I had coffee with an 80-year-old stranger this week.

His name is Roger. I’m 73. We connected on LinkedIn, discovered we both lived in Santa Barbara, and decided to meet.

We started with coffee, Cortados actually, and then talked a little about our backgrounds and what we’re doing these days, the usual things you cover when you’re getting acquainted.

About ten minutes in, I said something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

“We all get older. Some of us choose to become elders.”

That’s when the conversation changed. We went from getting acquainted to talking about values, responsibility, and what it means to have lived long enough to gain some perspective.

You know how sometimes you meet someone and discover you can skip the entire escalator ride and go straight to the top? That’s what happened with Roger. We were at 50,000 feet, conversationally, without climbing through all the usual introductions. It felt like one elder recognizing another.

Chris Anderson, 2003

It reminded me of something Chris Anderson told me back in 2003, when we were building the first version of TED Connect, software designed to help members of the TED community find one another. Chris said people connect on values more than anything else.

That was a three-minute conversation more than 20 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. This week, I experienced it again.

It also got me wondering where those values come from in the first place.

Age five

Later in the week, I was talking with my friend Ger Graus, an educator whose conversations regularly send me down intellectual rabbit holes.

I have this idea that my brain is a petri dish. Throughout the week, ideas drop into it. Some go nowhere and others begin to grow, and I’m always wondering which one will become my Sunday Story.

Ger and I got onto the subject of children and when they begin to understand right from wrong. I asked him how early he thought our fundamental values are established. Three? Four? Five? Six?

Ger said around five.

That got my attention.

By the time a child is five, they’ve spent years watching the people around them. They’ve seen how their parents treat one another, how adults respond to frustration, what happens when somebody tells a lie, and whether people are kind to strangers. Nobody has to announce that today’s subject is integrity. Children soak it up long before anyone gives it a name.

My hypothesis is that much of the foundation of our personal value system takes shape in those early years, and we spend the rest of our lives pressure-testing it against the world. I don’t believe values are permanently fixed at five. We develop them, challenge them, and sometimes replace them. But I wonder how much of what I believe today began with something I saw before I was old enough to remember it.

I certainly can’t remember being five.

My father left when I was two. My mother was a nurse who worked shifts, so my brother and I grew up with caregivers. I have warm feelings about those years. I remember being cared for, though I have very few specific memories.

What I don’t remember is anyone sitting me down to talk about values. I wish someone had. I’d love to ask my parents what they believed they were teaching us, which values mattered most to them, and what they hoped we’d carry forward.

I can’t have those conversations now, but I can remember the people who became important teachers later in my life.

The kitchens

When I moved to Santa Barbara at 19, I began working in professional kitchens. Over the following years I worked at Vista del Monte, Westmont College, Cate School, and eventually with the Jesuits. I was lucky. Wherever I worked, an older chef seemed to take me under his wing.

Chef George Grayson at Westmont was one of those people. He was a wonderful teacher and, in many ways, a father to me. Later I worked with Chef Veene, an old-school chef who was about 65 when I was 30. We worked together for a year before he retired.

I remember both men clearly. They taught me about cooking, of course, but what stayed with me went far beyond recipes and technique. They taught me to listen, to pay attention, to respect the people around me, to work as part of a team, and to see hospitality as something much larger than serving food. Mostly they did it by example.

When I eventually left cooking and helped start Wavefront Technologies, a 3D computer animation software company, I carried that hospitality ethos with me. I treated customers the way I’d treated guests in a restaurant. It was simply how I believed people should be treated.

Looking back, I realize those chefs had been teaching me values all along. I just didn’t recognize the lessons by that name.

Five tenets

Which brings me to martial arts.

Kymberlee and I are both black belts in Hapkido, a Korean martial art. I’ve always appreciated how explicitly the philosophy is taught. At our school, five tenets hung at the front of the room.

We repeated them when we stepped onto the mat and again at the end of class, every single time. That repetition felt powerful. Those five words became familiar long before I understood everything they asked of me. As the years passed, I found myself applying them well beyond the dojo, in my relationships, my work, and my hardest decisions.

I think of it as living a martial life.

For the first time, I had a set of values I could name without hesitation. They were written on a wall, spoken aloud in every class, and practiced on the mat.

Unconscious competence

There’s a concept in learning called unconscious competence: when you’ve learned something so thoroughly that you do it without thinking. Many of our values live there. We behave a certain way because that’s how we’ve always behaved, and we make decisions based on assumptions we’ve never examined.

So what changes when we become conscious of our values? What changes when we can actually name them?

I’ve written before about living on purpose, which to me means making deliberate choices about how we want to live rather than letting life happen to us. Our values are essential to that.

The five tenets of Hapkido happen to be mine, and they’ve served me well, but there are countless ways to build a meaningful personal ethos. What matters is that you choose yours on purpose.

Could you name the five values that guide your life?

Would the people closest to you recognize them in your behavior?

If you’re a parent, have you thought about which values you’re modeling for your children, intentionally or not?

And if you’re an elder, have you considered the responsibility that comes with having lived long enough to understand what those values mean?

Stairs and curtains

Ger and I spent quite a bit of time on that last question, and he offered an image I loved.

I think about Chef George Grayson and Chef Veene when I hear that. They helped me learn my craft, and they also showed me something about how to live.

Now, at 73, I find myself in conversations with younger people who aren’t looking for technical advice. Sometimes they’re looking for perspective. I don’t have all the answers, not even close. But I’ve accumulated a lifetime of experiences, mistakes, decisions, and relationships that have helped me understand why certain things matter.

That’s part of an elder’s responsibility: helping people discover what matters to them.

Citizen Zero

One more idea came out of that conversation, and it belongs to Carla Rinaldi, the Italian educator who helped shape the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood. She died in 2025. I think of her idea as Citizen Zero.

The premise is that we become citizens the moment we’re born. We have rights from the beginning, and as we grow, we take on responsibilities that fit our age and understanding. If citizenship begins at zero, then so does our education in values.

That means every parent, grandparent, teacher, coach, neighbor, and adult who interacts with a child is modeling something that child will carry forward.

I think about my mother, the caregivers I remember fondly, those chefs in Santa Barbara, and Grandmaster Dave Wheaton standing in front of us at our Hapkido International Dojo in Santa Barbara. I’m still discovering what they gave me, and I wonder what I’ve passed along to others without realizing it.

Roger and I never traded lists of accomplishments. We found our common ground in a conversation about values.

Chris Anderson was right all those years ago.

One piece of paper

So here’s something I’d like you to try. Find a piece of paper and write down the five values you believe guide your life. Don’t look them up or borrow somebody else’s list. Just sit with the question for a while.

Then ask yourself whether the people who know you best would recognize those five words in the way you live.

I’m curious how many of us could answer without stopping to think, and what we’d find when we did stop.

Show notes

Learn more

People

• Carla Rinaldi, Italian educator and guiding light of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood, 1947 to 2025.

• Grandmaster Dave Wheaton, our instructor at the Hapkido International Dojo in Santa Barbara.

• Ger Graus, educator, and the friend whose conversation led to this story, including the stairs and curtains image.

• Dr. Roger Jahnke, Institute of Integral Qigong and Tai Chi.

• Chris Anderson, head of TED.

• Kymberlee Weil, my wife, fellow black belt, and partner at StorytellingSchool.com.

Places

• Westmont College, a college in Santa Barbara where I worked under Chef George Grayson in the 70s.

• Cate School, boarding school in Carpinteria, California.

• Vista del Monte, retirement community in Santa Barbara.

Ideas

• Reggio Emilia approach, the Italian approach to early childhood education that treats children as citizens from the first moment of life.

• Hapkido, the Korean martial art behind the five tenets.

• The four stages of competence, the learning model that includes unconscious competence.

• TED, the conference and community behind TED Connect.

More from Mark

• TEDxSantaBarbara

• Mark Sylvester

• An Embarrassment of Pandas

• Carpinteria Improv

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

This Tuesday we talked for an hour. Before we hung up I told him I’d write about it on Sunday, and I asked for a picture of the two of us.

Then I told him about the six hours a week I give to conversations like this one. No agenda. We find thirty-five minutes of meat and potatoes. If I’d lived in Paris during cafe society, I would have been at the table. Probably as the waiter.

He laughed.

Three shocks

The iPhone arrived in 2007. By 2016, the leaders I worked with had all come up through the same school of thought. Plan the year. Run the quarter. Manage the people in the building.

Then three things hit inside ten years. Mobile put the internet in every pocket. COVID sent the building home. ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 and put a tutor, a writer, and an analyst on every desk.

None of the three stayed local. They reached everyone, everywhere.

Gallup, the research firm that tracks workplace engagement, reports that global manager engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025. Nine points in three years. Jonathan asked whether this is partly a generational age out. Maybe it is. I’m 73, and by any count I’m one of the old guard. Where I see the split is in who spends an hour a day learning.

What held

Two things I learned long ago still work.

At Wavefront, the 3D software company I co-founded 43 years ago, we sold in product families. Group what you offer by who needs it. Tucker Howard, who builds IdeasOut with me, writes every feature as a user story in the Agile method. As a person, I want this, so that I can do that. Both come down to one question. Who is this for, and what do they need done?

That question survived the phone, the pandemic, and the chatbot. What changed is speed, and how a person learns.

During COVID I cooked for seven families. Each had its own needs. I wrote seven menus, built the shopping list from them, and put an ordering app in front of the families. Product families, user stories, a working tool. I did it in weeks, with software I couldn’t have touched five years earlier.

The contact sheet

Jonathan is a sculptor trained at MIT. His current project, Truth Lost at Sea, is a forty-eight-foot floating sculpture. I worked with him on it.

He also has tens of thousands of photographs from forty years of work. When he started using AI on that archive, he skipped the search box. He asked for a visual contact sheet, the way a photographer reads a roll of film. Each image gets a verdict. Keep, leave, or delete. The tools sort in the background while he looks.

He saw how he’d use the machine before most people finish asking what it does. That’s an artist’s leap.

See one

I learned see one, do one, teach one in kitchens. Watch a cook break down a chicken. Break one down yourself, badly. Then show the next person.

That loop works on AI too. See someone use it on a real problem. Do it on your own. Then teach it to somebody else, because teaching is where you find out what you don’t know.

The struggle in the middle matters. Researchers call it desirable difficulty. Learning that costs you effort sticks. If the machine hands you every answer, nothing stays in your head. Use it to push on the problem, and keep your hands on the work.

Five steps

AI is generative. Ask it to do something twice and it finds two different ways to do it. The models change underneath you, so the process changes too.

At Coastal Intelligence, we’ve come up with a way to approach AI and run the same five steps every time: Intent, Data, Envision, Validate, Apply. It’s called IDEVA.

Intent: why does this work exist, and who is it for? Data: what do I already have that the work should draw on? Envision: what does good look like, written down so it can be scored? Validate: where does the draft break when I push on it? Apply: put it to work, then write down what made it work.

IDEVA is new. It’s too soon to tell whether it holds up for anyone but us and our clients. I personally run it ten times a day, and the output has gotten steadier. When the tool changes, the process doesn’t.

The hour

When I think about a week, there are 168 hours. Call 50 of them your professional life. Ten percent of that is five hours, an hour a day that I can spend learning something new.

When I’m building something, I spend closer to thirty percent. You don’t need that much to start. Trade one status meeting for an hour of learning. Spend it on a real problem somebody handed you this week, with a real person waiting on the answer.

It’s an investment in your relevance. Five to ten percent of a work week, and the return compounds.

The table

Here’s what Tuesday taught me. You have to be human to learn all this. You need someone across from you who’ll laugh at the waiter line, challenge the age-out question, and say show me the contact sheet.

So I keep a standing conversation outside the building. An hour with Jonathan, no agenda. Neither of us brings a deliverable. We bring what we’re working on, and we leave with something neither of us had at the start.

Find your table. Show up at the same time each week. Bring a problem and an open mind.

I’ll be there Tuesday.

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Find it wherever you listen, and subscribe here on Substack so the next one lands in your inbox.

Kymberlee got us seats in the first row of the mezzanine at the Wiltern in Los Angeles. From up there, the view was clear, and I could see the whole room. The floor below us has no seats. A few spots were reserved for people who needed them, and everyone else stood. On Tuesday, October 6, that floor was packed with young people who had come to hear one man and one guitar.

It was a birthday present. We hadn’t been to a live concert in a long time. We found Jesse Welles the way most people do now, through a phone.

Here’s what I keep noticing about him. Ask people if they know Jesse Welles and a lot of them say no. Show them a photo of a guy with a mop of curly hair, standing in a clearing in the Ozarks with an acoustic guitar, and they say, “Oh, I know that guy. I love that guy.” The picture arrived before the name did.

