Against Entropy: Rebuilding the Foundations of Resilient Systems, from Factory Floors to Dinner Tables

From afar, the work I do might seem scattered: industrial policy, healthcare research, reindustrialization, hosting dinner parties. But beneath the surface, they are all part of the same fight.

They are each places where our societal foundations have been worn thin, where the machinery of industry, care, and community is degrading in a world that’s faster, more volatile, and more fragmented. They are places where both technical precision and human repair are needed to make systems whole again.

This is what my work is about: rebuilding the architectures: industrial, civic, and social, that let people, organizations, and communities not only survive the shocks and entropic forces of an unpredictable world but build something resilient and human.

Marrying Odd Things

I’ve built something of a reputation, both intentionally and by accident, for combining things that, at first glance, don’t seem to go together. My academic background alone raises eyebrows: Industrial Engineering and Anthropology. I have yet to meet anyone else who holds degrees in both. For much of my early career, these disciplines felt like two ends of a rope I was constantly tugging at. The one steeped in optimization, data, and technical systems; the other grounded in lived experience, culture, and the messy realities of human behavior. Though after some reflection, conversation, and experimentation early in my undergraduate, I’ve stopped seeing them as opposites and started seeing them as complementary lenses. Rather, both are essential for understanding the systems that shape our world. Whether we’re talking about healthcare, manufacturing, or communities, these are always both technically complex and deeply human. The ability to navigate both sides is a necessity.

Part of what helped me reconcile these “odd” pairings is drawing from Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigms and, more importantly, the meta-perspective that systems science offers. Systems science gives a philosophical and methodological bridge where seemingly distinct or even contradictory approaches can be made to coexist. It’s not about smoothing over contradictions or forcing harmony where none exists. It’s about understanding tension between paradigms to allow new insights emerge, insights that wouldn’t have surfaced from either approach alone. This way of thinking has become my north star: embracing the frictions between data and narrative, and using them holistically towards more effective interventions. It’s what allows me to move fluidly between sectors while still anchoring in a systems lens that refuses to reduce complex problems to tidy checklists.

And when zoomed out, the different arenas I write about: reindustrialization, industrial policy, healthcare research, and community building, aren’t as disconnected as they might seem. They’re different entry points into the same puzzle: how do we rebuild and redesign systems to serve both human and technical needs in a world that’s increasingly volatile and fragmented? In the sections that follow, I’ll unpack why each of these areas has pulled at me over the years, and then weave them back together into a larger story of where I think the most important work is happening today.

Reindustrialization

Despite having "industrial" in the name, my industrial engineering education rarely steered students toward actual industry. Like many programs, it nudged top performers toward consulting, data science, or operations research, the fields where the work felt cleaner, faster, more prestigious. Manufacturing was something of an afterthought, a career path that felt like it was viewed as a bit ‘old-fashioned’. Though, amidst these pushes, I still read my manufacturing techniques book cover to cover and stared obsessively at cutting force diagrams.

Though, it wasn’t until I started paying closer attention to geopolitics that I realized how critical reindustrialization is, not just as an economic necessity, but as a foundation of national security and quality of life. A nation that doesn’t make things is a nation in decline. Service economies, for all their promises of endless growth, exist in an entropic state: they can only degrade over time without the anchor of physical production. Even our so-called knowledge economies depend on the infrastructure and tools that manufacturing provides. When you lose the ability to make, you lose the ability to learn, adapt, and defend. Innovation simply cannot exist for long without the proximity of production.

This realization hit me first intellectually, then emotionally. I came to see the hollowing out of our industrial base not just as a symptom of national degradation but as one of its root causes. It tied deeply into my own patriotic instincts: a simple desire to see the country strong, safe, and resilient again.

That’s when I stumbled into the hardtech startup world through Twitter. It was like opening a door to a different timeline. Here were people, engineers, founders, builders, who hadn’t just accepted the decline of manufacturing; they were reinventing it. Through new techniques, new models of financing, and, most importantly, a reimagined culture that made manufacturing not just relevant again but aspirational. Attending Reindustrialize 1.0 was a turning point. Watching the opening video, something clicked: I saw a space where I could bring my full self: technical, intellectual, and, particularly, patriotic towards doing the patient work of building systems that keep a country resilient, adaptive, and whole.

