Right now, I'm mostly focused on understanding the political, economic, and technological changes coming with AI. I've summarized that work here and I update the page regularly. Some recent highlights:
- In September 2026, I gave a series of talks in Spain on the labor effects of AI based on this slidedeck.
- To understand why everyone hates data centers, I transcribed and then analyzed two hearings in my hometown of Springfield, Illinois just as opposition was heating up nationally. That research formed the basis of my piece "The Political Backlash to Data Centers." I have also written about data centers here and here.
- And long before it was debated, I laid out a limited antitrust exemption proposal to deal with AI safety titled, "The Case for an AI Safety Safe Harbor."
My Substack is called Exformation. It's where I send updates on my work and publish personal essays. The blog on this site serves as a scratchpad to work out ideas before publishing them. For a while, I authored the Techne newsletter at The Dispatch. You can read about why I decided to change course here. My publications page lists of all my work, op-eds, essays. You can find my bio and more information about me here.
I’ve written policy papers on the lessons of the Apollo mission; the CHIPS Act and semiconductor economics; the regulation of over-the-counter COVID tests and other commercial diagnostic kits; the constitutional and legal challenges of regulating TikTok; and the efficacy of municipal broadband projects.
I'm a big fan of finding unique methods to understand public policy problems. For example, in "Where broadband likely exists in the United States," I estimated the broadband gap in the United States using a survey conducted by the Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative and logit models. Almost a decade ago, I collected screenshots from the uberdrivers subreddit to estimate how much drivers were making. But right now, I'm working on a longer paper that uses LLM personas to conduct quick regulatory compliance cost, based on these initial blog posts.
The U.S. needs to reform its system of excessive veto power, its vetocracy. The vetocracy paralyzes decision-making at every level, frustrating efforts to build homes, nuclear power plants, solar and wind projects, add new hospital beds, lay railroad tracks, and start businesses. I've collected the evidence of a vetocracy here. San Francisco is what happens when vetocracy comes to dominate a city. I'm also convinced the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Helene in Asheville were worsened because NEPA was used to stop a dam project in the 1970s. But the answer isn’t degrowth. While I am not completely wedded to the concept of the abundance agenda, it is a useful framing for what needs to be achieved. We should focus on economic growth. We need to go faster.I'm also interested in the concept of time; the perils and promise of geoengineering; if we should be vaccinating mosquitoes; whether its important that the FDA made aging a disease; King Tut's meteorite dagger; how real options analysis could help improve regulatory decisions; heuristics guiding my research into politics and policy; broadband buildout; and the moving goal posts of the net neutrality debate.Extra Resources
For my research fellows and students, I created a syllabus of key texts for tech policy, as well as a public policy cheatsheet. If you're interested in housing policy, I put together a housing and urbanism FAQ. For economists using ChatGPT, check out my prompts. For a full list of datasets, resources, technical manuals, and the like, check out my commonplace. I'm also constantly updating my working bibliographies on social media research, philosophy of technology, and theorems of cognition.