[Image created by Gemini]

THE STORY

Vera Wang was a competitive figure skater from the time she could stand walk. She trained seriously through her teens, aiming for the 1968 US Olympic team. She did not make it. She was good - genuinely good - but the two spots went to someone else, and that was that. She put the skates away, went to college, studied art history in Paris and at Sarah Lawrence, and at twenty-three took a job at Vogue magazine.

She was good at that too. She rose to senior fashion editor and stayed for seventeen years, becoming one of the most respected eyes in American fashion. She understood clothes the way she had understood skating - technically, visually, with a specific sense of what worked and why. When the editor-in-chief position opened up, she was the obvious internal candidate. The job went to Anna Wintour.

Wang left Vogue and spent two years as a design director at Ralph Lauren. In 1989, at forty, she got engaged to Arthur Becker. She went shopping for a wedding dress.

She could not find one she wanted to wear. The market was split between elaborate confections that felt like costume and simple gowns that felt like nothing. What she was looking for - sophisticated, architectural, modern - did not seem to exist. She designed her own dress. Then she designed a few more for friends. Then she opened a bridal boutique on Madison Avenue in 1990 with a $4 million investment from her father.

The timing was not obviously good. The early 1990s were a recession. Bridal was considered a backwater of fashion - not the place serious designers went. Wang went anyway, because she was not trying to build a fashion empire. She was trying to solve the problem she had personally run into: there was no dress for a woman who knew what good design looked like and wanted it on her wedding day.

The business grew steadily. Nancy Kerrigan wore a Vera Wang skating costume at the 1994 Olympics. Sharon Stone wore Wang to the Oscars. The brand expanded from bridal into evening wear, then ready-to-wear, then fragrance and home goods. Her name became, for a generation of American women, the answer to the question of what beautiful looks like. She was sixty years old before most of that happened.

THE LESSON

The two things that look like failures in Vera Wang’s story - not making the Olympic team and not getting the editor-in-chief job - are both real bummers. She wanted those things. She was qualified for them. Not getting them cost her something.

But the seventeen years at Vogue were not wasted. They were the exact preparation for the thing she ended up doing. Her eye for proportion, her relationships in the fashion world, her understanding of what women actually wanted when they dressed for the most important occasions of their lives - all of that came from the years she spent doing a job she was excellent at but never fully in charge of. The ceiling she hit at Vogue was the floor of what she built next.

“The years that look like a detour are often the foundation. The expertise does not disappear when the path changes - it comes with you, and it compounds.”

The AI era is going to produce a lot of paths that change without warning. Industries will shift. Roles will disappear. The thing your kid is training for right now may look completely different in ten years. What will not change is the depth of understanding they build along the way - the specific knowledge of how things work, why some things are better than others, what problems are worth solving. That knowledge travels. It applies in ways that cannot be predicted from the starting point.

Wang did not set out to build a bridal empire. She went shopping and could not find what she needed. The gap between what existed and what she actually wanted was so clear, and her ability to close it was so specific, that the business was almost an foregone conclusion. She was not looking for a market opportunity. She was looking for a dress. The business came from the gap. As most great businesses do.

I think about that a lot when I watch my kids interact with the world. The frustrations they have - the things they cannot find, the tools that do not work the way they want them to, the gaps between what exists and what they actually need - those are not just complaints. They are a map of where the work is.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What would you make if you could not find it anywhere?”

This question is asking your kid to look at their frustrations differently. This question asks them to identify the specific gap between what exists and what they actually want, and then to imagine themselves as the person who fills it.

Vera Wang was not a fashion designer when she went wedding dress shopping. She was a former fashion editor who could not find a dress worth buying. The path from frustrated customer to founder of one of the most recognized bridal brands in the world ran directly through that specific, personal, clearly articulated gap. She knew exactly what was missing because she knew exactly what she wanted.

Your kid knows what is missing in their world. They might not have named it yet, or thought of it as anything other than annoyance. In a world where the tools to build things are more accessible than they have ever been, the distance between “I wish this existed” and “I made this” is shorter than it has ever been too.

Next: He lost his sight at three. He was recording hits by fourteen. When he turned twenty-one, Motown told him his contract would not be renewed - without the “cute kid” appeal, they did not think a blind man could sell records. He walked out of that meeting and recorded four consecutive albums that changed American music.

Till then,

Ian

[Image created by Gemini]

THE STORY

Vincent van Gogh did not become a painter until he was twenty-seven. Before that he had failed at almost everything else: art dealing, teaching English, bookshop work, theology school, missionary work in a Belgian coal mining region where he gave away so many of his possessions that the church dismissed him for “excessive zeal.” He arrived at painting the way a person arrives at the only door still open.

What made it possible - financially, practically, psychologically - was his brother Theo.

Theo van Gogh was four years younger than Vincent and worked as an art dealer in Paris. Starting in 1880 and continuing until Vincent’s death a decade later, Theo sent his brother a monthly allowance that kept him housed, fed, and supplied with paint. The amount varied - sometimes it was 150 francs, sometimes more, sometimes a little less - but it never stopped. In return, Vincent sent paintings to Paris, hundreds of them over the years, which Theo stored in his apartment because he could not sell them.

The letters between them fill three volumes. Vincent wrote constantly - about what he was working on, what he was reading, what he was struggling with, why the light in Arles was different from the light in the Netherlands and what that meant for the color. He wrote about loneliness and failure and the difficulty of making the hand do what the eye saw. He asked Theo for money, for paint, for reassurance. He asked him, more than once, not to abandon him.

Theo never did. He also never stopped believing the work was important, even as his colleagues in the Paris art world regarded his brother as a curiosity at best. In ten years of serious painting, Vincent sold exactly one canvas in his lifetime - “The Red Vineyard” - for 400 francs, to a friend of Theo’s, a few months before he died.

Vincent died in July 1890 at thirty-seven, from a gunshot wound to the chest. Theo died six months later, at thirty-three, of illness compounded by grief. They are buried side by side in Auvers-sur-Oise.

The story does not end there. Theo’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, was twenty-eight when her husband died. She was left with a baby son, a small income, and a warehouse full of paintings no one had bought. She spent the next four decades organizing Vincent’s letters, translating them, negotiating with museums, lending canvases to exhibitions, and building the reputation that made him one of the most recognized artists in human history. Without Theo, Vincent could not have painted. Without Johanna, no one would have known.

THE LESSON

We tell the Van Gogh story as a story about solitary genius - the tortured artist, the cut ear, the madness, the sunflowers. That version leaves Theo out almost entirely, and it leaves Johanna out completely. I think that is a mistake, and not just because it is unfair to them. It is a mistake because it teaches the wrong lesson about how important work actually gets done.

Vincent could not have painted without Theo. That is not a metaphor. It is a material fact. The paint cost money. The food cost money. The housing cost money. Theo provided all of it, for ten years, without knowing how it would turn out - without any guarantee that the work was good, that it would be recognized, that the investment of his income and his time and his emotional labor would ever amount to anything. He kept sending the money because he loved and believed in his brother. That is it. That is the whole thing.

“Behind most of the work we call great, there is someone who made a decision to keep believing before the results were in. Your kid needs to know who that person is in their life - and so do you.”

The AI era is going to require a lot of people to work harder for things that might have come more easily before - like entry level jobs. Not only that but there will be work whose value will not be immediately obvious. New tools, new approaches, new ways of thinking about old problems - the results of that work will often take years to become visible. The people who will be able to sustain that kind of long-horizon effort are not the ones with the most confidence in themselves. They are the ones with a Theo: someone who keeps showing up, keeps saying that the work matters before the world has confirmed that it does.

And then there is Johanna. She never set out to build a legacy. She was a grieving widow trying to figure out what to do with a warehouse full of paintings. What she understood - and this is the part I keep coming back to - is that the work had already been done. It existed. Someone just had to care about it enough to make sure it was seen.