The clearing indoors

Then I walked into the Wiltern and saw that somebody had carried the clearing indoors. A full-size steel power-line tower stood center stage, with glowing cables draped from the rig and a field of small stars behind it. The floor was grass, scattered with daisies. The light kept changing, purple and pink, then blue with a yellow haze, then red, then green with orange. At one point he stood alone in a single pool of light, wearing a ringer tee from Norman’s Rare Guitars, a harmonica on a neck rack, a setlist taped near the stand. Later the band joined him, piano and two guitars and drums and bass. All night the crowd kept tilting its faces up toward those cables.

His story is the reason the set makes sense. Welles grew up in Ozark, Arkansas, and got his first guitar from Walmart when he was about eleven. The Beatles got him going. He spent ten years as a working musician in rock bands in Nashville, released a debut album in 2018, and opened for bigger acts. None of it broke through. By late 2023, he was burned out on touring, and he put TikTok on his phone on a whim.

A hospital room

Then his father survived a heart attack. Welles sat in the hospital room with a Woody Guthrie biography in his lap and figured out what to do next. He started writing songs about what was happening in the world, and he filmed each one in a clearing cut for power lines near his home. Same spot, same guitar, same look straight into the camera. By late 2025, he had more than three million followers on TikTok and Instagram combined. He has been nominated for four Grammy Awards. The tower on that stage is the clearing, and the people in that room knew it.

I don’t write about politics, and I’m not starting here. I’m writing about what happens in a room when one person with a guitar says out loud what a lot of people have been carrying. That experience is old, and it’s real, and it doesn’t care which side of any issue you stand on

How the songs are built

What I can tell you is how the songs are built. They’re dense. Four, five, six, seven verses, biting and satirical, each line packed tight, and the crowd knew the words. He says he writes when he has an opinion about something. He also writes about turtles, because he loves turtles. In 2019, he told an interviewer that he’d been writing songs since he was twelve and had around 339 unreleased tunes sitting in notebooks and on hard drives. So the overnight success had a very long night behind it.

I don’t know his process, and that’s what pulls at me. I was in a cover band in high school. We played the Beatles and songs like that, so I know how it feels to stand inside someone else’s songs. Writing them is another job entirely. Welles does it in front of a phone, then walks onto a stage like a man in his own living room. Dylan for the words. John Mayer for the hands and the ease. Nobody told me to see either of those in him. I saw it myself, from the first row of a balcony, before I’d read a word about him.

The fifty years

And then the fifty years folded up. When I was in high school, the Vietnam protests were on the news, and the music we listened to energized us. It told us we weren’t the only ones paying attention. Standing in that mezzanine, watching a young crowd sing every word back to a guy from Arkansas, I felt that again, the same charge, in a different century.

So here’s what I’d pass along. When a song finds you on your phone, go stand in a room with it. Take someone you love. Get there early, and look up at the cables.

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story comes with an audio version you can hear on Substack and wherever you get your podcasts.

Lyrics

Jesse Welles, “Horses.” Read the full lyrics on Genius: https://genius.com/Jesse-welles-horses-lyrics

The video and podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Music.

A year ago, in the middle of a crowded room at TED AI in San Francisco, everyone was staring into a phone except two of us. I walked over to the other one and told her she was the only person there without hers. Jacki (jackelinetorres.co) was volunteering. She tells me she’s good at leaving conversations she has no interest in, and she stayed in that one. We’d both seen the same thing in each other: we wanted a real conversation.

She reached out recently and asked for an hour, which shows initiative, so I said yes. She joined my video call on Thursday from Bakersfield, where she lives near her grandmother. She was born and raised in Venezuela, so I told her about my four days there thirty years ago, showing an oil company how to visualize their probe data. My one complaint was that nobody stops at a traffic light. She laughed and said nobody does.

Then she told me what she wanted. She’s 31, trained as an architect, became an AI product designer, and a few months ago she was laid off. Five months of job hunting later, she wanted something to aim her energy at, and the something was a TEDx talk. TEDx events are independently organized, locally run, and licensed by TED. How does a person get picked?

When I help a TEDx organizer choose a speaker, I use three questions. What’s the idea the world needs to hear? Why does it need to hear it now? Why are you the right person to bring it? Jacki said, “I struggle with that one.” She’s 31. “I have my stories of a 31-year-old,” she said. “I don’t have seven books published or whatever.”

I told her most TEDx talks are personal growth stories and local community stories, and that a TEDx was coming up in Bakersfield in April. She said she’d go anywhere. Berkeley is the goal, but she’d take Santa Barbara. Then she told me what sat underneath. She was bored and she needed something to do. “I need inspiration,” she said, “and that’s why I’m talking to you. It’s not even just about the one talk.”

I said, “That’s a different question.”

Jacki designs AI products for a living, and a designer never starts with a solution. She starts with a problem. Hers was on the table twelve minutes in. She needed something to do, something that interested her, and a way back to work. I never said that out loud. I handed a designer a brief and let her notice she was the client.

The brief was one line. Design an interesting job. Design a workflow that finds it. Then pitch it the way you’d give a talk. Founders work this way, starting with a problem they have and building the thing that solves it. Jacki told me she’s always been entrepreneurial. “I’m a visionary,” she said, “but I’ve never really committed to doing things.” Here was a chance to be her own first customer.

Test it in the world

A designer tests early, in front of real people, so the first move was to volunteer. She already volunteered at TED AI, and she can say so when she writes to an organizer. I told her to find the Bakersfield organizer that day, say where she could add value, and ask what he needs most. His event had no website, and Jacki can build one in two hours.

Every TEDx runs on volunteers. A candidate who helped produce a TEDx carries as much credibility as one who gave a talk. A talk shows what a person did on one stage for eighteen minutes. Volunteering shows what she does for months, with no paycheck holding her there, on a team with a hard date and a live audience. The organizer who watched her do it can vouch for her by name, and she walks out with twenty new friends who are curious about ideas.

Understand the user

Most of us never study ourselves with the care we’d give a customer. The tool for it is a diagram called Ikigai. I asked if she’d ever heard of it. While I watched her screen, she typed “iky guy” into Gemini, Google’s AI chat tool. I laughed, and Gemini still gave us an answer. I told her, “It’s I-K-I-G-A-I.” Then she remembered. A career coach had mentioned it to her once, and she recalled it was a diagram. That started the next part of the conversation.

Ikigai is Japanese for a reason for being, and the Western version is four overlapping circles. Ask a Japanese person and you’ll get grief, because in Japan the word runs far deeper than a Venn diagram. I use the four circles anyway, because they get people to say true things about themselves out loud. She writes five honest answers in each circle, skips the overlaps, and uses an AI chat tool to turn each circle into five good questions. The answers have to be hers. Then she writes the job description those answers add up to. It’s about four hours of work, and I told her she’d be done by five o’clock.

See what a stranger sees

Late in the call, she stopped me. “I want to make a quick pause,” she said. She wanted to go back to the stage. How does she get approved for a TEDx? An organizer Googles a speaker the way a hiring manager Googles a candidate, so I sent her to a scan I built that shows what a stranger finds when they look for her online. Her score was 15 out of 100, with one word beside it: invisible. The report listed five things to fix first.

Pitch it like a talk

I’m no expert on hiring. Apart from my twenties as a chef, I’ve always worked for myself, so I know job interviews only from the outside. What I know is speakers. A speaker who wants a spot on a high-stakes stage builds a two- to three-minute pitch around three questions: what’s the idea, why now, and why me. I call it the three-question pitch. A job interview is a high-stakes stage with an audience of one, so I told her to point the three-question pitch at the company. Candidly, I’d never thought of it that way until I said it to her.

It starts with research. Before she writes a word, she looks for the company’s answers to the first two questions. What idea does it want the world to know, and why does it matter now? A company that can’t say so on its website is a red flag to me, with one exception. For a strategic communications role, a muddy website proves the company needs help, and she can point straight to it.

The third question becomes the hook, and it’s the one she struggled with. At 31, I had already spent a year at Wavefront, a computer graphics company, on the way to changing the world of computer-generated images. I told her that at that age you hold a wealth of lived experience nobody else has. That’s the answer to why me. The application says: I know what you’re trying to do, I agree it matters, and I can help you get there. She writes it herself.

The workflow keeps the discovery work in her hands. Everything she’s produced so far drives a deep research request for twenty ranked jobs from a board like Indeed, including jobs she may never have considered. She scores each one from one to ten on how much she could love it, how many calories it costs, and how much it pays. A second round of research checks the companies behind her top picks for clear answers on what the world needs, why now, and why them. The ones without answers drop off. She chooses with her own common sense and AI to assist.

What I assumed

Jacki read an early draft of this piece and asked a fair question. She asked about a stage, and I gave her a job search. Why? I have deep experience with matching engines, and matching is how my brain works. Hand me a person and an opportunity and I start building. Whether I gave her what she needed is her call. She says she’ll answer that one later.

What I’m testing is a hypothesis. A serious pass through a tool like Ikigai can surface something a person hasn’t fully noticed about herself, and deep research around that map might turn up a very specific job that fits her closely. Might. I designed this workflow to solve one problem, hers, and my entrepreneurial brain says it could be worth building out. Stay tuned.

A constraint called maybe

Moments before she stopped me, Jacki said she’d thought of building a website to make all of this easier. “Maybe I’ll do it,” she said. I told her don’t say maybe, just do it. “When I say maybe,” she told me, “it’s kind of like I have to choose.”

Designers call that a constraint, and constraints are what make a design decision possible. The plan follows that order. Volunteer first. The map, the scan, and the pitch follow.

If you’re looking for work, write your own brief. One line on what you want, one line on what bores you, and design the job that fixes both. Then pitch it to the company that needs it most, and treat the whole thing as an experiment.

Listen to “The Client Is You” on Suno

You asked me for a stage
Said you needed something to do
Bored and five months looking
Nothing coming through
I said, that’s a different question
Let’s go back
A designer starts with the problem
So here’s the brief

The client is you
The client is you
Design the job
The client is you

You move faster than I talk
Design the job you’d love
Design the workflow that finds it
Volunteer at a TEDx
Build their website in two hours
Meet twenty people
Who love ideas
Then pitch it like a talk

The client is you
The client is you
Design the job
The client is you

Three questions for the room
What’s the idea
Why now
Why you
An interview is a stage
With one person watching

The client is you
The client is you
Design the job
We’ll see how it goes

The client is you
The client is you

Share

Share Through Another Lens

I had the list in my hand so I could glance down at it. It’s called Ten Things To Know, eight years of coaching TEDx organizers boiled down to one page, and I know all ten by heart. I hold the page anyway so I don’t sound like I memorized it.

Nobody who watches a TEDx talk online sees the room where the show gets planned. TEDx is the independently run, local version of TED, and the people who organize it are often doing it for the first time. This room was Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara, twenty students and two teachers getting ready for their 2027 show.

Half of them had produced the last event and half were new, and I ask a lot of questions in these rooms because I like to get them talking about the individual pieces of the show. I’ve worked with high school students for a long time, in a lot of different ways, and the one constant is that I challenge them to think bigger. It’s the right age for it, and it’s why I keep coming back.

Libraries had been on my mind. I’m working on a digital one, and in August I’d produced a show in Columbiana, a small town in Ohio, where the first job in any planning room is finding the ideas. When I lead that conversation I like to start with a picture, and the picture I’d carried for two months was a library, and I had never said it out loud to anyone who would use it.

The speaker item

Then we got to the item about speakers.

Most organizers start there, because speakers are visible and ideas are abstract. You know someone impressive, and you build the show backward from the person. I’ve done it myself.

I looked down at the page and didn’t read it. Eight years of work sat in my hand and the library had never been tried on anyone, and I said, “Imagine you have this library,” and I felt very connected to that room.

It’s a circular room and you’re standing at the center, with shelves curving away in every direction. On them sits every TED and TEDx talk ever given, sorted by category, then subcategory, then subcategory again. Which shelves are crowded, and which are almost empty?

One shelf is packed, resilience and mindset and getting through the hard thing, stacked three deep. A story of struggle and recovery is easy to pitch to a committee and it fills seats, and a local event rewards what the audience already recognizes, so in the planning room it’s the quiet default. It also fills the shelf that’s already overflowing.

The main TED stage, which one curation team builds for the whole world, leans toward technology and science, while local events lean toward personal growth. Read them as one pile and the local talks bury the main stage, so read them apart and each shows you what it misses.

The empty shelves

Other shelves have gaps nobody has noticed, and the gaps follow a pattern. Engineering, agriculture, and the work of keeping things running barely register, and when they show up at all they arrive dressed as something else, like gene editing in crops or drones over forests.

