I am writing this from La Colombe on 4th St and Lafayette in Lower Manhattan. I am drinking a cold brew. Solid as solid gets. 7.5/10 Cold Brew. After being in Europe for 3 weeks it’s a pleasure to be back in a place that believes in 21st century beverage innovations. What I mean by this is that there is no cold brew in Europe. Whether this is some sort of rebellion or just plain old ignorance is un-important to the cold brew admirer.

I’ve hit the point where the older I get the younger I want to be. It kinda feels like a Benjamin Button situation except in reverse. So instead of aging backwards, I’m actually aging forwards. For those that have not seen Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt pretty much ages in reverse. So my analogy makes sense because I’m actually aging forwards.

Why do I bring this up? First off, don’t ask questions. Second off, don’t worry about it. Third off, you wanna take this outside? But if you’re gonna be annoying, then yes I will tell you why I wrote such a profound statement.

When I was sleeping on a couch in Lisbon, Portugal a couple weeks ago in an Airbnb with my absolute dawgs from college, it was almost like going into some sort of time portal where we all reverted back to the college versions of ourselves, in the best and worst ways possible. It was pretty great but unsustainable. I enjoyed getting to pretend I had minimal responsibilities but the whole reason it was fun is because I knew it was gonna end. Similar to how Brad Pitt knows he’s gonna die in Benjamin Button.

There is something about removing yourself from your daily routine to just go and party in Europe at a bar where nobody knows you and nobody cares to know about you. And you don’t even speak the same language in a lot of cases. Unless of course S&M by Rihanna comes on during karaoke. Love is not the universal language, Rihanna is.

Living in NYC for two years has given me the superpower of perspective. When you’re in the most densely populated but also diverse area in the universe, you interact with every single type of human. Rich or poor, busy or unbothered, drunk or sober, goated or not goated, it all hits you square in the mouth like how im gonna hit you square in the mouth if you keep asking questions. So, you can’t help but feel a little insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Which is very freeing and actually something we all need to be reminded of some times.

With this newfound sense of perspective, the Euro Trip becomes a great opportunity to exercise this newfound sense of freedom and perspective. You appreciate the inconveniences because you know a unique experience often comes with uncomfortability, but you can appreciate the value of a unique experience. That was a really roundabout way of saying that yes I wasn’t necessarily thrilled to be sleeping 5 feet from my buddy Jay Dee, who was switching off between coughing and snoring for an entire night’s sleep, but you gotta roll with the punches.

I was in Cannes and Paris for work, and then Lisbon and Ireland for fun with friends as we were going to our buddy Beans’ wedding in Ireland. Naturally I got frosted tips in Cannes. I thought it was funny at the time, and I still think it’s funny, and I have no regrets.

I have a fake job and I had the opportunity to get frosted tips from Pinterest (not sponsored) so to me it was the most obvious yes of my life. Perhaps it has hindered my ability to talk to #chicks but if you can’t have me at my frosted tips you don’t deserve me at my unfrosted tips.

I’m convinced that hangover’s aren’t real in Europe. My 12 buddies and I went out like 14 nights in a row but with a can-do attitude and a bunch of kebabs, we found the inner strength to make it through Lisbon and onto Dublin and then onto Athlone to celebrate our buddy’s wedding.

Before we went to Ireland we partied with a bunch of Norwegians in Lisbon after their squad had won against Brazil. It was awesome. They let me wave their flag. I love Norway now.

The Irish are really funny because they’re super nice and I also can’t understand anything they say. They speak english but I felt like I understood the portuguese better somehow. Do the Irish know that I can’t understand what they are saying so I just nod and say “yeah” and laugh when they laugh?

We went to a bar in Athlone, Ireland the night before the wedding, and we met these two guys that were the Irish version of Ricky and Julian from Trailer Park Boys.

They appeared to work some sort of blue collar job, as they were wearing the reflective vests and had a general vibe of blue collarness that I can only cosplay by purchasing workman pants from Carhartt. They told us that they were gonna go back to work soon, but first they wanted to have some pints and visit the local pub, where one of the guys’ kids was a bartender. Now, that’s pretty cool. What was interesting to me was that the kid was 16. I asked the guys how old you need to be to drink at a bar in this town, and they said “10”. Incredible.