THE ONE THING

Two questions this week - one for your kid, one for you:

“Who is your Theo - and have you told them what it means that they keep showing up?”

For your kid: most of them have someone who believes in their work before it is worth believing in. A parent, obviously, but also sometimes a teacher, a coach, a friend, a grandparent. The person who asks about the project. Who remembers what they are working on. Who does not need the results to be in before they decide the effort matters. That person deserves to be named, and thanked, and told specifically what the support has made possible.

For you: you might be someone’s Theo right now, and you may not know it. The kid who seems like they are going nowhere, the one whose work is piling up in a metaphorical warehouse with no buyers - the fact that you have not stopped believing is doing more than you can see from where you are standing. Theo supported Vincent for ten years before anyone could tell him whether he had been right. You may be somewhere in the middle of that timeline. Keep providing it.

Johanna’s question is worth asking too: what exists that no one has seen yet, and who is going to care enough to make sure it gets seen? Sometimes that is the whole job.

Next week: She spent twenty years working for someone else, becoming one of the best in the world at a job she was never given the top title in. At forty, she went shopping for a wedding dress, couldn’t find anything she actually wanted to wear, and decided to make it herself.

You have seen the dress.

Till then!
Ian

[Image generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914. By her early twenties she was a film star in Europe, famous partly for a scene in a 1933 Czech film in which she appeared nude - a scandal that followed her for decades. Louis B. Mayer signed her to MGM and renamed her. By the late 1930s she was one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood. The studio called her the most beautiful woman in the world.

What almost no one knew was that she was also an engineer.

Lamarr had grown up in a household where dinner table conversation ran to science and technology. Her first husband, an Austrian arms manufacturer, took her to business meetings where she listened to discussions of weapons systems and munitions contracts. She absorbed everything and said nothing. When she escaped the marriage and fled to London in 1937, she was carrying a mental inventory of weapons technology that would shape the work she did for the rest of her life.

After Pearl Harbor, Lamarr wanted to contribute to the war effort in a way that mattered. She knew from what she had heard in those meetings that radio-guided torpedoes - a promising technology - had a critical vulnerability: the guidance signal could be jammed. An enemy who detected the radio frequency could take control of the torpedo or disable it entirely. The problem, as she understood it, was that a fixed frequency was easy to find and easy to block.

She came up with an idea she called frequency hopping: the guidance signal would jump rapidly and unpredictably between frequencies, following a pattern synchronized between the transmitter and receiver. An adversary trying to jam a single frequency would find the signal had already moved. She developed the concept with composer George Antheil, who contributed the synchronization mechanism - inspired by the player piano rolls he used in his music. They filed a patent in 1942.

The Navy looked at it and passed. The patent sat unused. It expired in 1959, seventeen years before the technology was finally adopted by the military. By then, neither Lamarr nor Antheil had any legal claim to it. The electronics industry built spread spectrum technology - WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, most modern wireless communication - directly on the principle she had patented, without compensation to her or acknowledgment of her role.

In 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her a Pioneer Award. She was eighty-two. She died in 2000. In the years since, she has been recognized as a foundational figure in wireless communication. The Hollywood actress, it turned out, had powered the information age.

THE LESSON

In her era, the category Hedy Lamarr was placed in - actress, beauty, spectacle - was so complete that it left no room for what else she was. The people who might have taken her patent seriously in 1942 could not hold both ideas at once: that the woman on the movie poster was also the woman who had figured out a genuine solution to a weapons engineering problem. The category did the work of dismissal so efficiently that no one even had to make a conscious decision to ignore her. They just couldn’t see past the frame.

This is a particular kind of invisibility, and I think it is going to become more common in the AI era, not less. As more work gets filtered through systems that sort and label and categorize people early, the gap between the category and the actual person is going to create more Hedy Lamarrs. People whose real capability is hidden inside a label that doesn’t fit.

“The question worth asking your kid is not what category they fall into. It is what they are building that the category cannot see.”

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What do you know how to do that the people around you don’t know you can do?”

This is asking about the gap between the category and the person. Every kid has capabilities that are invisible. The quiet kid who writes code at midnight. The athlete who is also a serious reader. The class clown who understands systems better than anyone in the room. The label that got attached early - good at school, bad at school, the funny one, the serious one - has a way of making everything else harder to see.

Hedy Lamarr spent her whole career being seen as one thing while being something else entirely. The something else turned out to matter more than the thing she was known for. Not to her bank account, not in her lifetime - but in the actual history of how human beings communicate. That gap between what you are known for and what you have actually built is worth paying attention to. Sometimes it is a tragedy. Sometimes it is just information about where the real work is happening.

Ask your kid what they know that nobody seems to know they know. Then really listen. You might be surprised what has been going on inside the story you already thought you understood.

Next week: He was told his drawings were not good enough to get into art school. He applied twice. Both times, rejected. He spent the next decade drawing anyway, in poverty, in obscurity, in a boarding house in The Hague where he wrote thousands of letters to his brother asking him not to give up on him. His brother didn’t.

Until then,

Ian

[Image generated by Gemini]

He failed at three careers
He was rejected 1000+ times
Now, his name is on every bucket

THE STORY

Harland Sanders was five years old when his father died. His mother went to work in a canning factory, and he learned to cook for his younger siblings. He left home at twelve. By the time he was in his thirties he had already been a farmhand, a streetcar conductor, a railroad fireman, a law student (he got into a fistfight with a client and was disbarred), an insurance salesman (fired), a ferryboat operator (the company folded), and a tire salesman. Nothing stuck.

In the early 1930s, he started cooking chicken out of a service station in Corbin, Kentucky. He had no dining room - customers ate at his own table. The food was good enough that people kept coming back, and eventually he had a proper restaurant with 142 seats. He spent years refining the recipe, experimenting with a pressure cooker to cut the cooking time without sacrificing texture. By the early 1950s, food critics were making the drive to Corbin specifically to eat his chicken. A travel guide called it one of the best restaurants in America.

In 1955, a new interstate highway was built that bypassed Corbin entirely. The traffic that had kept his restaurant alive simply stopped coming. Sanders was sixty-five years old. He auctioned off everything, paid his debts, and was left with his car, his recipe, his pressure cooker, and a Social Security check for $105 a month.

He decided to franchise the recipe.

He drove around the country, showing up at restaurants unannounced, cooking his chicken for the owners, and proposing a deal: a nickel for every piece they sold using his method. He slept in his car to keep costs down. Most restaurant owners said no. Some said no twice. The exact count of rejections has been debated, but the number most commonly cited is over a thousand.

He got enough yeses. By 1963 there were more than six hundred Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises operating in the United States and Canada. In 1964, at age seventy-four, Sanders sold the company for $2 million - roughly $20 million in today’s dollars - to a group of investors. He kept the rights to the Canadian operations and stayed on as a brand ambassador for the rest of his life.

He died in 1980 at age ninety, still working. His face - the white suit, the string tie, the glasses - became one of the most recognized images in the history of commercial branding. There are more than 27,000 KFC locations in 150 countries. He started all of it at sixty-five, after everything else had failed.

THE LESSON

There is a timeline most of us carry around in our heads - a set of ages by which certain things are supposed to have happened. Career established by thirty. Peak earning years in your forties. Wind down in your fifties. By sixty-five, the story is supposed to be mostly written. Harland Sanders is one long argument against that timeline, and what I find most useful about his story is not the triumph at the end but the specific texture of the middle.

He didn’t know it was going to work. He was sleeping in his car. He was getting rejected every single day by people who had better things to do than listen to a sixty-five-year-old man with a pressure cooker pitch them on a recipe. There is nothing in the middle of that story that looks like the prelude to a global brand. It looks like a man who ran out of options and kept going anyway.

“The AI era is going to force a lot of people to start over - not at sixty-five, but at thirty-five and forty-five, more than once. The kids who understand that starting over is a skill, not a failure, are going to be in a completely different position than the ones who think the path is supposed to be straight.”