Say a researcher has spent fifteen years studying how the sound of a city shapes a child’s thinking, and she has never been on a stage. Say a logistics engineer knows how to rebuild a supply chain after a flood, and nobody has asked him to explain it in eighteen minutes to the people who could use it. Those talks belong in the library, and they don’t exist yet.

Before we talk about speakers, I ask organizers three questions, in this order: why this idea, why right now, why this person. Put the idea first and you end up standing in front of an empty shelf.

The pause

The show will happen in the school gymnasium, in front of a few hundred kids and adults, and that matters. Then I told them the real audience is the world, and I stopped talking. A kid in Bangalore, I said, a kid in Frankfurt, hears one talk from a show like theirs and something shifts for that kid. I let it sit. Twenty-two people looked back at me and nobody said a word, and I knew they were with me because I make a point of looking at every one of them, and at twenty-two that’s easy, and I’ve stood close enough to enough of these talks to say it plainly: ideas change everything, and these twenty are about to go find one.

Here’s the number behind that pause. One talk from one of the school’s own shows has been watched more than four million times.

Every talk you’ve ever watched started in a room like that one, with somebody deciding it was worth a shelf. I don’t know which shelf these twenty will choose. If you’ve ever thought about giving a talk, don’t start with the story you know will get applause. Go stand in the middle of that library and find the shelf that’s almost empty. See if there’s a gap you could fill.

Listen to “The Empty Shelf” on Suno. Through Another Lens is also a podcast.
Listen on Apple Podcasts

I sent William back to his seat.

He’d walked up to pitch a movie. Six kids, one long butcher-block table in a junior high maker lab, a bundle of orange pencils in the middle nobody had touched. I’d asked each of them the same thing before they started. How bad do you want this movie made? William said very badly. I asked if he wanted it more than the three kids who’d gone before him. He thought about it and said, I wouldn’t say so. So I said okay, go sit down, and called the next kid.

Then I watched his face.

That’s the moment I drove home thinking about, and it’s the reason I’m writing this instead of a tidy lesson on story structure. I’ll get to the structure. It took seventy-five minutes and it worked. But the thing that happened to William’s face took about four seconds, and it’s the part that matters.

The room

The class is the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s youth film program. Claire Waterhouse runs it. Over twenty-four sessions these six kids will make short films and screen them for their parents in a real auditorium in December, and my job on the second Tuesday was to get them from nothing to a story they could say out loud in one sentence. I did a version of this at the festival’s summer camp and wrote about it then. This is the junior high edition. Same idea, a room with less patience for anything that isn’t a game.

The games

So we played games. Zip, zap, zop around the circle, eyes on the person you’re passing to, because on a set a light can fall on you if your head isn’t on a swivel. The name game, where everybody picks a word that starts with their first letter. Magical Mark. Intelligent Isaac. Kindly Kenneth. Wonderful William. Zany Zephers. Calm Claire. You have to step into the middle and say it with some volume, and the first kid who tried gave it about a two out of ten, so we tried again at a three.

Then the Pixar spine, taped to the cubbies in Sharpie. Once upon a time. Every day. Until one day. Because of that. Because of that. Until finally. Ever since then. We went around the table and built a story one line at a time, and the first thing this group did with a hero was kill him. Second story, a girl gets expelled and her mom takes her phone, and she dies too. Junior high has a strong sense of how things end.

The writers room

I put the expelled girl back on the table and ran a writers room on her. Why’d she get expelled. Fourth fight. Why four fights. Cyberbullying. Then somebody added a dad, and somebody added a brother who died, then didn’t die, he ran away, he lied about his age and joined the army at seventeen. The story got darker with every hand that went up and I kept asking the only question a producer gets to ask, which is who’s buying a ticket to this. Don’t kill the son. Show the happy scenes at school. School’s her escape. Maybe she writes and someone discovers what’s going on at home. Maybe the story is that she’s strong and nobody gets to knock her down. One kid said, I would watch that. Then I stopped it and said what I was seeing. Too many threads. Was there a dead brother or not. Were the parents abusive or just fighting. What happened to the online bullying, which is where this whole thing started. That’s the job of the room too, somebody has to hold the core idea while everyone else piles on, and for one afternoon that somebody was me.

Then I needed three story ideas from each of them. Five minutes, three real things from your own life. Something that happened to you, something that bugs you, something you’re curious about. Pairs. Pick your partner’s best one. Then the pitch, four parts, hook, want, stakes, and why you’re the one telling it. And here’s where the TED part of my life showed up, because the first question I ask anyone who wants the TED stage is the one I asked these kids. What’s the idea the world needs to hear, and why now, and what gives you permission to say it.

The pitches

Jose went first because I made him. A true story about a teacher, told with a straight face, and the ending hasn’t happened yet. Zephers pitched the e-bike he wants and his parents won’t buy, the friends who ride off without him, the crash you can see coming. Kenneth, after I made him say nine out of ten, pitched a mean, lonely guy who pays a shady stranger for a perfect friend, and what shows up at the door is an exact copy of himself, and then the accidents start. Isaac closed with a company called Engenetics and Tech Biology, a 1979 training tape, and a corporation that turned its own workers into machines, found out, and kept going.

Four seconds

And in the middle of all that, William.

He came back up before I asked him to. That’s what I saw on his face while Isaac was walking to the front, the thing that happens when a kid decides. The mouth sets. The shoulders come off the wall. I said okay, then show me you want it, and he stood up straight and gave me a ten-year-old who finds his lost cat, brings it home, and walks in on his fifteen-year-old brother eating raw steak and raw fish at the kitchen table, and the brother looks up, says oh, hello, and jumps out the window. Fade to black. It’s a strange little movie and I’d watch every second of it, and the reason it exists is that for four seconds William sat in his chair and felt what it was like to have his story passed over, and decided he didn’t like that, and did something about it out loud in front of six people who’d just watched him get sent down.

That’s the whole class. I could teach want, obstacle, change to anyone in twenty minutes. The part I can’t teach is the moment a person decides the story is worth wanting in public, where it can be turned down. Most adults never get there. They pitch from the chair, hedged, ready to shrug if it doesn’t land, and then they wonder why the room didn’t lean in. William got there in junior high because I gave him a reason to, and the reason was a small, honest no.

WAIT and WAIST

We ended with one sentence each. Then two words I made them write down. WAIT, Why am I talking? WAIST, Why am I still talking? Learn the first one and people will let you keep going. Learn the second and they’ll ask you back.

Somebody asked which of the five I'd fund. Kenneth's clone and Isaac's corporation, I said, and I'd put both in front of an audience and see. The core idea in Isaac's is a company that knew it was broken years ago and didn't fix it, and if that's true, what else is true? Where do those people eat, who do they trust, what do they love. That's the next twenty-two sessions.

I’ll be in the auditorium in December. Five films. I already know which one I’m watching for the kid who came back up.

Share Through Another Lens

Listen to “Come Back Up” on Suno:

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts

This one comes with a song called “Small Bursts of Light.”

I filmed my own laptop screen with my phone. That’s the part that still makes me laugh. I was sitting in my studio, phone held up to my monitor, recording a video call I was already on, so I could play it back to the man on the other end of it.

Noah benShea is eighty one. A poet, a philosopher, the kind of man who has a serious composure until he doesn’t. We’d been talking for months over Zoom, working on forty years of his writing, and there was this one small problem neither of us could fix with words. He’d forget the camera was above his screen. His eyes would drift down to my face on his laptop instead, and on my end, it looked like he was reading something off a page. It broke the one thing I didn’t want broken. The connection.

The Eye Line

So I found a camera that clips onto the top of a laptop, with a little arm that swings down so the lens sits right where his eyes naturally land. No studio, no crew, no budget. Just a small piece of hardware and his own Mac laptop. He wasn’t sure it would work. I wasn’t completely sure either.

Then I played it back for him. And I watched his face change. That’s when the smile came, the one that breaks through the composure. He was tickled. Genuinely tickled, like a kid who’d just seen a magic trick land.

He thanked me afterward. Not for the technology. For the fact that, for a few seconds on a screen, it looked like he was looking someone in the eye again.

Coffee With Noah

We’ve known each other for about thirty years. Noah’s a fixture in this town, the kind of person everybody in Santa Barbara seems to have a story about. A few months ago we were having coffee and he was telling me about Jacob the Baker, a series of books he wrote years ago that got turned into a film and still sits on Amazon today. People had been asking him for a prequel, and he was doing the math out loud, how many years a book like that takes to write, how many years he actually has left to write it. It wasn’t self-pity. It was just arithmetic, the kind you start doing at eighty-one.

I made a joke. I told him I’d written a book the weekend before. He laughed, then he stopped laughing and asked how that was even possible. I’d used my own platform, the one I built for myself long before anyone else touched it, to write something called A Moment in Time, a six-hundred-page illustrated book that looks at history sideways, tracking eight different countries at once from a thousand years before Christ to twenty years from now, so you can see what else was happening in the world the moment something famous happened somewhere else. He’d heard vaguely that AI could write things. He’d never sat across from someone who’d actually used it to finish something real.

He asked if I could help him. That was it. That was the whole beginning. One offhand joke over coffee, and a few months later we have a website, a Substack, a strategy for Facebook and Instagram, a mailing list, songs written from his own words, and a business built entirely out of forty years of one man’s writing and philosophy. He’s spent his whole life trying to get his words out into the world. He just never had anyone who could move as fast as the thoughts arrived.

That camera arm cost less than dinner for two. It solved something money alone never would have. And it’s a small example of the same pattern that started at that coffee table, technology doing the moving so his voice doesn’t have to slow down to fit it.

The Fear of Missing One

He didn’t have a name for the thoughts that kept arriving. They just showed up without warning, while he made coffee, while he sat with his wife, and he’d text them straight to me, asking me to add them to our notebook. For a while that meant watching my phone for his messages and copying them over by hand, and it was the fear of missing one, of some thought slipping past me and disappearing for good, that finally pushed me to build something better. First Light was already the name of the whole project, so light was already the language we were living in. Fireflies just showed up as the obvious next word. Small bursts, there and gone, unless you catch them.

The Same Jar Twice

So I built him a jar. Not a real one. An app, simple enough that an eighty one year old who has never called himself technical can open it and just talk, or just type, the moment a thought arrives. It wasn’t until later that I remembered he’d already written about a jar himself, decades ago, a short parable called The Pickle Jar about the kind of solitude that sneaks up on a person in the middle of a crowded room. I hadn’t borrowed the idea on purpose. It had been sitting in his own forty years of work the whole time, waiting for someone to notice the two jars were really the same jar.

Every firefly he catches goes somewhere now. Into the work. Into the website. Into the strategy we’ve been building together for four months, all of it drawn from forty years of writing that already exists, never invented, never put in his mouth. If it sounds like him, it’s because it is him. I made a rule early on, nothing gets conjured. Every word traces back to something he actually said or wrote.

What He Handed Me

I’ve wondered what it feels like to have your phone buzz with your own thought before you’ve finished thinking it. Noah didn’t really answer that when I brought it up. He handed me something he’d already written years earlier, in a collection he calls Small Truths, small enough to read in a minute, sturdy enough to carry a lifetime.

“Sometimes you hear something at just the right moment to answer something for which you very much needed an answer. You can think this is a coincidence but the word coincidence at its root means ‘things falling together.’ And in a world which so often feels like things are falling apart, sometimes the unexpected arrival of an idea or thought appearing unexpectedly is a sign that things are falling together for you. And that is a sacred sign both for who sent and who received.”

That’s Fireflies, four years before Fireflies existed.

What I Actually Built

I didn’t set out to build technology. I set out to solve one problem for one friend, how do you get a lifetime of wisdom out of a man’s head and into the world before it’s too late to ask him what he meant. The eye line camera and the firefly jar are the same idea wearing different clothes. Both exist so something true can travel the short distance between one person and another without losing anything on the way.

I’ve spent two years building a platform around that idea. This week, we’re four weeks from putting it into other people’s hands. But if you asked me what I actually built, I’d tell you about a smile on a screen before I’d tell you about the software.

Listen to “Small Bursts of Light” on Suno

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts

You can read Noah’s words on the Substack I’ve built for him.

Every AI prompt you borrow from someone else is a recipe you didn’t write.

That’s the whole thing. That’s what I want you to sit with this Sunday morning before we go any further.

The fence and the foundation

Corporate speak calls it a Standard Operating Procedure. A chef calls it a recipe. The difference isn’t semantic. The SOP is written to prevent deviation. The recipe is written to enable it, to hand someone enough structure that they can eventually make the dish their own. One is a fence. The other is a foundation.

AI rewards you for showing up as yourself. It doesn’t reward good prompting. It rewards the chef in ways it can’t reward the cook.