But even in these circles, I saw a gap that spoke to both my IE and anthropology sides. While the technical talent is there in the brilliant people working on the hard problems of logistics, reshoring, and manufacturing processes, the “soft” infrastructures are still missing. The connectors between people, strategy, sourcing, and policy are not often in the limelight, yet they are the glue that makes the hard pieces work. My work now lives in that space: helping bridge the worlds of hardtech and human systems, ensuring that the energy we’re putting into reindustrialization is supported by the cultural, organizational, and informational architectures it needs to endure.

Industrial Policy

While reindustrialization sparked a clear personal and professional calling, I quickly realized that my understanding of the policy side was quite limited. I didn’t encounter industrial policy in my coursework, neither in engineering nor in the few economics classes I took. It simply wasn’t on the radar. Even in broader public discourse, industrial policy barely registered. The dominant economic narratives in the U.S., influenced heavily by Austrian and libertarian schools of thought, treat government intervention in industry as either irrelevant or harmful. That consensus has shaped not only how we talk about economics, but how we think about the very legitimacy of national strategy in production.

For a while, I didn’t question it. It was only after immersing myself in the reindustrialization and hardtech startup communities, through events like Reindustrialize and through the networks I built on X, that I started to see the blind spots. Particularly, if the semi-interventionist industrial policies were ‘always harmful’ as the current economic schools taught, why did they lead to the first American Golden Age and the current rise of East Asia? These communities are filled with builders who understand the technical and entrepreneurial sides of manufacturing resurgence, alongside the role of policy mechanism that make (or unmake) industrial capacity.

So I started from scratch. I had to teach myself the basics: the key pieces of legislation that shaped American industry over the last century, the often-forgotten decisions that led to the erosion of our manufacturing base, the tools other countries use to shape their industrial futures. It became clear that reindustrialization can’t just be a cultural or technical movement. Without shaping the policies that govern industry, the movement risks building on sand. Policies influence everything from supply chains to workforce development to how capital flows into (or away from) strategic sectors.

Industrial policy is still a language I’m learning. But it’s one that, like systems science, helps connect the dots between the work of individuals, firms, and communities and the broader architectures of power, investment, and national direction. If we want to build a resilient, sovereign industrial base, policy is a critical component of the conversation.

Hosting and Community Building

Parallel to my professional work in reindustrialization and systems, I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking and writing about something that might seem far removed: hosting and community building. In many ways, this work grew from personal frustrations. Growing up in the U.S., I saw firsthand how atomized and fractured our society had become. My parents, like many of their generation, didn’t really have close friends. Social life peaked in high school or college, and from there, it became a slow drift into isolation. Friends and family scattered across states and time zones, and without strong local networks, people turn inward, focused on survival within the walls of their own homes, with little capacity or trust left for broader engagement.

I realized I didn’t want that future for myself or my family. I didn’t want to live in a world where the relationships that mattered were digital. I wanted to rebuild high-trust pockets within an increasingly atomized and digitized society. I wanted spaces where friendships weren’t just for leisure, but became the foundation for deeper participation in the world around us. I wanted the kinds of friendships and communities that exceeded momentary or transactional forms.

This is a longing of the human soul. Every time I would talk about my friendships and hosting, about the art of gathering people in intentional, meaningful ways, I get the same response: “Yes, I want that. But I don’t know how.” It’s not that people are disinterested. It’s that we’ve lost the social muscle memory. We no longer have the lived models of what healthy, durable communities look like, much less how to build them from scratch.

That’s why a lot of my writing in this space is focused not just on romanticizing community, but on giving people the tools to make it real. How to host dinners. How to start a group. How to create spaces that are hospitable, yet still rooted in the reality of a busy world. It’s all connected, in the end. Whether I’m writing about manufacturing, healthcare, or neighborhoods, it’s always about systems. And communities are systems too, perhaps the most fragile and maintenance-intensive of all. They require constant tending, invisible labor, and infrastructures of trust, consistency, and commitment that, once eroded, take generations to rebuild.

