I have.

I have literally carried one with my own two hands. I further suspect most of us have said some version of that line out loud in a room, right after doing or saying the most awkward possible thing. You open your mouth to recover, and what comes out instead is the thing that needed no saying. The obvious thing. The thing that makes the silence louder. “I carried a watermelon.”

I say it probably more than any other phrase in my daily life, which is a strange thing to admit about a quote from a 1987 romantic drama set in the Catskills. I say it in meetings when I’ve just said exactly the wrong thing. I say it when one of my many jokes lands flat and the pause stretches just a beat too long. I say it the way other people clear their throats or laugh quietly at themselves. It’s a souvenir from someone else’s embarrassing moment, and I borrow it freely because it fits my own life more often than I’d like to acknowledge.

But I have to be honest, it might not even be my favorite quote.

My favorite quote is “Utah, get me two.”

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Point Break. 1991. Gary Busey, playing FBI Agent Angelo Pappas, says it to Keanu Reeves before they go into a bank they suspect is about to be robbed. He’s ordering meatball sandwiches. The bank is about to explode into chaos. And he wants two. Not one. Two. I can’t fully explain why this line lives in me the way it does except to say that it represents something I aspire to: the perfect combination of total incompetence and complete calm, the person who has seen enough to know that whatever’s about to happen, you should probably eat first. I use it constantly. I use it in situations that have nothing to do with sandwiches, banks, or Keanu Reeves. It just works. It always works. The sheer confidence of it. The priorities of it. “Utah, get me two.”

This is what I want to write about.

Not movies as art or culture or awards-season conversation. I want to write about what they actually do to you. The way they live inside you when you’re not thinking about them. The way they become part of the language you reach for when your own words aren’t quite enough.

I know this isn’t a new idea. Roger Ebert called movies “a machine that generates empathy.” But Ebert was writing for everyone. I’m writing this for myself and maybe a few friends who use movies in the same way. I’m writing it for the kid I was, and for the dad I am now, and for the particular way those two people keep finding each other on a summer night when a movie starts, and the proverbial lights go down.

The Great Outdoors is the unofficial kickoff of our summer. Every year, first warm night we can manage it, the projector goes up, Goose my Dude takes his spot at my feet, the kids grab blankets they don’t need, and I light a cigar. No negotiation. No debate. Just the movie.

And every year, within minutes, we’re all inside it.

John Candy and Dan Aykroyd don’t get enough credit for what they’re actually doing in that film. The bear and the raccoons and the ‘ol 96er are all great, but the movie that stays with me is the one happening between Chet and Roman. Two brothers-in-law who love each other and have spent half a lifetime disappointing each other in the specific way that only family can. Candy plays Chet like a man who loves his family too much to stop trying, three years before Clark Griswold made that particular dad a household analogy. Aykroyd plays Roman as so overconfident, so relentlessly performative about his own success, that you almost miss the desperate need for approval running just underneath it. Kids laugh at the raccoons. But they feel that part too, even if they can’t tell you why yet.

That’s the easiest kind of movie connection. The rhyming kind. But I don’t think it’s the most interesting kind.

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Later that night, after everyone had gone inside, I watched Dirty Dancing (probably second only to The Devil Wears Prada as my guilty pleasure flick).

I’ve seen it countless times. I know every beat. And when Johnny walks into that room at the end and says nobody puts Baby in a corner, and she takes his hand, and they walk toward that stage together, I smiled before I had a single thought about smiling. And then, naturally and involuntarily, I weld up.

I want to be honest about this because I think it matters lest there be any confusion. I have no biographical connection to that story and I’m not Johnny Castle. I didn’t spend summers at Kellerman’s, or anywhere that looks like Kellerman’s. The world of that film is not my world in any external sense.

And yet it hits me every single time.

And the soundtrack. God, the soundtrack. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” is essentially a mixtape closer, the song you put last on Side B because everything after it would feel like a letdown. It earns its ending. The whole film does. But you can’t separate what the music does from what the people on screen are doing. We’re singing along to and about something real because the dancing ensamble are feeling something real, and somehow that transaction completes itself through the screen and lands in your chest, whether you’ve ever set foot at Kellermans or not.

What moves me in that final scene isn’t dance. It’s not romance or nostalgia for a decade I didn’t live through (although we are looking for a Kellerman’s type spot for a family vacation). It’s someone publicly choosing another person. It’s dignity. It’s the refusal to let someone be made smaller by a room that has already decided who they are. It’s the belief that love should be visible, celebrated, and that it shows up as action, so that it cannot be shamed into hiding.

“I’m right on top of that, Rose.”

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. 1991. Christina Applegate plays a teenager holding a professional job she has absolutely no business holding, keeping it together through borrowed confidence and sheer nerve. She delivers that line as a way of projecting competence she doesn’t fully have, and it is one of the most accurate descriptions of professional life I have ever encountered in any medium.

I say it when something is technically not yet handled but will be, when the wheels are in motion and the situation is under control in the loosest, most meaningful sense of that phrase. It names something true about the particular comedy of trying to appear like you know what you’re doing when you are, in fact, figuring it out alongside everyone else.

I’m not sure who in my professional orbit has necessarily seen this movie. It doesn’t matter. The line still lands. That’s what movie quotes really are: shorthand for emotional experiences that don’t always have good words. They’re the thing you reach for when what you want to say is complicated and the situation calls for something quicker and truer.

The mixtape piece I wrote a few months ago was really about the same thing. A song title on a J-card spine is its own kind of shorthand. Born on the 4th of July. Make Out Songs Vol. 2. Crowded Pool Bar. You didn’t need to hear the tape to understand what it was saying about the person who made it. Movies work the same way. The titles we carry around with us, the quotes we reach for, the scenes we return to, they’re the songs on Side A of whoever we are.

Grayson and I grew up watching Marvel movies together, and I want to say something specific about why, because superhero movies are easy to dismiss, and I don’t think the dismissal is entirely fair.

We weren’t watching because we thought we’d go to space tomorrow. We were watching because those movies kept making a case for something genuinely hard to believe in when you spend any time reading the news. They kept saying: people can be better than this. Ordinary people. Scared, flawed, self-interested people can still, when it matters, choose something larger than themselves.

Robert Downey Jr. built something over a decade of those films that I don’t think has a real precedent. Tony Stark started as the most self-interested person in any room and became someone who gave everything he had for people he’d never meet. That arc worked because Downey made you believe both ends of it. The arrogance and the sacrifice. You couldn’t have one without the other, and he never let you forget that the sacrifice cost something real.

Nobody leaves Avengers: Endgame thinking they’re going to wield a hammer or reverse time. But you might leave believing that sacrifice is real. That loyalty is real. That when the moment arrives, someone will stand up. That one day, we’ll get to say in some fashion: “I am Ironman.”

That feeling has a sound, and I found it recently in the most unexpected place.

Project Hail Mary uses Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” in a way I was completely unprepared for. If you haven’t seen the film I won’t give you the full context, but here is what I can tell you: there is a moment when that song arrives and it is not ironic, it is not nostalgic, it is not background. It is the exact emotional truth of what is happening on screen: a story about a human being who wakes up alone in space with no memory, slowly piecing together that he might be the last hope for everything, and choosing to keep going anyway. When that song came in, I cried the way I cry at the end of Dirty Dancing, before I had decided to, before I had time to explain it to myself.

“We never learn, we’ve been here before. Why are we always stuck and running from the bullets?”

Harry Styles wrote that song about a broken world and the terrifying freedom of having no choice but to hope anyway. The movie found the one scene in which those words mean everything, and I sat in the dark theater and felt it completely. That’s what I mean when I say I watch Marvel movies because I need to believe humanity is capable of better. Sometimes the feeling arrives through a superhero. Sometimes it arrives through an astronaut alone in the void with nothing but the decision to keep going. Sometimes it arrives through a Harry Styles song. Go figure.

The Godfather is not really about organized crime. It’s about community. About who you decide your people are and what you owe them. Marlon Brando understood that the Don’s power came from stillness, from the sense that he had already thought of everything and was just waiting for you to catch up. But what I think about when I watch that film isn’t the violence or the mythology. It’s the neighborhood. The way everyone on that street knows each other. The way people show up. The way problems get solved at the local level, by people who actually have to live next to each other afterward.

“A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

It’s not about crime at all. It’s about presence. About showing up. About the belief that your first and most fundamental obligation is to the people closest to you, not to some abstract cause or distant institution. The Don says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, because to him it is.

We’ve drifted a long way from that. Not into crime, but into something I think is its own kind of loss. We’ve convinced ourselves that Washington is our fundamental political community, that the arguments happening on cable news are the ones that actually define our lives. But I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think most people actually feel it to be true when they’re being honest. Your neighborhood is your community. Your city hall is your community. The people you’d call if something went wrong at two in the morning, that’s your community. The Corleones got a lot wrong. But they knew who their people were, and they showed up for them. I think about that more than I probably should for someone watching a movie about a crime family.

Rocky isn’t about boxing. It’s about dignity and hope. Bill Conti’s score is basically a mixtape in itself, the kind of thing you put on when you need to believe the thing you’re about to attempt is actually possible. “Gonna Fly Now” is on every running playlist ever made for exactly that reason. It found the truth in the moment.

Field of Dreams isn’t about baseball. It’s about fathers. About conversations you never got to finish. Kevin Costner standing in that field when his father walks out of the corn and asking him if he wants to have a catch is one of the most honest moments American cinema has ever produced, and it works because James Earl Jones had already spent twenty minutes building the case that some things are worth believing in even when the world tells you you’re crazy.

What I keep coming back to is what movies have done for me as a father and as a friend.

They create a shared language. Reference points. The particular intimacy of people who have laughed at the same things and sat in the dark, having the same private experience at the same time. That’s what my mixtape crew does, still, trading Spotify links and having too-long text messages about what made the cut and why. The medium changed. The instinct didn’t. We are still curating our way through our own lives, still reaching for the songs and scenes that name the thing we’re feeling.

My kids may not remember every plot detail of every movie we’ve watched together. But they’ll remember the patio. The warm night. The sound of all of us laughing in the same direction. A summer that felt whole while we were in it.

And someday, years from now, one of them will come across The Great Outdoors, or something we watched together, and something will go quiet in them, and they’ll find themselves back there. Not exactly as memory, but as feeling. The way “Fade Into You” can drop you back into a specific room in a specific year before you’ve even consciously recognized the song.

That’s the quiet gift movies have given me my whole life. Not escape. Not a distraction. A place to return to. A way to stay connected to people, moments, and versions of myself that would otherwise slip away.

I was a kid who borrowed other people’s words for the moments when my own weren’t quite right. This is the language we built together:

Nobody puts Baby in a corner.
Utah, get me two.
I’m right on top of that, Rose.

This isn’t just shorthand for movies we’ve seen. It’s proof we were in the same room, feeling the same thing, at the same time. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

Life moves fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Joe Baker used to show up at my house at 8 in the morning during the summer to tutor me in math. Not a school morning. Not in the Math Resource Center. Summer. At my house.

I’d sit across from him at my dining room table and stare at problems I couldn’t figure out, and Joe would just work through them. No frustration. There was no look on his face that told you what you already knew, that you were behind. He just stayed until it clicked.

I’ve thought about those mornings a lot since he died.

Joe Baker spent forty-six years at Calvert Hall College High School. Forty-six years. He was loud. Fast-talking. Passionate about things most people gave up being passionate about somewhere around their second decade in a classroom. He was somewhere between teacher, coach, and your favorite uncle, the one who cared a little more than the situation required, more than was strictly professional, more than you deserved on your worst days.