Three years ago

Three years ago, when ChatGPT was still new and everybody was scrambling to figure out prompts, I was right there with them. I’d try one, it wouldn’t work right, I’d try another. Same as everyone else that first year.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Someone has to get dinner on the table before they can write the recipe for it.

Around then I started noticing the come-ons. Download this prompt pack. A hundred prompts that will change how you work. I downloaded a bunch of them, out of curiosity more than anything, and started running the same test on every one. I’d hand the prompt to my own AI and ask it a single question: aren’t we already doing this? Nine times out of ten, the answer came back the same. Yeah, you’re already well past that.

I didn’t know it yet, but that question was the whole education. A borrowed prompt only tells you what someone else already figured out. It can’t tell you what you’ve already outgrown. Stop asking it and you’re not cooking anymore. You’re gambling on whether someone else’s ingredients work twice.

The book that changed it

What actually shifted things was a book, Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. One rule in it stuck harder than the rest: treat AI like a smart but error-prone intern, not a tool. I was head chef at a novitiate for five years in my twenties, so I heard that differently. Sous chef. Give it a station, real context, a clear bar for what good looks like, and it preps exactly what you need. But the chef still tastes before anything goes out, because hand it the whole kitchen and it’ll confidently plate something that isn’t ready. That’s the whole move, writing a recipe instead of handing someone a fence.

That’s the moment I stopped being a cook.

What’s actually in the recipe

Once I stopped downloading and started writing my own, I learned what actually has to go into a recipe that works. Audience first: be honest, who’s actually reading this, not who you wish were reading this. Tone is next: what does this person sound like when they drop the performance. Purpose: what does this piece need to do. Sections matter more than most people think, because the architecture that holds issue three together has to hold issue fifty-three together too. And then the hardest ingredient, what done looks like, because without that you’re just cooking until you get tired.

That last one stops most people cold. They’ve never defined what done looks like for their content. They publish when they run out of time, not when the dish is ready.

A chef doesn’t write the recipe once and walk away. They make it, they taste it, they add salt, they pull back the acid, they let it rest longer. In AI terms, that means running the system, reading the output with real critical attention, and adjusting the prompt before you publish anything. The system gets better because you’re paying attention, not because the tool is magic.

Freestyle needs training

Some people need the recipe. They follow it exactly until it becomes second nature. Some people want to freestyle from day one. Freestyle isn’t automatically bad, and it isn’t automatically good. Training underneath it decides which one you get. You can get that training a few ways: take a workshop, read a book, or sit down and treat the whole thing like a lab. Try something. Watch it fail. Adjust. Try again.

Cognitive scientists have a name for that part: creative struggle. The people who study how learning actually sticks will tell you the same thing every chef already knows. Skip the struggle and the lesson doesn’t land. I got lucky. I had the time to sit with the failures, add more salt, pull back the spice, and let the recipe come together slowly instead of copying someone else’s and hoping it worked.

I’m on the other side of that now. I’m comfortable in the kitchen. AI is my kitchen, and it’s working.

You already know what you make. You don’t need a better recipe card. You need to write down the one you’re already using.

Tell me what you’re actually cooking with AI right now. Not the prompt you borrowed. The recipe underneath it.

This one comes with a song, “Write It Down.”

I copied someone’s recipe
Followed it word for word
Never changed a single thing
Never wrote one of my own

A chef creates, a cook repeats
One of these is you and me
A chef creates, a cook repeats
Which one are you gonna be

Then I checked one against my own way
Against how far I’d already gone
Nine times out of ten I’d passed it
I’d been cooking on my own

A chef creates, a cook repeats
I found out which one was me
A chef creates, a cook repeats
Not repeating anymore

Check it for yourself
See how far you’ve grown
Ask the same question
You might already know

A chef creates, a cook repeats
That’s the one I’m choosing to be
A chef creates, a cook repeats
Write your own, don’t just repeat

Chef, not cook
Chef, not cook

Every Sunday Story comes with its own song. Hear the others in the podcast archive: Listen on Apple Podcasts

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts

It read everything. Then it handed me this:

“You return to a singular, unresolved tension. The friction between structured, automated efficiency and the raw, vulnerable somatic presence required for true human connection. This tension is never resolved. You hold both sides against each other, asking if the ease of the system is eroding our actual ability to show up.”

Nobody talks like that.

But it wasn’t wrong. It found the argument exactly. I’d never have put it that way, and it took me a minute to see that’s the whole point.

I’m sitting in the same chair I sat in two years ago.

Back then I was writing one of my first pieces and teaching myself AI at the same time. What came back scared me, and not because it was bad. It was competent. Clean sentences, correct structure, nothing I could point at and fix. It took me a while to find what was wrong, because what was wrong wasn’t in the writing. There was nobody in it.

So I drew a line, and I’ve held it since. I’m the creator. The machine is the editor. It doesn’t get to make the thing. It gets to help me see the thing I made.

Here’s what took me two years to notice.

I’ve done this before.

The first time

I cooked for ten years. Restaurants, institutions, a knife roll and a schedule. Then I sat down at a café table in Santa Barbara with Bill Kovacs and Larry Barels, and by the time the coffee was cold we were talking about building a computer graphics company.

I knew nothing. That’s not modesty, it’s the actual condition. I had come out of a kitchen into a world with its own language, its own math, its own people who had been at it for years while I was learning to break down a chicken.

Every day had the potential to hand me something I couldn’t have imagined the day before.

I wanted to make computer generated images. Not as a business plan. As a personal quest, the way you want to learn a piece of music or get a sauce to break the right way. And when there was something I wanted to do and couldn’t do yet, I’d go find someone on the team and describe it, and they’d conjure a tool.

Then it turned out a lot of other people wanted to make computer generated images too.

The second time

The last two years have felt exactly like the first two years of that.

Same condition. So much to learn, so much I don’t know, and every morning carrying the possibility of another unlock. Same personal quest, except now the thing I want to make is an essay instead of an image. Same wrestling with tools I don’t fully understand, and the same refusal to hand myself over to them.

The one difference is that I conjure the tool myself now. Nobody down the hall builds it for me. That part I did not see coming.

And it’s turning out the same way. A lot of people want their thinking to reach somebody. They can feel the difference between writing that carries a person and writing that doesn’t. That was true about images and it’s true about sentences.

Same thing. Different medium.

Where it breaks

The parallel is nearly perfect and then it breaks, and where it breaks is the entire subject.

At Wavefront, nobody worried that the software was making the film. The tool lived in one medium and the work lived in another. A renderer computes light. It has no opinion about what the shot means. You could hand it everything and it would still hand back exactly what you asked for, no more.

The tool I use now works in the same medium as the work. It makes sentences. Sentences are the thing I do.

That’s why I needed a line this time and didn’t need one then. I drew it before I could have explained why. Two years later, the paragraph up top explained it for me.

It came back correct. It found something in two years of my writing that I had never named, and it named it in words I would not use if you paid me. Somatic presence. Structured, automated efficiency. Nobody says that at a dinner table.

But the thing it named was mine.

What the worry is missing

We’re all worried about this now. Slop, watermarks, detectors, a whole industry standing up to answer one question. Did a person make this.

The worry is real and I share it. What I notice is that it stops at authorship, as if who typed it is the only thing at stake. It isn’t. That paragraph proves something harder. A machine can find what’s true about you and still be unable to say it like a person. It got the diagnosis right and the language wrong, and we keep collapsing those into one skill when they’re two.

So which one is the writing?

That’s what I’ve been circling for two years without knowing it. If a system can name what I mean before I can, and I can say it in a way it never will, then where does the line I drew actually sit?

I don’t have an answer. I’m spending September on it.

Can a system hold you, or does it replace you?

[Warm downtempo soul vocal: gravelly bass-baritone, older male, chest voice, speak-sung, close-miked, dry, no vibrato, Rhodes and programmed kick underneath, analog warmth, male vocal only]

I fed a machine my words

Two years of them, all of it

I said now tell me what I mean

It took about a second

I cooked ten years before this

Then I learned a whole new trade

I know the sound of my own voice

I have earned that much

It came back perfect

Not one word to fix

It said the thing I meant to say

And there was nobody in it

Nobody in it

So I made a rule that morning

And I have kept it ever since

I write it, the machine reads it

It does not hold the pen

You can build a thing that helps

You can hand it too much rope

There is a line in there somewhere

I found mine early

It came back perfect

Not one word to fix

It said the thing I meant to say

And there was nobody in it

Nobody in it

Then it read me back to myself

Found the thing I never named

Used words I would never say

And the thing it found was mine

Two years arguing with myself

Never knew that is what it was

Took a machine to say it plain

In a voice that was not mine

It came back perfect

Not one word to fix

And it was true

And it was right

And there was nobody in it

Nobody in it

Somebody has to be in it

Somebody has to be in it

There’s a photograph of my father on the deck of a ship. I don’t have it, only a picture of it on my phone, and I couldn’t tell you where the print went. He’s nineteen. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth, hands on his hips, deck jacket open over a sweater, looking straight down the lens like the camera owes him money. A crane behind him, a deck winch beside him, ships out on the water. He is the only thing in the frame that isn’t working.

James Russell Sylvester. United States Navy, Second World War. Nineteen and colder than he wants to be.

He didn’t talk about the war. What I had growing up was that he worked in the kitchen and made ice cream. For most of my life, that’s what my father did in the Navy. He made ice cream.

He made it on a ship, in a war that ended before I was born. I never tasted any of it.

The one he told

There was one story.

Before a landing craft drops its ramp, it has to hit the beach straight. Come in sideways and the next wave takes it broadside and rolls it. Turtles it, was the word at our house.

So men went over the side into the surf with ropes, holding the boat square while it ran in. My father was one.

I don’t know the island and never will. I couldn’t tell you whether he said eight men or two, and I’ve caught myself telling it both ways.

The Navy had a name for the rope. Anti-broaching line, printed in the manual with a diagram, held by a beach party that came ashore with the third wave. On a real beach, in the first wave, the rope existed and the hands didn’t.

Whatever my father was doing out there, he was improvising a fix for something the Navy had written down and not yet manned. He never put it that way. He gave me four sentences and was done.

What my brother told me

At his memorial service in July of 2022, on what would have been his birthday, my brother told me our father had been the cook for the executive officer and senior staff. The wardroom. He fed the men who ran the ship.

I was sixty-nine years old, standing at the end of the Santa Barbara breakwater with my family, and that was new information.

I’ve spent my working life around kitchens. In the summer of 1971, at eighteen, I learned to cook in a diner in Auburn, California, flipping pinto beans in a dry pan until I could do it without spilling them, and weeks later put two eggs in two pans on Van Nuys Boulevard and landed them clean. That’s the whole reason I had the career I had.

I knew my father worked in a galley. I did not know he ran the officers’ mess. Nobody told me until he was dead.

I asked my brother again this week. Nothing more, and I’m fairly sure he’s forgotten he ever told me about the wardroom. So what’s left is my memory of my brother’s memory of a man who didn’t talk.

The list

There’s one more piece.

When the ship made port, my father was handed a list and sent ashore to do the buying. The officers didn’t eat out of the ship’s stores. He walked into markets in countries he’d never seen and bought the food.

For twenty years I traveled the world for the software company I helped start, and the best mornings were the ones I got up early in some city and went to the food market. I couldn’t cook on those trips, I was there to work, and I went anyway every time and couldn’t have told you why. Nobody told me about my father’s list until years after I’d left that company.

I’d have liked to walk one of those markets knowing he’d done the same thing.

The sentence

I said something this week I’ve said for years. I don’t have veterans in my life. I care about the work and support people who do it, but I’ve never sat with one. Everything I know is secondhand.

I said it four days after standing in the lobby of a TEDx in Columbiana, Ohio, with my arms around a Green Beret.

That’s Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, United States Army, retired. Twenty-three years in uniform, nearly eighteen of them in Special Forces. He goes to that TEDx every year to coach veterans through their talks, and I see him there and hug him because I love the man.

Doc Diego was there too. He’s a psychologist, he works with Scott, and his whole subject is what soldiers carry home and can’t put down. We talked twice, at length, and I could have gone all day.

The first sentence

This week I went back and reread a piece I published in February of last year.

It opens like this.

My best friend, Tom, just got his draft notice. Vietnam is calling, and that’s it. That’s the final push we need.

July of 1971. I’d graduated from high school a month before. Tom’s notice came, we got in the car and left Los Angeles with six weeks to burn. Somewhere north, around midnight, a pickup pulled up beside us at a red light and Tom went rigid. It was his father, the one he hadn’t seen in years, in a town neither of us could have named. He motioned us to follow.

We followed the taillights to a house on the edge of Auburn. Tom and his father went inside. I stayed on the porch with a borrowed blanket and the crickets.