Healthcare in Argentina

Healthcare was never my first love. But it turned out to be a perfect case study for the kinds of systems I’m most interested in. On paper, it was also an easy sell: when you’re looking for funding or partnerships, you can fit almost any systems problem into a one-page proposal if you tie it to healthcare. But beneath that practicality, what drew me in was the way healthcare systems so vividly sit at the intersection of human and technical complexity.

Healthcare, at its core, is a technical system that’s filled with machines, hierarchies, protocols, and workflows. But it’s also deeply human: shaped by administrators, doctors, nurses, and patients, all with egos, emotions, histories, and experiences into the system. You can’t separate the technical and human in healthcare and expect to have an effective model. Over and over in my research, whether interviewing rural patients in Argentina, navigating insurance bureaucracy or mapping barriers and enablers to care access, I found that most breakdowns in healthcare weren’t due to the technical side alone. Rather, the “soft,” human aspects: trust, education, willingness to challenge the system, misunderstandings between providers and communities dominate the change-able aspects of healthcare delivery.

What became clear is that healthcare cannot be effectively optimized in either domain (technical or human) on its own. There’s too much interaction. You need a holistic approach that sees the system as both in the totality of its mechanistic and social components, as both process and narrative. Healthcare became, for me, a living laboratory to test my models of how to manage and improve complex socio-technical systems.

It also became a space where I could tie together my eclectic toolkit: pairing cybernetics with ethnography, critical systems thinking with network analysis, bringing together theories from engineering, anthropology, and systems science into a cohesive practice. My work in Argentina especially highlighted the need for these blended approaches, where geography, policy, culture, and technology all collide, and where solving one layer of the problem often reveals three more hidden beneath it.

Healthcare taught me that systems are often finicky. And the only way to make them better is to engage with them as whole systems: technically messy, unpredictable, and deeply human.

The Rope (not Thread) that Connects

People often ask how all these seemingly unrelated interests fit together: reindustrialization, industrial policy, healthcare research, hosting dinner parties. The easy answer is systems science. But that undersells it. These are all, in their own ways, arenas where I’m grappling with the fraying foundations of American life. Societal layers that have worn thin by decades of neglect, abstraction, and fragmentation.

Reindustrialization is the forward-looking project: rebuilding my country’s capacity, strength, and sovereignty over the long arc of decades. Industrial policy is the rearview mirror: excavating how we got here, what was lost, and the quiet, often invisible, decisions, both intentional and accidental, that shaped the brittle conditions we now face. Hosting and community building is immediate and intimate: stitching together the social fabric that makes broader participation possible and durable. Healthcare research has been my proving ground: the crucible where I’ve learned to see, study, and intervene in systems where the human and technical are inseparable.

But underneath all of it runs a deeper current: resisting the dangerous assumption that systems naturally tend toward progress or order. They don’t. They, like everything, are under the influence of entropy. Left untended, they drift toward decay. Trust erodes. Knowledge calcifies. Infrastructure crumbles. Whether it’s a nation’s factories or a community’s bonds, entropy wins unless we actively intervene, repair, and rebuild.

And those interventions can’t live in silos. The health of a nation’s factories is bound up in the health of its communities. The strength of a supply chain mirrors the strength of the relationships that move it forward. The resilience of a healthcare system depends not just on machines and protocols, but on the invisible infrastructures of care, solidarity, and reciprocity between people.

All of my work, whether on factory floors, in clinics, or around kitchen tables, is about creating the conditions for systems to do more than survive shocks. It’s about making them more resilient, more human-centered, more robust against the slow violence of neglect and the sudden shocks of a volatile world. And that work is always both technical and human. It is always more tangled than our diagrams suggest, always demanding more attention than our institutions are designed to reward.

In the end, it’s not about balancing the human and the technical. It’s about refusing the false separation altogether. It’s about recognizing that real resilience only emerges when we build systems that are technically sturdy enough to endure and human enough to hold us, always in the pursuit of fighting entropy.