Unlike most About pages, used by companies to paper over the chaos and associated fellonies of their early days, I’ll take a stab at honesty here. I’ll also get personal. As suspicious as I am of leaders who overshare (usually to virtue signal), everyone who moves to New Athens is jumping in the deep end. If you’re drawn to the city, you deserve to know who’ll be pulling a lot of the strings.

Five of my personal interests merged into New Athens.

First, before New Athens took shape, I was considering starting a Classical charter school. I had recently helped start another. Hiring and retaining great teachers is extremely difficult, so I ran a little exercise. I designed a theoretical school around a single goal: be the best possible workplace for teachers. Then I considered who I could realistically hire and retain. In short, the experiment failed: it was a middling work environment. The problem was that I couldn’t overcome disruptive student behavior and bad habits that start at home. This may sound mean and judgmental, but if you’ve worked in a school, you know. Short of convincing every parent to put down their phone, the best teachers would lose patience and quit within a couple years. (More or less, this has already happened nationally.) I decided the only option was to go down a level: a city.

Second, my wife and I want our two boys to grow up in a not-completely-insane world. We don’t see that future taking shape anywhere in the US right now. If we can raise the boys to be anything besides cruel manosphere actual-racist lunatics, and they marry women who are anything besides hysterical Kool Aide-guzzling communist lunatics, and we get some grandkids out of the equation, we win. Time to roll up the sleeves.

Third, I came up with a theory we discuss a lot behind the scenes. I’m not sure how original this is, but the theory is that disputes over the proper use of technology are growing just as fast as the AI industry, if not faster, and may spark a major social schism in the US, if not globally. One side will adopt the digital world as the real world, and the other side will step back from life online and recommit to physical reality. Not full-meal-deal Amish, but with a fundamental skepticism in lieu of fundamental excitement for new technologies. This schism will scramble politics, again. This is a big prediction that may not come true, but it’s been useful to ponder in fleshing out the basic contours of the city.

Forth, I’ve long been intrigued by what America does with its “best and brightest,” as the saying goes. (Who are usually just kids with rich and/or ball-buster parents, though exceptions exist.) Before I was born, these beasts supported the space race and winning the cold war. When I was a little kid, they got funneled into finance and consulting jobs on the East Coast. By the time I left home, the destination had moved yet again: Silicon Valley, where software was eating the world! (I showed up too, though as a broke photographer.) Today our best and brightest are being funneled into the AI industry. At their computers, they’re working hard to put everyone else out of work. Also, the hours are long, so they’re intentionally not starting families, further disconnecting them from anything anyone’s ancestors would remotely consider a good life, wisdom, or reality. I know flipping out on the About page is probably a bad look, but honestly this is so stupid—full-on stooooopid—it makes me want to blow my brains out. I have a better idea: how about we take our smartest and most ambitious young people and set them to work rebuilding civilization for families? Socially useful. Deeply rewarding. Hardest challenge there’s ever been, or ever will be. And maybe we won’t go extinct. You follow.

Finally, back in 2014 when I was living in San Francisco, I got scared the San Andreas fault would pop and the entire West Coast would fall into the ocean. It wasn’t just me—a bunch of scientists were saying it’s happened before and will happen again. I Googled “Prepper” and got a bunch of gun ads. The deeper you go down that rabbit hole, the more people you find with shipping containers full of ammo, fridges full of illicit antibiotics, and overwhelming fear and paranoia. I made me feel bad. But I like people, I reminded myself, so I came up with another idea: why not build a resilient community here in the good times, so when the bad times come the people with the guns would prefer to join the community rather than shoot everyone and take all our stuff? I got sidetracked with young kids for a decade, but in some respects New Athens is a revival of my desire to be helpful and thus joined, rather than useless and looted.

Along the way I’ve been inspired by…almost everything and everyone. Recently, I’ve been enjoying the writing and speaking of Mary Harrington, Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Haidt, Walter Kirn, Louise Perry, Rob Henderson, Charles Marohn, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying.

At a later date I’ll write about my brush with communism as a teenager, where, traveling alone in propaganda-plastered China, in the aftermath of man-made famine, I did not see a single adult man over 50 who was taller than 5’3”. A few months later I visited the S-21 prison and killing fields in Cambodia, where I stood in front of a 25-foot pile of human skulls as the grandchildren of the dead tugged my pant leg, begging for money. I’ve been asked if I’m “excited to be in charge of a whole city.” On the contrary I fear revolution in my bones and view government, in the first place, as a magnet for narcissists and psychopaths. I’d live in the woods if I didn’t have children with their whole lives ahead of them. Alas. Duty calls.