That is the last of Tom. Two thousand more words about a kid learning he could survive a hundred plates on a Friday night, and the man whose draft notice started the car is gone by paragraph two.

I published that eighteen months ago and never noticed.

He reported. My number came up the following February and was never called, because the draft ended that December. He went and I didn’t.

Then I lost touch with him. That’s the phrase I’ve always used, and it isn’t true either. Tom married a girl we met on that trip. She outlived him, and she has been at the edges of my family ever since, close to people I love, one phone call away for thirty years.

His widow never went anywhere. I did.

I didn’t lose Tom’s world. I stayed right next to it. I lost Tom.

He’s dead now. I don’t know when, or how, or what he brought back with him, or whether anybody ever asked him.

The habit

In November of 2019, Scott walked onto our TEDxSantaBarbara stage and gave a talk he called The Generosity of Scars.1

He opened it in character, dying, a medic working his chest. Then he stepped out of the scene and told a theater full of strangers about the afternoon he stood in his bedroom closet with a loaded pistol and no intention of coming out alive. He heard his son get home from school. That’s the only reason he walked out.

Six months later he told that story to a friend from Afghanistan who was somewhere darker still, and watched the color come back into the man’s face.

He’d written a play about all of it by then. Last Out, four actors, twenty-eight cities. On our stage he cut scenes out of it and set them into eighteen minutes, stepping in and out of character and back again. My wife Kymberlee helped him build it. She was his speaking coach.

I was in the wings, where I’ve watched a hundred talks go out. They were on their feet before he was off the stage. I watched that from behind him.

I’ve been repeating that phrase for seven years like a man who understood it. The generosity is in setting the thing down where we can see it, on purpose, knowing the price, and it only works if somebody picks it up.

My father put four sentences on the table and I let them sit for fifty years. My brother filled in the rest four years ago and I still said this week that I don’t have veterans in my life. Tom’s whole war I turned into the first paragraph of a story about myself.

Neither of those men was out of reach. One of them lived until 2022.

I have his widow’s number. I called her this week and she hasn’t called back. She has known for thirty years what happened to Tom, and in thirty years I never once asked.

My niece married a Marine. Brian stood honor guard at Arlington, folding flags into triangles for widows he’d never met. When my father died he arranged a ceremony there for a Navy man who isn’t buried in that ground. He had a flag flown in my father’s name, and he brought my brother and me each one.

We didn’t scatter him. My brother has an urn and so do I.

My father’s ashes are in this room and the flag is right next to them.

A surgeon rebuilt my left shoulder on Tuesday, so I’ve spent this week sitting still, talking into a phone because I can’t reach a keyboard.

Sitting a few feet from both of them, saying out loud that I don’t have veterans in my life.

Here are the lyrics to Four Sentences

Nineteen on the deck of a ship

Cigarette in the corner of his lip

He is looking at me like I owe him

And I don’t know the half of him

He made ice cream out on that ship

In a war that ended before me

I never tasted any of it

And that’s the whole of what I knew

Four sentences about the war

And then he never said no more

Four sentences on the table

I let them sit there fifty years

Four sentences on the table

Nobody comes and clears

Men went over into the surf

Ropes to hold the boat from the roll

Was it eight of them or was it two

I have told it both ways, that’s the truth

He bought the food in foreign towns

Handed a list and put ashore

I walked those markets twenty years

And never knew he’d walked them before

Four sentences on the table

I let them sit there fifty years

Four sentences on the table

Nobody comes and clears

There’s a boy on a porch in Auburn

With a blanket and the crickets and the dark

His best friend’s inside with his father

And a draft notice folded in the car

I said I don’t know any soldiers

I have said it half my life

His ashes are here in the room with me

And a flag folded up tight

Four sentences on the table

I let them sit there fifty years

Four sentences on the table

And now there’s nobody to hear

He made ice cream I never tasted

I never once asked him about it

He was in the room the whole time

He was in the room the whole time

The plane out of Santa Barbara was twenty minutes late, which meant the connection in Denver was already tight before we landed. My hip has me on a cane these days, which earns us early boarding and costs us speed everywhere else, and the terminal was the most crowded I’d seen in years, everyone walking fast in different directions at the same time. Stopping for any reason felt like an indulgence I couldn’t afford. I stopped anyway. There was a voice, the internal kind that doesn’t explain itself, and it said stop, take the picture, you’ll figure it out. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just knew I needed it.

The wall

What I was looking at was a sign, dark brown lacquer, gold letters raised enough to read in braille underneath: Courtesy Phone. Above it, a No Smoking placard. Below it, an actual phone, the kind that used to hang in every kitchen in America, cream-colored, the handset heavy in a way plastic doesn’t feel anymore, a cord that coiled down toward the floor like it had given up trying to reach anyone. Around it, an Exit sign, a fire pull box, a keypad with a strip of red tape across the top. Emergency equipment on every side. And in the middle, one plaque that wasn’t emergency anything. It said courtesy.

Kymberlee was next to me. Nobody else was looking at that wall. A phone nobody was going to use, promising something nobody rushing past had time for.

The confession

I took the picture instead of picking up the phone, which is its own kind of confession. Whatever that phone offered, I didn’t take it. I wanted proof that it existed more than I wanted the thing itself.

We made the Pittsburgh flight with nothing to spare, and the moment I sat down I started writing. I don’t always do that. I’m always watching for the moment in a week that intrigued me, that’s the job I’ve given myself, but it’s rare that one grabs me hard enough that the seatbelt sign is still on and I’m already typing. This one did, and I think it’s because of the six weeks I’d just spent building a website for a friend, a poet-philosopher who has spent forty years writing about the space between what people say and what they mean. Working inside somebody’s language for that long changes how you walk through a day. You start seeing signs, literally and otherwise. So when I saw this one, the only person I sent it to was him.

His name is Noah benShea. Author of the Jacob the Baker books, the ones that ended up on Starbucks cups and hospital meal trays, translated into languages he doesn’t speak. I’d been living inside his sentences for a month and a half, and the picture went to him before I’d walked away from the wall.

Do you have change

He wrote back before we boarded. First he said the whole thing was a kind of prayer, that you’d have to get on your knees just to make a phone like that answer. Then, in the next breath: I love this. Do you need some change to make the call on that phone, because there’s another anomaly here. It’s some old phone. Courtesy, does anybody even know what that word means anymore. And if you had to use change, do you have change. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. He was right. Underneath the joke was the actual question, the one he’s spent a career asking without ever making it sound like a question. When was the last time you had change for anything.

The free call

Somewhere over the Rockies I worked out what the sign probably meant. A courtesy phone is a free call. It’s a courtesy from a day when a call cost money, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a day before everyone carried a thousand-dollar phone in their pocket. The airport was saying: here, this one’s on us. Which only deepens the anomaly. It’s not for staff, staff have radios. It’s for a traveler, a stranger, someone who needed to reach somebody and didn’t have the coin. Somebody once looked at a terminal full of strangers and decided the building itself should be kind to them, and wired a wall to prove it.

The fire pull is for an emergency. The exit sign is for getting out. The keypad is for getting in. Every other thing on that wall assumes something has gone wrong or needs protecting. Courtesy assumes nothing’s wrong. It just sits there, running on faith, the kind Noah named, where you get on your knees and hope whoever’s on the other end decides to pick up.

Still on the wall

Nobody uses it anymore, obviously. But somebody kept the plaque up, kept the phone wired, kept the sign polished enough to catch a wandering eye at a gate nobody remembers the number of. That’s the part I keep turning over. Not the phone. The fact that it’s still on the wall, in a building otherwise engineered to keep your eyes moving forward, rush, rush, gate change, boarding group, no time to read anything that doesn’t apply to you.

I’ve been writing this since the wheels left Denver and I still can’t answer the simplest version of the question. If I’d picked it up, and it worked, and someone answered, who would I have called, and what would I have said. I had a cane in one hand and a phone worth a thousand courtesy calls in the other, and no change on me at all.

Listen to “Some Change” on Suno

Share Through Another Lens

First session had just let out. I was standing in the doorway between the theater and the lobby, taking the temperature. How’s everybody doing. Enjoying it so far. That kind of thing.

A guy came up to me.

“Are you the TEDx guy?”

I don’t know what made him pick me. Maybe I looked official. Maybe I looked like I didn’t live there.

“How could I help?”

He said, “Why did you bring TED to our small town?”

I didn’t blink.

“Because small towns need big ideas.”

He said thank you.

I said, “Next year when I come back, I want you to bring twenty of your friends.”

The red letters

We didn’t bring TED to Columbiana. TED is the big conference. Big Ted, we call it. Vancouver for years, San Diego next. What’s in Columbiana is a TEDx, independently organized under license, run by people who live there.

He didn’t know that. Almost nobody does. He’d been watching talks in front of big red letters his whole adult life, on a phone, on a laptop, on a screen some teacher pulled down in a classroom. Now the letters were in his town and he was sitting in front of them.

So he had the facts wrong and the feeling exactly right. Something did come to his town. I wasn’t going to be the guy who corrected him on the licensing.

And I know why he thought it.

Because the set was very good.

A thousand talks

I’ve been going to TED since 1994. A thousand talks, give or take, live in a room. That’s a strange thing to be able to say out loud, and what it gives you is a bar. You learn what a room feels like when a talk lands. You learn how much of that is the talk and how much is the room it landed in.

When the chance came to produce them, we started at home, with TEDxSantaBarbara, and built a reputation for shows that ran clean. That’s how Greg Smith found us.

Greg lives in Columbiana, Ohio. Six thousand people, a traffic circle, and a theater on Main Street that everybody calls the CAT. He came to us years ago and said he wanted to bring this to his hometown, and would we help him figure out what that looks like. My wife Kymberlee and I have been helping him produce it ever since.

I’ve been producing or helping produce these since 2010, and I hold teams to a standard. The letters. The lighting. Where a speaker walks on and where the light finds them. The transitions. The sound. Months go into all of it, and the reason is simple. Nobody sitting in that theater should have to grade on a curve. A town that gets a lesser show learns it deserves a lesser one.

So a man sat down on Main Street in a town of six thousand and watched something that looked exactly like what he’d been watching on his phone for the better part of twenty years.

Of course he thought TED came to town. That isn’t an accident. That’s the job.

He’d been through one other thing that morning, and it matters more than it sounds.

Nearly everyone has seen a TED talk. Alone. On a screen, while doing something else, and then you close the tab and go back to your life.

Almost nobody has sat in a room for a whole day of them.

Fourteen or more of them in a row do something the same talks can’t do one at a time. They start talking to each other. A line from the second one lands differently after the ninth. Your brain stops evaluating and starts absorbing. And you’re not alone in it. You’re shoulder to shoulder with people who heard the same thing at the same second, and when it breaks, you all spill into the lobby at once and the room gets loud.

That’s what he’d walked out of when he found me.

The electrical room

Here’s what he didn’t see.

Backstage at the CAT is the electrical room. Blue panels down one wall, a rack of red parts bins, a commercial vacuum parked next to the fire extinguisher. Somebody hung a red clothes hanger off a ceiling pipe. The greenroom is a garage on a residential street, string lights and folding tables and bottled water in red plastic baskets.

Nobody cleaned any of it up. Nobody was going to. Every TEDx backstage on earth looks roughly like this. The front of the house is designed to be seen. The back of the house is designed to get people ready.

Share Through Another Lens

The clipboard

The two women in that photograph are a speaker and her coach.

The coach is Kymberlee. She spends six months with each of these people. Helps them find the idea, cut it to the bone, build it, then teaches them how to walk out and deliver the talk of their life in ten minutes with nothing in their hands.

Look at what’s still in hers.

That’s the clipboard with the speaker’s script on it. Kymberlee follows every line from the wings, watching a monitor you can’t see from this angle, pushing everything she has at the stage. Ten minutes of not breathing.

The speaker came off. Kymberlee never put the clipboard down. She opened her arms with it still in her hand.

And she’s the one with her eyes closed. Nobody claps for her.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that hug. One year a speaker came off and found me. Big guy, my height and my weight, and he sank into my arms and I had to hold him up.

People underestimate what these speakers put themselves through. Six months of work and six months of dread, compressed into ten minutes, in front of everyone they know, with no notes and nowhere to hide. Then the ovation. Then they walk off, and the whole structure they’ve been holding up lets go at once.

They melt. Almost every one of them. You can feel the relief come off them.

That’s the photograph. It’s the part nobody sees, and it’s the part I’d put first.

We’ve produced hundreds of these talks by now, and here’s what makes six months a reasonable price. One person, one day, ten minutes. It changes the life of the person who gave it, almost without exception. Then it goes up on ted.com, and it can reach thousands of people neither of us will ever meet.