He wasn’t selling the school. He believed in what the school could do for a person. There’s a difference. A real one.

Prestige didn’t interest him. Appearances didn’t interest him. What interested him were the kids walking those hallways like the awkward freshmen. The seniors performing confidence they didn’t have. The young men who left Calvert Hall and became fathers, coaches, teachers, firefighters, neighbors.

That was the thing Joe cared about most. The ripple effect.

The impact of a school is almost impossible to measure from inside it. It lives in the small stuff.

For me, it was Mr. Hooper stopping you in the hallway to tell you to take his creative writing course next year while writing you up for cafe duty because you forgot your belt.

Getting buried under a freshman baseball dogpile after winning the conference championship and realizing somewhere in the middle of it that your playing career had already ended in the exact right way.

It’s your senior psych presentation turning into complete nonsense because your buddy decided you needed to complete a checklist of random acts; play air guitar and swat invisible flies and stare dramatically out the window mid-sentence while kids who weren’t even in the class packed themselves into the room just to watch.

That’s what stays. Not grades. Not transcripts. People and moments.

Baltimore is a school town. Always has been. Mention Calvert Hall or any of the area's private schools anywhere in this town, and somebody immediately has a story. A brother who went there. A dad who still talks about a coach from thirty years ago. A retreat. A game. A friendship that became something more.

The buildings are only part of it.

The real foundation was people like Joe Baker. Teachers who stayed late. Coaches who pushed you harder than you’d ever push yourself. These are the folks who understood, really understood, that teenage boys are mostly just uncertainty wearing a confident face.

Joe understood that better than most.

That's why this year's All Day Hall Day is different. Joe showed us what it looks like when somebody goes all in on a place and never stops. That kind of commitment doesn't sustain itself. It needs people who believe in it enough to keep it going. Joe was what Calvert Hall looks like when it’s working. Not polished. Not performing. Just a man who showed up, at school, at games, at your dining room table at 8 in the morning in July, because he thought it mattered.

It mattered.

Forty-six years of it mattered.

And if this town is a little better because of the men who came through those halls, Joe Baker had something to do with it. More than something.

There’s is a short story I’ve come back to over the years. An empire becomes so obsessed with precision that its mapmakers eventually create a map as large and detailed as the empire itself. Every road. Every boundary. Every feature, captured perfectly. A one-to-one representation of reality.

And completely useless. Because the world shifts way too fast for a perfect map to matter. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” —Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

I was recently appointed as the Director of Emergency Management for Baltimore County. It’s a role I’m stepping into with a real sense of responsibility and, honestly, a lot of gratitude for the people across this county who have been doing this work long before I arrived.

The story I share isn’t really about cartography. It’s about something many of us in this field recognize, even if we don’t say it out loud: the belief that if we plan thoroughly enough, think clearly enough, and document everything just right, we can get ahead of uncertainty.

We all know, at some level, that’s not how things work. But we still tend to build that way. Let’s put this on hold, we’ll come back to it shortly.

Most people don’t spend much time thinking about emergency management, and honestly, that’s a good thing. If you wake up, turn on the lights, get your kids to school, go to work, and come home without disruption, then a lot of things are working the way they should.

But the work is always there, just beneath the surface.

At its core, emergency management isn’t just about what happens when something goes wrong. It’s about ensuring the systems people rely on every day are reliable, connected, and resilient under stress when needed.

Power. Water. Healthcare. Transportation. Communications. The things that make daily life possible. Emergency Management doesn’t own these lifelines, but we coordinate directly with the owners and stakeholders who operate them every day, so that when one is under stress, the others don't fall out of step.

What makes this work challenging and so critically important is that those systems don’t fail in isolation. A disruption in one place has a way of moving.

If power goes down, water systems can be affected. If water is disrupted, healthcare facilities feel it almost immediately. Transportation slows. Supply chains tighten. People who were already on the edge feel it first and most. What starts as a contained issue can begin to spread, not because any one system failed completely, but because they are all connected.

You don’t have to stretch far to imagine it. We’ve seen versions of it before: during major storms, during the early days of the pandemic, in smaller incidents that didn’t make national headlines but still had real impacts on communities like water main breaks or prolonged power outages.

This is the environment in which emergency management operates. Not in clean scenarios, but in interconnected systems, under real conditions, with real people. And that’s where strategy matters — but not the kind that mistakes thoroughness for readiness.

We’ve all seen plans that look complete. Well-structured, detailed, every box checked, every known risk anticipated. And then something unexpected happens. Or happens faster than anticipated. Or cuts across multiple systems at once in a way no one modeled. As Mike Tyson put it: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In those moments, what matters isn’t how perfect the plan was. It’s whether the system behind it can adapt. Whether the people involved know how to work together. Whether information moves clearly and decisions can be made without hesitation. Real strategy doesn’t try to anticipate everything; it builds the capacity to respond when something unanticipated arrives anyway.

So my approach to this work starts in a different place. It starts with people. Not as a talking point, but as the foundation.

Who is this system meant to serve? Does it actually work for them? Is it accessible? Is it understandable? Does it account for the reality that not everyone starts from the same place or has the same ability to respond when something goes wrong?

Those questions shape everything else.

And they aren't abstract questions. I think about the person who needs dialysis three times a week and has no margin for a transportation disruption or a facility that's lost power. For them, a system failure isn't an inconvenience; it's a medical emergency measured in hours. Those are the people who tell you whether a system actually works, because they're the ones who feel it first when it doesn't. If we're designing preparedness around the people with the most resources and the most flexibility, we're not really doing whole-of-community preparedness.

From there, it becomes about designing systems that hold up under pressure and ensuring the work is shared among the agencies, partners, and communities that carry it forward every day, rather than concentrated in a single office. It means spending as much time on preparedness and mitigation as we do on response, because the strongest response is often the one that never has to happen at full scale. And it means being honest about uncertainty. Not trying to eliminate it, but designing around it.

Data and technology play a critical role in that.

They help us see patterns earlier. They give us better visibility into what’s happening across systems. They allow us to move from reacting to anticipating. They make it easier to share information quickly and clearly, especially at the leadership level, where decisions must be made with incomplete information.

But they’re not the solution on their own.

If anything, they can become their own version of that oversized map. So detailed, so complex, that they’re difficult to use when it matters most. But when we use them with discipline and clarity and as tools in service of people rather than ends in themselves, data and technology give us something genuinely powerful: the ability to see around corners before the storm arrives.

This is where the work becomes less about control and more about coordination.

Emergency management occupies a unique position. It doesn’t replace the work of fire, police, infosec, IT, public health, public works, schools, or any of the other agencies that serve this county. It is the connective tissue creating a shared understanding before something happens and a shared direction when it does.

It’s about ensuring that when multiple systems are under pressure simultaneously, they don’t pull in different directions. It’s meetings that don’t make the news. It’s plans that get updated before they’re needed. It’s exercises that surface small gaps before they become large ones.

It’s also making sure the people who don’t typically think of themselves as part of the emergency response apparatus understand the role they may need to play. School staff, public works crews, healthcare workers, and community organizations are often the first to feel the impact of an incident, and in many cases, the first to act before additional help arrives.

It’s relationships built over time, so that when something does go wrong, people already know how to work together, not exchanging business cards in the middle of a crisis, but building trust well before it ever arrives.

And honestly, my job is to be in service to the people doing that work, not the other way around. The firefighter who knows every street in their district. The public works crew that gets called at 2 am when a water main breaks. The school nurse who becomes a lifeline when a community facility needs to open as a shelter. These are the people the system runs on. My role is to make sure they have what they need: proper training, clear information, coordinated support, and leadership that pays attention, so that when the moment comes, they can do what they already know how to do.

You won’t always see it. And if we’re doing it well, you won’t need to. But the impact shows up.

Decisions are made faster and with more clarity. Coordination feels smoother, even in difficult situations. Recovery starts sooner and moves more steadily. And over time, the overall strain on the system is reduced, because we’re not just reacting, we’re preparing, adjusting, and improving along the way.

Baltimore County already has a strong foundation to build on. There are experienced professionals across agencies who understand their roles deeply and care about the communities they serve. There are partnerships in place that have been built over years, sometimes decades.

My role isn't to replace that. It's to strengthen it. And to be clear about what that means to me: I'm accountable to the people doing this work every day, and to the residents counting on it. That's the direction accountability runs in this role. Not down from a leadership title, but outward toward the agencies, the partners, the community organizations, and ultimately the people of Baltimore County who deserve systems that hold when they need them most. Because at the end of it all, this work isn't about plans, or frameworks, or even strategy in the abstract. It's about whether the systems we build hold up when people need them most. That's the standard. And it's the work I'm here to do.

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If you know TALMAR, you know it’s never been just a farm. It’s a place where people show up to do real work. The kind that leaves your hands dirty but somehow makes your head a little clearer.

For Kaiti and me, it’s become part of our rhythm. We’ve volunteered there with the kids for years. It’s where we go every December to get our Christmas tree. Not because it’s the easiest option, but because it feels right to be part of what’s happening there.

This Saturday, they’re making something official. TALMAR is becoming Serviceberry Farm. And the more you sit with that name, the more it just fits.

So why the Serviceberry?

If you’ve never noticed one, you probably have without realizing it. The Amelanchier, if we’re going to be scientific. Or maybe you know it as the Juneberry. Whatever you call it, the Serviceberry is usually the first thing to bloom in the spring. White flowers, almost like a veil across the woods, before anything else has really woken up.

The name carries some history, too. In parts of Appalachia, it was called “Sarvis.” When those flowers showed up, it meant the mountain roads had thawed enough for circuit-riding preachers to make their way back into the valleys and hold services. Sometimes those were long-delayed funerals after a hard winter. Others call it “Shadbush,” because it blooms right when the shad run upstream. Either way, it’s always been tied to the same thing. A return. A signal that people could come back together.

That part feels right for this place.

Because the work isn’t changing. Even with a new name out front, the mission is the same as it’s been for 25 years. It’s still a place where horticultural therapy helps veterans and people with disabilities find their footing again.

There’s a practice they do called “Sit and Spot.” Every morning, ten minutes. Just sit. Pay attention. Notice what’s changed on the farm. Notice what’s changed in you. It’s not about perfect rows or record harvests. If someone leaves a little steadier than when they arrived, that counts.

I’ve been thinking about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry lately. Kate Joyce, who leads TALMAR, shared it with me and talked about how much it shaped the way she sees this work. And once you hear her talk about it, you start to see it in everything they’ve built there. Kimmerer writes about this idea of a gift economy. A serviceberry tree produces more fruit than it can hold onto. It has to give it away. Birds take it, people take it, the seeds spread, and the whole thing keeps going.

She has a line that sticks with you: “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”

It comes from a story Kimmerer tells about a hunter who brought home more meat than his family could eat. Instead of drying it or locking it away, he invited the whole village to a feast. When asked why he didn’t save it for a rainy day, he explained that by feeding his neighbors now, he was ensuring they would feed him later. He wasn’t just giving away food; he was building a social safety net.

It’s a shift in how we define wealth. Real security doesn’t come from stockpiling or having the biggest ‘freezer.’ It comes from the strength of the bonds you build. It’s the knowledge that when you have a surplus, you give, and when you are empty-handed, someone else’s ‘storage’ will be open to you. It’s an investment in people rather than things.

That’s what this place has always felt like.

When we’re out there, we’re not just showing up to volunteer. We’re part of it. The work matters, but so does the connection. You feel it when you’re there.