When the gents left the bar, we said goodbye and thanked them for a great convo and helping us understand the Irish culture. At that moment I thought that was a cool moment and I’ll never see those guys again. I was wrong.

About 30 mins later, we were outside of the pub drinking in the street because that’s apparently how life works in Europe. A pretty crappy beat up car pulls up to the corner, and wouldn’t ya know it, it was Ricky & Julian!

We went to dap em up, and we got a glimpse into the backseat of the car, which was full of probably 50 empty beer cans. After some pleasantries, Ricky asked if anyone wanted cocaine. It should also be noted that this whole exchange happened about 15 feet from the front door of the town Police Station.

When we arrived at the climax of the Euro Trip, we all had already began reminiscing on the trip we just had, and I think we all kinda realized we may never be able to do something like this ever again. Let’s face it, a lot of my buddies are getting married, they’re gonna start having kids, and they’ll have a lot of priorities in life that supersede a 2 week rage fest in Europe. You can look at that as a negative, or you can have the perspective to realize that’s what made the trip fun.

Congrats to my buddy Beans and Gaby. Euro Summer is over.

- jack

I am not a New York Knicks fan. I grew up watching the Chicago Bulls and am still a fan of them. The first full Knicks game I watched this season was in the second round of the playoffs. I’ve lived in NYC for less than 2 years. I don’t really succumb to the propaganda that New York City is the only city in the world and it’s the only good place to live. I moved here for work. I just so happen to be here when the Knicks are good. I have no reason to feel any sort of way about a Knicks championship.

But when I hugged that random, sweaty man in the middle of Spring St between Mott and Mulberry, I felt like I had just exercised a lifetime of demons. The scene last night in New York City was shocking. It was a flood of humans all rejoicing over a basketball team. But it could have been anything I guess, as long as enough people cared about it. And plenty of people care a lot about the New York Knicks.

I was merely a spectator to a group of fans that had spent much more time following and rooting for a team I had no emotional connection to. But it didn’t matter. There was no fandom checking inside “Beyond the Pale” last night. And by the end of the night I can assure you I had an emotional connection.

I remember pouring out into the street when the Knicks won. We’re out there high-fiving, and I look to my left, and the bouncer from the bar we were just at is just in the crowd with us. I thought for a moment maybe he should be at the door of the bar, but then I thought well that was kinda a narc-y thing for me to think, so I just kept it rolling.

Then Mac and I ran into the bodega (a bodega is what new yorkers call a store) to try and find some beer. The gentleman at the counter informed us they did not sell beer. Mac and I tried to convince them that they sold beer, to which they did not really have a response. So Mac and I went back out into the streets.

You look around and you notice people in the fire escapes in the apartments overlooking the streets. You forget that those perches even exist. You wonder about the structural stability of said perches. You realize it probably doesn’t matter. Because of course, nothing can go wrong in this moment. I half believed that we all had just found the invincibility stars from Mario Kart.

You see a car coming and the crowd erupts in celebration for this car. It’s like a mini parade. Any sort of movement rings in a reaction from the crowd. Whether it’s a car, a bike, a firetruck, this crowd is going nuts. Some guy rode his bike through with a Knicks flag. It was like a modern day version of Braveheart.

Inside the bar I started a Seven Nation Army “ooohhhh oh oh oh oh ohhhhh ohhhh” chant. Check that off the bucket list. On the walk home I ignited a few “Knicks in 5” chants. I think I even griddy’d at one point. How could I not? You stand in the middle of the street celebrating a championship in NYC and try not to griddy. Try Not to Griddy Challenge Level Impossible.

I just really could not believe how many people were outside. It was really unfathomable how every single person living in New York City seemingly was watching this game and celebrating this moment.

Today, it feels like everyone is collectively hungover. Like one of those hangovers when you’re in high school and you just woke up at your senior year prom house, and you don’t actually have a hangover but you’re not even thinking about it because your boy kissed his crush for the first time ever. Whatever the word is for that feeling is kinda how all of New York feels right now.

