I started 📝CulturePulse because I was tired of watching people make enormous decisions about human beings with almost no model of how humans actually work. I had spent more than a decade on that question — how groups bond, how beliefs spread, why people fight over things that look, from the outside, like abstractions. The academic tools were rich but slow. The commercial tools were fast but dumb. Neither could do the one thing that mattered: take a real population, in all its messy heterogeneity, and tell you what it would actually do.
So I built one that could. CulturePulse grew out of a simple, stubborn conviction — that culture is not magic. It is a system. It has feedback loops, information flows, and incentives, and if you take that seriously you can model it. Not perfectly, not like clockwork, but well enough to test an idea before you inflict it on millions of people. We build psychologically realistic 📝digital twins of societies — populations of agents that believe, value, and behave the way real people do — and we use them to ask the questions you cannot ethically run as experiments. What happens if you censor this? What de-escalates that? Where does this conflict go next?
The work has taken us from Northern Ireland to the Balkans to a fifteen-million-agent model of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict built for the United Nations. None of it assumes people are simpler or better than they are. That is the whole point. We are not that kind of monkey, and pretending otherwise is how good intentions become bad policy.
CulturePulse exists to put a real model of human beings in the room before the decision gets made. That is the founding idea, and it has not changed.