About

Israel 🇮🇱 🍕 🛫 → 🛬 Patchogue, NY (Strong Island) 🏈 🏀 🎶 → MIT 🏈 🎶 🤖 → Seattle 👨‍💻 🌲 🐣 🎶 → Portland 👨🏽‍🌾 👨‍💻 🎶 → NYC 🐣 👨‍💻 🎶 → Portland 👨🏽‍🔬 🏀 🎶 🏢

I spent over a decade in tech back when the machine learning frameworks everyone now takes for granted were still being discovered and you spent a good part of the job building models yourself. Mostly that meant leaving a model to train overnight and finding out it had died in the first ten minutes. After that I ran growth for a few startups, and then started one of my own. Startups taught me a lot, most of it about what I did not want to spend my life on. The work I kept drifting back to was the unglamorous public kind, budgets, laws, policies, incentives, and records nobody reads. So I stopped silicon-valley tech stuff and started the Civic Lab.

Not everything I do is neutral. I built Rip City Not Rip Off, a campaign about the City's Moda Center deal, arguing that Portland should not put around $573 million of public money into the arena without private capital in the deal, a share of the new revenue, and rent closer to what the same owner pays in Raleigh. It comes from the same place as the rest of this, reading the actual terms and comparing them against what other cities got. It is also advocacy, so the Lab publishes the conflict and takes no paid work touching the arena negotiation while the campaign runs.

I'm someone who can't stop asking "but how does this actually work?" Whether it's America's corporate oligopolies, Israel's hidden security taxes, or why my perfectly good tweets get zero traction.

I'm obsessed with invisible systems. I want to map the hidden architecture of power, the stuff that shapes our lives but stays conveniently out of view. If there's an economic structure quietly extracting wealth or a political framework pretending to be neutral, I want to dig into it.

I care deeply about structural inequality. Poor kids have a 7.5% chance of making it into the top 20%, while rich kids have a 40%+ chance of staying there. Rich kids are more likely to graduate college even when they have worse test scores than poor kids. The game is rigged, and it means we're wasting enormous amounts of American (and global) talent. I write and dream about an America where opportunity isn't predetermined by your zip code. Where an actual plumber can build plumbing software and domain experts don't need to cosplay as engineers. AI might finally let people with actual knowledge build solutions, instead of watching well-connected Stanford (+MIT, etc) grads spend two weeks learning an industry then raising millions. That possibility excites me.

I'll engage with anyone's ideas seriously. I've spent time with Chomsky, Yarvin, and everyone in between. Not because I agree with them all (I definitely don't), but because I'd rather understand the strongest version of an argument than dismiss it. Even when someone's conclusions are terrible, their reasoning might be interesting.

I really care about trade-offs more than principles. Don't tell me something is "necessary" or "for safety." Tell me what it costs per unit of good achieved and what else we could buy for the same money. Every dollar misallocated is a dollar not spent on something better. This makes me insufferable at dinner parties.

I try to think about conflict without picking teams. Whether it's Israel-Palestine or American politics, I want to understand power dynamics, historical context, and what different frameworks reveal. Simple hero-villain narratives bore me. Messy reality fascinates me.

I'm a pragmatic idealist. Yes, our systems are deeply broken. Yes, incremental improvements still matter. No, these aren't contradictory. I want to understand how power actually works and imagine how it could work differently. Revolutionary thinking meets spreadsheet analysis.

Music is central to how I understand the world. It's how I engage with history, transcendence, and everything that doesn't fit neatly into analytical frameworks. I like building community and run a recording studio in Gowanus. I like listening to things that rewires how I think. Music is where I find joy and wonder that logic can't quite reach.

I'm not above the frivolous. I like to eat out a lot, go on long walks, and lose repeatedly on the AOE2 ranked ladder.

Mostly I'm just trying to see clearly. Even when (especially when) I don't like what I see.