- jack

At a bar in Richmond, VA last weekend there was live music and the band played Purple Rain. You talk about bringing a house down. It was insane. The lead singer was ripped, and halfway through the song just took his shirt off. I would do the same thing. Felt bad for the rest of the band members. Like they might as well not be up there. This guy is a solo act at this point and he should be treated as such.

Besides the magnificence of this live performance combined with the adrenaline-pumping feeling of witnessing a well-timed fog machine spewing out some sort of (likely) poisonous gas, I was also thinking about how the song “Purple Rain” came to be.

Prince originally wrote it as a country song and sent Stevie Nicks a 10-minute instrumental, asking her to write the lyrics. She said, "I listened to it and I just got scared. I called him back and said, 'I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.'"

Lol. Too much for you? You’re Stevie Nicks, dawg. You’re the one that dunked on your ex dude on national television via the power of vocal inflection.

Prince made the song Purple Rain as a country song. He also made a 10 minute instrumental for it. He also didn’t make it for himself. Think about that as a start. He went from that to it now being one of the greatest rock ballads ever, and probably the most defining work of his career. And also the primary reason for the most iconic Super Bowl Halftime Show ever.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that when someone asks where you want to be in 5 years you should tell them that’s the dumbest question of all time. In other words, how can I be expected to know the future when Prince didn’t even know what genre of music he would inevitably be making. In other other words, if you’ve got a good feeling about something you don’t need to have the end result figured out and you certainly don’t have to seek approval from others about “what your goal is”. Prince’s initial goal was to make a country song for Stevie Nicks.

I got to be speak at a graduation for Masters students of VCU Brandcenter a few days ago. I guess seeing all these students that got started on a journey that they knew would be difficult and weren’t 100% sure it was even for them was another reminder of the points i’m trying to make here.

I have this sinking feeling that a lot of people end up in situations or careers or projects because the end of it is quite clear. It’s why the “corporate ladder” exists despite it having about 0.0000005% positive sentiment. At the end of the day people would rather have a sure thing than the right thing because the right thing might not be as obvious as you think.

What even is the “right thing” though? Well first off, stop asking me hard questions. And second, that’s completely up to you. Regardless of your situation I think everyone has the ability to make their situation right for them if they have the right mindset.

But really, the right thing for you is likely on the other side of a difficult or unconventional decision. Because the conventional decision might be “right” for a lot of people, but logically speaking, if it’s “conventional” it likely has a low ceiling in terms of fulfillment for you.

If my guy Prince (I also think Prince and I would have been boys by the way. Like I know at first he’d size me up and think we wouldn’t be boys but if he chilled with me. this theory also stands for Timothee Chalamet) stuck with the “conventional” decision he wouldn’t have made a 10 minute instrumental and he also wouldn’t have totally switched the genre of his song after already making it.

I almost think the unconventional decisions and paths are the ones that define you. Like, what are you willing to do differently from others? That’s what makes you you and not someone who fits a certain mold. And shocker of the day, but those unconventional decisions are hard to do.

If it were easy it would be conventional. Going into a masters program is hard, writing a 10 minute song is hard. Do more of those things. Because if it’s hard maybe you won’t like it but it’ll actually become a part of your identity unlike the 99% of things everyone does.

You put yourself at so much of an advantage when you do things differently. It really applies to any project or job or whatever. Like, even if you work a boring corporate job, you can approach the work in a way that’s not the status quo, and at least people will pay attention and be curious about what you’re doing.

Those in the corporate game call this “innovation” and they spend billions of dollars a year pretending like they are investing in “innovation” when they are actually investing in “automating the things we already do so that the automation can do things the exact same way so nothing actually changes”.

Now go on and be different and if questions your decisions and asks you what your goal is for whatever you’re doing just say you’re doing the Purple Rain thing and that they wouldn’t get it and if they have any issues with that they can take it up with The 2007 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

- jack

In walking from the West Village to my apartment in the Bowery, I heard 3 different languages, 7 different instruments, 2 arguments in Washington Square Park, and 1 makeout sesh outside of the NYU dorms. Someone screamed at me asking if I had been saved by Christ. A couple of friends argued whether or not one of them should text a girl back now or wait a few hours.

