I confess without shame, I am tired & sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine.—General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1865

I live and work in Washington, DC, but I’m not a politics junkie. To me, politics is like the weather. It changes a lot, people drone on about it constantly, and “good” is totally subjective. I like winter, you like summer; you’re a liberal, I’m a conservative. Furthermore, political opinions are like noses: No two are totally alike, but everyone has one. My nose is big, but its existence is utterly unremarkable—sort of like my political opinions.

My thing is ideas, especially policy ideas. While politics is like the weather, ideas are like the climate. Climate has a big impact on the weather, but it’s not the same thing. Similarly, ideas affect politics, but they aren’t the same.

When done right, policy analysis, like climate science, favors nerds with PhDs. And that’s me. I have a PhD in policy analysis; for my doctorate I studied applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling. I taught policy at a university for ten years, before becoming the president of a public policy think tank in Washington, DC, a job I’ve held for a decade. (Before graduate school, I spent twelve years making my living as a musician, but not the cool kind. I played the French horn in a symphony orchestra. So yeah—nerd-o-rama.)

Having a little distance from politics has made it so that even in the heart of DC, I don’t usually take political battles too seriously. In the 2012 presidential election season, my wife and I had a bumper sticker custom-made for the Volvo—VEGANS FOR ROMNEY—just to see the reaction of other DC drivers.