So Saturday isn’t really about a rebrand.

It’s just a good reason to go. If you’ve been meaning to check it out, come by.

If you’re trying to raise kids who understand that showing up for other people matters—or if you just need that reminder yourself—it’s a pretty good place to spend a few hours.

We’ll see you at the farm.

The Details:

What: Serviceberry Farm Rebrand Celebration
When: This Saturday, April 25, 2026. 2-5pm
Where: 1994 Cromwell Bridge Rd, Baltimore, MD

It’s 1992. You’re losing a race against time. You’re in the passenger seat of your dad’s car, halfway down the street, when the DJ’s voice crackles through the speakers with that specific FM-radio authority: “Coming up after the break… we’ve got the new one from the guys from Los Angeles.”

And just like that, nothing else matters. You are begging your dad to floor it into the driveway. He’s not going faster. He’s definitely not going fast enough. You’re already unbuckled before the car stops, door open, halfway out, already sprinting toward the front door. You can hear the radio fading behind you, and you’re praying to the gods of magnetic tape that the commercials stretch just a little bit longer.

The stereo’s gotta be on. Tape’s gotta be ready. I don’t even know if the volume actually mattered, but it felt like it did. Maybe I made that up. Either way, I wasn’t risking it. You hit the bedroom floor, sliding on the carpet, finger hovering over that little red REC button. You wait. You hold your breath. And then—too early, too late, the DJ still yapping over the intro like it’s his job, which it is—it doesn’t matter. You hit it. That little red light clicks on.

That’s it. You’re in it now. You might not get another shot.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner…”
— Under the Bridge, Red Hot Chili Peppers

You listen back immediately. Just enough to check. A second of silence. That soft, steady, beautiful tape hiss. And then there it is. Maybe you let the ending run too long. Maybe you didn’t. Either way, you’re not fixing it with the deck. The deck’s useless for that. You grab a pencil, stick it into the spool, and start turning it slowly, carefully, like you’re doing something delicate, even though it’s just plastic.

You got good at it. Weirdly good, actually.

I used to buy blank tapes in packs. Usually Maxell. I was always a little jealous of the kids who had the yellow ones. The high-bias kids. The rich-kid tapes. Those ones. Supposedly, you could hear the difference. I don’t know if that was true, but it felt true.

But my real origin story belongs to my grandmother. When I got my first player, she gifted me a three-pack starter kit: The Monkees, U2’s Rattle & Hum, and the Footloose Soundtrack. It was an eclectic, beautiful, slightly confusing entry point into the medium, but honestly? They’re still the bedrock. I will defend the Footloose soundtrack to my dying breath.

In the beginning, your library was at the mercy of the airwaves. You sat by the radio for hours, finger cramping over the button, waiting for the DJ to finally play the song you needed so you could snatch it out of the sky.

“We only get one chance
And nothing ties our hands
You’re what I want, listen to me
Nothing I want’s out of my reach (I’m free)”
— I'm Free, Kenny Loggins

There was a period where B104 was pumping out Motownphilly or Color Me Badd’s I Wanna Sex You Up on a loop. And look, whether I was an R&B guy or a Rock guy was irrelevant. I knew it needed to land on a mixtape. If the harmony hit right, it was going on the Maxell. Period.

But then came the evolution: the dual-deck recorder. Suddenly, you weren’t just a scavenger; you were a distributor. The dual-deck changed everything. Borrow a tape from a friend, put it in one side, blank tape in the other, hit high-speed dubbing, and just… go. It felt like you were getting away with something.

By the time the elementary and middle school talent shows rolled around, I had graduated to professional-grade curation. I wasn’t just catching songs; I was building atmospheres. I remember making a specific mix with Poison’s Every Rose Has Its Thorn and Guns N’ Roses’ Don’t Cry to serve as background music. There’s a very specific kind of 11-year-old confidence required to stand on a stage while Bret Michaels croons in the background. But at the time? That was it. That was the move.

“Was it something I said or something I did?
Did my words not come out right?”
— Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Poison

But eventually, you run out of blanks. And that’s when you had to start making decisions. This is where the workaround happens. Those little plastic tabs on the top of the cassettes, the ones you pop off so you don’t accidentally record over your favorite album? They’re supposed to be final. Unless you have scotch tape, then you just cover the holes and pretend that rule doesn’t exist.

That’s how an old George Thorogood tape my grandmom gave me, another gift I’m reasonably sure I never even took out of the shrink wrap, quietly became something else entirely. By that point, I was maybe 12. I didn’t know much, but I knew what I liked, and in 1992, George Thorogood just wasn’t it. Which is funny, because a year later, he was my first concert at Merriweather.

So it all comes back around, I guess.

The thin cardboard insert mattered just as much as the music. The J-card. The index card cut down to size and slid into the plastic case. You’d write the songs out by hand. Carefully at first. You start out neat. Then, as Side B started to vanish, your handwriting would get tighter, more desperate, until you were squeezing the final track into the corner like a secret message.

The title always went on the spine. The title was the whole thing.

• Born on the 4th of July

• Don’t Kill The Mixtape

• Locals Only

• Crowded Pool Bar

• Make Out Songs Vol. 2

  ---

You didn’t always know what you were saying when you made one. You just knew certain songs had to be there. For me, Under the Bridge was always on it. Felt honest, even if I had no idea what it was actually about. And then Every Breath You Take, which I thought was a love song.

It’s not a love song.

But at 12, it felt like one.

“Oh, can't you see
You belong to me?”
— Every Breath You Take, The Police

We were all becoming curators. We were all making our own versions of something. Love songs, breakup songs, songs for the drive to the mall. You can do that in ten seconds now. Back then… it took a weekend. And a little luck.

The mixtape hasn’t died; it just changed form. Now it’s a Spotify link. No hiss. No pencil. No limit on space. Which means the only limits left are the ones we impose on ourselves. And I still trade them. Every few months, a link pops up in the text feed from the mixtape crew.

The crew still exchanges the big ideas: Top of 2025, Fuck This Job, or I Said I Loved You But I Lied. Same conversations, too. What made the cut. What didn’t. Why something doesn’t belong, even if it’s a great song. Or why it does.

I’ve found stuff I never would’ve come across otherwise. Had long, probably too-long conversations about bands like Ween and whether U2 is somehow both the best and worst band at the same time.

Honestly, it’s kind of great.

“That’s great it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, and aeroplanes. Lenny Bruce is not afraid.”
— It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), R.E.M.

I still keep that one rule: 60 or 90 minutes. That’s it. It forces you to actually think about what belongs.

I’ve built up a pretty ridiculous catalog over time. All over the place. I have a mix called Greatest Song Intros where Dire Straits sits next to New Order and Rush. I have a Red Coats Are Coming tape where an all-British lineup, including The Jam, segues into Black Sabbath. None of it makes sense. All of it does.

In the spirit of all this, I’m sharing a few.

Check out How It Could Have Gone: Thirteen Stories. It’s the narrative whiplash of Marty Robbins storytelling crashing into Slick Rick and Eminem. No algorithm would ever suggest this. No record store would allow it. But that’s the point.

If you want the “old soul” version, check out The One That Got Away. It’s the Mazzy Star, Cranberries, and Radiohead vibe. The stuff you didn’t understand then, but you feel in your bones now.

You remember yours. The title. The person it was for. The first song on Side A.

“Fade into you
Strange you never knew
Fade into you
I think it’s strange you never knew.”
— Fade Into You, Mazzy Star

Go make one again.

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I was twelve years old the morning my dad let my brother and me get fully dressed for school.

Uniforms on. Polo shirts tucked. Like any other Monday, we were going through the motions of a morning governed by a carpool schedule, completely unaware that the script was about to be flipped.

Usually, when my dad decided we needed a break from the classroom, he’d take us to D.C. to walk through one of the Smithsonians or tour the Memorials. Today, we call those “mental wellness days.” Back then, especially in a school run by Mrs. Short and the nuns, it was just called truancy.

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It wasn’t until we were sitting at the breakfast table that he asked the question with a look that hovered somewhere between a conspiracy and a gift:

“Do you want to skip today?”

Not skip because we were sick. Not skip because we were lazy. Skip because something better was waiting. We didn’t even have to ask where we were going. There was only one place in the world that mattered that day.

Before heading downtown, we stopped at the Giant in Loch Raven Village to get peanuts. I remember doing this before going to any game at Old Memorial Stadium, just like my dad and uncle did when they were kids, before hopping on the #3 bus for the straight shot to 33rd Street. That grocery store sat right behind my Pop’s house on Kirkwall Court, the only court in The Village, and was the first place I was ever allowed to walk to on my own, and I’d hit my Pop up for a dollar to buy those Hostess Apple Pies in that green-and-white waxy package.

The air was that perfect Maryland transition: low 60s, crisp yet soft enough to promise what was coming. The grass was heavy with dew. Someone in the neighborhood must have mowed the day before, because that first-cut-of-the-season smell was everywhere. At twelve, I didn’t yet know the specific olfactory signature of a Major League dugout. But I knew that smell. Fresh. Earthy. Alive.

On that walk to the Giant, we passed my Little League field. It was empty and quiet, the dirt kicked around, and the chalk lines were dull from our travel game that weekend. I didn’t think about it like this then, but I was looking at the backyard version of the cathedral we were soon heading toward.

While my dad stayed back at my Pop’s house for a bit, my brother and I trailed along, gloves already in our hands. We carried them like talismans, like we actually expected a foul ball to find its way to two kids sitting under the lower terrace overhang.

By the time we reached Camden Yards, I had already walked through baseball once that morning. The ballpark didn’t feel like a brand-new construction project. It felt like it had always been there, waiting for the city to finally catch up to it. The warehouse, the green steel, and the brick didn’t feel like architecture; they felt like an identity.

We found our seats on the lower terrace, on the first-base side. Because of the overhang, you couldn’t actually see the arc of a high fly ball. You just had to listen to the crack of the bat and the head shift of the crowd and guess where the ball went. It didn’t matter. We were close enough to home plate to see the dirt fly. We were in the building.

Everyone remembers the big anthems. “I’m Talking Baseball.” “Orioles Magic.” And of course, “Thank God I’m A Country Boy.” The songs that demand you stand up and shout. But when I think of this morning from 1992, I don’t hear the brass or strings. I hear a soft hum. It was the theme song for that inaugural year, a track called “Welcome Home.” It wasn’t a hype song; it was a vibe: steady, understated, and vintage.

The entire day felt like the cinematic magic of Field of Dreams had leaked into Baltimore. I think of Terrence Mann’s monologue:

“And they’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”

Standing there in the lower terrace, the “Oriole Magic” felt real. My favorite player, my idol, and Baltimore’s favorite son, Cal Ripken Jr., was warming up just a few dozen yards away. There was never any irony lost on me that my name was also Cal; in Baltimore, that name was a badge of honor I was never shy about wearing. I wore #8 on my own Little League team. I played shortstop. I spent my Saturday mornings trying to mimic his iconic throwing motion from short.

To see the Iron Man trot out to that pristine patch of dirt, it felt like my entire universe could fit perfectly into the space between the grass he stood on and the seat I was in. I wasn’t just a kid at a game; I was a boy watching the best version of himself, or at least the version I dreamed of becoming.

The box score says it was a shutout. Rick Sutcliffe, with his strange hide-the-ball grip, went the distance. Chris Hoiles hit a two-run double. By most analytical measurements, it was a quick, perhaps even lackluster, game.

To me, it was the greatest game I’ve ever seen.