I’ve been spending more time without headphones in my ears while I’m walking around. I think this is directly correlated to warmer weather and more people being outside, hence more to listen to. I think my brave stance against headphones is a small function of a larger yearning for slowing down and chilling out and just feeling more like a human and less like the dudes in Wall-E.

There’s a weird phenomenon I have experienced in my own life where I don’t remember the last time I was truly bored. I remember being way more bored as a kid. I can distinctly remember texting back my crushes in middle school or on skype chats just saying I was bored.

They would be like “whats upppppppp” and i would be like “nm just chillin, pretty bored lolllllll hbu”. Inside I was of course freaking out, because you’re telling me this girl just hit me with 8 P’s on that “Up”?

Nowadays, we rarely find time for boredom. We all have infinite ways to keep ourselves entertained and be anywhere but with ourselves in that moment. I like that mantra where it’s like: “If you are eating, then be eating. If you are walking, then be there walking.” It’s kinda a little bit too Rick Rubin for me but the overall message is kinda a nice reminder to be mentally present in what you are physically doing. Connecting mind and body, ya hearrrrrrd?

I imagine this substack is probably not the most relatable for parents. I get it, you have kids and they are now your lives. Now shut it so I can keep this blog going.

A part from the entertainment/distraction side that is speeding us up, there’s a weird thing with the “hustle culture” of NYC where every time you ask someone how things are going they HAVE TO SAY THEY’RE BUSY. It’s this roundabout badge of honor to say that things are going really well. I don’t know if this is just what happens as you get older but I feel like in the last two years the default response to “how’s it going” has become “super busy” and not “really good!”

Because to me, it’s obviously objectively a good thing to be busy if you’re building something or working on something you love or whatever, but why do you have to signal it so hard to everyone and why do you feel like that’s your identity? Nerd!

I hate that people feel the need to justify their lives and careers and passions to themselves and others. Whether it’s all a front or not probably varies from person to person, but the societal norm we’ve created where wearing your hustle as a badge of honor has a really gross after taste to me.

And the next thing I’ll say is a take I’ve been stewing on for a minute. This one has been in the lab for a while, and I’m gonna get it out there now.

Justification for the actions that make you who you are is a poisonous venom that we all need to move on from.

We spend more time justifying our actions to others than actioning our actions. And then people ask you to justify your actions to them in order to justify their own decisions and lifestyles. And we call that a doom spiral in the biz. We gotta limit our doom spirals.

More often than not, one of the first questions people ask me about Breaking and Entering is “how do you make money?” Rarely do people ask, “what do you like about it?” or “what’s your favorite part?” They ask me to justify its existence rather than talk about the actual thing. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s actually laugh out loud funny that my explanation of Breaking and Entering almost always prompts an immediate questioning of how it could possibly exist as a real functioning business. I actually think I need to just start explaining this fairy land company better.

So between working, the mental judo in justifying how you spend your time, and the never-ending cycle of entertainment available at our fingertips, where in there do you find time to actually slow down and chill out and daydream for like 10 minutes.

It starts with taking the headphones out when you’re walking around. I almost feel like I need to prove to myself that I can sit with being bored. Like I can entertain myself. I can slow down. Shut up. Yes I can. Idiot. I’m not an idiot. You’re an idiot.

See! Like that! A totally normal inner dialogue with myself.

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast!

- jack

I am writing this from Stumptown Coffee Roasters at 30 W 8th St in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. I am drinking a cold brew, and I have the best seat in the coffee shop. I have a direct look into the laptop screen of the person in front of me. She’s texting her friends while flipping back and forth between a research paper she’s working on. 9.2/10 cold brew (it’s actually really good).

Stumptown Coffee Roasters is credited with pioneering the modern “cold brew” movement. Making a Stumptown cold brew is a shockingly painstaking and arduous process. After doing some research I learned:

• They steep their grounds for a full 16 hours at room temperature and then double-filter the result.

• Stumptown treats their coffee like raw milk or craft beer. It is kept under constant refrigeration and pressurized with nitrogen from the moment it’s brewed until it hits your cup. This requires a specialized, expensive supply chain and heavy kegerator equipment in every shop.