This reminds me of one of my favorite internet GIFs of the last decade:

Sanders had started over so many times by the time he was sixty-five that he had gotten reasonably good at it. Not comfortable - I don’t think it was ever comfortable. But practiced. He knew how to pick up the pressure cooker and get back in the car. Most people only have to learn that once. In the world your kids are entering, they may have to learn it several times.

One look at my LinkedIn will tell you - I had to learn this lesson too. Part of the digital economy and volitility of my industry. Or as a therapist once told me, “You don’t work at the library, Ian.”

The other thing worth sitting with: the thing that finally worked was something Sanders had been doing for twenty years before he turned it into a business. The recipe, the technique, the understanding of what made the chicken good - all of that was developed quietly, without anyone watching, during the years the interstate hadn’t been built yet. The expertise was old. The application of it was new. That combination - deep knowledge looking for a new form - is one of the most useful things a person can carry into a world that keeps changing the rules.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What would you try if you knew that starting over wasn’t embarrassing?”

This question is for your kid, but honestly it might be for you too. The embarrassment of starting over is one of the most underrated obstacles in adult life. We don’t talk about it much, but it shapes an enormous number of decisions - the career that isn’t working but feels too late to leave, the skill that was never developed because the window seemed to have closed, the thing you wanted to build that you told yourself you should have started earlier.

Sanders wasn’t embarrassed. Or if he was, he didn’t let it stop him. He showed up at restaurants with his pressure cooker and cooked chicken for strangers and asked for a nickel a piece. He did that more than a thousand times. The willingness to be in that position - to be the sixty-five-year-old in the parking lot with the car that doubles as a bedroom, making the pitch one more time - is not a small thing. It is, in fact, THE THING.

Ask your kid what they would try if starting over didn’t mean they had failed at something first. Then listen for what they already know they want to do but have been waiting to feel ready for. The readiness rarely arrives on its own. Sometimes you just have to load the pressure cooker and go.

Next week: The publisher told her the book had no audience. Too long, too strange, too hard to categorize. She had been writing it for five years, mostly in a coffee shop, because her apartment was too cold to work in. She was a single mother. The rejection letters came back twelve times. You know how it ends.

CYA!
Ian

^{[Lydgate Beach, Kapa’a, Kauai HI]}

A note: This issue is a little late because I was in Kauai with Malvina, celebrating a big birthday. It is not a coincidence that this week is about Frida Kahlo. Frida is one of Malvina’s favorite artists.

Happy birthday, Malvina, I love you!

Rejected from every art school
Told her work was too strange
She kept painting anyway

THE STORY

On September 17, 1925, eighteen-year-old Frida Kahlo was riding a bus in Mexico City when it collided with a streetcar. The accident broke her spinal column, her collarbone, her right leg in eleven places, and her pelvis. A steel handrail pierced her hip and exited through the other side. The doctors did not expect her to live. She spent a month in the hospital, then went home to a bed fitted with a special easel her mother had built above it, and a mirror mounted to the canopy so she could see herself. She started painting.

She had not been a painter before the accident. She had planned to study medicine. The bus crash did not give her a vocation - it gave her the hours, the stillness, and the subject matter that would define one.

Kahlo painted herself more than any other subject - fifty-five of her 143 known paintings are self-portraits. She painted her pain directly: surgeries, miscarriages, a body in pieces and in recovery. Critics who encountered her work in the 1930s and 1940s often didn’t know what to do with it. It was too raw. Too intimate. Too insistently female. Too Mexican. Andre Breton, the father of Surrealism, tried to claim her for his movement. She rejected the label. She said she didn’t paint dreams. She painted her own reality.

Diego Rivera, the muralist she married (twice), recognized her talent early and promoted her work aggressively. But for most of her life, she was known primarily as Rivera’s wife - the interesting woman with the unibrow in the colorful clothes. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico didn’t happen until 1953, the year before she died. She attended it lying in a four-poster bed that had been carried into the gallery, because she was too ill to stand.

She died in 1954 at forty-seven. Her last diary entry read: I joyfully await the exit - and I hope never to return.

In the decades after her death, her reputation grew past anything she experienced in her lifetime. Her self-portrait sold for $1.7 million in 1990 - the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a Latin American artist at the time. In 2021, another sold for $34.9 million. In 2010, her image was placed on the 500-peso note, making her the first woman - and the first artist - to appear on Mexican currency.

THE LESSON

Every criticism leveled at Kahlo’s work during her lifetime turned out to be a description of its value. Too personal became the reason it connected. Too strange became the reason it endured. Too Mexican became the reason it mattered to millions of people who had never seen themselves reflected in European art.

When something is genuinely original, the first response is often to describe what it is not - not polished enough, not conventional enough, not what we were expecting. Those criticisms are accurate. They are also beside the point. The question is not whether the work fits the existing category. The question is whether the work is authentic. The question is how it makes you feel.

“In a world where AI can produce “competent” on demand, competent is not the goal anymore. The goal is irreplaceable. Frida Kahlo was irreplaceable because no one else had her particular combination of experience, obsession, and refusal to look away.”

I think about this a lot in the context of what we are asking our kids to become. The educational system - reasonably, given when it was designed - optimizes for competence. The AI era is going to make competence a floor, not a ceiling. What comes after competence is character: a specific, developed, recognizable point of view that could only have come from this particular person living this particular life.

Kahlo did not try to paint like other painters. She tried to paint like someone who had been in that bus crash, who had spent years looking at herself in that mirror, who had a specific cultural inheritance and a specific body and a specific grief. The particularity is what made it art. The same principle applies to work that is not art at all - to the way your kid thinks about problems, makes decisions, builds things. The more specifically “theirs” it is, the less replaceable it is.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What is something about the way you see things that other people don’t seem to see the same way?”

This question asks about perspective. The thing they see differently might not feel like an advantage yet. It might feel like a liability - the way they notice things that others miss, or care about things that others find unimportant, or approach problems from an angle that seems obvious to them and strange to everyone else.

Frida Kahlo painted what she actually saw when she looked at herself - not what she was supposed to see, not what was flattering, not what would sell. The doctors, the critics, the art establishment all had opinions about what she should be doing differently. She kept looking at her own face in that mirror and painting what was there.

The kids who will do most distinctively well in the next twenty years are not going to be the ones who figured out how to be more like everyone else. They are going to be the ones who figured out how to be more like themselves - specifically, deliberately, with increasing clarity about what they actually see and think and value.

That process starts with someone asking them questions that help them see what makes them uniquely unique.

Next week: He was sixty-two years old, driving from town to town with a pressure cooker in the back of his car, sleeping in that very car most nights. He had already failed at three careers. His pitch was rejected more than a thousand times. His name is on every bucket.

Till then!
Ian

It was 1945.

Frozen dinners would never be the same

[Image generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

Percy Spencer grew up in Howland, Maine, in genuine poverty. His father died when he was eighteen months old. His mother left shortly after. He was raised by an aunt and uncle, left school after the fifth grade to work in a spool mill, and taught himself everything he knew - electronics, physics, mathematics - from library books and correspondence courses. He never earned a high school diploma. He would go on to hold 300 patents.

In 1945, Spencer was a senior engineer at Raytheon, working on magnetrons - the high-powered vacuum tubes that generated microwave radiation for radar equipment. One afternoon, while standing in front of an active magnetron, he reached into his pocket for a peanut butter chocolate bar he’d brought from home. It had melted into a soft, warm smear.

A different kind of person might have been annoyed. Spencer was curious.

He sent out for a bag of popcorn kernels and held them near the magnetron. They popped. He tried an egg. It exploded. He understood what was happening: the microwave radiation was exciting the water molecules inside the food, generating heat from the inside out rather than from the outside in. It was a fundamentally different way of cooking - and it had been sitting inside radar equipment for years without anyone noticing.