Fathers don’t always narrate the importance of a moment while it’s happening. They don’t stop and say, “Pay attention, this is the architecture of your memory being built.” They just change the day. They let you put on your school clothes and then tell you to grab your O’s hat and glove. They lead you through the neighborhood, past your own empty ballfield, and into a place where the grass smells exactly the same but the lights are a little brighter.

My brother and I just followed.

I don’t remember every play, but I remember the feeling of being twelve and believing that every Opening Day would feel exactly like this. I remember the way my dad held the moment steady for us, long enough for it to settle into our bones.

Some days don’t announce their importance. They just unfold, one step at a time, until years later you realize you’ve been carrying them with you the whole way.

Opening Day, 1992.
A father who knew when to break the rules.
And a song, playing quietly under the surface, saying exactly what needed to be said.

Welcome home.

Share Present Tense

For the last ten years, I’ve worn the same ring on my right hand. It is a black tungsten class ring from the Naval Postgraduate School. It is simple, durable, and light enough that I forget it’s there on most days. Like anything you wear every day for a decade, you eventually stop noticing it. It gets scratched, the finish takes a beating, and it just becomes part of your hand. I only really think about it when I take it off to wash my hands and realize how pale and smooth that part of my finger looks without it.

Every once in a while, I take it off and spin it on my finger. On the inside of the band, engraved in small letters that are easy to miss, are six words: Character is built in the dark. You have to hold the ring just right to read them because the black tungsten does not reflect light easily. The engraving is subtle, which, I suppose, is the point. The phrase is not for an audience. It is a private reminder that the moments that shape me rarely happen under bright lights. More often, character is formed in the small, agonizing decisions made when no one is watching.

I hadn’t thought about those words in a long time until I watched the Oscars recently. During an acceptance speech, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson pauses to thank his kids and says something that sticks with me: “I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them... but also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

When I hear it, I agree, but not just because of the politics. I think about it because of the questions my daughter, Mila, asks about whether something could actually happen here. I think about it because of the way my youngest daughter flinches when an emergency alert goes off on all our phones at once. And, unfortunately, it again pings me when my son asks if I saw the most recent tweet from our Commander-in-Chief.

For them, the “mess” isn’t just a metaphor. It is an ambient, low-grade anxiety that hums in the background of their lives. It is not always the fear of a bomb dropping; it is the death by a thousand cuts they witness every day on their screens. It is the feeling that the world is fragile, that the institutions meant to protect them are fraying, and that they are presiding over a slow, very real decline.

The line stays with me the rest of that night. It’s still there when I wake up the next morning. It hits home because it confirms the fear so many parents carry: that we are handing our kids a bill for a life they don’t get to live.

But as the day goes on, the thought doesn’t let go. Are we really leaving them a wasteland? Or is the inheritance more complicated than a simple apology?

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The Reservoir is Full

There is a persistent anxiousness in our collective that suggests we are standing on the edge of a cliff. I think about this often when I am out running the trails at the reservoir behind my house.

The Loch Raven Reservoir is a massive, life-sustaining resource for millions of people. It holds about 23 billion gallons of water and is the lifeblood for the Baltimore region. But to create that resource, an entire town called Warren was submerged in 1922. If you go deep enough and the water levels are low enough, you can still see the old foundations and, according to some, the ghosts of a different era at the bottom of that lake.

The problem is that we tend to spend so much time staring into the dark water, obsessing over the ruins of the town at the bottom, that we forget the reservoir is actually full. We are so fixated on what is lost or broken in the process of building the modern world that we ignore the staggering, almost frightening abundance we have built on top of it. We are the first generation to grow bored with the impossible. We’ve taken the most significant leaps in human history and filed them away as basic expectations.

In 1990, nearly 36% of the world lives in extreme poverty; today, that number is below 8%, even as our global population surges. This is not just a statistic; it is evidence that we can move the needle on the most deep-seated issues of our lifetime. It means that hundreds of millions of people who once spent every waking hour just trying to survive are now free to think, build, and contribute.

It does not mean the work is over, or that the struggle for those still left behind is any less urgent. But it proves that the “impossible” problems of the past are not a permanent part of the landscape. They are challenges we now have the actual capacity to solve, if we can find the collective will to do it.

The Ferrari in First Gear

For the first time in humanity, “programmable medicine” has moved from science fiction to standard care. Even the way we handle knowledge shifts: a kid with a smartphone in a rural village today has access to more information than the President of the United States did just thirty years ago.

We are not leaving them a broken machine; we are leaving them a high-powered Ferrari that our generation drives in first gear. We didn’t fail to build the future. We just haven’t learned how to use it yet. We have built a global nervous system through the internet, but we have not yet mastered how to live on it without tearing each other apart. We create Artificial Intelligence, but we still argue over whether it is a toy or a threat, rather than using it to solve the “big” problems like desalination or clean energy.

Our failure is not in the building. It is in the harnessing. We’ve expanded the ceiling of what is possible, but we get distracted by the noise before we can actually reach it.

The truth is, it’s hard to drive a Ferrari when everyone in the car is fighting over who gets to hold the map. We have these world-altering tools at our fingertips, but we’re currently using them to fuel an outrage economy.

Our public square is no longer built for solving problems; it is built for the sharpest jab and the loudest voice because, as I’ve written before, nuance does not “index” well in an algorithm. We have created a world where it is professionally profitable to be cynical, and that cynicism is exactly what keeps us from harnessing the abundance right in front of us.

This is why I look at my children with more hope than I look at our current leadership. It is not just paternal pride; it’s a cold and straightforward assessment of the incentives. While our leaders are rewarded for their performance, I see a generation coming up that is already exhausted by the show.

The Big Reveal

The question of whether we are leaving them a mess is still there when my oldest son, Grayson, shows me the essay he wrote for his senior class president campaign. He has to explain what leadership means to him. In the middle of the page, he writes a line that makes me stop: “Being a leader is who you are when nobody is watching.”

I stop reading and sit with it for a minute, and look at the black ring on my finger. I slip it off and hold it up to the light: Character is built in the dark. For years, I thought of those words simply as a reminder to myself. But sitting there with my son’s essay, I realize that the people watching those quiet moments most closely, all along, are our children. I never sit Grayson down for a lecture on the virtues of the dark. I never taught him that specific phrase. Yet, somehow, the idea takes root. He does not just inherit the “mess” of the world; he absorbs the quiet moments, the ones that happen when the cameras are off and the lights are low.

A Letter to the Next Generation

To Grayson and Maverick, Mila and Hadley—and to all the sons and daughters reading this—I want to be clear about the hand you have been dealt.

I am sorry for the housekeeping mess. I am sorry we have not yet figured out how to talk to one another without a screen acting as a shield. I am sorry that the institutions we pass on to you look more frayed than they did when we found them. I am sorry that we often modeled division when we should have modeled curiosity. These are real failures, and you deserve honesty about them.

But I refuse to apologize for the world itself.

I know what you hear every night. I know the headlines that scroll across your phones tell you that the world is ending, that the climate is a lost cause, and that your neighbors are your enemies. I know that “anxiety” has become the background noise of your youth.

But I want you to hear this: You are not inheriting a funeral. You are inheriting a construction site.

Our generation laid the foundations for things we do not always have the courage, patience, or imagination to finish. We built tools that can rewrite the code of disease, harness the sun, and connect every human brain on the planet to the sum total of human knowledge. We built a world where knowledge moves at the speed of light and where one determined person can change the trajectory of millions of lives.

That does not mean the work is done. It means the work is now yours.

You will inherit problems that will frustrate you. You will deal with systems that move too slowly and people who are too certain and too angry. There will be moments when the news feels like a tidal wave, and it feels easier to give in to cynicism than to keep building.

Resist that temptation.

Cynicism is the easiest posture in the world, but it is the cheapest thing you can own. It requires no imagination whatsoever and zero courage. Anyone can stand on the sidelines and explain why something cannot be fixed. Anyone can point at a ruin and call it a failure.

Builders are rarer.

Be builders.

When you look at the world we hand you, do not spend all your time staring at the ruins at the bottom of the reservoir. Remember that the reservoir itself is full. It is full of ideas, of tools, and of billions of people who want to solve hard problems if someone is willing to lead them.

Lead, as my son describes in his essay, not as the loudest voice in the room, but as the one who earns trust rather than demanding it. Lead with the quiet strength that does not need a “like” or a “share” to feel validated.

Lead with curiosity. Lead with common sense. Lead with decency.

And remember that the most important decisions you make will not happen in public view. They will not be captured on camera or performed for an audience. They will happen in the quietest moments when nobody is watching, and there is no applause waiting on the other side.

That is where character is built. That is where the world actually changes.

This story does not end with our unfinished business. You are inheriting a world still under construction, filled with tools we do not fully understand and potential we have not quite reached. We give you the abundance. We give you the starting point.

The rest is yours to build.

And if the quiet lessons you absorb today are any indication, I have a feeling you will know exactly what to do with it. We are not just hoping you will be okay. We are betting on it.

We trust you. Not because we have to. But because we see who you are, even when the lights are off.

The Final Edit

The other night, Grayson asked me to take a look at the final draft of his essay. He calls out the very last line: “My eyes will be your eyes. My ears will be your ears. I will be your friend.”

He pauses. “I think I should change it,” he says. “I think I need to ask for their vote.”

Sure, I thought to myself, “remind them to check the box. Make sure they know you’re running to win.” He’s looking for the hook that moves the needle.

But I tell him to leave it exactly as it is.

“Don’t touch it,” I say.

The last thing this world needs is another person obsessed with the tally. We have plenty of people who “lead” us today who base their principles on the vote count. We’re drowning in it. What we don’t have enough of is exactly what he wrote: kids who are willing to just be present and actually listen.

I tell him it shouldn’t be about the scoreboard. It’s about that earlier line he wrote, when there’s absolutely no political advantage in doing it:

“Being a leader is who you are when nobody is watching.”

If character is built in the dark, then maybe leadership is just what happens when you stop worrying about the “ask” and start worrying about the person.

Maybe that’s how it should always be. And if they’re thinking in those terms today, then I can assure you, the kids are gonna be alright.

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“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

Author’s Note: This essay is the final piece of a thematic trilogy. To see how the Impartial Spectator fits into the larger picture, it is best understood as the resolution to the questions raised in my previous two pieces:

1. Act I (Silence): What we lose when the center goes quiet

2. Act II (Certainty): How far away is the thing we’re angry about?

3. Act III (Independence): This essay.

The Path of Performance

The first two pieces of this series were incomplete. I wrote about the silence of the center and the distance and distortion of our grievance, but until now, I hadn’t addressed the underlying mechanism that makes both possible, or what I consider to be the path that leads back to a solution.

We have become obsessed with the “Like,” but we have forgotten the “Lovely.” This tension is at the heart of our moral fatigue and the engine of our collective anxiety. It is the reason we feel so exhausted by even our own convictions. We are living in an era of performative certainty, where every issue requires an immediate, high signal declaration of allegiance to a “side” or what I previously referred to as our “in-group.” We’ve confused being loud with being right, and being loyal with being moral. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to join the digital chorus, it is not because you are weak. It’s because the internal mechanism that is supposed to guide you, the Impartial Spectator, is being methodically dismantled by the world around us. This figure is our Internal Referee: the only part of our character capable of looking past the immediate “Like” to judge what is truly “Lovely.”

But this referee is not just a conscience or the source of the problem; it is the only viable solution. Reclaiming the authority of the spectator is the only way to break the silence and bridge the distance.

