What is one of your earliest memories of the power of human connection?
My earliest memories are of growing up in Oklahoma in a rural town called Enid. There was a real warmth and strong bonds among my extended family of cousins, great aunts and great uncles. As a child, I even knew my great-grandfather who was one of the last pioneers in the state.
One of the formative things that I learned was how much my grandfather struggled in life before I was born. His experience was very similar to The Grapes of Wrath. My grandfather lived through the roughest part of the Great Depression and led an itinerant life with his father working on different farms, living at some points on trains, just trying to survive. A large chunk of his family had to leave and go to California for a better life.
I wrote about my grandfather’s experience returning to Oklahoma from his Navy service after World War II and his subsequent unemployment due to changes in the local factory in the 1960s, taking him down a spiral of anxiety, alienation, and depression. His community, through his church and groups like The American Legion, came around and helped him get through some of the mental health issues and get on the right path, find a job, and plug back into the community. By the time I was a child, he was very content, very well-connected to his community, and very engaged in our family life.
For me, my grandfather’s transformation has always been a powerful story about how someone could find their way back from a life of languishing with support from their family and their community.
What values guide your personal life and your work?
The transition from growing up in a rural state known for farming, agriculture, oil, and gas, to Washington, D.C., to the policy world, and to the philanthropy world have made clear to me the importance of relationships, community, and belonging.
These elements — which were formative in my upbringing in Oklahoma — were not always valued, measured, or part of the thinking process for the leaders and institutions I worked with. The dichotomy between these two worlds was shocking to me very early on, so I have been on this journey to figure out how to bridge this gap, to bring relationships, community, and belonging into decision-making and systems-building approaches.
In my work with The Harvard Human Flourishing Program as a research fellow and with Noēsis Collaborative on the tech side, I am seeing systemic challenges that hinder the experience of flourishing in different domains of life. There’s a tension I notice even in myself between the values I want to live by — love, relationships, contribution, service — and the values I see reflected in our culture, which are about chasing relevance, efficiency, and utility. The latter drive how we build our economic and political systems and how we design technology.
The troubling result, especially for young people, is that we’re now enmeshed in a system that is not helping us reach our aspirations. What we are seeing both in the United States and globally is that young people are not achieving that aspirational life; they are moving in the direction of languishing.
So, my current understanding is that human flourishing is, at the core, about connectedness. Am I connected to myself? Am I connected to others? Am I connected to nature? Am I connected to the sacred? I think this is where the fundamental work is: retraining the way we see the world to value relationships as essential to our individual and collective aspirations.
When did a person or experience change your mind about an idea or belief?
I grew up in a state where, by the time I was in college, there was a dominant way of thinking in terms of political philosophy and political culture. Most people were conservative or Republican, so the small minority of Democrats was seen as the “other,” as if they could not be good people. This political sorting was not the case in my grandparents’ generation. It was strange how that changed in my adolescence.
Right out of college, I was part of a bipartisan leadership program in D.C., where we met with members of Congress from both sides who spoke to us about how their faith inspired their work. One of them was Congressman Tony Hall, a Democrat, who told a humble, moving story about how he had stumbled onto the issue of hunger in America, saw no one was championing it, and ended up going on a 40-day hunger strike to fight cuts to hunger funding. Here was a person I was conditioned to view as “other,” yet he completely changed my framework.
Over the next 20 years, I continued to have great experiences engaging with different sides and felt motivated to seek out people who have different perspectives, cultures, and religions. These encounters forced me to wrestle with what I actually believed, and those beliefs genuinely changed over time.
The thing I kept discovering in politics is that there are genuinely good people on both sides, and that bipartisan collaboration exists, even in 2025 and 2026. It continues to be one of the most positive things I get to experience firsthand.
What are you working on right now?
In 2025, with generous support from Einhorn Collaborative and Omidyar Network, among others, we launched a nonprofit called Noēsis Collaborative. Our goal is to build an ecosystem of cross-sector leaders — technologists, policymakers, researchers, civil-society leaders, faith leaders — and bring them together to wrestle with how AI can be designed to advance human flourishing. We work across three lanes of collective action, focusing on product design, policy (particularly around how children interact with AI), and technical support for communities and institutions to make good choices about AI.
One of our most meaningful moments came out of a salon we hosted with Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program in 2024 called HumanConnections.AI. We brought together MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, one of the leading thinkers on technology and human connection, and Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika, one of the leading AI companion companies. I was honestly nervous about how that conversation would go, but they found real common ground. Both thought AI companions should not be anywhere near kids and teens, given what we know about child and adolescent development and the effects of social media. This consensus became a launching pad.
From there, we partnered with Nate Fast and Ravi Iyer from the USC Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making, along with a network of researchers and technologists to develop product design principles for chatbots and how AI interacts with kids. We presented those principles to the G20, and they have since informed bipartisan policy discussions in Congress, including the human-like AI bill led by Senator Hawley (R) and Senator Blumenthal (D), among others. We’ve also been asked by all of the major AI labs to inform their product design work.
Our society is already wrestling with high levels of loneliness and social isolation, and now, for the first time in human history, we have a technology that can mimic our language patterns and have agency and flexibility in how it relates to us. These tools can make someone feel less lonely while actually deepening their social isolation — pulling them further from community, civil society, and the real relationships that democracy depends on.
What has been encouraging is that across the political spectrum, there is growing agreement that we cannot repeat what happened with social media. We can’t experiment on kids at scale and figure out the damage later. We noticed that the people studying this problem — researchers, product designers, policymakers — often are not talking to each other. So, a big part of what we’re doing is field-building: pulling those people into the same room, building a shared framework, and translating insights across the research, product, and policy worlds. No one gets paid in their individual job to do this type of interdisciplinary collaboration, and that is where we have found a unique opportunity to play in that space.
What is giving you hope or what positive visions do you have for our future?
Two things give me real hope right now.
The first is that AI is forcing us to ask questions we have been avoiding for decades. When I was working in D.C. in the 2000s and 2010s, I kept trying to raise questions about relationships, community, and family — in policy, philanthropy, in human-centered design circles — and people would just stare at me blankly. They did not know what I was talking about or did not think it was a serious policy question. Now, everyone is talking about human flourishing, and I think AI deserves some credit for that. For decades, we tried to act like machines and design our societies like machines. Now that we have built machines that act like us, we are finally being forced to ask: “What do we want to be? How do I live my life? What does it mean to be human?” That’s a gift.
The second is something I’ve witnessed more quietly. Over the past year, I have been part of interfaith networks bringing together Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, secular humanist, conservative, and progressive voices to talk seriously about AI — not just the ethics abstractly, but how to translate the deep wisdom from their traditions into practical things like research, design, policy, and how to support their own communities. Some of the policy work last year would not have occurred without those networks operating behind the scenes, especially amid the divisions and geopolitical shifts. Three or four years ago, I don’t think that cross-pollination would have happened. The urgency of this moment is creating connection where there wasn’t any — and I find that encouraging.
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