Spencer filed his first microwave oven patent in October 1945. The first commercial model, which Raytheon called the Radarange, was released in 1947. It stood nearly six feet tall, weighed 750 pounds, required a water line for cooling, and cost $5,000 - roughly $65,000 in today’s money. It sold primarily to restaurants, railroads, and ocean liners.

The home version took another twenty years. By the 1970s, the price had dropped below $500 and the size had shrunk to something that fit on a countertop. By 1975, microwave ovens were outselling conventional ovens in the United States. Today there are more than 200 million in American homes alone.

Spencer was asked, late in his life, whether he had planned any of it. He said he had not. He said he had simply been paying attention.

THE LESSON

Percy Spencer left school after the fifth grade. He never got a high school diploma, never attended college, never earned a credential of any kind. He also filed more than 300 patents over his career at Raytheon and became one of the most productive engineers in the company’s history. The tension between those two facts is the lesson.

We have built an entire apparatus around the idea that the credential precedes the capability. You get the degree, then you get the job. You pass the test, then you’re qualified. The sequence feels logical. Spencer’s life is a forty-year argument against it. He didn’t wait to be certified. He just kept learning - from books, from colleagues, from the work itself - and the learning compounded into something the credential system would have taken decades to produce, if it could have produced it at all.

“The AI era is going to expose a gap that has always existed between the credential and the capability. Your kid needs to know which one they’re actually building.”

This is not an argument against education. It’s an argument for being honest about what education is for. The degree is useful because it signals something - that you can finish things, that you can operate inside a system, that you have a baseline of knowledge. But it has never been the same thing as capability, and in a world where tools like AI can compress the learning curve dramatically, the gap between the two is going to become more visible, not less.

Spencer’s self-teaching worked because he was genuinely motivated - not to pass a test, but to understand how things worked. That distinction matters more than ever. The kids who are building capability because they’re curious will keep building long after the grade is posted. The kids who are collecting credentials because they’re supposed to will stop the moment the credential is in hand.

You can’t always tell the difference from the outside.

But your kid knows which one they are.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What are you learning right now that nobody is making you learn?”

This question asks about what they’re actually curious about. It might be something they’re watching on YouTube at midnight. A skill they’ve been practicing without telling anyone. A subject they’ve been reading about that has nothing to do with school. That’s the thing worth knowing about.

Percy Spencer taught himself electronics and physics from library books because he wanted to understand how the world worked. Nobody graded him on it. Nobody told him it would lead anywhere. He just kept going because the subject was interesting to him. That intrinsic motivation is what carried him through fifty years of productive work - and it started long before anyone recognized it as valuable.

If your kid can’t answer this question - if everything they’re learning is assigned, graded, and tracked - that’s the real conversation. The habit of learning for its own sake is the one skill that doesn’t expire. The credential has a shelf life. The curiosity doesn’t.

Next week: She was rejected from every art school she applied to. She was told her work was too strange, too personal, too uncommercial. She kept painting anyway. Today her canvases sell for more than most people earn in a lifetime, and her face is on the currency of her country.

Till then!
Ian

[Imaged generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

Spencer Silver was a chemist at 3M in 1968 with a clear assignment: develop a super-strong adhesive for use in aerospace construction. He failed at the assignment. What he created instead was a microsphere adhesive, tiny acrylic spheres that bonded lightly to surfaces, could be peeled away cleanly without tearing, and left no residue behind. It was stable, it was consistent, and by every metric he’d been given, it was useless.

Silver didn’t throw it away.

For the next six years he presented his “failed” adhesive at internal 3M seminars, looking for anyone who could figure out what it was good for. Most of his colleagues were politely dismissive. A few were less than polite. He kept going back.

Art Fry attended one of Silver’s seminars in 1974. Fry was a product developer at 3M and also a tenor in his church choir. Every week, the paper bookmarks he used to mark hymns in his choir book slipped out during the service. It was a small, chronic irritation that had never produced a solution.

Sitting in Silver’s seminar, something connected.

What if the bookmark stuck just enough, but not permanently?

Fry spent months on the prototype, solving the real engineering problem: how to get the adhesive to stay on the paper strip rather than transferring to the hymnal page. He developed a coated paper that held the adhesive reliably. The bookmark worked.

3M’s leadership wasn’t convinced they had a product. In 1977 they tested it under the name “Press ‘N Peel” in four cities. It flopped. Consumers didn’t understand what they were supposed to do with a notepad that wasn’t as sticky as regular tape.

Fry proposed a different test: give it away. He and Silver sent free samples to the secretaries of Fortune 500 CEOs.

The reorder rate came back above 90 percent.

3M launched Post-it Notes nationally in 1980. Within a year it was one of the company’s best-selling products. The global market for Post-it Notes and their derivatives is now worth billions of dollars annually. They are in virtually every office, classroom, and kitchen in the developed world.

Spencer Silver lived to see all of it. He died in 2021 at the age of eighty, having spent fifty-three years watching what he’d accidentally created become part of the texture of daily life. He was modest about it to the end. He gave a lot of the credit to Art Fry.

THE LESSON

The concept of “failure” is only meaningful in relation to the original question. Silver’s adhesive failed the question it was asked, make something stronger. It succeeded at a question nobody had thought to ask yet. That’s not failure.

That’s a discovery in need of a problem.

What I keep coming back to is the six-year gap. Six years between Silver’s invention and Fry’s choir rehearsal. Six years during which the adhesive was technically “useless,” and Silver kept showing up to seminars anyway. Not because he knew it would work out. Because he thought it was interesting.

“The willingness to stay curious about something before it’s proven — that’s what kept the invention alive long enough for the right question to find it.”

The AI era is going to produce a lot of Spencer Silver moments. Capabilities that don’t solve the problem they were built for. Ideas that fail their first test. Tools that get shelved because nobody can immediately see what they’re for. The kids who learn to ask “what question does this answer?” instead of discarding what doesn’t work the first time, they’re the ones who will find the next “Post-it note” like discovery.

There’s a second thing worth sitting with. Art Fry brought the question from somewhere completely unrelated. His choir hymnal had nothing to do with office products. The connection only happened because he was a product developer who went to Silver’s seminars AND sang in a church choir. The breadth of his life is what made the insight possible.

The adhesive sat on the shelf for six years waiting for someone who lived in two worlds at once. Your kid doesn’t need to specialize so early that they lose the ability to see across domains. The more different worlds they have access to, the more likely they are to be the person who walks into the seminar and thinks: wait, I know exactly what this is for.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What’s something you tried that didn’t work the way you expected, but turned out to be interesting for a different reason?”

Not “what have you failed at”, that question invites shame and a short list. This question is asking something different: what surprised you? What didn’t work but stayed in your mind? What experiment produced the wrong result but an interesting one?

Silver didn’t throw away the adhesive because it surprised him. He didn’t know what it was for, but he knew it was doing something he hadn’t seen before. That curiosity, the willingness to be interested in what you don’t yet understand, is what kept the discovery alive long enough for Fry to find it.

Your kid has things like this. Experiments that didn’t land the way they planned. Interests that don’t fit neatly into a category. Skills that haven’t found their question yet. The conversation worth having isn’t about fixing those things. It’s about staying curious about them. Because you genuinely cannot tell, in the moment, whether something is a dead end or a Post-it note waiting for Art Fry.

Next week: He was testing radar equipment when a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. He didn’t understand why. It was 1945. Nobody would eat a frozen dinner the same way again.

Till then,
Ian

[Image generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

In the summer of 1920, a fourteen-year-old boy named Philo Farnsworth was plowing a potato field on his family’s farm in Rigby, Idaho. He was guiding a horse back and forth across the field, row by row, watching the parallel lines of turned earth stretch out in front of him.

It was in that field, doing that work, that he figured out how to transmit a moving image through the air using electricity. He saw the rows. He thought: what if you could scan an image the same way, line by line, fast enough that the human eye would read it as continuous motion? He was fourteen years old. He was plowing potatoes.