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The Two Paths to Being Loved

I am going to ask you to step into some 18th-century philosophy, but I hope you will stick with me, because the payoff is a direct map of our current social crisis. Seventeen years before he became the “father of modern economics” with The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. In this earlier work, he observed a fundamental duality in human nature: the desire to be loved, and the deeper desire to be lovely.

To be “loved” is to receive praise. To be “lovely” is to actually deserve it, to be the proper object of that praise. Smith noted that there are two paths to achieving this:

• Path A: To be rich, powerful, and famous.

• Path B: To be wise and virtuous.

Path A is the highway to immediate applause. Path B is a quiet, narrow trail. The tragedy of our current era is that we have industrialized and incentivized Path A, making the pursuit of digital fame the default setting, while Path B, the path of the quiet center, is increasingly seen as a sign of weakness.

The Mechanism of Death

My claim is that the Impartial Spectator, the internal judge who helps us navigate these paths, is dying. To understand this loss, we must distinguish it from what we commonly call “conscience.”

Our conscience is an internal moral alarm, often shaped by our upbringing, our culture, and, increasingly, our social media feeds. It tells us when we’ve crossed a line. But as we grow older in a polarized world, that alarm is often tuned by the tribe. It rings loudly when we disappoint our own side, and sometimes goes quiet when the harm is done by people who share our jersey.

The problem today isn’t that people are “bad” or lack a conscience; it is that they are “captured.” Their internal moral alarm is still firing, but it is only wired to the frequency of their in-group. Their conscience is active, but their Impartial Spectator is dead. This is the most empathetic way to understand the radicalization we see in our streets and our feeds. People feel deeply righteous because their conscience is screaming, but they have lost the “third-person” perspective required to see that their righteousness is being manipulated.

I am not suggesting a new philosophy here; I am simply updating Smith’s eighteenth-century firmware for the algorithmic age. But for that update to hold, the Spectator needs three conditions to function. And the modern world is systematically dismantling all three.

1. The “Cool Hour” Smith believed the spectator requires a “cool hour” to judge an action fairly. Reflection takes time. But we now live in an instant reaction economy where the first take is the only one that scales. If you don’t have an opinion in the first five minutes, the algorithm decides you don’t have an opinion at all.

2. The Mental Balcony To see clearly, you have to step off the stage and onto a balcony. You need distance to observe your own performance. Today, algorithmic emotional flooding keeps us “on the stage” in a state of constant performance. It is impossible to be an impartial judge when you are currently being blinded by the spotlights of a digital crowd.

3. The Freedom to Falter The spectator must be allowed to disagree with the home team. In the past, you could change your mind in private. Today, nuance is treated as a betrayal, and the “exit tax” for disagreeing with your tribe is professional and social exile.

And when all three conditions collapse simultaneously, as they do in the algorithmic age, something else fills the vacuum.

This is where the distance of grievance becomes dangerous.

The Simulated Proximity Paradox

This is where the distance of grievance becomes dangerous. Smith’s ‘Circles of Sympathy’ suggested that our empathy naturally ripples outward, strongest at the center with family and fading as it reaches strangers. Distance usually equaled indifference.

But today, modern media simulates proximity without the accountability of real contact. We see a pixelated “enemy” 1,000 miles away and we feel a surge of emotional intensity as if they were standing in our front yard. But because they are not actually there, we feel no responsibility to “adjust our pitch” or find concord.

We have replaced real proximity with a curated caricature, effectively blinding the Impartial Spectator. We get all the dopamine of righteous anger with none of the social friction that usually keeps our worst impulses in check. That is the full picture of what we are up against.

The Resurrection: The Sovereignty of the Second Thought

If the Spectator is dying, how do we bring it back? The answer is the single most counter-cultural act possible in 2026: Changing your mind.

To change your mind today is to declare that your spectator has more power than your external notification count. Changing your mind is not a glitch in your character; it is the ultimate proof of life for your conscience. It demonstrates three things that the “tribal” world finds terrifying:

1. Your identity is not fully fused with your tribe.

2. Your Impartial Spectator still functions.

3. Your dignity is not dependent on the applause of a crowd.

Act III: Independence

The “quiet center” isn’t quiet because people don’t care. It’s quiet because the incentives punish moral independence.

Smith believed social harmony, what he called concord, required us to be like a chamber orchestra. We don’t have to sing the same note in unison, but we must be willing to lower our volume enough to hear the person next to us.

We have mistaken “staying locked in an echo chamber” for “holding on to our principles.” But a principle that cannot withstand a conversation isn’t a principle; it’s a script.

The real counter-cultural act isn’t joining a louder tribe. It’s reclaiming your independent judgement. Democracy requires people willing to occasionally disappoint their own side.

The applause of the crowd is loud. The voice of the Impartial Spectator is quiet. But it is the only voice that still belongs to you.

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A few years ago, during a family vacation to San Francisco, my kids stood on a street corner near the Wharf, watching a Waymo glide past. They were horrified. “I would never get in a self-driving car,” one of them said. “That’s way too scary.”

I looked at the car, then back at the chaotic swarm of distracted human drivers around us, and told them: “The car doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than us. And frankly, that’s a pretty low bar.”

But here’s the problem: when we apply that same “low bar” logic to AI in the workplace, we shrink ourselves. When we treat upskilling as a way to “keep up,” we’re implicitly accepting the premise that humans are just slightly buggy, slower processors. We accept that we are replaceable, optimizable, and perhaps a bit too inefficient for the modern world. (Author's note: As the father of a newly driving 16-year-old, even slightly better than humans is okay on the road, but it’s a hollow ambition for our careers.)

The framing is almost always defensive. AI is survival gear. AI is an insurance policy. AI as a shield against irrelevance. If your ambition fits inside what you can already execute manually, AI will always feel like a shortcut. It’s just a way to get to the weekend faster.

But if your ambition exceeds your current capacity, AI becomes an amplifier.

The Humanities of the Machine Age

True workforce development isn’t about learning to “prompt” so you don’t get fired. It’s about the humanities of the machine age. It’s about leaning into the three things that we experience and apply fundamentally differently than a processor: Judgment, Empathy, and Synthesis. While a machine can simulate these outputs through sheer scale and statistical probability, it lacks the lived context to understand why they matter. It can generate a “judgment” based on a pattern, but it can’t feel the weight of the consequences. We aren’t competing on who can process faster; we are competing on who can define what is worth processing in the first place.

This is where the ceiling rises. When the “cost” of generating an answer, a draft, or a design drops to near zero, the value of the work shifts from the execution to the intent. If you use AI as a shortcut, you’re just producing more “average” faster. But if you use it as an amplifier, you’re using that reclaimed time to exercise a higher level of humanity. You’re moving from being the person who “does the thing” to being the architect who decides “which thing is worth doing.”

The Gravity of the Mean

Why does the “shortcut” method always lead to mediocrity? It’s baked into the architecture of the tools. When we rely on the machine to do our thinking, we fall victim to three specific technical devaluations (see footnote for some interesting reading):

1. The Regression to the Mean: AI is trained on the “middle” of the internet. It has read Pulitzer Prize winners, but it has also read millions of mediocre LinkedIn posts and generic corporate memos. It aims for the mathematical center of that data to ensure it’s “correct.” If you just hit “generate” and “paste,” you are publishing the literal definition of “the most likely thing a human would say.” That is the definition of average.

2. The “Hallucination of Politeness”: Because these models are tuned for safety and helpfulness, they tend to smooth over the “edges” that make human work interesting. They avoid the bold claim or the uncomfortable truth. You get a polished, professional-sounding output that has all the friction and therefore all the soul, sanded off.

3. High-Speed Derivative Work: If a thousand people use the same tool to solve the same problem as a shortcut, they receive roughly the same 85% viable solution. You aren’t creating a competitive advantage; you’re participating in a race to the middle, producing “more” at a volume that actually devalues the work itself.

The Paradox of the “Last Mile”

However, there is a nuanced trap in how we measure “productivity” today. Recent research from MIT (Noy and Zhang, 2023) shows that AI is a phenomenal equalizer, helping lower-skilled workers “catch up” to high performers by automating the baseline requirements of a task. But we have to be honest about what “catching up” actually means: it means moving toward the center.

For the novice, AI is a ladder to the middle; for the expert, it is a tether to the average.

This creates what I call the “Last Mile” Paradox. If the machine can handle the first 85% of a project, the research, the drafting, the structural scaffolding, that 85% essentially becomes a commodity. Its market value drops to near zero because everyone can now produce it at high speed.

This doesn’t make the work less valuable; it makes the remaining 15%, the part that requires human judgment, empathy, and synthesis, infinitely more precious. When the “average” becomes free, the “exceptional” becomes the only thing worth paying for. The value of that last mile doesn’t just stay the same; it skyrockets. The “High Ceiling” is found in that final 15%, where we stop processing data and start practicing the art of becoming.

The Superman Problem

This decision on how to handle that final 15% brings us to a different kind of 'low bar' conversation, one that took place on a farm in Kansas. In the 2013 Superman film, Man of Steel, Jonathan Kent tells a young Clark:

“You just have to decide what kind of a man you want to grow up to be, Clark; because whoever that man is, good character or bad, he’s... He’s gonna change the world.”

Today, we are handing out digital capes to everyone. AI is giving us superpowers, enabling us to process a thousand documents in seconds or generate complex code with a single sentence, which were previously reserved for the elite or the highly specialized.

But a superpower without a philosophy is just a shortcut. Or the origin story of a villain. If you use these tools without a clear sense of “who you want to be,” you default to the machine’s “average.” You become a faster version of everyone else. But if you bring a distinct human character to the tool, you aren’t just “keeping up.” You are, for better or worse, changing the world of your work.

Take Refik Anadol. He is perhaps the best modern example of someone who decided exactly what kind of architect he wanted to be in this new world. He didn’t look at AI and see a way to automate a painting; he saw a way to paint with the “collective memory” of humanity. He used his superpower to amplify a specific, deeply human intent.

The Anadol Method: Data as a Humanities Project

While most are looking for shortcuts, Anadol is looking for “data pigmentation.” His work provides a blueprint for the humanities of the machine age because it relies on the very pillars we often ignore in traditional upskilling.

When Anadol created Unsupervised for the Museum of Modern Art, he didn’t ask the AI to “make art like MoMA.” That would have been a regression to the mean. Instead, he applied Judgment to curate a site-specific dataset of the museum’s history and Synthesis to link that data to real-time inputs like the weather and the movement of the crowds.

More recently, with the launch of the Large Nature Model (LNM), he moved into the realm of Empathy. He didn’t just scrape the internet for photos of trees; he collaborated with indigenous communities like the Yawanawá to collect ethically sourced data from the rainforest. He is using the machine to help us “hear” and “see” nature in ways our manual senses never could.

This is the “High Ceiling” in action. By bringing a distinct human character to the tool, Anadol isn’t just generating content; he’s creating a new category of human expression. He proves that the machine doesn’t replace the architect; it finally gives the architect the scale to match the ambition.

The Character of the Architect

If you don’t provide the Judgment, the machine provides the Probability.

• The Machine’s Probability: What is the most likely, safest, most common response?

• The Human’s Character: What is the right, most impactful, or most courageous response?

True workforce development in the machine age is less about learning the “superpower” and more about developing the person who wields it. It’s about sharpening your judgment so you know when the machine’s “average” isn’t good enough. It’s about deepening your empathy so you know who the superpower is meant to help. And it’s about mastering synthesis so you can connect those superpowers to a vision that exceeds your manual capacity.

We aren’t here to be faster machines. We are here to be more expansive humans.