• While most shops use older, lower-grade beans for cold brew (assuming the cold process hides flaws), Stumptown uses their premium, single-origin Arabica.

All of this extra work, time, and effort creates a product that might be, what, marginally better than the cold brew from the chain across the street? Why go through all of that?

Because what makes it hard is what makes it good. Stumptown’s competitive advantage is that they are willing to outwork their competition. Coffee is such a commodity. It’s very simple. It’s very hard to differentiate coffees the same way you can differentiate cupcakes. So how do you give yourself an advantage? You do the hard things over and over again because nobody else is willing to.

The result is better coffee but also some bravado. A little bit of extra confidence and swagger. Because if you keep doing the hard thing over and over, the divide between you and your competitors keeps increasing.

“Drinking coffee is a pleasure. Coffee drinking is fun, and it feels good, and underlying all our hard work is pride in cultivating pleasure.”

—Jim Kelso,
Director of Quality Assurance

By nature, we all look for an easy way out. How can we accomplish a given task in the quickest and easiest way possible? We recall how we did this task in the past, we replicate our process, and we get a similar result to what we are accustomed to and worked for us in the past.

But what if we started embracing difficulties in our work? What if we gravitated towards the unknown? What would happen if we made our process as difficult as possible? Well, one award winning movie director has embraced this mindset throughout his career.

David Fincher is the director behind movies like Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and Fight Club. Fincher is infamous for requiring actors to do up to 100+ takes for a single scene. There is an example of this where Jake Gyllenhaal had to open up a door 125 times for a scene in Zodiac. Can you imagine how mentally draining that must be?

David Fincher wants his actors to stop acting and start “being”. It’s not easy, but what makes it hard is what makes it good. And one could argue that the reason David Fincher has been so successful is because he’s willing to push his actors and do things difficult where other directors might settle for Take 57 because they just want to move on.

Every time David does the harder thing, he widens the gap between him and his competition. Reminds me of Kobe Bryant.

"People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong." - David Fincher

Kobe’s most famous “hard” choice was starting his day at 4:00 AM. Most NBA players practiced twice a day (starting around 10:00 AM and again in the afternoon). By starting at 4:00 AM, Kobe could fit in four full workouts a day while his peers did two.

Kobe famously explained that if you do two more hours of work than everyone else every single day, after five or six years, the gap is so large that it doesn’t matter how hard the other players work in the summer, they can never catch up. What makes it hard is what made Kobe good.

"I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you." - Kobe Bryant

What I think is an important distinction is that these people aren’t doing something hard just for the sake of doing something hard. They’re doing something they know will make them/their output better. And often times, the things that make something better than the competition is the thing that requires more effort. It’s kinda simple math. If less people are willing to do the hard thing, the more valuable the output of the hard thing is, because it’s unique and simply put, better.

Not to go Rick Rubin mode, but if you have a great idea, it’s pretty much your responsibility to do what it takes to bring that idea to life in the most true and authentic way possible. Like you owe it to us. With great power comes great responsibility type beat.

Rick Rubin worked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers for their album Stadium Arcadium. He made them write 38 completed songs. For most artists, 10 good songs is its own beast. Rubin believed that "perfectionism is a cap on the upside." By forcing the artists to produce a massive volume of work, he makes them stop being precious with every note. It’s a very difficult thing to write 38 completed songs just to not use like half of them. But this difficult process is what made the album good.

"Shortcuts avoid the discomfort of challenging our prevailing beliefs, so our worldview continues to shrink." - Rick Rubin

I think it’s a fun exercise to stop yourself the next time you start a task and want to do the comfortable and easy thing. Ask yourself, “what would make this harder?” because often times, that’s the exact thing that will make it better.

Sorry this wasn’t that funny. Deal with it.

- jack

I also want to be perfectly clear that I am not perfect and this blog is primarily just me speaking to myself. So don’t read this and think I have everything figured out.

In 1968, a band called “The New Yardbirds” was touring in Scandinavia to fulfill a commitment made by previous band members that had left the band. The remaining members filled the gaps with new guys, and they knew they were just together to hit some small clubs across Scandinavia, then move on with their lives.

