Whatever happened to the cheerful sci-fi future our movies and TV promised us? We're a long way from AI like Data and C-3PO, who help us be us without pretending to be us. The deeper question isn't better guardrails or tougher regulation — it's what we ask AI to optimize for: human thriving, or human imitation?
I'm a technologist and founder building at the intersection of AI, human agency, and relational intelligence — the capacity to drive trust, agency, and real connection.
At 
, I'm building relational AI that uses decision theory and human-AI psychology to deepen human connection. We're creating the first dataset of longitudinal healthy relating, so we can train AI on empirical signals of human thriving.
These are the droids we're looking for. It's what the industry hasn't built yet — and what LLMs structurally cannot deliver — but it is what matters most.
I coined the terms "agentic tech" and "tech for human agency" in my research at UT Austin and founded tethics & chill, an invitational community of founders, funders, builders, and thinkers advancing technologies that expand human agency. I also advise ex/ante, the earliest VC fund to back agentic tech, write 
, a blog on agentic tech, and host 
.
Previously: AI security at Deloitte, media and politics roles at NBC, NPR, the U.S. Senate, founded the Cato Daily Podcast in 2006 (accidentally shoehorning it into obligatory daily episodes for 20 years straight by picking the first name that came to mind, but I was young and carefree then...), and six years in East Africa advancing global health, workforce development, and women's education.
For fun: skydiving, acro yoga, ashtanga, climbing, skiing, and reading broadly across science, tech, sci-fi, and theology.