For Further Reading

If you want to dive deeper into the friction between human intent and machine probability, here are a few starting points that informed my thinking for this piece.

1. On the “Machine Hallucination”

Read: Refik Anadol Studio: Projects and Research. Why: While I use AI as a level to keep lines straight, Anadol uses it to make them melt. He treats data as a form of “pigment” and “lumber,” using massive datasets to create fluid, architectural-scale art that he calls “machine hallucinations”. I included this because it represents the far end of the spectrum, where the tool isn’t just correcting the plumb line, but imagining entirely new rooms based on collective memory and data.

2. On the “Stochastic Parrot”

Read: On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots by Bender, Gebru, et al. Why: This is the foundational paper that popularized the idea that LLMs don’t “know” anything—they just predict the next likely word. I included this because it explains why, without a human hand on the wheel, AI defaults to a “regression to the mean.” It’s a bit academic, but it’s the best explanation of why the machine’s version of the truth is often just the most “average” one.

3. On the “Hallucination of Politeness”

Read: A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment by Askell, et al. (Anthropic). Why: This explores the “HHH” framework (Helpful, Harmless, Honest). I cited this because it shows how the “politeness” we see in AI isn’t an accident; it’s a design choice. It’s the “safety sanding” that often smooths over the bold, idiosyncratic edges that make human writing and judgment valuable.

4. On the Risk of “Model Collapse”

Read: Model Collapse: AI-generated Data Makes Models Forget by Shumailov, et al. (Nature/University of Oxford). Why: This paper explains a fascinating and terrifying phenomenon: what happens when AI starts training on its own output? It effectively creates a “race to the middle” in which the original data is lost in favor of derivative echoes. It’s the technical backing for my “85% logic” that the machine gets us close, but the last mile of innovation is a purely human endeavor.

5. The “Variance” Concept (The Real 2023 Research)

Read: Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence by Noy and Zhang (2023) (MIT). Why: This is the study that actually proves the “85% solution” point. They found that AI significantly helped lower-skilled workers “catch up” to high-performers, effectively decreasing the variance in output. It proves that AI is a “great equalizer.”
Author’s Note: This study proves that AI raises the floor for everyone, but my argument is that it also threatens to lower the ceiling for the expert. It turns a unique skill into a baseline commodity.

6. On the “Commodification of Execution”

Read: Strategy and the Internet by Michael Porter (Harvard Business Review). Why: Although written in 2001, this is, for many, the “bible” for understanding the Productivity Frontier. Porter explains that when everyone adopts the same high-speed tools, everyone becomes more efficient, but no one gains a competitive advantage. It’s the original theory behind why “the average” becomes a commodity. I included this because it’s the economic foundation for the “Last Mile Paradox.” If everyone has the same superpower, the only way to win is to be the one who knows where to fly.

7. On the “Philosophy of Synthesis”

Read: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan. Why: This work explores how the mind synthesizes reality into meaning, and Pollan’s recent book highlights the “Humanities” side of the equation. While AI processes data, humans synthesize meaning. It’s the “how-to” guide for the final 15% of the work that a machine simply cannot replicate.

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These aren’t partisan demands; they are basic human instincts.

When you scale that instinct up to something like the reconstruction of Gaza, the logic feels just as straightforward. A $10 billion investment in infrastructure, water, and power isn’t controversial. It is humanitarian. Children don’t need an ideology; they need a functioning world.

But as someone who has spent a career building teams and institutions, I’ve learned that the sentiment behind a project matters far less than the structure that supports it. Design determines behavior. Incentives shape outcomes. The internal logic of an organization usually governs what leadership alone cannot.

That is why I am looking past the headlines about the United States Institute of Peace being administratively renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. I am less interested in the political theater and more interested in the blueprint of the newly formed Board of Peace.

The Innovation Argument

I want to be clear that I am a believer in innovation within government. We need it. The traditional multilateral models of the 20th century—the UN, the IMF, the World Bank—can be notoriously cumbersome. They were designed for a world of slow-moving diplomacy, not the rapid-fire challenges of the 21st century. Bureaucracy, for all its intentions of fairness, can often become a graveyard for progress.

So, when a new model emerges that promises to bypass the red tape and mobilize $10 billion at the speed of private equity, we should pay attention. Innovation in how we fund and execute peacebuilding is critical to addressing the financing gap in global infrastructure.

We see the power of this kind of “incentivized” model in things like the Maryland Grand Challenge or the global XPrize. These initiatives prove that by setting a clear, high-stakes goal and backing it with significant capital, you can catalyze breakthroughs that traditional systems might never reach. They turn a stagnant problem into a race for a solution.

The Shift from Treaty to Capital

Under the reported structure of the Board of Peace, a permanent seat requires a $1 billion contribution. On one hand, this is a masterclass in incentive design. It turns peacebuilding into a capitalization event, attracting serious commitment from global players who want a seat at the table.

This is where my curiosity deepens. When you link permanence to capital, you are not just innovating; you are changing the institution's DNA. Treaties aim for a balance of power among sovereign states. Capital, by its nature, seeks a return, whether that return is strategic influence, commercial viability, or political leverage.

If governance becomes investment-anchored, we have to ask what happens to that momentum when the initial capital is spent. Does the model continue to serve the public mission, or does it narrow the room to only those who can afford to stay?

The Question of Continuity

Durable institutions are meant to absorb leadership and move beyond it. The Peace Corps began under Kennedy, but it did not remain “Kennedy’s Corps.” It became a permanent expression of American engagement that survived every transition of power for over sixty years. The same is true for NATO, which was built to hold steady regardless of who occupies the Oval Office.

Attaching a leader’s name to a mission can create a temporary jolt of energy, a catalytic moment that breaks a stalemate. But peace is a long-game. It unfolds over decades. The real test of an innovative model is not whether it can catalyze action today, but whether its structure retains credibility once the current leadership cycle has ended.

The Blueprint Matters

We seem increasingly willing to trust capital where we once leaned on treaties. I get why. Capital can build a port or a power grid in months because it is efficient. But peace requires more than just the physical bridges that reconnect a broken region. It requires a separation between public mission and private opportunity.

When we change the blueprint of how we build peace, we should be honest about the design. Innovation should be the engine, but the institution must be the anchor. Bridges can be built quickly, but a peace that lasts requires something more durable than a market cycle and something more permanent than the name on the door.

To some, that caution can read as a lack of conviction, or an unwillingness to stand for anything at all. My 25-year-old self might have agreed. He was sharper, faster to draw lines, and more comfortable mistaking certainty for strength. But today, I see it differently. I think strength can live in restraint, and clarity can come from sitting with complexity long enough to think; something that often frustrates those who prefer certainty over understanding.

Certainty is about closure.
Understanding is about contact.

Certainty wants the question to stop.
Understanding is willing to let it stay open a little longer.

Certainty says: I know what this is.
Understanding says: I’m still learning how this works.

All of that brings me back to the grievance and to my curiosity about the role distance plays in how it forms. When I talk about grievance in terms of distance, I’m not inventing the idea from scratch. I’m drawing from a few frameworks that inform how I think about this, some through formal study, others over time.

In communications research, the social distance corollary describes how people tend to perceive harm and influence as greater when it occurs farther away from them or toward others than when it occurs directly. As distance increases, it becomes easier to assume impact without direct contact, and harder to test those assumptions against lived experience.

I was also introduced to this dynamic through Social Identity Theory, which I studied under Dave Brannan and Anders Strindberg at the Naval Postgraduate School. Their teaching focused on how group identity shapes perception, how beliefs, grievances, and threats can be absorbed through affiliation rather than experience, and how narratives harden as they become markers of belonging.

Taken together, these ideas help explain something I keep noticing in everyday life. The farther we are from an event, the more confident we often feel about what it means and who is to blame.

I don’t offer that as a conclusion. I offer it as a question worth starting with.

We live in a moment where almost everyone speaks as if something has been taken from them. Scroll through social media. Listen to campaign rhetoric. Watch cable news for more than a few minutes. The language is strikingly consistent, even when the issues differ.

I’m interested in what makes certain beliefs feel worth expressing, and where that conviction actually comes from.

Belief can be private and complicated. The public expression of that belief is more directional. It reaches for an audience, affirms an in group, and often draws a line that invites a reaction from those outside it. That’s why what shows up most often isn’t an explanation or a personal story. It’s a meme shared with “So true.” A headline reposted with “This says it all.” A clip passed along with a brief endorsement of whatever action, policy, or authority happens to be in focus. Sometimes there’s no commentary at all. Just the share.

Those posts aren’t arguments; they’re signals that tell you where someone stands, but not how they got there. That gap is what I want to understand. Not just what people believe, but how belief becomes conviction, and how conviction becomes grievance.

Sometimes, something really does happen to us. A direct encounter. A real loss. A moment that leaves a mark. That’s first-degree. It’s rare, but it’s real.

More often, the irritation doesn’t come from anything we experienced ourselves. It arrives in pieces. A story from a neighbor. A post in a group chat. A headline we scroll past twice. A clip someone insists we have to see. It comes from different directions, at different volumes, often repeated just enough times to feel familiar. Over time, it starts to sound like experience. We stack it alongside our own memories and respond to it as if it were ours.

A step further removed, the experience disappears almost entirely. What remains are statistics, talking points, and clips stripped of context. Enough to feel informed. Enough to feel justified. Not enough to be grounded.

And then there’s the farthest distance of all. When a grievance no longer needs an event. It becomes part of identity. Something reinforced by the people we listen to, the spaces we inhabit, and the stories we hear most often.

By that point, certainty is complete even though nothing has actually touched us.

That doesn’t make people bad. It makes us human. And influenceable.

A quick note on fairness as we move forward: I’m not trying to balance positions or split the difference between ideologies. The symmetry I’m interested in is mechanical, not political. The same forces shape certainty on all sides, even when the conclusions differ. Issues rooted in belonging and deservedness are where distance does the most work. Distance from direct experience. Distance from contact. They’re also the ones most likely to make us defensive. That’s exactly why they’re useful as case studies.

Immigration and subsidized benefits sit at a similar crossroads. They are both about belonging. Both about fairness. Both about who deserves what and under what conditions. And in both cases, people often feel sure long before they’ve been close to it.

Consider how each one typically enters public conversation.

A headline about a crime committed by someone who should not have been here circulates widely. It is shared with a brief affirmation. “This is why.” “So true.” “Enough already.” The story itself may be real. But for most of the people sharing it, it did not happen to them. There is no personal encounter attached. The meaning is assumed and passed along.

Now consider how stories about public assistance often travel. A clip about fraud. An article about abuse of the system. A statistic pulled out of context. Again, the response is rarely a story. It is a signal. “This is out of control.” “This is why taxes are so high.” “This isn’t fair.”

Different issues. Same behavior.

It’s worth pausing on an obvious pushback here. Why am I owed this level of explanation? After all, it’s my right to be as descriptive or as vague as I want with my social commentary. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.

That’s true. You don’t.

As I said, belief can be private and complicated. No one is entitled to your interior life. But the moment belief is expressed publicly, it stops being only about you. It becomes directional. It reaches for an audience, affirms an in-group, alienates an out-group, and often draws a line that invites a reaction. At that point, the question isn’t whether you owe anyone an explanation. It’s what you intend the expression to do.

If the goal isn’t dialogue, or understanding, or even persuasion, then it’s worth asking what remains. Was this shared to clarify something you’ve experienced, or to signal belonging? To invite conversation, or to harden the boundaries of a tribe and push the out-group a little farther away? These aren’t accusations, but they are questions worth asking in a culture where shares travel far faster than lived experience.

