ABOUT

Ryan Johns is a systems engineer and governance architect who has always been drawn to complex systems, particularly why the theoretical and the factual so rarely intersect. Currently that curiosity is focused primarily on the opportunity and risk AI poses — not as an advent, but in how society chooses to engage with it.

His work leans toward an expansive view of systems thinking, focused on the importance of multidisciplinary synthesis, sitting at the intersection of epistemology, organizational design, cognition, physics, and emerging technology — asking questions like "how do we know what we think we know?" and "what happens when we treat AI collaboration as infrastructure rather than extrapolative tool?"

Before founding Systemically Foolish as a practitioner lab, Ryan balanced consulting and conventional engineering, often working at the intersection of both. His experience in the trenches of QA for safety-critical systems informed his belief that most problems blamed on "bad actors" are actually problems of bad systems. He brings a background in music theory, history, bio/chem, and a geometric intuition for complex systems.

Above all, he firmly believes that we should be able to laugh about most things in life, and that people who write biographies of themselves in third person probably need to spend less time talking to computers and more time walking their dogs. (Ube, his Australian cattle dog, could not agree more.)