The Pentagon credited its $600,000 armored trucks with saving as many as 30,000 lives in Afghanistan. But my co-author and I got our hands on the data and found that math didn’t hold up. Within weeks of our Foreign Affairs article, the official estimate came down to over two thousand. Even then, our years of research counted as just one estimate. The old number stuck around and got repeated in the press. It had friends in high places. Robert Gates, who’d championed the $45 billion spend as Secretary of Defense, disputed our finding in a statement to USA Today; Ashton Carter, who went on to become Secretary of Defense himself, co-wrote a rebuttal.

How’d that shaky number travel as far as it did?

I study how ideas catch on: why some get amplified while others never get a first look. Fame Machines picks apart the systems that route attention (filters, hubs, halos, and feedback loops) and turns them into practical moves writers, creators, and builders can actually use.

I released music as Moose and did what I could to move the needle. Big names jump to the top of your feed; small fries like me blow their ad spend and get squat. That on-the-ground education in playlists, gatekeepers, and the attention gap helped spark this book.

I've worked in academia as an econ professor, spent a decade at Morgan Stanley as an Executive Director in predictive modeling, and most recently led AI safety research for classrooms at MagicSchool AI. I hold doctorates from Chicago, where Freakonomics author Steve Levitt advised my dissertation, and from Columbia, and I've published more than twenty academic articles in economics, AI, and neuroscience. I've given invited talks at MIT, the Pentagon, and West Point.

I designed the visuals for Fame Machines using a mix of code-based generation, digital editing, and generative AI. I live in Savannah, Georgia with my wife Stephanie and a growing collection of houseplants.