The new group was playing with nothing to lose. They were care-free, enjoying the ride, playing to groups of confused teenagers in random clubs that didn’t know who this crew was. They had paid to see the old band, not this new crew of randoms.

The New Yardbirds realized the more fun they had, the more loose they played, the more the crowd was stomping their feet and going ballistic in response to the musical fusion on stage.

When The New Yardbirds got done with this mini tour, they re-grouped and figured they ought to start a real band. They named themselves Led Zeppelin.

Steve Wozniak describes the period of designing the Apple II as a creative flow state. He was trying to "show off" to his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club. Like Led Zeppelin playing in basements, Woz was just having the time of his life building something to show his buddies.

There’s a certain shine that comes from us humans when we’re truly “playing loose”. Like an NBA player with the hot hand, or a musician who’s in the middle of the Free Bird solo in a frat basement, or a Creative Director in the middle of a rousing pitch to a client. They all feel the same to us as humans.

The idea of “playing loose” isn’t only reserved for superstars or actors or pop singers. It’s for all of us. It applies to our professional careers, it applies to our everyday lives.

In an era where professional and personal lives are more and more intertwined, “playing loose” is a critical state of being to keep you from losing your mind.

The issue is that playing loose means you gotta get other people’s perceptions of you out of your list of priorities. We all worry too much. I worry too much. You worry too much. We care about what people think of us. We want the approval of everyone. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Pop Mega Star, Olivia Dean, has a nice POV on the idea of letting other people’s opinions get in the way of you playing loose and being yourself:

Thanks, Olivia. Consider myself released. Also wait a second:

DO YOU THINK FETTY WAP CARES ABOUT YOUR OPINION ON HIM HAVING LITERALLY ONE EYE. THIS GUY WENT TO PRISON, CAME BACK, STILL HAS ONE EYE. STILL DOESN’T CARE. BUT YOU CARE THAT SOMEONE MIGHT TYPE MEAN THINGS ABOUT YOU?!?!!

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." — Heraclitus

You think I have the faintest idea who “Heraclitus” is? No clue. But I do know that when you’re one of those ancient people that only has one name, you’re a pretty big deal. Also the idea of this prehistoric dude being able to form a complete sentence is pretty impressive. This guy was definitely the smartest dude in the world, as evidenced by him spelling “seriousness” correctly.

But what Hercucletus is saying makes sense. All the people you are motivated and inspired by got to where they are by having an insane amount of fun. All of them would agree that their favorite time was when they were doing their thing without the pressures that come with success.

Before Nirvana was mega famous, Dave Grohl recalls that the band was at its happiest during the Reading Festival in 1991, just days before their hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was even released.

They were rising stars in the underground, playing with immense energy, and hadn't yet been burdened by intense media scrutiny. To them, they were just three guys in a van who finally had enough money for gas and cheap food. And it was a blast for them.

Stefani Germanotta was a "go-go girl" and club performer in New York’s Lower East Side. She was doing “heavy metal burlesque” shows on no budget at dive bars across the neighborhood. Stefani described this as her most creatively inspired period and where she built up the courage to truly play loose. She was performing for 20 people at most on a given night. She would use this period to catapult herself to global superstardom under the stage name Lady GaGa.

I can go on and on and on and on. You get it now.

Based on all these anecdotes, you don’t get the luxury of playing loose because you’ve “made it”. You “make it” by playing loose long enough.

It’s somewhat parallel to the themes of the book “The Alchemist”. That book is all about following your destiny, and how things will just work themselves out. 2 A+ quotes inbound:

"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure"

In 2026, take the pressure off yourself. Play loose. Time’s running out.

- jack

Last night the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers in the NFL playoffs. If you don’t know football, I’ll just say that this was the equivalent of the witch dying in The Wizard of Oz. Ding dong, the witch is dead type beat.

The Bears hadn’t beaten the Packers in the playoffs since December 14, 1941. One week after Pearl Harbor. During the game in the week prior, on the day of the attack, one player famously asked “where the f*** is Pearl Harbor” on a live broadcast when they learned about the bombing.