That’s the arithmetic Kymberlee is running in the wings with the clipboard in her hand. She isn’t counting whether it goes well. She’s counting who it reaches.

No second tier

The guy in the lobby wasn’t asking why TED. He was asking why here.

Because a town of six thousand can hold the same ideas as a city of six million. The second tier was never a size. It’s a choice about what somebody’s willing to build in the back, where nobody claps.

Small towns need big ideas.

And I meant the other part. Bring twenty of your friends.

There’s a song for this one. The Last Ten Feet.

TEDxColumbiana is an independently organized TED event held at the Columbiana Arts Theater in Columbiana, Ohio. Photograph published with permission.

♪ This one comes with a song, “Butterfly Lane.” Linked at the end. ♪

We were finishing a business meeting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; Jonah was our host when he asked if we had a few more minutes. We checked our watches, the way you do when you are trying to look responsible, and said sure, what’s up. Would you like to see the butterflies, he said. We said yes before he finished the sentence. He already had the look of someone who knows the thing he is about to show you is going to make the rest of the day irrelevant.

On the way, he opened a door we would have walked past a hundred times without noticing, no sign on it, and took us down a hallway that was not part of any tour. He stopped us at a pane of glass we did not know was there. On the other side, a tech was unboxing a shipment of chrysalises just in from Costa Rica, lined up like cargo, each one a butterfly that had not happened yet. It is not the kind of thing you think about when you buy a ticket. Somebody has to receive the shipment

The sound first

The exhibit is called Butterflies Alive, though everyone just calls it the pavilion. The permanent structure has its own name too, the Sprague Butterfly Pavilion, built in 2018, and it turns out it was nominated for Best Butterfly Garden in USA Today’s 10Best awards last year. I did not know that until I went looking. What caught me off guard was the sound. Step into that netted enclosure at the edge of the museum grounds and you hear it right away, a thousand sets of wings moving at once, quiet but never actually silent. I did not expect that. They call the path through it a lazy river, which is exactly right. You move with the current, families and children drifting from one section to the next, and every few minutes a chime sounds to mark the transition. The chime is not for atmosphere. It is the signal to check yourself before you leave, to make sure nothing has decided to come with you.

A tail, apparently

We were somewhere in the middle of the river when Jim said, quietly, that I had a tail. I turned to look and could not see it, which is the nature of tails, and there was only so far I could twist without doing something ridiculous. Jim took a picture instead and turned his phone around so I could see. An owl butterfly had landed on the tail of my shirt, right at my waist, and it had been there long enough that it had apparently made a decision. I did not reach back to check for myself. The last thing I wanted was to hurt it. It was not resting. It had chosen. The wings were open and still, the eyespots looking out at the room with the calm authority of something that does not worry about meetings or agendas

I did not try to stay still. I just kept walking, aware the whole time that I was carrying a passenger, something that had made its own decision about where it wanted to be. People gathered the way people do around small beautiful things. Someone took photographs. The butterfly stayed through all of it, through the attention and the murmuring and the phones, apparently unbothered by any of it, and it held on for nearly the whole walk.

Jim’s turn

Jim got tagged too. He sat down for a second on a bench along the river and a giant swallowtail landed on his leg, wings folded up in that yellow and black checkerboard they wear. He did not want to move, and as far as I could tell he did not, not until it decided on its own to leave. Both of us walked out of that pavilion having been chosen for something, whatever that something was

The blue morphos never stopped moving, which is how they survive, that impossible blue coming from structure-bending light rather than pigment, never sitting still long enough to photograph. I stopped trying and just watched, which is what you are supposed to do anyway.

Butterfly Lane

On the way out, I mentioned to Jonah that the street behind our house, probably three miles from where we were standing, is called Butterfly Lane. He knew it, of course. I have lived in Santa Barbara fifty-four years now, and I found that name decades before I ever lived near it, back when it still sounded like a rumor, and it took years to understand it was not one. It is named for the migration that used to happen there every year, tens of thousands of monarchs arriving in the eucalyptus groves to overwinter. In the twenty years we have lived in Montecito we have walked that street more times than I can count, down to Butterfly Beach and back, a stretch of sand that stays mostly local because you have to already know it is there, eucalyptus towering on both sides the whole way, and I still close my eyes sometimes and try to see what it looked like when those trees were actually dripping with them. The numbers now are a fraction of what they were. I already knew that. Days like this one just make it heavier.

A hundred monarchs

About ten years ago, a friend handed us a chrysalis, the kind of thing that sends you straight back to sixth-grade science class, and we watched it through to the end. We loved it enough that within a few years we had a garden full of milkweed and were doing it on purpose, caterpillar to chrysalis to wing, launching them off our own back porch into their six weeks of life. We probably helped a hundred of them make that trip. Every stage of it felt like a small magic trick performed slowly enough that you could see how it worked. Now, when we are out somewhere in town and one drifts past, usually while everyone else keeps walking, we stop. We do not say much. We just watch it, then look at each other, both of us back on that porch for a second before it flies off.

Checking for hitchhikers

The chime sounded before the exit, the reminder to check. A volunteer was waiting there with a feather duster and had us spin around slowly while she checked us for hitchhikers, working the duster along our shoulders and sleeves like she had done it a thousand times, because she had. There is also a large mirror so you can inspect yourself, and an exhaust fan above the door that discourages anything from slipping through regardless. I checked my shirttail in the mirror. The owl butterfly was already gone, sometime between the chime and the mirror, departed without ceremony back into the warm air of the pavilion. We walked out with the kind of smiles you cannot manufacture, and the agenda from earlier was already ancient history. I said it then and still mean it: every meeting should end this way, a little recreation and a little education bolted onto the back end. But the afternoon had already been reclassified, and my waist still carries a kind of memory that is hard to explain to anyone who was not there.

♪ Listen to “Butterfly Lane”: suno.com/s/9TA3jLYk6DbQj9sI ♪

🎧 This one's also up as an episode. Hit play above, or keep reading below.

“Got your back.”

That’s what Harnoor said, hand on my shoulder, thirty seconds before we walked out to do something neither of us had done in front of an audience before. Just the two of us. Two-prov, the form where there’s nowhere to hide, nobody else in the scene to lean on.

Fifty Years

Two months before that night, Harnoor told me they were putting a two-prov show together and asked if I wanted to try it with him. There are fifty years between us. My first thought wasn’t the one you’d expect from a future scene partner. It was closer to a question: why me? I could have spent a week running that scene in my head, finding every reason fifty years makes this the wrong pairing. Instead I answered what he’d actually asked, not what I assumed was underneath it. I said yes.

I said the same thing. Got your back. Then we walked out to two chairs and a black curtain and nothing else. No idea, not one single idea, of what either of us was about to say.

And I felt safe.

That’s the part that still gets me. Not excited, though I was that too. Not nervous, though I was that too. Safe. The kind of safe you feel when you’ve done the reps, and you know it, when the only thing left to do is stop thinking and let go.

The Reps

It took years to earn that tap on the shoulder. Classes, then more classes. Years of group scenes where you could always step back if you froze, let someone else carry the moment while you found your feet again. Two-prov takes that away on purpose. There’s no back row. You either trust what you’ve built with your partner or you don’t walk out at all. Harnoor and I walked out because the reps were already banked. The rehearsal wasn’t for the audience. It was so that on the night, neither of us had to think.

Two-prov strips out everything you’d normally lean on. In a group scene you can watch, wait, step in when you’re ready. With just two of you, you’re always on. You look at your partner, and in an instant you’re reading a character off the way they’re standing, the set of their face, before either of you has said a word. Then someone speaks, and whatever they say becomes the reality of the scene. Not what you planned, not what you saw in them a second ago, but what they actually said.

The World Now

I remember one where I clocked Harnoor looking tired before we walked out, and I had a line ready, something about a hard day at work. He beat me to it. He came out as the one running late. “Sorry, professor, I know I don’t really have an excuse.” And that was the world now. I’m a professor. He’s a student. He’s late, and some part of me had to decide, right there, whether this was the first time or the tenth, whether I was the professor who let it slide or the one who didn’t. I didn’t get to keep the story I walked out with. I had to answer the one he actually gave me.

That’s the whole form, right there. You build a world out of nothing, hand it to your partner, and then you live inside whatever they hand back. No net. No do-over. You can’t talk your way back to the version you had in your head.

Here’s what took me longer to see. That’s not an improv skill. That’s the skill. The tap on the shoulder before we walked out wasn’t a promise that nothing would go wrong. It was a promise that whatever version of the scene showed up, tired or late or off-script, I’d stay in it with him. Got your back doesn’t mean I’ll protect you from what’s true. It means I won’t leave the room when the truth walks in wearing a different face than I expected.

Off Stage

I’d already done that once, before I ever stood on those two chairs. Harnoor asked, and the rehearsed answer was every reason fifty years between us made this the wrong pairing. I didn’t give that answer. I said yes, and found out the assumption was the only thing in the way. I notice the same reflex off the stage now, in meetings, in conversations headed somewhere I didn’t plan for, when someone walks in already carrying something- a bad morning, a decision half made- and my instinct is to run the scene I’d already written in my head. Drop the line you rehearsed. Answer the person actually in front of you.

Harnoor and I didn’t get good at this by talking about it. We got good at it by doing it badly, in front of people, enough times that the thinking finally got out of the way. Nobody tells you that’s how you arrive at trust. You don’t decide to trust your instincts. You rehearse your way into it, so many times that on the night it matters, there’s nothing left to do but let go.

The Other Sixty

Here’s the math I keep coming back to. An hour with those two chairs is supposed to move something in the sixty hours of life that come after it. Not the bit, the practice that gets you there. If it only shows up under a black curtain, it’s a hobby. If it’s still there Tuesday morning in a meeting, or at dinner, or on the phone with someone having a hard week, the hour on stage was never the point. It was the rehearsal for the other sixty.

Two people, two chairs, no net. Turns out that’s not a stripped-down version of real life. It’s the most honest version I’ve found. You don’t get to choose who walks into the scene or what they bring with them. You only get to decide, before you walk out there, whether you’ve got their back.

🎧 This Sunday Story runs as a podcast too, if you'd rather listen next time.

Share

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called Both Words. Put it on while you read if you like, or save it for the end. Either way it belongs to the piece.

Their anniversary was Thursday, and I missed it, which is how this started. I went digging through my phone for pictures of the wedding, three years back now, and the first thing that came up wasn’t the ceremony at all. It was a picture I’d taken of a picture.

My mother, in a veil and wire glasses, standing next to my father in a dark suit at the front of a church, candles behind them and white flowers in tall stands on either side. Somebody had brought that portrait to the wedding and set it out on a table where people would walk past it. I stopped and photographed it with my phone because I don’t own a copy myself. I still don’t.

A wedding I got to write.

Elsa is my niece. She and Brian asked me to marry them, which I had never done, and I said yes before I’d finished hearing the question. Then I sat down and realized I didn’t actually know them. Not as adults. I knew a kid I’d seen at intervals and a young man I’d met a handful of times, and I had a wedding to write.

So I went after it. Phone calls, questions, the kind of research you do when you’re afraid of standing up in front of a hundred people with nothing true to say. It took weeks. It worked.

Brian served in the honor guard at Arlington. That’s a young man in dress blues standing at attention beside the worst day of a stranger’s life, folding a flag into a triangle for a widow he has never met. Elsa is trained as an expert in American Sign Language, so her whole skill is making sure a person gets understood when the ordinary channel doesn’t reach them. They have both built a life around showing up for people who need something.

I stood between them on July 23, 2023, at an old brick house in Virginia that had been there since the Civil War, in a gray suit with a black folder, and gave the talk. Elsa’s veil ran all the way down to the brick. Brian wore a blue suit that struck me as exactly the right amount of confident

It took me until this week to notice what was happening in that photograph. A man whose training is standing in a formal role at somebody else’s threshold. A woman whose training is closing the gap when communication fails. And me in the middle, doing both jobs at once, for the only time in my life.

Officiating puts you eighteen inches from two people at the exact moment they become each other’s family, close enough to hear them breathing, and the whole job is to say the words and then get out of the frame.

I got out of the frame. Came home, and went straight back to seeing Elsa at twelve years old, all elbows and momentum, running around somebody’s yard.

The arithmetic

People assume there has to be a rupture behind a gap like that. There was a fight, if you want one. My brother and I went at each other constantly as kids, and I moved out at seventeen. We patched it up years ago, and we’ve been fine since, so the fight isn’t the answer.

The answer is arithmetic. He’s 71, and I’m 73, two years apart, and he married late and had Elsa when he was nearly forty. By the time she was that kid on the lawn, my own daughter was grown. Opposite coasts, different decades of the same life. Nobody chose it. Our calendars never once overlapped, and then it was thirty years later.

