george-mason-university
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Jordan Bramble
Jordan Bramble is the co-founder and CEO of Antares Nuclear (Antares Industries), a Torrance, California company building factory-produced, transportable fission microreactors of up to 1 MW for defense, remote industrial, and space applications. A systems engineer and physicist who did a stint in federal policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Bramble started Antares in 2023 on a contrarian bet: instead of chasing the commercial grid on price, sell nuclear's unique capability to customers who need power where the grid and diesel can't reach. Under his leadership Antares raised more than $130 million, built out a 145,000-square-foot factory, and in June 2026 became the first private company to bring an advanced reactor - its Mark-0 - to criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program. His stated ambition is to make energy abundant 'from Earth to the Asteroid Belt.'
Alex Tabarrok
Alex Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist, the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. With Tyler Cowen he co-writes the influential blog Marginal Revolution and co-founded Marginal Revolution University, one of the largest free online libraries of economics education. His work spans patent reform, the economics of innovation, high-skilled immigration, bounty hunters, and voting theory, and he became a prominent public voice during the COVID-19 pandemic advising the US government on incentives to accelerate vaccine production.
Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University who turns provocative ideas into bestselling books and graphic novels. He coined 'rational irrationality' to explain why democracies pick bad policies, argues education is mostly signaling, champions open borders and housing deregulation, and keeps a perfect public betting record on his predictions. He writes the Substack 'Bet On It' and has built a career out of cheerfully defending unpopular positions with data.
Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson is an American economist at George Mason University who builds markets that turn opinions into prices. He pioneered prediction markets in the late 1980s, invented the logarithmic market scoring rule that underpins many modern betting and crypto markets, and proposed futarchy, a system of governance where we 'vote on values but bet on beliefs.' He is the author of The Age of Em, a detailed forecast of a civilization run by emulated human brains, and co-author of The Elephant in the Brain, which argues most of our behavior is driven by hidden, self-serving motives we'd rather not admit. He blogs at Overcoming Bias and coined the term 'the Great Filter.'
Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen is an American economist, author, and public intellectual who has turned relentless curiosity into a public utility. He is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and chairman of the Mercatus Center, the co-author of the long-running economics blog Marginal Revolution, the host of the Conversations with Tyler podcast, and the founder of Emergent Ventures, a grant program that has funded more than 1,000 ambitious people worldwide. Across books like The Great Stagnation, Stubborn Attachments, and Talent, he argues that sustained economic growth is a moral imperative and that the rarest resource of all is context.