I’m a designer, technologist, adventurer, and mystic living up on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, in the heart of Cascadia.
My work prioritizes curiosity over certainty, awareness over distraction, agency over convenience, and our natural world over virtual ones.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
— John Cage
I have a hard time understanding my nature when I'm not in nature, so my wife Kristie Dahlia and I spend a lot of time in the woods and the desert and the sea. Out there we’ve learned that we don’t need much to be happy, that less comfort makes us feel more alive, and that the occasional real fear of death extinguishes most other anxiety. When we’re back home we try to remember.
I am fascinated by how little we understand about how consciousness works, and exploring the threshold of that understanding is a lifelong passion. I like talking about design, technology, and adventure, but I love talking about the mystery.
I’m grateful you’re here.
02022 – NOW
I’m the Director of Communications & Design for The Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 01996 by Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, and Danny Hillis.
We foster long-term thinking and responsibility by encouraging imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
02017 – 02022
In 02018, after twenty years in San Francisco and a year long DIY refit, we sailed Rejoice, a 40 foot Hallberg-Rassy sloop, out the Golden Gate and south to Mexico and the extraordinary Gulf of California.
We spent four years living aboard and it really changed our priorities. We wrote about it over on Getting Free.
02010 – 02017
I was a Senior Product Designer at Google for seven years, where I led design projects on Search, Material, and Fuchsia.
I was Design Director at Metaweb when we were acquired by Google, and the technologies we had spent five years creating became the foundation for the Knowledge Graph and dozens of other machine learning efforts at the company.
I think parties are magic. I staffed my first TED in 01999, and followed Richard Saul Wurman to EG in 02003, which I helped produce for over 15 years. I co-founded the SF Embassy, a collective of music-loving city explorers founded at SxSW in 02010 — when we went to Iceland in 02013, we were the second largest group of Americans to visit that year. I also helped out with Yes and Yes Yes, another SxSW offshoot that threw the whole conference in the giant pool at the Ace Palm Springs. When I went to Burning Man in 01996, it was the first time I had to “voluntarily assume the risk of injury or death” to attend something, which I liked so much that I went back to the evanescent desert city nine more times. The 02010 Kumbh Mela at Haridwar is the largest human gathering I've been in — over 40 million people came to bathe in the Ganges over the course of the event, which has happened every three years in one of four locations in India for centuries.
I am fascinated by communities both ephemeral and eternal, and how the roles we play in them change who we are.
We're back on land, but we learned we really like to get out there in the wilderness on the regular. We built out Stevie, a 20 year old Land Cruiser 100, using a lot of what we learned living aboard.
In 02022 we drove her over 8,000 miles, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Yucca Valley, up 11,000 feet to Great Basin's Mount Washington, and back down under the old growth redwoods in Northern California, before finding new roots on the Olympic Peninsula. More adventures to come.