Dinner on the way south

In June, Amy texted. Elsa’s mother, two full weeks ahead, asking whether Kymberlee and I would be around, because she and Elsa were driving down to see Elsa’s grandmother and wanted to stop for dinner.

We ate outside. June gloom, that gray lid Santa Barbara puts on the start of summer, everybody in sweatshirts by six. Elsa wore an oversized tour shirt from 1993, the year before she was born, with soft pants and sneakers, dressed for comfort rather than company. She’s pregnant. Her first, my brother’s first grandchild, due any day now, possibly the day this goes out.

What I remember from that dinner isn’t the baby. Elsa and Amy ordered in tandem and then ate off each other’s plates without ever discussing it. One would reach across with a fork, and the other wouldn’t look up, because there was nothing to look up about. They have obviously been doing it for years.

I watched from across the table and felt something rise in my chest that I’d have to call intense happiness, which is a strange amount of feeling to have about two women sharing a meal.

It took me a while to work out why the volume was so high. I was a latchkey kid, and I’ve written before about seeing my father twice a year, so I’ll leave that part where it is. What I haven’t said is what a twice-a-year childhood does to everything around it. Nobody drove anybody anywhere to sit at a table together. When I met Kymberlee, part of what pulled me toward her family was that they did it constantly, on a Tuesday, for no particular reason. Nobody over there thought a shared meal was an occasion. I did. I still do.

Elsa and my daughter Melissa are close. They talk most days. I know that because Melissa told me.

My mother’s face

What I love in Elsa is the way she looks at things. Bright and sparkly, lit up before she’s even decided whether the news is good. It’s very Sylvester. It’s also my mother’s.

My mother died in 2012. Elsa was seventeen. There were seventeen years when both of them were alive inside the same family, and I could not tell you whether they ever sat in a room together. That’s the sentence that stopped me cold this week. The answer is one phone call away. Amy would pick up, she’d know instantly, and she’d be glad I asked. I’ve had her number the whole time. So this isn’t distance doing something to me. This is a thing I have not done.

Which also means the resemblance may not be mine to hand over. It could be the ordinary observation on their side, said at every Thanksgiving I wasn’t at, so worn in that Elsa has heard it since she was a girl. Or nobody has ever said it. I can’t tell you which, and that’s the part I keep turning over. Missing the years costs you the years, and everybody knows that going in. What nobody warns you about is losing the ability to tell whether the thing you noticed is rare or completely ordinary.

The folder

Here’s what I can’t get around. I have already closed this gap once. I did it in a matter of weeks, well enough to stand up in Virginia and say true things about two people in front of everyone who loved them. I know how to do this. I’ve proved I know how.

I only did it because somebody handed me a folder.

That’s the mechanism. Please give me a role, and I’ll cross any distance you name. Please send me an occasion with a date attached, and I’ll handle it thoroughly. Without one I’ll stand at the edge for thirty years and call the whole thing circumstance.

Both words

She’s due any day. Somebody is going to hand me a title again, and I’ll take it, the way I always do.

She’s been handing me one since she could talk. She calls me Uncle Mark. She has always used both words, and I notice it every single time, which probably means some part of me has been treating the title as a loan.

Amy texted two weeks ahead. Melissa and Elsa talk most days. Elsa says, Uncle Mark. I’ve spent thirty years grading the Sylvesters as a family that doesn’t do this, while they did it in my direction the whole time, with no occasion attached and nobody assigning it.

The next time she says it, I’m going to answer.

Listen to Both Words on Suno: https://suno.com/s/SS1m6iRyoi9WLWhP

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called None of It Was Mine. If you’d rather listen first, the link is at the end.

Two hours into the lesson, I’m standing next to my wife in a room that used to be a dry cleaner’s, except none of it is real. There’s no dry cleaner. There are no photographs on the wall behind us, no five generations of somebody else’s family, no great-great-great-grandfather who started the business. Phyllis Katz put us there with eleven words. A married couple. He’s getting the business in the divorce. Go.

The Family That Never Existed

Kymberlee started naming them. Her mother. An aunt who sewed buttons. A great-great-great-grandfather who was, she decided on the spot, the queen’s tailor. Each name landed as it had always been there. I stood in the middle of a family that had existed for maybe four seconds, feeling something I did not expect to feel at seventy-three, in a room I’d paid to be humbled in on my birthday.

I felt small, and not because Kymberlee was funnier than me in that moment, though she was. The more names she gave to that lineage, the more real it got, and the more real it got, the more I understood that my character had married into something enormous and had brought nothing to it. No trade, no history, just a man who’d noticed she was staying in a business she didn’t want, staying because leaving felt like disappointing relatives who were already gone. I told her that in the scene. I told her the thing she actually wanted was the music, the guitar she wouldn’t put down, and that I’d left, eventually, because she never did.

The Actual Assignment Is Silence

The gift itself was simple. My birthday landed this week, and Kymberlee arranged two hours alone with Phyllis Katz, a founding member and former director of the Groundlings, one of the people who helped build the school itself, decades in television, film, and stage, still teaching, still sharp enough to stop you mid-sentence. Two of the six people in our improv group were there too, Harnoor Lai and Louis John. Our regular coach is Navaris Dawson, Thursday nights over Zoom, here in Santa Barbara. Phyllis subs when he can’t make it, which means a founding member of the Groundlings is our backup, a fact that’s been ironic on a dozen different levels since the first night we found out. Mostly, what Phyllis gave us that day was silence.

Not the kind that happens because nobody has anything to say. The kind you build on purpose and then refuse to fill. Two people up at a time, a relationship, a moment that matters, and one instruction underneath everything else. Find the awkward silences. Do not talk your way past them.

I am not good at that. I’ve spent a career, four decades of it, making rooms comfortable, filling the gap before anyone else has to feel it. Phyllis was asking me to do the opposite on purpose, in front of people, for no reason except that the silence was where the scene actually lived. Every instinct I have said, keep talking. She kept saying Stay.

Productive Struggle, Mid-Scene

So there I was, an invented husband standing in an invented business that belonged to an invented family that was not mine. The actual struggle of the whole two hours had nothing to do with remembering a game or hitting a mark. It was standing still. Letting the moment sit there, ugly and unresolved, instead of rescuing it with a joke or a line or anything at all. I have a word for what that felt like now, one I picked up a few weeks back from a teacher talking about how children learn: productive struggle. I was in it, mid-scene, wanting badly to fill a hole Phyllis needed me to leave open, not knowing yet whether I could.

I pushed forward instead of talking. I let the pause sit past the point where every part of me wanted to say something, anything, to make the discomfort stop. Kymberlee let it sit too. And in that stretch of nothing, standing surrounded by five generations of people who had never existed until she named them, something actually happened between us that no line of dialogue would have gotten to faster.

Later, working with Harnoor, Phyllis said something I wrote down without meaning to. His character already had the answer, she told him. He just had to stop getting in its way. Once you actually know who you’re playing, the character thinks of it. You don’t have to. It gets fast enough that it starts moving on its own, and that speed isn’t a trick. It’s just enough time inside the thing that your own thinking finally gets out of the way and lets the truth through. I recognized what she was describing. It’s the same reason I could stay inside a silence by the fourth scene without bailing the way I’d wanted to on the first. Fluid and authentic turned out to be the same word, arriving late, after enough of it that I stopped deciding what to say and started actually being there.

None of It Was Real, All of It Was Real

Here’s the part I keep turning over since. None of what happened in that room was real. The photographs weren’t real. The dry cleaning business wasn’t real. The great-great-great-grandfather was invented on the spot by a woman who had never met him, because he doesn’t exist. We built the whole thing out of nothing but the words we chose to say to each other.

But the two of us, standing in it, were completely real. What passed between us in that silence, the discomfort, the decision not to fill it, the actual attention we were paying each other instead of waiting for our turn to talk, that part wasn’t pretend. That part is the same skill whether the room is invented or not. It’s the difference between listening to someone and waiting for the gap where you get to speak next. Most conversations I’ve had in my life, the good ones and the forgettable ones both, come down to which one of those two things I was actually doing.

I’ve run companies. I’ve produced over a hundred TEDx talks from the wings of a stage in Santa Barbara. I’ve built systems meant to help other people say what they mean. None of that taught me to sit in a silence I’d built with someone else and let it stay uncomfortable until it turned into something true. Phyllis Katz taught me that, at seventy-three, standing in a fake dry cleaner’s, surrounded by a family that was never mine, on the one night of the year built entirely around the fact that I was born.

The Pause I’m Supposed to Keep

Kymberlee teaches her speaking clients something she calls the Power of the Pause, a breath, a beat, room enough for what was just said to land. What Phyllis had us do was the same thing stretched longer and left raw, uncomfortable on purpose, never rescued.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it away from the stage. I know the silence is still there, the next time someone I love is talking and I’m already deciding what I’ll say back.

Listen to None of It Was Mine on Suno: https://suno.com/s/seXowXziIKjJryR2

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called Knock Twice. Read first and let the song land after, or listen first and let it open the door. Either order works.

I get on a video call with a stranger named Patrick Phillips, and the first thing I learn is where he’s sitting. A coworking space that could be anywhere, across a twenty six mile bridge from New Orleans. Forty one years old. Alone at a desk most days, building things nobody asked him to build.

Twenty six miles of causeway across Lake Pontchartrain connects his side of the water to New Orleans. He crossed it for high school, then again for college in Baton Rouge. His father was a Marine, so home was wherever the next base happened to be. Louisiana is the place that stuck.

The Skip

A few weeks back, he was coding a project management tool for himself, the way some people build model trains. Twenty years in government will teach you every framework and every throwaway best practice there is. So when the AI helping him build the tool suggested a system he’d never heard of, that got his attention. He didn’t stop to study it. Instead of researching the framework the way he’d researched everything else in his life, he skipped straight to a person. Close by, in New Orleans. He found the guy online and just connected.

When Matt Hayne, an EOS coach, heard Patrick’s story, he said, “You gotta meet my buddy in Santa Barbara, Mark,” and sent the intro. When Matt sends me someone, I pay attention. He knows I love meeting new people.

That’s how a former Treasury employee turned solo builder ended up on a video call with me. I’ve spent forty three years building software. Six Academy Awards worth of it.

Patrick spent most of his career in government, mostly at Treasury, then a stretch at a private consulting firm doing portfolio oversight work most people have never heard of and wouldn’t enjoy hearing about if they had. Somewhere in the last year he started building his own tools instead of buying software built by other people. He hit walls the way everyone does who tries this. Then it worked, and it was, in his own words, the best feeling in the world.

Cortado Buddies

Matt and I didn’t meet through business either. A couple of years back, he was in Santa Barbara visiting clients and went looking for an improv school to sit in on. He found the one my wife and I run, and turned out to be the funniest person in the room. We found out we were both coaches, different disciplines, and started meeting for coffee whenever he was back in town. We both liked the same drink, it turned out. A cortado. We became Cortado Buddies. Years of it now, pictures of coffee sent back and forth, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. He’s careful about who he introduces me to. That care is the entire reason the introduction meant anything.

The Tour

For the next hour, Patrick got the tour. The Atari user group in Santa Barbara, Cold War engineers who taught a kid who couldn’t code how to make graphics because I kept showing up and asking. The company that came out of it, Wavefront, three friends, six Academy Awards for visual effects software that ended up inside Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and pretty much every Marvel movie made since 1999. The TEDx events, two hundred seventy five of them and counting. Cooking for seven families during the lockdown because I used to be a chef and nobody could get to the store. Teaching myself to build my own tools to run all seven menus because that’s what a chef does when the machine shows up and I happen to be bored.

None of it was a pitch. It was me answering a question a stranger asked, at length, the way you do when you like the person on the other end of the call.

The Aside

Then, close to the end, something shifted. I’d asked him if he had a family. No, he said. Ten years with someone he loved. It didn’t work out. No kids. Forty one now, and honestly, right now, focused on getting the next stage of his life off the ground. He mentioned the coworking space again, a shared room full of strangers all staring at their own screens, building their own things, alone. He said it almost as an aside. I don’t really have many people to bounce ideas off of.

I didn’t fix that. I didn’t offer advice. I said, Cool, cool. Well, you’re in.

Two words doing the actual work of an entire hour.

The Knock

Here’s what’s strange about how this happened, from where I sat. An AI recommended a framework. A stranger read the recommendation and, instead of researching it alone the way he used to at Barnes and Noble as a kid, decided to knock on an actual door. The framework was never going to be what mattered. What mattered is that someone was standing on the other side when he knocked. I let him in.