This is where the work of communication scholars like Dr. Richard Vatz, who taught political rhetoric and persuasion at Towson University, becomes useful. Vatz argued that meaning doesn’t live inside events themselves. It is created by what we choose to make salient. The very act of selecting a story, a meme, or a headline and circulating it assigns significance, whether or not we explain why.

Seen through that lens, sharing without context is not neutral. It is a rhetorical act. It elevates one fragment of reality over countless others and asks the audience to feel its weight. As Vatz put it, “the very choice of what facts or events are relevant is a matter of pure arbitration. Once the choice is communicated, the event is imbued with salience.” What we highlight becomes what matters, even when we say very little ourselves.

In both these cases, belief is expressed without explanation. The post doesn’t tell you where the belief entered the person’s life. It doesn’t describe a moment of contact. And it doesn’t say, this happened to me or to someone I know. It simply aligns and moves on.

For some people, there is real first-degree experience here. A neighbor affected by a crime. A family member navigating public assistance. Those moments matter. They carry weight. But they are rarer than the confidence and breadth with which these issues are discussed.

More often, what circulates is second and third-degree material. Stories heard from someone else. Clips seen out of context. Headlines encountered repeatedly. Over time, they stack. They begin to feel like experience. And once they do, certainty follows.

What’s striking is not that people care. It’s how similar the path to conviction looks across issues that are supposed to divide us. When we’re far from something, we see less of its complexity. Hearing the same story or example again and again makes it feel true and settled, even if we’ve never experienced it ourselves. Once something aligns with who we see ourselves as or with the group we belong to, it no longer needs evidence.

That symmetry is the point.

At some point, all of this narrows not to who is right or which policy wins, but to a simpler, more honest question: where did this certainty actually come from? Whether it grew out of something that happened to you, something you witnessed up close, a moment that crossed from abstraction into your own life. Or whether it arrived another way, absorbed over time, repeated often enough to feel familiar, reinforced by stories that came already shaped and already urgent.

That distinction matters more than we like to admit. Because when certainty forms without dialogue or engagement, empathy collapses. People turn into Sims. Policy becomes punishment instead of solving a problem. And grievance, formed at a distance, becomes harder to let go of.

None of this is an indictment. It’s an invitation to pause long enough to keep the question open. Practice restraint instead of closure. Seek understanding before certainty. To ask whether the thing we’re about to amplify is rooted in lived experience, careful learning, or simply repetition. Whether we’re extending understanding, or just extending the reach of a story we didn’t stop to examine.

The question isn’t whether you’re allowed to feel strongly. You are. The question is who told you that you were harmed, how far away that harm actually is, and why that story felt convincing enough to carry forward. That isn’t a question with a clean answer, but it might be the right one to start with.

Addendum: If you’re curious

If any of this sparked your interest, a few of the ideas I’m drawing from may be worth exploring further.

The notion of distance shaping perception appears in communication research in what’s often called the social distance corollary, which examines how people experience and evaluate harm differently depending on proximity and contact.

I was also influenced by Social Identity Theory, which I studied under Dave Brannan and Anders Strindberg at the Naval Postgraduate School. Their teaching focused on how group belonging shapes perception, how beliefs can be absorbed through affiliation rather than experience, and how narratives harden as they become markers of identity.

And for anyone interested in rhetoric and persuasion, the work of Richard Vatz is especially relevant here. His essay The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation argues that meaning doesn’t simply reside in events themselves, but is created by what we choose to highlight, repeat, and circulate.

None of these offer answers so much as better questions. Which, for me at least, is the point.

Before I hit record on my watch and send the run off to Strava—because data—I make a choice. Not about distance or pace yet, but about tone. The early miles still feel negotiable, and I treat them that way. I pick the music that’s going to set my cadence while I still believe I can decide how this run is going to feel.

That decision usually starts before I’m out of bed. Sometimes the night before. A song surfaces and lingers. When I wake up, I test it. While I’m getting dressed, I argue with myself about it. Do I open hard with something aggressive, all tension and drive, letting the first mile burn off excess energy? Or do I slow the whole thing down from the start and put on The Joshua Tree, let the rhythm stretch out instead of spike?

Those two choices don’t just sound different. They move differently. One shortens my stride and dares me to outrun the morning. The other widens the steps and asks for patience. What I’m really deciding is what I want playing 1.4 miles in, when I crest Providence Road, when the easy climb tops out, and the horizon opens. The sky is just starting to turn, orange and blue bleeding into each other. I want to know what song is playing right then. I want to know how fast I’m moving when I look up.

That’s the early bargain. Pick the right song. Pick the right speed. Set the conditions. For the first mile or two, it almost feels like it works.

I want to run, I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name

Somewhere after the first few miles, the playlist stops being a plan. It’s still there, still playing, but it just stops being the point. The cadence holds. Not perfectly, but close enough. The hills roll, the pace stretches and compresses with them, and I let it. I’m not chasing negative splits. I’m trying to stay steady.

My watch says I am.

My body has its own commentary. My left knee fires a quick warning shot. The Achilles tightens just enough to remind me things are probably gonna get weird. Nothing dramatic. Just enough feedback to register. My body doesn’t ask for attention yet, but it wants to be acknowledged.

That’s where fatigue starts to argue back, not physically, mostly in my head. It asks whether this pace makes sense today. Whether twelve is really necessary. Whether nine would have been enough. I don’t argue with it. I keep the effort even and let the question sit. I’ll ask it again later, more than once.

The music is still running, but I’m no longer curating the experience. Songs blur together. I don’t notice what’s playing unless it stops.

After Providence Road crests the first time, the run starts breaking itself into mental sections. Markers I’ve learned to trust, some I love. Others foreshadow dread. I’ll see all of this again on the way back, but direction changes everything. If it’s easy now, it usually isn’t later.

There’s the double downhill, the first one down Providence, then again along Loch Raven Drive. It’s free speed if I’m smart, punishment later if I’m not. I let my legs open up just enough to feel like I’m moving without asking them to do anything stupid. This is where I’m reminded that restraint is part of the work.

Then there’s the bridge. In the winter, I can see it from about a mile away through the trees. On calm days, it’s nothing more than a sprint to beat my last time. When the wind is whipping, it’s a grind with nowhere to hide and nothing to break it. I put my head down and keep the cadence even. No thinking. Just get across and hope that the approaching car gives me some room.

Morgan Mill Road comes next. Not quite halfway, but close enough that it matters. It’s where most of the other runners peel off, start, or finish their loops. Morgan Mill is also where I stop because I have a choice: do I climb the half-mile out-and-back for fun, or do I keep moving forward? I lean into the yellow road barrier, stretch the quads, reset the shoulders. I tell myself, quietly: this might hurt a bit, but let’s go.

Peerce’s comes after that, the real midpoint. The stop sign is an anchor. I pull the earbuds out. The hat comes off. Legs get a quick stretch while early morning cars roll by, I think mostly nurses heading into Saturday shifts. This is where I take my first real reset. Sometimes I change the playlist here, depending on how I’m feeling. If I opened with U2, this is usually where I reach for Rage.

What’s strange is I’ll change it again a mile later, back at Morgan Mill, before the push home.

By then, most of the ideas from the first half are gone. The clever ones, the idealistic ones, especially the conversations I rehearse with my kids that always sound better out here than they ever play out in real life. Those fade. What replaces them are things that don’t need as much clarity. Foundational pieces. The bones of a new idea. The shape of something I’ll pick up Monday morning when I open the laptop. Sometimes it’s the opening paragraph of the next essay. Sometimes it’s the last one, and I work backward. That’s how this one started.

There’s one final stop, and it isn’t about ideas at all.

After the long climb to Loch Raven Drive and Providence Road, my heart rate is already pushing 170. I’m standing at the base of the last real obstacle: the climb up Providence that eventually gives way to the mostly flat mile and a half home. There’s nothing to think about here. No insight. No playlist swap. Just the climb. I have to get through it to get home. No way around it. Just up and over.

It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime
What better place than here, what better time than now?

This fucking climb.
Let’s go.

When I get home on a Saturday morning with twelve miles in the bag, the house is still asleep. The neighborhood is too, garages still closed and porchlights still on. I’m wrecked. Legs like jello. Shirt soaked through. One quad tight enough that I’m already favoring it (truthfully, I’ve probably been favoring it since Morgan Mill). Another toenail that probably won’t make it another week. I leave my shoes and socks scattered on the side patio because I don’t feel like dealing with them yet. If I’m thinking straight, I’ll fill an ice water. Usually I’m not. I should probably stretch too, but I won’t. Coffee before anything else, because I’ve already spent the morning negotiating with myself. I won’t feel like eating for a few hours.

Most ideas don’t survive the run. They show up loud in the first few miles and fall apart somewhere between mile four and nine. A couple stick. Not because they’re clever, but because they hold up under fatigue. Near the end, with the music still in my ears but no longer driving anything, a line from Stubborn Love comes through and just fits:

It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all
The opposite of love is indifference

Indifference is opting out. Indifference is never having to find out. Whatever comes after the run is the result of caring enough to test something and staying with it long enough to see what holds up.

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So I learned where my energy actually mattered. My family. My people. Trail runs with Goose. That choice still feels right. Maybe I won’t contribute beyond this essay, we’ll see.

What has changed is how often the world insists on dragging the fight back into the room.

On January 7th, Renee Nicole Good was killed in Minnesota during a federal law enforcement operation. And almost immediately, the machinery kicked in. Before facts. Before accountability. Before anyone paused long enough to acknowledge that a person is dead.

Say her name: Renee Nicole Good. A mother, a poet, a "professional agitator." Not to inflame. Not to score points. To remember that this wasn’t an abstraction or a headline. She was a person, and she mattered.

Just like Charlie Kirk mattered.
Just like Brian Sicknick mattered.
Just like George Floyd mattered.

You don’t have to agree with someone to insist they shouldn’t die unnecessarily. That shouldn’t be controversial. And the fact that it is tells us how far off course we’ve drifted.

Instead of that basic humane response, leadership and our parties’ hardline followers rushed to narrow the frame.

Rather than acknowledge the loss of a life or call for a careful investigation, J.D. Vance responded by posting a message, (which I’m including in full rather than paraphrasing) that immediately turned this killing into a question about political loyalty, framing it as a litmus test for how elected officials “should” respond, explicitly tying it to the broader question of votes and party positioning.

Kristi Noem echoed that framing by reposting the Department of Homeland Security’s characterization of the incident as a “domestic terror attack.”

That isn’t leadership. It’s rushing to control the narrative before anyone is willing to confront what actually happened.

The reaction was immediate. And it was ugly.

I scrolled through X and Facebook and saw people locking into positions almost instantly. No pause. No curiosity. Just hard stances delivered with total certainty. A person had died, and instead of restraint or care, I saw venom. I saw people using a death to confirm whatever they already believed, then daring anyone else to disagree. Any grief I saw or read was irrelevant unless it could be weaponized.

A person was dead, and almost no one seemed interested in slowing down long enough to sit with that.

That kind of certainty should set off alarms. Not because conviction is wrong, but because confidence without context isn’t clarity — it’s performance. Most people already know violence is wrong. Repeating it like a mantra isn’t moral clarity. It’s moral avoidance. It lets everyone feel principled without having to actually say what they think happened, who failed, or where responsibility lies.

And that’s the real problem.

Violence doesn’t just come from bad actors. Its thriving in a system where accountability is optional and consequences are negotiable. Where every death gets flattened into content, spun into narrative, and rushed past before anyone has to sit with it.

