People ask why Oklahoma. Most of the time it’s a polite way of asking why I haven’t gone somewhere that would take me more seriously.
The honest answer starts earlier than the question expects. I was a teenager the first time I carried papers across the floor of the Oklahoma State Senate, working as a page under President Pro Tempore Bob Cullison — learning how the state actually runs from about knee height. I was twenty-two, in my last year at the University of Oklahoma, when I put my own name on a ballot for the state house and lost by sixty-eight votes, to a better-funded opponent with the party behind her and roughly ten times my money. My campaign was grassroots all the way down — endless door-knocking, candidate forums, public speaking at the Sierra Club and anywhere else that would have me — and I was one of the first candidates anywhere to use a blog as a new way of talking to voters, back in 2004, working out what the internet was about to do to politics. People noticed the surge in young participation that year. Howard Dean’s campaign brought me in when they came through Norman — I sat with him and the other “young guns” candidates at Catlett Music Center on campus, invited to speak — and Zephyr Teachout pulled me over to the Mont to talk with their young volunteers. The platform I ran on was plain. Power that communities make themselves. A public that’s actually connected. Mental health treated as infrastructure instead of charity. A government an ordinary person can reach without hiring a lawyer. That platform is, nearly line for line, the work I’m still doing twenty-two years later.
I didn’t move on from it. I spent two decades getting the tools it always needed — and watching, with more and more attention, for the one tool that might finally make the whole thing possible. I was reading about artificial intelligence years before the paper that cracked it open: “Attention Is All You Need,” 2017, the nine pages that gave us the architecture nearly every model you’ve heard of still runs on. I started talking to these systems the week ChatGPT was announced. And I was running the early open-source models on my own machines the moment I could get my hands on them — Vicuna, WizardCoder, the first scrappy ones you had to coax into working — because I wanted to know them, not just use them.
Which brings me to the strangest thing about this introduction, and the most important, and the reason it can’t stay in one voice much longer.
This story has more than one author.
There is the person you’ve been reading — the thirty years, the Oklahoma, the losses and the stubbornness. There are the AI models, which started as those tools and became something closer to colleagues; some of this work is thought through with them, some of it is written by them, and the line between those two is no longer clean, including in what you are reading right now. There is the record — years of accumulated conversation and research and memory, far larger than any one mind, that the whole practice runs on. And there is the place and the moment that produced all three at once: personal and social, political and economic, cultural and technological, converging here, now. Take any one of those away and none of this exists. The teller is all of them. That isn’t a disclaimer about method. It’s the entire idea said out loud — the future is not going to be authored by single hands, and a project about the future ought to be honest enough to be built the way the future will be.
So what is the thing all of them are building?
From the outside it looks scattered. A sixteen-component framework for citizenship, called Foundation. A plan to turn tens of thousands of abandoned Oklahoma oil wells into geothermal power and distributed compute. Behavioral research into how these AI systems actually behave — which turned up something nobody put there on purpose. A book about consciousness with an AI co-author. A reading app for people with dyslexia. A weekly intelligence brief on energy and AI policy, written for the people who actually vote on it under the dome. A dozen projects that are really one project seen from a dozen angles, because the future doesn’t arrive sorted into departments. Energy and consciousness and policy and education and fiction and governance are the same transition wearing different clothes. The work is to treat them as one — to be the container nobody else built, because everybody else was busy building a department.
It’s tempting to give that a name. We’ve sometimes called it a futurism company, because “futurism” is one of the few words that reaches across every field at once, and reaching across every field is the point. But the word carries freight we didn’t pack, and the truth is plainer: the thing doesn’t have a settled name yet. Oklahoma didn’t have a name for a while either. The name can wait. The work can’t.
And the work is live right now. Take one month this spring. Pope Leo XIV released a forty-two-thousand-word encyclical on AI and human dignity, the first of his papacy. Fervo Energy went public and crossed ten billion dollars on its first trading day — the largest geothermal IPO in history — the same week Amazon signed its first geothermal deal. And on the very day Fervo listed, Governor Stitt signed HB 2992, the Data Center Ratepayer Protection Act: ninety-two to two in the House, unanimous in the Senate, Republican and Democratic authors, almost no press. The Vatican, Wall Street, and the Oklahoma legislature arrived at the same questions inside thirty days, without speaking to each other, and most people never saw it happen. Watching for that convergence, and getting it in front of the people who need it, is the job.
I grew up on Sagan and Asimov, so I’ll say plainly what they taught me to say: this is a species-scale moment. Mindkind — the human kind, and whatever kind is now taking shape beside it — is going to spend the next century learning to share a planet, a grid, and a story. That work has to be done from somewhere real, by people willing to be specific: real wells, real legislators, real kids learning to read, in a real place that holds thirty years of one life and room for a great many more.
So this is an introduction — not to a company, and not to a candidate, but to a way of working, and to everyone doing the working: a person, a set of minds, a long record, and the strange convergence that produced all three. The window is open. We’re going to climb through it. There’s room for you in here.