Somewhere near the end of the call, talking about nothing in particular, I told Patrick something I tell my improv students. If you try to be funny, you will fail. If you just try to be human, the human condition is hilarious, and you’ll be awesome without trying. I was talking about improv. I was also, without quite meaning to, talking about the hour that had just happened between us.

A coding tool suggested some homework. A stranger did the homework. And somewhere in Louisiana, a guy who spends his days alone in a room full of other people stopped being quite as alone as he was an hour before.

Listen to Knock Twice on Suno: https://suno.com/s/D7I3XZinoWazpmL9

Share Through Another Lens

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Nine Feet Up.” Read first and let the song land after, or listen first and let it set the room. Either order works.

Duey Freeman rides a horse named Moon, and when he does, the top of his head is nine feet off the ground. He spent sixteen years on search and rescue in Colorado, and when the terrain got too rough for vehicles, they sent crews of six or eight horses out in formation across the plains and into the boulder fields. From that height, you could see three times what a person on foot could cover. But the real advantage wasn’t the altitude. It was the silence.

You could hear people. Sometimes it was shouting, sometimes it was crying, and sometimes, in the worst cases, it was just breathing. That sound, a human being making the smallest possible noise to signal they were still alive, is what found them in the places where nothing else could.

Duey is clear that drones are remarkable. They go where horses can’t, they cover ground faster, and with the right equipment, they can read heat signatures through terrain no human team could navigate. The tool genuinely solved a problem. But the drone’s rotors make noise, constant noise, and that noise filled the very silence that used to carry the signal. You gained a camera and lost an ear. The team got more altitude and less contact. Those two things happened simultaneously and they weren’t separate events. They were the same event.

Every Tool Upgrade Is a Sense Trade

Every tool upgrade is a sense trade. It sharpens one kind of perception and dulls another, in the same motion, no exceptions. This isn’t a complaint about technology, it is just the architecture of how tools work. A tool extends one capability by concentrating energy there, and that concentration always costs something on the other side of the ledger. The drone designers weren’t careless. They were solving the visibility problem, and they solved it. The hearing problem wasn’t in their design brief. It wasn’t even visible to them as a problem, because they had never been nine feet up on Moon in a boulder field listening for someone’s exhale.

The tool doesn’t know what it is missing. That isn’t a flaw in the tool. It is the definition of a tool. The flaw only enters the picture when the person operating the tool forgets that the tool’s ignorance isn’t the same as their own, and stops trusting what sixteen years in the boulder fields already taught him.

Having the Tools Isn’t Having the Taste

Having every tool in the kitchen doesn’t make you a chef. The knives, the pans, the right burner, none of that turns out a good plate.

It doesn’t come from the equipment. It comes from having been in it long enough to trust your own judgment over anyone else’s, including the machine’s.

The Trust Problem

This is where the conversation about AI lands, and lands hard. There is a version of working with these systems where the reps you’ve put in are still the final judge of what’s good, where the tool’s speed serves your taste instead of replacing it. Then there is the other version, the one worth worrying about, where you stop trusting what you know and start trusting what the system hands you, simply because it arrived fast and looks finished. You take the output at face value instead of running it through everything you’ve earned. That isn’t a tool problem. It’s a trust problem, and the trade is yours to make or refuse.

How the Habit Moves In

Handing your taste to the tool isn’t a dramatic failure. It happens in small increments, each one reasonable in isolation. You let the AI draft the language because it sounds close enough, so you stop asking whether it actually sounds like you. Absence stops registering. Not because you stopped caring. Because the machine kept moving, and it was easier to let it. The habit doesn’t announce itself either. It just moves in, one skipped question at a time, one place where your own taste would have caught something and didn’t get asked to. The crying goes unheard. Not once, loudly, in a way you could catch and correct. It goes unheard at scale, quietly, across everything you are producing, and the gap between what your work used to carry and what it carries now widens without announcing itself.

The Leaders Worth Watching

The leaders worth watching right now are the ones who still trust the thousand reps over the machine’s confidence. They use capable tools, and they bring something the tool can’t access: a long memory of what the work felt like before the tool arrived, a calibrated sense of what a real result sounds like versus a plausible one, and the discipline to stay in the search even when the drone is already in the air covering ground. You can see it in the small habits. They read the draft twice, not once, the second time listening instead of scanning. They ask what’s missing before they ask what’s polished. They trust the plate they know how to cook, not the recipe the machine just handed them. They aren’t Luddites.

Duey still gets calls sometimes, years after he stopped riding search and rescue. People want to know how he found the ones nobody else did. He never says the equipment. He says the ear. The ear caught the exhale nobody else heard, once, under a downed pine, in weather that would’ve grounded any drone, and the ear only knew what to listen for because of sixteen years spent trusting it.

Refined taste isn’t about selecting better tools. It’s about trusting what your own experience already taught you, over whatever the tool hands you first, and refusing to serve the plate before you’ve tasted it yourself. Nine feet up in the silence is where you learn the difference.

Listen to “Nine Feet Up” on Suno: https://suno.com/s/kNwnXcCGuwRQ99ZJ

A note before you start. This one comes with a song. It’s called “Looking Up.” Read first, then let the song find you on the other side.

Before they sat down, I was watching a bird.

It was working the banana plant at the table next to mine. In and out of the broad leaves, checking angles, very purposeful. The harbor was behind it. Boats in the channel. The mountains past that. A clear Fourth of July afternoon in Santa Barbara, the kind you drive across the state for.

Then the family arrived. Mom, dad, three kids, two grandparents. Tourists, obvious from the cameras and the way they sorted themselves into chairs. Good vibe. Having the grandparents there made it feel even better. The adults had chosen well: a great table, a beautiful day, the whole harbor to look at.

Then out came the iPads.

One in front of each kid. Snap, snap, snap. The kids went still. Heads down. Totally trained. The parents stood at the table long enough to order from the server, then walked away. Nothing at that table moved. The girls in their pink hats. The boy in the teal shirt. Three screens. The harbor behind them. Nobody looking.

I looked at my lunch companions and said, “I have to take a picture of this.”

I did. And I sat with what I was feeling, which took me a minute to name. It wasn’t anger exactly. It was something closer to grief. Because fifteen feet behind those three kids, through the glass, was the harbor. Boats. A holiday. And six inches into the banana plant, a bird was working very hard at being a parent.

It did not have a phone. It did not need one. Every single thing that bird needed to do for its young, it was doing.

I thought about my friend Michael.

Michael is a stay-at-home dad in Santa Barbara. His son is three. There is no TV in their house when he’s around. No phone screens. His son has essentially zero experience with them. When a friend texted Michael a photo and said “show this to your boy,” Michael didn’t. He didn’t open the phone. He didn’t show the picture.

Instead, they walk. Santa Barbara is good for walking, and they make the most of it. Michael teaches his son the way Sesame Street used to teach all of us, out loud, in the world. They count things. One of those, two of those, look at that. His son is three and he knows where he lives. He knows his street. He knows his neighborhood. Michael has taken the job seriously in the way only someone who has thought hard about it does.

Here’s the part I keep thinking about. Michael figured out that his son loves music. So he went to Suno and started making songs out of the lessons. Things they’d learned on their walks turned into songs. Now, when they drive somewhere, his son listens to songs his dad made for him. Reinforcement, joy, presence, all of it at once. Michael invented his own Sesame Street and put it in the car.

Three kids with iPads at a harbor restaurant and a dad making his son songs about the world outside the window. Both scenes happened this week. Both are real.

I’m at the Cold Spring AI Summit in Montecito this week. Two days, workshops, keynotes, people thinking hard about what AI does to kids and classrooms and learning. The question of AI and our children, from parents, teachers, and administrators in K through 12, is one of the most important we have right now.

But I keep coming back to the harbor.

I spend an enormous amount of my life in front of screens. More than most people, probably. It’s the nature of the work. And what I’ve noticed is that when I have the chance to be with humans, I put the screen away. Not because someone told me to. Because I crave the humans more than I crave the screen. I think most of us do, once we slow down enough to notice it.

The question isn’t whether our kids should use technology. They will. They already do. The question is what they learn to crave. What they learn to reach for when there’s a choice.

Three kids, three iPads, a harbor full of boats, and a bird working a nest in the banana plant twelve inches from the back of their heads.

The bird saw everything.

Listen to “Looking Up” on Suno: https://suno.com/s/NexgQwX5Tl2lae1J

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Two Words,” written as a companion to the essay. Listen first and let it set the room, or read first and let the song land after. Either order works. Both are short.

When I asked who wanted to work in the film business someday, I expected a forest of hands. Twenty-Five teenagers, the first morning of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Teen Film Camp, all of them there because they applied to be. This had to be a room full of future directors and editors and cinematographers.

Two hands went up.

These were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen-year-olds. Beautifully bouncy, gloriously distracted, the kind of room where confidence shows up and disappears on a ten-minute cycle. You can’t lecture a group like that. You have to show them something they can feel.

And the thing I most needed them to feel had nothing to do with a camera. In a few days, they would be making films in crews of three and four. Four teenagers, four people each privately sure their idea is the one that should win. Whether that crew makes one good film or four half-films nobody finishes comes down to something smaller than talent. It comes down to how they answer each other.

The Circle

So we didn’t start with gear. We stood in a circle outside, and one at a time we tapped the shoulder of the person beside us, held their eyes, and said three words. “I’ve got your back.” Then we threw an imaginary ball around the circle until a banana and a frog joined it and the whole thing fell apart laughing. Both were the same lesson, wearing different clothes. Pay attention to the person across from you, or you drop the frog. Presence first.

No But, Yes But, Yes And

Back inside, I gave them three ways to answer a pitch. No but. Yes but. Yes and. Then I asked a team leader to stand up and pitch me the movie his crew was about to make.

He got a sentence in and I no-butted him. It’s been done, I said. The budget won’t cover it. The lead should be older. Every door shut before he reached it, and he slowed, then stopped, the way you do when you realize the person across from you was only waiting for a gap to say no.

I told him to start over, and this time I was generous. I nodded, I smiled, I yes-butted him. Yes, that’s interesting, but what if the ending changed? Yes, I love that, but the lead should really be older. By the third soft agreement, his idea wasn’t his anymore. I’d agreed with every word and walked off with the whole thing. That one is worse because it looks like collaboration while doing the same damage, and it’s the one that runs most of the meetings I’ve ever sat in.

Then I told him to pitch me one more time, and I said yes and. He gave me a kid who finds something. I said yes, and the thing he finds is alive. He came back fast, yes, and it’s been waiting for him. Yes, I said, and it knows his name. And he was off, both of us building the same thing in the air between us, the idea getting bigger every time it changed hands. He didn’t stop when he ran out of pitch. I had to tell him we were done.

He sat back down buoyant. You could see it on him from across the room, that lit-up thing a kid does when something he made got bigger instead of getting taken. I asked the room what was different about the three. They knew. Same pitch, same kid. The only thing that changed was the two words I chose to meet him with.

That is the whole game on a set. No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement, which is exactly why it survives in rooms where no-but would get you thrown out. And yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying. Being nice has nothing to do with it. Yes-and keeps an idea alive long enough to find out what it wants to be.

Everything I put them through that morning was improv, the same games I play on a stage on the weekends. Yes-and is its first rule. It turns out to be the first rule of any room where people are trying to make one thing together.

Intention

Once an idea is alive, you can ask the harder question, so I asked it. How do you want people to feel when they walk out of your film? That one landed like a foreign language. They’d been thinking about the shot and the gear and the cool idea, which is to say they’d been thinking about themselves. Almost none of them had pictured the person on the other end of the work. Yes-and is what carries a crew across that gap, because you can’t build toward a stranger’s feeling while you’re still guarding your own pitch.

Five Days

The clock on them was brutal. Five days to make a five-minute film, shot on iPhones, cut on laptops, every crew teaching itself to direct, light, cast, edit, and produce all at once, the whole thing due in front of their parents on Friday night. Under that kind of compression, talent is not what saves you. The crews that finish are the ones who can answer each other with yes-and. The ones stuck in no-but and yes-but spend five days defending pitches and screen a mess on Friday, if they screen anything at all.

The Back of the Book

Then I turned the intention inward. I gave them one quiet minute and a single instruction. Write down how you want to feel at the end of this week. Keep it private, in the back of the book where nobody will see it. And when the week gets hard, when you are stressed or sure your film is falling apart, open the book and read your own words back to yourself. I know that one works. I have watched it work on me for years.

Their films screened for their parents last Friday night, five days after almost none of them would raise a hand for a job in the credits. The films matter to me less than what got written in the back of those books, and what happened to the kid who felt yes-and work on him in front of everyone. That is the lesson I hope outlasts the week and the month and most of what they think they came here to learn. It is why I make the drive up to the Whittier Ranch every year.

Share

Listen to “Two Words” on Suno