Two years later, he drew the diagram on a blackboard for his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman. Tolman kept the drawing. That sketch would later become critical evidence in one of the most consequential patent battles in American history.

In 1927, working in a small lab at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, Philo Farnsworth, twenty-one years old, funded by a small group of private investors, transmitted the first fully electronic television image. It was a straight line. He pointed the camera at a glass slide painted black with a single line scratched into it, rotated it ninety degrees, and the receiver showed the image move.

His investors asked when they would see some dollars.

What happened next is a story about what happens when one person with an idea meets an institution with resources and no intention of losing.

David Sarnoff ran RCA, the most powerful communications company in America. He had built his empire on radio and he understood immediately that television would be the next one. He sent his chief engineer, Vladimir Zworykin, to visit Farnsworth’s lab in 1930. Zworykin spent three days studying everything. When he left, Sarnoff offered Farnsworth $100,000 for his patents and a job. Farnsworth said no.

So Sarnoff did what large institutions do when they can’t buy something: he tried to bury it. RCA filed competing patents, claimed Zworykin had invented the technology independently, and launched years of litigation designed to drain Farnsworth’s resources and run out his patent clock.

Farnsworth fought back. In 1934, his patent examiner, presented with Justin Tolman’s blackboard sketch from 1922, the one the chemistry teacher had saved for twelve years, ruled in Farnsworth’s favor. RCA was forced to pay him royalties. It was one of the only times in history that a solo inventor defeated RCA in court.

He should have won. Instead, he lost anyway.

World War II halted the commercial development of television entirely. By the time the war ended and TV sets began appearing in American living rooms, Farnsworth’s key patents had expired. The technology he had invented, fought for, and won in court was now free for anyone to use. The television age arrived exactly as he had imagined it, and he made almost nothing from it.

In 1957, Farnsworth appeared as a mystery guest on the television game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” The panel had to guess his secret. His secret was that he had invented television. They didn’t guess it.

He died on March 11, 1971. Three weeks earlier, astronauts on Apollo 14 had used a television camera to broadcast from the surface of the moon. Watching it, Farnsworth turned to his wife Pem and said:

“This has made it all worthwhile.”

THE LESSON

We live in a society that has decided the timeline for doing something that matters is very short. Thirty Under Thirty. Founders who exit before they’re old enough to rent a car. The implicit message our kids absorbs from all of it: if you haven’t figured it out yet, you’re behind.

One of my favorite influencers is Gary Vaynerchuk, and one of my favorites of his pearls of wisdom is, “You’re f’ing 20, you’re so f’ing young, do you know how much f’ing time you have?” He then goes on to say the same thing about 30, 40, and 50 year olds. He’s fighting against the idea that we’re all somehow too late, behind or finished when in reality, we’ve often barely started.

In this precious human life we have - it’s almost never too late to make a significant contribution.

Philo Farnsworth had the idea at fourteen. He proved it at twenty-one. He spent the next four decades fighting for it, losing the financial reward, watching someone else get the credit, and dying before the world fully understood what he had built.

And yet.

“This has made it all worthwhile.”

That is not the statement of a man who lost. That is the statement of a man who understood, finally, that his life had mattered. That the timeline for mattering is not a quarter and it’s not a year and it’s not financial. The timeline is a life - the entirety of it.

The cruelest part of the Farnsworth story is not Sarnoff. Sarnoff was just doing what powerful institutions do. The cruelest part is the war. The timing. The fact that between winning in court and the moment the world was ready, the clock ran out through no fault of his own.

We all face versions of this and our kids too. The thing they build may not land when they expect it to. The credit may go somewhere else. The timing may be wrong. The institution may have more resources and more patience than feels fair.

What Farnsworth had, and what no one could take from him, was the knowledge of what he had actually done. The sketch on the blackboard. The line on the screen in 1927. The moment on the farm in Idaho when he saw the rows and understood something nobody else had understood yet.

The AI era is going to compress some timelines and stretch others in ways nobody can fully predict. Some of what your kid builds will land fast. Some of it will take longer than feels reasonable. Society will tell them the slow things aren’t working.

Often society will be wrong.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What’s something you’re working on — or thinking about — that you’d still want to have done even if it took ten years?”

Not “what do you want to do for a job.” Not “what’s your five-year plan.” Those questions flatten the answer into something that sounds reasonable, responsible.

This question is asking something different: what matters enough to you that the timeline doesn’t change the wanting?

If your kid has an answer, even a partial one, even an uncertain one, that’s the thing worth paying attention to. That is gold.

That’s the sketch on the blackboard.

Next week: He invented an adhesive that wasn’t sticky enough. His colleagues called it a failed experiment. It sat on a shelf for five years — waiting for someone to realize it was the answer to a question nobody had thought to ask yet.

See ya!
Ian

[Image generated by Gemini]

If you’re Gen X like me, born somewhere between the mid-’60s and 1980, you remember pegged jeans (we called them French-cuffed). Sebago or Docksiders, no socks. Jams, those loud, baggy, clam-digger shorts that made no sense and were everywhere. You remember where you were the night the Thriller video premiered on MTV. You remember the sick feeling on January 28, 1986, watching the Challenger explode on television.

And there is a good chance, at some point, you wore a Swatch on your wrist.

Bright plastic. Cheap. Interchangeable. Nothing like the serious watch Dad wore. You might have had three of them. You might have worn them all at the same time. That was the point. It wasn’t a watch. It was an accessory, a statement, a small act of self-expression you could afford as a teenager. The Swatch was as much a part of the decade as the music and the hair.

What almost no one knew at the time, what almost no one knows now, is how close it came to never existing. And what had to happen, sixteen years earlier, to make it possible.

THE STORY

In 1967, Swiss engineers did something extraordinary. Working at a research center in Neuchâtel, they developed the world’s first quartz wristwatch movement. It was more accurate than anything that had ever been built. It didn’t need winding. It was smaller, cheaper to produce, and more reliable than the finest mechanical timepiece Switzerland had spent three centuries perfecting.

They had just invented the future of their entire industry.

Then they entered it in an international watch competition, and displayed it openly for anyone to examine. They didn’t patent the core technology aggressively. They didn’t rush it to market. They assumed that Swiss craftsmanship and heritage would remain the point, that precision mechanics would always be what people valued, that the quartz movement was an interesting technical achievement but not a threat to the way things worked.

Japanese engineers were in the room. They took careful notes.

Seiko launched a commercial quartz watch in 1969. By the mid-1970s, Japanese manufacturers were producing quartz watches by the millions at a fraction of the cost of a Swiss mechanical watch. By 1983, the Swiss watch industry had collapsed. Employment fell from 90,000 workers to under 30,000. Iconic houses that had existed for a century were bankrupt or absorbed. The country that had defined timekeeping for three hundred years had been nearly wiped out, by a technology its own engineers had invented and given away.

What saved them was not a return to what had worked before.

In 1983, a Swiss engineer named Ernst Thomke, working with businessman Nicolas Hayek, introduced the Swatch. It was made of plastic. It had 51 parts instead of the traditional 90-plus. It cost less than forty dollars. It came in colors and patterns that had nothing to do with tradition or heritage. It was not a precision instrument sold to someone who cared about craftsmanship. It was a fashion accessory sold to someone who wanted to express something about themselves.

The Swiss watch industry thought it was beneath them.

It sold 100 million units in six years. It funded the revival of the entire Swiss luxury watch industry. Omega. Longines. Breguet. All of them survived because Swatch generated the capital and the infrastructure to keep the parent company, the SMH Group, alive long enough for Swiss craftsmanship to find its market again.

The engineers who invented the quartz movement were not foolish people. They were among the best watchmakers in the world. What they failed to understand was that when you invent something that changes everything, the old assumptions, about what people value, what the market rewards, what your product actually is, no longer apply.

