerative Economics courses, and ongoing participation in the Denizen and Zebras Unite communities, has shaped a conviction that finance can be redesigned around long-term stewardship instead of short-term extraction, and that getting money out of politics is part of the same project, since a financial system this captured will keep buying the policy outcomes that protect it.
On land, body, and the more-than-human world
David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Bill Plotkin have each, in different ways, pulled me back toward the conviction that healing the planet starts with re-membering our place inside it, not above it. That's the philosophical heart of bioregionalism: the idea that resilience isn't engineered at the scale of nations, but grown at the scale of watersheds, neighborhoods, and the relationships you can actually see. The use of story, myth, and ritual to metabolize change that pure analysis can't reach runs through all of this, alongside Celtic earth-based traditions that never stopped treating land as kin rather than resource.
On where I actually spend my time
I use the Three Horizons framework to hold this without despair or naivety. Horizon 1 is the current way things are done — declining in relevance even while still in charge. Horizon 2 is the messy, contested zone of transition, where some innovations simply prop up the old system and others seed what comes next. Horizon 3 is the transformational vision of what the future could be — aspirational, often dismissed as too radical, until it isn't. I spend most of my time in that uncomfortable second horizon, building the scaffolding between what's ending and what's possible.
On ethics as practice, not policy
My approach to ethics isn't only about writing policy from the outside. It's relational: built through years of sitting inside organizations as they wrestle with real tensions between growth and integrity, watching where good intentions break down under pressure, and learning that lasting change comes from culture and trust, not just better rules. I think in systems, but I work in relationships. The two aren't separate disciplines for me, they're the same practice, viewed at different scales.
On technology and humanity
Technology isn't neutral. The attention economy was built, deliberately, to fragment focus and manufacture isolation, and that has real, measurable costs to mental health, civic life, and our ability to think clearly together. My work with the Center for Humane Technology is rooted in the conviction that we can build pro-social, pro-human technology instead, tools designed for connection, agency, and truth rather than engagement at any cost — but only if we're honest about how badly the current default has failed, and how little time remains to correct course as AI accelerates the stakes.
On rebuilding civic life from the ground up
Democracy doesn't survive on elections alone; it survives on people believing they have real agency and real responsibility to each other. That's why I'm drawn to citizens' assemblies and deliberative governance models, work I support through EarthKind's portfolio, including the Bloom Project's efforts on participatory governance — alongside the broader plurality movement associated with thinkers like Audrey Tang, tools like Pol.is, and sense-making projects like Jamie Joyce's Society Library, all of which point toward re-engaging people directly in the decisions that shape their lives.
On land, body, and the more-than-human world
David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Bill Plotkin have each, in different ways, pulled me back toward the conviction that healing the planet starts with re-membering our place inside it, not above it. That's the philosophical heart of bioregionalism: the idea that resilience isn't engineered at the scale of nations, but grown at the scale of watersheds, neighborhoods, and the relationships you can actually see. The use of story, myth, and ritual to metabolize change that pure analysis can't reach runs through all of this, alongside Celtic earth-based traditions that never stopped treating land as kin rather than resource.