About Me

Narrowly, I’m an education entrepreneur, founder of The Socratic Experience, a virtual school for students grades 3-12. It is based thirty-five years’ experience creating innovative schools and programs. For an early statement of my pedagogy, see The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice.

More broadly, I’m interested in how innovations in institution and culture can improve the human condition. Basically human outcomes are the result of a genetic substrate, exogenous physical reality, and human institutions and cultures. While I’m vaguely interested in improvements in the human genetic substrate, my sense is that potential improvements in human institutions and cultures in the coming decades are an order of magnitude more significant with respect to potential impact. Yet very few are focused on systematically improving legacy institutions and cultures. Thus I’m an advocate for the broader recognition of:

Strong’s Law:

Ceteris parabis, properly structured free enterprise always results over time in higher quality, lower cost, and more customized/niche products and services.

This includes law, governance, culture, + community, those domains where we most need innovation.

This leads me to a deep interest in, and commitment to, innovation in law and governance, especially as manifested in the global movement towards Startup Cities, Free Cities, Charter Cities, Network States, Seasteading, Special Economic Zones with innovative law and governance, and other approaches to the creation of a globally competitive ecosystem of law and governance. My blogging at Let a Thousand Nations Bloom is a partial record of many of my thoughts on this movement. As Seasteading President Joe Quirk notes, “Don’t argue, build.”

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