THE LESSON

The Swiss engineers made two mistakes. The first was giving the technology away without understanding what they had. The second, and this is the one that actually finished them, was assuming that because they had built the best version of the old thing, they were safe from the next innovation that was coming around the corner.

AI is the quartz movement. It is sitting in the room right now. Everyone can see it. The question is not whether your kid’s field will be affected, it will be. The question is whether they are the Japanese engineer taking notes, or the Swiss engineer assuming their three centuries of craftsmanship will protect them.

“The danger is not the new technology. The danger is the assumption that what you’ve already built is enough.”

Your kid has something the Swiss engineers didn’t: time, and the awareness that the disruption is coming. The engineers in Neuchâtel built the quartz movement and didn’t recognize it for what it was. Your kid can look at AI right now and ask a different question: not “how do I protect what I know?” but “what does what I know become when combined with AI?”

Swatch didn’t win by being better at watchmaking. It won by asking what a watch could be for someone who didn’t care about watchmaking. That kind of question is available in every field, in every profession, right now. The people who ask it first, and build the answer, are the ones who don’t end up handing their industry to someone who was paying attention.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation:

“What’s something you know how to do really well — and what does it become when you add AI to it?”

What do you already have, a skill, an interest, a body of knowledge, and what new thing does it make possible when you utilize AI as a “thinking partner?”

The Swiss engineers had three centuries of watchmaking knowledge. Combined with the quartz movement, that knowledge could have built anything. Instead they protected the old thing and watched someone else build the new one.

Your kid doesn’t have to make that mistake. But they have to ask the question now, while the room is still full of possibilities.

Before someone else starts taking careful notes.

Next week: He invented television. He held over 300 patents. He died nearly broke, and almost no one knows his name.

See ya,
Ian

[Image generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

By the early 1980s, the Grateful Dead made a decision that made their record label deeply uncomfortable: they decided to stop trying to prevent taping at their shows. This is a different narrative than what is commonly believed, which is that the Dead “encouraged taping.” They didn’t. In fact, they tried to fight it for years.

Fans still got taping equipment in. Thankfully.

Jerry Garcia described the members of the band as “pathologically anti-authoritarian” and that included not being an authority over their own fans. Especially their fans. They knew people were going to tape no matter what they did, and they weren’t willing to police their own audience.

By 1984, they formalized it entirely, designating a specific section at every concert, the taper section, where fans could set up equipment and record the full performance. Every music industry executive said the same thing: you are giving away the product.

The label was not wrong that this broke the rules.

The tapes didn’t replace the concerts or album sales. They created demand for them, exponentially. A kid in Ohio who got a tape of a New Year’s show from 1978 didn’t decide he didn’t need to see the Dead live. Quite the contrary. He bought a ticket to every show within driving distance and brought three friends. The recordings were the invitation. The community, the adventure, the trip, was the product.

But the taping policy was only part of the story.

In the early 70s the Dead built the “Wall of Sound”, the largest, most obscene and most sophisticated concert amplification system ever constructed, a mountain of speakers that took a crew of dozens to assemble and a fleet of trucks to move. They drove it across America because they believed their audience deserved to hear music the way it was meant to sound.

LOUD.

The cost was staggering. The industry said it was insane. They did it anyway.

They played in front of the Pyramids of Giza in 1978. They built their own direct-to-fan ticketing operation, Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, that kept prices accessible and cut out the middlemen entirely, decades before anyone called that a “disruption strategy.”

The Grateful Dead never played the same show twice. Not as a gimmick, but as a means to keep themselves interested, and because they believed the experience of being there, in that room, on that night, was the whole point.

They were a LIVE band meant to be seen LIVE.

They never had a top ten album.

They had one top ten hit in thirty years.

By every conventional metric of the music industry, they should have been a footnote. Instead they became one of the highest-grossing touring acts in American history for their time, sustained a devoted community of millions across five decades and beyond, and produced a model of fan relationship that every major artist and brand in the world now tries to replicate.

They mastered “social media” marketing before it even existed.

All this being said, the music, the songs, the concerts, the experience, is most of the story. They have a songbook that is beloved, that will likely carry on, as the late Bob Weir had hoped, for “300 years.”

Nothing happens without that.

If their music stunk, none of this would be relevant or interesting.

But the way they conducted themselves as a band, and as a business, will be studied for just as long.

They never shied away from blazing their own trail, bucking the trend, doing what the establishment said was crazy, and in doing so cemented their legacy as one of the most truly American institutions of all time.

THE LESSON

The marketing strategist Rishad Tobaccowala in 2023 coined the phrase, “A Company of One.” The idea that the future of work is not a career ladder inside a large institution but a set of skills, relationships, and tools assembled by an individual into something distinctly their own. Sam Altman, the CEO if OpenAI, has said versions of the same thing: that AI will make it possible for a single person to build what previously required a team, a budget, and a decade of institutional credentialing.

In fact, this newsletter; the research, the drafting, the editing, the formatting - would have taken me two or three times as long without AI. Not because the ideas aren’t mine. They are. But because AI handles the parts that used to be friction, and friction is what stops most things from getting started. I’m one person, writing about things I care about, on my own timeline, with tools that didn’t exist five years ago.

The Grateful Dead didn’t wait for the music industry to create a path for them. They built the Wall of Sound, they went to Egypt, they ran their own ticketing, they made their own rules because the existing ones didn’t fit what they were trying to build.

The tools they had access to: emerging sound technology, a newsletter to connect with fans, a community willing to follow them anywhere - were unusual for their time. They utilized them.

Your kid has remarkable tools for their time. The question is whether they’ll use them to try and replicate the old path or to build something entirely new with them.

“The future does not fit in the container of the past.”

This line is Rishad’s. I think about it a lot. The container - the degree, the job title, the career arc, the industry hierarchy - was built for a different time with a different set of tools and constraints.

Some of it still applies.

Some of it is the music industry telling the Dead not to let their fans tape.

The hard part is knowing which is which.

The only way to find out is to start building something and pay attention to which rules still matter.

THE ONE THING

This week’s conversation with your kid (or YOURSELF!):

“If you could build one thing, just you, with the tools you have right now - what would it be?”

Not a career goal. Not a resume line. Something you’d actually make. A newsletter, a product, a service, a community, a project. Something that solves a problem you care about or creates something you wish existed.

Something the old version of you, five years ago, without these tools, wouldn’t have done.

Then ask the follow-up: what’s the first thing you’d do this week to start?

The Dead didn’t announce a new model for the music industry.

They just loaded the truck.

Next week: In 1967, Swiss engineers invented the quartz movement and displayed it at an international watch congress. They didn’t commercialize it, it threatened everything they’d built. Seiko saw it, built it, and within fifteen years the Swiss watch industry had collapsed from 90 percent global market share to nearly nothing. What they did next, the Swatch, is one of the most instructive comebacks in business history.

And it has almost nothing to do with watches.

See ya then,

Ian

We’re at that moment again.

[Image generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

This week, Anthropic “released” a new AI model called Mythos. They announced it and then said they would not release it to the public and only made it available to a select group of companies. Not because it wasn’t ready but because the world wasn’t.

In testing, Mythos had identified thousands of previously unknown software vulnerabilities that would threaten the foundational software of our society and economy. Within 48 hours of the announcement, Treasury Secretary Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Powell had assembled Wall Street’s top executives for an emergency briefing.

Shit is getting real.

Two months ago, the United States and China sat in the same room at a summit in Spain and both refused to sign a joint declaration on military AI guardrails. Not because of a disagreement on the details, but because they wouldn’t agree to agree. Two of the world’s most powerful nations. Racing toward artificial general intelligence. No framework. No treaty. No governing body.

I want to tell you this is unprecedented. But that’s not quite right. The specific technology is new. The shape of the problem is not.