The Stoics warned about this long before social media timelines and feeds. Marcus Aurelius didn’t mince words: “what harms the community harms the individual.” Indifference isn’t neutral. Delay isn’t harmless. Silence isn’t clean.

Because here’s the part we don’t like to admit: outrage works. It grabs attention. It hardens sides. It rewards whoever yells first and loudest. Calm doesn’t travel. Nuance doesn’t scale. And restraint sure as hell doesn’t monetize.

So we get volume instead of judgment. Heat instead of light.

Most people I know don’t want chaos. They don’t want civil war. Even when their commentary is narrow or overly simple, it usually comes from exhaustion, not malice. Truth takes work. It takes context, patience, and a willingness to sit with complexity. Reducing it to a one-liner isn’t clarity. It’s avoidance dressed up as conviction.

Most people are just tired. They want to live their lives, raise their families, and believe that someone, somewhere, is still minding the guardrails. But exhaustion doesn’t go viral. Compassion doesn’t rack up shares.

So the center goes quiet.

And I have to own my part in that. I stepped back. I stopped engaging. Not because I didn’t care, but because the conversation felt corrosive and pointless. My blood pressure would spike and I would stay up doomscrolling, seeking out arguments counter to my own opinions and goinga all in. Eventually, over time, silence started to feel like self-preservation.

But silence has consequences.

In that quiet, harm gets normalized. Not because people approve of it, but because calling it out feels risky, messy, or immediately politicized. The bar drops and eventually, things that should stop us cold barely register.

The Stoics were blunt about this. If it isn’t right, don’t do it. If it isn’t true, don’t say it. Ethical responsibility doesn’t require perfect information. It requires a spine. Especially when harm is done by those with power and authority.

Saying something crossed a line isn’t partisan. It’s human.

We’ve seen this cycle before. Different victims. Different uniforms. Same aftermath. A rush to justify. A fear of being “the one” who names the failure out loud.

But this isn’t inevitable.

There are people doing quieter, harder work to change the incentives so outrage isn’t the only thing that wins. People focused on rebuilding trust instead of burning it for engagement. It’s slow. It’s unglamorous. It doesn’t go viral. And that’s exactly why it matters.

That’s what I’m holding onto.

Not just that violence is wrong. That’s obvious. But that silence isn’t neutral. That inaction carries weight. That moral courage doesn’t require certainty, just honesty. And that enough people choosing responsibility over reaction can still interrupt this pattern.

Because if silence becomes our default response to harm, then we’re not confused anymore.

We’re complicit.

That opening line from Bruce Springsteen’s enduring song, My City of Ruins, first stuck with me on a trail run early last year. Not because it’s dramatic (though it is), but because it’s honest. It doesn’t rush past the wreckage or the challenges. It doesn’t look away. It simply names what’s there.

In a year marked by transition, grief, and recalibration, that line became a quiet companion: clarifying, grounding, and yet, oddly, empowering.

2025 brought more change than I expected.

We lost my father-in-law and my grandfather-in-law in quick succession. My father went through a series of ongoing health challenges and scares. Around the same time, I left a job I’d been in for six years. There were stretches when life felt quiet. Doors closed, and a few chairs at Thanksgiving sat empty. Traditions we took for granted changed.

There’s a boarded up church, with a sign out front sayin’ “Stay out.”

Yet at the same time, the world felt louder than ever. Everyone talking. Everyone reacting. Certainty everywhere, wisdom harder to find. Big, confident statements traveled fast, while the harder work, like context, nuance, and actually understanding what was true, felt easier to skip. It got harder to tell what really mattered, what was substance, and what was just noise dressed up as conviction.

The church door’s thrown open, but the congregation’s gone.

So I slowed down.

I read more than I had in years. I wrote, not for an audience at first, but to hear myself think. And I kept noticing the same themes, on the page and in real life: uncertainty and struggle, yes, but also redemption, dignity, and the kind of resolve that comes from actually living it.

I kept returning to a line I’d written earlier this year, one that only grew truer with time:

Clarity narrows the field, not because opportunities disappear, but because you refuse to compromise what matters most.

That idea became a filter. It helped explain why ending some chapters hurt, but also why they felt right. Why certain paths, once appealing, now feel misaligned. Why the work I want to do, and the people I want to do it with, feel clearer now than they ever have.

These days, I’m spending more time in conversations about building. I’ve been working closely with early-stage startups, mentoring founders through this pivotal moment in their journey. About alignment. About what’s worth doing next and what’s not.

Now the sweet bells of mercy drift through the evening trees.

This was also the year I watched the once-immovable, unshakable patriarchs of our families reveal something quieter and more human. Not fading. Just real. Still steady. Still leading, but no longer pretending to carry everything alone.

There’s something sacred about realizing that, over time, we begin helping carry pieces of the world we once assumed they always would. Time does what time does. The roles shift gently, almost imperceptibly, until one day you look up and realize the handoff has already begun.

Come on rise up

At home, both of our girls started new schools. Watching them find their footing in new hallways, new friendships, and new expectations was grounding in the best way. Helping them navigate confidence, self-advocacy, kindness, disappointment, and resilience has been a daily reminder of my most important title: dad.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I kept moving. Literally.

I logged over a thousand miles on trails this year, including a week on the Appalachian Trail with my son. Long days. Sore legs. Quiet conversations that only seem to happen when you’re walking side by side. And a deeply earned sense of gratitude for a sixteen-year-old who wanted to hike with his dad.

I started a nonprofit. I joined a board. I mentored startup founders and coached people standing at their own crossroads, trying to figure out what’s next. Different contexts, same questions. And along the way, I was reminded how much this work goes both ways and how much you learn when you’re trusted to walk alongside someone else. And the same truth kept resurfacing:

I want to keep building things that matter with people who care.

A lot of that clarity comes from my wife, Kaitlin. Watching how she leads, how she listens, how she carries people without needing credit, has taught me more about leadership and vulnerability than any role I’ve ever held. She reminds me that strength doesn’t announce itself. It shows up consistently and does the work.

My City of Ruins asks a question we all face eventually:

“Tell me, how do I begin again?”

My answer, heading into 2026, is simple.

With these hands.

With these hands, I’ll keep building.
With these hands, I’ll keep mentoring.
With these hands, I’ll serve.

For many, this is disorienting. But for others—the reinventors—it’s an opening.

In my last piece, “Leading Through Uncertainty,” I wrote about putting people first when the ground starts to shift. This is the next chapter. The people who once held our institutions together are becoming the builders of what comes next.

Armed with years of solving complex public problems and equipped with AI and open-source tools, these individuals aren’t just looking for jobs. They are designing a new era of service: one that lives outside the bureaucracy but remains rooted in the mission to make people’s lives better.

The Baltimore Blueprint We’re already seeing this in Baltimore. When the Greater Baltimore Committee acquired UpSurge, it wasn’t just a merger; it was a passing of the torch. A legacy civic institution recognized that regional growth now depends on entrepreneurial principles: agility, inclusivity, and the courage to rethink broken systems. They are proving that the future won’t be led by bureaucracy alone, but by coalitions that pair institutional wisdom with startup energy.

Maryland is a natural laboratory for this. Between our universities, mission-driven founders, and deep bench of civic leaders, mid-sized cities like Baltimore can model how to convert disruption into renewal.

The challenges we face—reskilling a workforce, bridging the digital divide, and ensuring economic growth reaches every neighborhood—aren’t abstract policy points. They are lived realities.

Empathy as the Differentiator Technology makes this moment possible, but technology isn’t the answer. AI and open data have lowered the barriers to entry, but the real “killer app” is empathy. The reinventors who take the time to actually understand the humans behind the data will be the ones who build solutions that last.

The irony? Many of these reinventors are realizing that the very systems they helped build no longer know what to do with them. Our traditional hiring models value specialists over connectors and process over perspective. During my 20 years in government, I saw too much of the “ready, aim, aim, aim” mindset—a cycle of stalled innovation born from hesitation.

The entrepreneurial approach changes the math. It frees problem solvers to imagine, build, and execute without the red tape.

The Call to Build If you are one of these reinventors, don’t wait. Start building. The Baltimore renaissance needs your experience. Whether it’s through UpSurge, Innovation Works, Conscious Venture Lab, or the StarTUp at Towson, there is a seat at the table for you.

We have an opportunity to do more than just recover; we can reimagine. Reinventors who act with courage can transform institutions from the outside in. If we connect their purpose to this region’s potential, we can turn uncertainty into design.

Strip everything else away, and the truth remains: Don’t wait for permission. Just create. The work will find where it belongs.

Who knows if the funding will be there? Who knows if we can hire? Who knows when the market will finally settle down?

I don’t hear this as pessimism; I hear it as exhaustion. So many leaders are trying to do the right thing while the ground shifts beneath them—economic pressure, policy changes, and workplace expectations that look nothing like they did five years ago. Even seasoned leaders feel off-balance, not because they lack experience, but because certainty has become a rare commodity.

In moments like this, leadership doesn’t need to be louder or more complex. It needs to be more human.

The Friction in the System
There is a natural instinct in uncertain times to pull back: to pause hiring, to delay decisions, to wait for more data. I’ve felt that instinct myself. But more often than not, pulling back creates distance—distance from your people, your customers, and the small signals that tell you where opportunity is actually forming.

Years ago, I worked on a commuter rail project that changed how I think about problem-solving. Riders were frequently buying tickets on the train instead of at the kiosks, which meant they were paying extra fees. The assumption was straightforward: the app must be the problem. If we built better technology, behavior would change.

Instead of starting with the tech, we spent time with the riders. We watched how they moved through the stations. We noted when they arrived, what they were carrying, and how rushed they were.

What we discovered was embarrassingly simple: the kiosks were too far from the platforms.

By moving the kiosks closer—not by redesigning an app—onboard ticket purchases dropped significantly. The issue wasn’t user behavior; it was friction built into the system.

Leadership works the same way. When people struggle, it is rarely because they don’t care or lack capability. More often, the environment is working against them. Adaptive leadership begins with noticing that friction and having the humility to fix what’s in the way.

Absorbing the Disruption
In uncertain times, leaders can’t eliminate disruption, but they can absorb it. They can create steadiness where possible, listen carefully, and make decisions even when the information is incomplete. Most importantly, they can stay close to the people doing the work.

This is why relationships matter so much during volatility. No organization navigates a storm alone. The strongest leaders I’ve worked with intentionally build trust across sectors—public, private, and nonprofit—not because it looks good on a slide deck, but because resilience is collective.

When I chaired Central Maryland’s Urban Area Security Initiative, progress didn’t come from a rigid hierarchy. It came from relationships. Multi-disciplinary partnerships allowed information to move faster and resources to be used more effectively. The result was real impact and real savings for the state.

The Pilot’s Mindset
Putting people first isn’t “soft” leadership; it is practical leadership. Leading often feels like building the plane while flying it. You adjust midair, test assumptions, and course-correct. The only truly bad decision is refusing to decide at all.

Technology, strategy, and structure all matter. But culture determines whether any of it actually works. When people feel trusted, supported, and seen, they adapt. They solve problems you didn’t anticipate. They help carry the weight of uncertainty instead of being crushed by it.

Uncertainty isn’t going away, and that isn’t a failure of leadership—it’s just the environment we’re in. But we can meet that environment with clarity, steadiness, and attention.

Progress rarely comes from having all the answers. It comes from showing up, listening well, and choosing your people—again and again—even when it feels hard.

If there is a path forward right now, it starts there. Put your people first. Who knows what becomes possible when you do.