2022—
Technology today gives us the power to go beyond thinking differently—to transcend what divides us across culture, economy, and civil society.
Engager was founded on a bet about the 21st-century knowledge economy: that niche media communities, connected through media and commerce, could become a vehicle for social impact. The bet is still open.
2024—
The Engager model meets the market — social entrepreneurship in healthcare, at the edge of AI-enabled knowledge work.
Networked Cooperatives asked whether community-driven models could shift healthcare incentives toward prevention and wellness. What it found was that the question is structural: where AI is built for profit, trust has to be built in — patients, caregivers, and contributors as part of the care itself.
2026—
Cooperative AI, Value Collectives, Trust Architecture: three structural pillars for the societal impact of agentic AI.
Ontological Commitments is where the first two acts become a position — a publication about what we build into systems, and what those systems commit us to in return. Each article takes a stand on economic cooperation, collective governance, and institutional trust, grounded in one conviction the earlier work earned: trust emerges from structure, not assertion.
HOSSAIN PAZOOKI lives and works in New York City. He builds AI systems and writes about what they commit us to: trust that comes from structure, not assertion.
His path runs from building things to proving they can be trusted. He started as an econometrics research assistant at USC's Institute for New Economic Thinking, then spent his early career as a founding engineer shipping 0→1 products — first for a metal 3D-printing ML platform in Los Angeles, then for Engager, the venture he co-founded in New York. Engager led him into healthcare with Orawell Group, the period Networked Cooperatives covers, where building systems whose failures reach patients gave him his working discipline: nothing load-bearing is trusted until it survives an attempt to break it. Today that discipline is his research subject as an AI Research Fellow with the Algoverse program, and the ground of Ontological Commitments, a publication in the works on AI systems and the architecture of trust.
Education
University of Southern California
B.S. Electrical Engineering
B.A. International Relations & the Global Economy
2013–19
Algoverse AI Research
AI Research Fellow
2026–
Institute for New Economic Thinking
Research Fellow
2017–19
Employment
Orawell Group — AI/ML Tech Lead
Nov 2024 – Jan 2026
Engager Inc. — Founding Engineer
Mar 2022 – Aug 2024
3DEO — Founding ML Engineer
Sep 2020 – Feb 2022
Penske Media Corp — Data Engineer
Jun 2019 – May 2020