On June 14, 1946, a 75-year-old financier and statesman named Bernard Baruch walked into the first session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (seen in the image above) and opened with these words:

“We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business. Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation.”

Baruch was presenting the Baruch Plan, the first serious proposal for international control of nuclear weapons. It called for a United Nations authority that would own and operate all nuclear facilities worldwide, conduct inspections, and hold veto-proof power to punish violations. The scientists who had built the bomb, the people who understood better than anyone what they had created, had spent the previous year drafting the framework behind it. They knew the arms race had to be stopped before it started.

The Soviet Union rejected the plan. The arms race happened anyway.

But the proposal mattered. It established that international control was a legitimate idea worth fighting for. It kept the conversation alive through the most dangerous decades of the Cold War. The Partial Test Ban Treaty came in 1963. SALT I in 1972. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty built a framework that 80 countries eventually signed. None of it was inevitable. All of it required people who refused to accept that a nuclear arms race with no guardrails was acceptable.

That the future of humanity was worth it.

THE LESSON

I teased you last week with the story of Zeno, the philosopher who lost everything in a shipwreck and washed up in Athens with nothing. The reason that story matters here is the move he made: he didn’t wait for rescue. He didn’t rebuild what was lost. He walked toward the people doing serious thinking, Socrates and his students, and joined the conversation. Out of it he created Stoicism which reframed the way human beings observe their thinking in the light of what they can control and can’t. In doing so, he fundamentally changed the world .

That’s what Baruch did in 1946.

That’s what this moment is asking of all of us.

The US and China are not going to slow down on their own. Competitive pressure doesn’t stop because it should. The history of every arms race tells us that the only thing that creates the room for a treaty is citizens, scientists, and leaders who demand one, loudly, persistently, and before the moment passes.

Or worse.

There are people building that right now.

• The Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI (https://www.cbpai.org/) named after the 1946 proposal, is developing a comprehensive framework for a US-China led global AI treaty.

• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (https://thebulletin.org/) founded by the people who built the bomb and have been sounding the alarm ever since, has moved the Doomsday Clock and is explicitly calling for AI arms control.

• The Stop Killer Robots coalition (https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/) is pushing for legally binding international agreements on autonomous weapons.

These are not fringe organizations. They are serious people doing serious work who need more serious people behind them.

Unprecedented and existential moments aren’t new.

What’s new is that it’s now our generation’s turn to show up.

THE ONE THING

This week, have the conversation with your kid that the news is already inviting.

“You’ve heard a lot about AI this week. What do you think should actually happen between the US and China, between the companies building this, between the people in charge and the people who aren’t?”

Our kid’s generation are going to inherit whatever framework, or absence of framework, this moment produces. They have more stake in the answer than anyone.

Then check out the links I shared above together. Read what they’re proposing. It’s the most direct line from a concerned citizen to the policy conversation that exists right now.

Baruch was 75 years old when he walked into the United Nations. The scientists who handed him the framework were in their 30s and 40s.

This has never been a problem for one generation to solve alone.

Share back with me how your conversations go and I’ll include highlights in next weeks issue. Thank you!

Next week: In the early 1980s, the Grateful Dead did something every music industry executive told them was suicidal: they set up a dedicated section at their concerts for fans to bring in recording equipment and tape the shows for free. Their own label thought they were insane. What happened instead was one of the most devoted fanbases ever assembled, a touring business that made them one of the highest-grossing acts in America, and a direct-to-fan ticketing operation that cut out the middlemen entirely. They gave away the thing everyone said was the product, and discovered the ultimate product was the community.

See ya then,

Ian

[Image generated by Gemini]

THE STORY

On September 9, 1956, a 21-year-old singer from Memphis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and 60 million people watched. That was 82.6 percent of every television set in America, tuned to the same channel, at the same time. It remains one of the most-watched broadcasts in the history of American television.

Ed Sullivan didn’t want to book him.

Earlier that year, Sullivan had called Elvis Presley “unfit for family viewing.” The complaints had been coming in for months from parent groups, from clergy, from civic organizations who had watched Elvis perform at county fairs and drive-in theaters and concluded that this young man’s pelvic-thrusts were a threat to the moral fabric of the country. A women’s group circulated a petition. A judge in Jacksonville, Florida had an arrest warrant drafted and ready, to be served if Elvis so much as swiveled on stage. One reverend told his congregation that Elvis Presley was “morally insane.” Another offered prayers for his salvation. The PTA formally condemned him.

Sullivan booked him anyway, not because he changed his mind, but because his competitor Steve Allen had put Elvis on television the month before and the ratings had been crushing. Sullivan was a businessman. He paid $50,000 for three appearances.

By the third appearance, on January 6, 1957, CBS had made a decision: the cameras would only show Elvis from the waist up. At the end of that performance, Ed Sullivan walked onstage, put his arm around Elvis, and said to 60 million people: “I want to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy.”

Irony.

In 1993, the U.S. Postal Service held a public vote: young Elvis or old Elvis for the stamp. Americans cast 1.2 million ballots. Young Elvis won in a landslide. Graceland now receives more visitors per year than the White House.

The adults who panicked about Elvis’s hips weren’t wrong that rock and roll would destroy something. It did. They were just panicking about the wrong thing.

Tin Pan Alley, the New York songwriting district that had dominated American popular music for sixty years, was finished within a decade. The professional songwriters who wrote for professional performers, the arrangers, the bandleaders, the entire infrastructure of the swing era: gone, or gutted, or reduced to a fraction of what it had been. Real people. Real careers. Real livelihoods. The disruption was real.

The actual transformation was happening in the business model. Rock and roll didn’t just change music, it changed who wrote it, who owned it, who controlled it, and who got paid. The performers became the songwriters. The teenagers became the tastemakers. The entire power structure of the American music industry inverted, and it happened while the PTA was busy drafting morally outraged petitions.

THE LESSON

The people warning about AI disruption are not wrong that disruption is coming. Some jobs will be displaced. Some industries will contract. Some business models that exist today will not exist in ten years. Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional. Will it happen? Yes. How will it unfold exactly?

No one knows.

Here is what the Elvis story tells us: the contingency that gets most negatively impacted by a disruption is almost never the one that didn’t see it coming. It’s the one that saw it coming and focused on the wrong thing.

The Tin Pan Alley establishment saw rock and roll coming. They fought it directly. What they missed, what the panic obscured, was that the real question wasn’t “will this destroy our music?” It was “who will own the music business that comes next?” The teenagers answered that question.

The AI conversation happening in most households, most schools, and most boardrooms right now is the “pelvic thrust” conversation. Will it take jobs? Will it cheat on essays? Is it dangerous? Will it end humanity. Those questions are not wrong. But they are the wrong frame for a kid who is going to spend the next forty years building a career inside whatever comes out the other side.

The right frame is: who is going to own what’s built next? And is your kid in the room when that’s being figured out, or are they waiting on the sidelines for the adults to finish the debate?

THE ONE THING

One question for your kid this week:

“If AI is going to change your field — and it is — what’s the part of your field that you think it can’t touch?”

This is the business model question. What’s the thing in their chosen direction that requires a human judgment, a human relationship, a human presence that no model can replicate? Soft-skills. Because that’s where they should be building.

The Tin Pan Alley songwriters who survived the rock and roll era weren’t the ones who fought hardest to preserve the old model. They were the ones who figured out what their actual skill was - melody, structure, the architecture of a song, and found a way to bring it into the new world.

Next week: Around 300 BC, a merchant named Zeno lost his entire cargo in a shipwreck and washed up in Athens with nothing. He walked into a bookshop, heard someone reading about Socrates, and followed a stranger into a conversation that changed his life. What the founder of Stoicism can teach us about raising kids who don’t need the plan to go right in order to move forward.

Till then,

Ian

It made them billions

Last week I asked you to sit down with your kid and ask them one question: what part of AI are you genuinely curious about — not worried about, curious about? And then I said: write down what they say. We’ll use it. You did it, thank you!

WHAT YOU HEARD

Honestly, when I said “write down what they say,” I half-expected to get back a lot of “I don’t know” and “It’s fine, Dad.” That is not what happened!

Here is an excerpt of responses I received:

Elle is in high school. Here response was so thoughtful:

“I have three statements: one positive, one negative, one question.

Positive: I’ve seen news of AI being able to write treaties that countries can actually agree on. I’ve seen multiple cases of this being used for Israel and I wonder how AI can be used to end war in Iran rather than escalate it. An AI expert came to my school and his whole job is making AI systems for peacemaking.

Negative: Lots of artists are upset about generative AI and how it devalues real skill. I think this may be true for visual arts but maybe not for the ephemeral performing arts.

Question: How much water does it really use? I’ve heard reports that AI is bad for the environment because it uses up clean drinking water, but when an AI expert came to my school he said this is false, the water evaporates and most of it ends up being reused, so it is a more sustainable closed loop. I wonder what the truth is and it must be somewhere in between.”

What a response! Our kids are amazing. Wisdom beyond their years. Thinking of AI in treaty negotiations, the difference between visual and performing arts, and the environmental footprint of LLMs. I loved her framework and how she organized her thoughts. I don’t hear fear but genuine curiosity and a wait-and-see POV. Drama-free.

Then there’s Jackson, who graduates from college in two months, job offer already in hand. His grandma wrote to tell me he’s “one of the lucky ones.”

I love this grandma for writing that. And I’m going to gently push-back. Jackson said:

“I am most curious how or if they are ever going to be able to make the widespread use of AI environmentally sustainable.”

That is not the question of someone who is lucky. Lucky is finding a $20 bill. Jackson is thinking about infrastructure constraints on a trillion-dollar technology. He’s not asking whether AI will take his job. He’s asking whether AI can survive the world it’s scaling into. He’s planning to be in the room when all that gets figured out.

Now let’s look back in time again for a lesson we can apply today.

THE STORY

In 1982, a man named Jack Valenti stood before a United States Congressional subcommittee and delivered one of the most fantastically wrong predictions in the history of American industry.

Valenti was the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s top lobbyist, its face and voice in Washington, a man who had been Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant and who spoke with the full authority of the studios behind him. He was there to testify about a terrifying new technology that threatened to destroy the American film industry.

His exact words:

“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

The Boston Strangler. That’s what he called the VCR! How dramatic! Almost like, “AI is going to end all work and destroy all entry-level jobs, and…” but I digress…

The studios had sued Sony two years earlier, trying to have the VCR’s unsuccessful predecessor, Betamax declared illegal. Their argument was simple: if people could record movies off television at home, they would never pay to see them again. The theater business would die. The studios would collapse. The most powerful entertainment industry in the world would be strangled by a small Japanese machine that let people watch movies and TV shows on their own schedule.

In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that home recording was legal. Sony won. The VCR was here to stay.

Within five years, the home video market, the thing Jack Valenti tried to warn us about, had become much larger than the theatrical box office. By the time VHS rental peaked in the early 1990s, it was a $12 billion annual industry, built entirely on the back of the technology Hollywood had begged Congress to kill.

Jack Valenti lived until 2007. He never fully acknowledged the irony.

The Boston Strangler had built Hollywood’s second act.

Now we’re in the third act, and COVID and technology have absolutely taken a massive bite out of the movie theatre business but that’s a topic for another newsletter.

THE LESSON

First and foremost, when people think they have a massive vested financial interest in things remaining the way they are, be wary of their prognostications!

But, here’s the part that doesn’t get told alongside the Valenti story: the people who built the home video industry were not the ones who were sitting around waiting for Hollywood’s blessing.

They moved while the studios were still in court.

The video rental store owners. The early distributors who licensed content directly. The entrepreneurs who saw what the technology could do and didn’t wait for the MPAA to endorse it. They built the infrastructure of an entirely new business while the establishment was still debating whether it should exist at all.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled and the studios came around, the market was already up and running. The latecomers, the studios, the established players, had to buy their way into a business the early movers had already built.

The VCR didn’t need Hollywood’s approval to transform Hollywood. It just needed people willing to move before the verdict was in.

Your kid is living in the middle of a similar time right now. The establishment, some of it, is still debating about AI. Still hashing out the terms. Still waiting for consensus on what’s appropriate, what’s allowed, what’s safe. What’s next.

The people leading the common sense conversation about AI are not waiting for the the final verdict.

They’re tinkering, testing and building it.

And, it’s early! It’s so early. Never been a better time to jump in with both feet.

THE ONE THING

One questions to ask your kid this week:

“What are you waiting for permission to try?”

Not what’s holding you back. What specific thing, tool, project, experiment, approach, have you been putting off until it feels more settled, more endorsed, more obviously okay?

Valenti had the full weight of Hollywood behind him and he was still wrong. The people who were right were the ones who moved before it was comfortable.

The window doesn’t stay open forever.

Don’t wait for permission.

Next week: In 1956, Ed Sullivan’s producers told him a 21-year-old singer from Memphis was too dangerous for television. They eventually let him on, but insisted the cameras only show him from the waist up. The performance became the most-watched television moment of its era.

Till then,

-Ian

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Before 1450, Europe had 30,000 books.
By 1500: 20 million.
The Church called it the end of civilization.

Welcome to Do Not Be Discouraged - a weekly newsletter for parents and their kids navigating Generation AI. Each issue: one story from history, one lesson, one thing to do.

I’m Ian Mirmelstein. I’ve spent 25 years navigating the disruptions that were supposed to change everything forever - the dot-com collapse, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, the everything-is-worse news cycle that never stops. What I’ve learned isn’t that technology destroys industries. It’s that the people who keep their head when everyone else is losing theirs tend to land well. I started this newsletter because my sons are graduating into the loudest version of that panic I’ve ever seen - and I wanted to give them, myself and you, something steadier to stand on. Let’s go.

THE STORY

In 1450, if you wanted a book, a monk copied it by hand. The process took months. Books were so scarce that most Europeans never held one. The Catholic Church which controlled nearly all written knowledge at the time wasn’t just the religious authority of the age. It was the information infrastructure of civilization.

Then Gutenberg’s press arrived.

Within fifty years, the number of books in Europe went from 30,000 to over 20 million. Church leaders called it civilization’s greatest threat. They warned it would corrupt knowledge, erode authority, and destroy the moral order. They weren’t being hysterical, they were accurately describing what the technology would do to their world.

What they couldn’t see was what it would build: the Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution. Mass literacy. The modern university. Every institution we now associate with Western progress grew directly from the thing the most powerful institution of the age tried to stop.

The monks who adapted became publishers. The ones who didn’t became footnotes.

THE LESSON

Right now, AI is playing that role and the predictions are loud, credentialed, and genuinely scary. McKinsey. Goldman Sachs. Harvard Business School. They’re not wrong that disruption is coming.

What they can’t see, what no one can see yet, is the equivalent of those 20 million books that didn’t exist yet. The jobs that haven’t yet been named. The industries that will be built on top of the thing that was supposed to end everything. The unknown is always invisible right up until it becomes the story.

Our kids aren’t entering a destroyed economy. They’re entering the part of the story before anyone knows where it’s really going. That’s not a catastrophe. That’s an opportunity if you’re willing to see it, arm yourself with the tools to succeed, and run at it like it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

THE ONE THING

This week, ask your kid one question and actually listen to the answer:

“What part of AI are you genuinely curious about?”

This is not a career planning conversation. Not a pep talk. Just curiosity. You’re looking for the signal underneath the noise. Most kids have one. Most parents never think to ask.

Write down what they say. We’ll use it.

Next week: In 1982, the head of Hollywood told Congress the VCR was “the Boston Strangler.” The industry spent millions trying to ban it. What happened next will not surprise you but the numbers will.

— Ian

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