Less than 24 hours after the attack, 43,000 fans lined up to try and get tickets to watch the Bears play the Packers in the following week. It meant something. People cared a lot. About a seemingly trivial game. It’s just a game.

Last night, lifelong Chicago Bears fans were moved to tears of joy because the football team they root for beat their rival team in the first round of the NFL playoffs. An emotion most midwestern men reserve for (some) funerals and their daughters’ weddings was expressed because a bunch of guys they’ve never met before won a football game.

It meant something. People cared a lot. About a seemingly trivial game. It’s just a game.

People are quick to analyze these kinds of emotional expressions and dig to the core of why someone might care so much about something so irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Can you imagine someone saying they gotta go grab tickets for the bears packers game on December 8, 1941?

Why do you care? The Japanese are actively bombing our country and you’re going to stand in line in the freezing cold for nosebleed seats to a football game?

YES.

To care about something is to put your peace on the line. You put your chips in the center when you make that agreement with yourself that you’re going to take the time to emotionally invest in an uncertain result. It’s an especially hefty wager as a Bears fan. Trust me.

It’s a really beautiful thing. It’s an escape. And nothing brings the people together like a Bears playoff run. At the end of the day humans yearn for connection and community. It can literally save lives. Wait what?

Chicago homicides fell to their lowest level in 60 years in 2025. I’m not saying this is correlated to the fact that the Chicago Bears have gotten people to commit less crimes via getting them to focus their attention on the team, but I just think that’s interesting. And this wouldn’t be the first time a team/player lowered crime rates.

In 2011, an East Baltimore high school basketball player named Aquille Carr was dubbed “The Crime Stopper” because street criminals would come to his high school basketball games, versus spending their time committing crimes. This was all detailed in an incredible GQ profile on Aquille. The community rallied around him. They had nothing else. They had no reason to come together. Until a basketball player came along that was too good to ignore and too easy to root for.

First off, how badass is it to be called The Crime Stopper in legit one of the most crime-ridden cities in the US. If they called me “The Crime Stopper” in high school it would be stopping tax fraud or something, not literal shootings. This dude is legit saving lives.

Rooting for a team and caring is the exact release a society need sometimes. It’s such a vital part of humanity. When the Cold War was at a fever pitch (nailed it), the 1980 US Hockey team provided the escape from so many negative things happening in the world and for Americans. I’m sure people were like:

How could you possibly care about a hockey game at a time like this???

But then again, how could you not??? Look at this!

It’s cool to care.

Sports are beautiful, and they provide the clearest look into the human psyche.

Like I said, if you want to know about what matters, look no further than what can get a grown midwestern man to actually express an emotion.

- jack

I can still smell the pinecones and unique odor of sweat mixed with UV blue mixed with a White Grape Swisher Sweet mixed with the smell of cotton candy from somebody’s tricked out Vape that was literally bigger than a modern day JBL speaker.

When we arrived at the scene, the party was just starting to pick up. After picking up a 24 pack of Busch Light from our “plug” Big Mike for $53, we made our way to Grace’s(?) family home. Grace’s parents were out of town, and word spread quickly after her failed attempts of “keeping it to only like 10 or 20 people”.

It was June 22nd, 2016. And there were 150 high schoolers in someone’s house.

“Who’s on aux? Play One Dance!”

“Yoooo!!!!”

One Dance starts playing, someone starts twerking, I am literally just starting to go through puberty, I look away. I recommend we go play Beer Pong. I learned how to play that at the Homecoming after party in 2015.

The night keeps moving forward. It’s the best party you’ve ever been to. You drink 2.5 beers. You pretend like you’re really drunk. Your buddy that drove wants to go get food. You leave because you have no other choice.

You go to sleep. You wake up. It’s 2026.

2016 was a movie. What can I say? Summer 2016, you kidding me? Kanye was still kinda mentally stable I think! I think the worst thing he did up to this point was the Taylor Swift thing. Imagine that. Imagine a world where THAT is Kanye’s worst move.

10 years is a long time. It goes by quick but I was legitimately prepubescent 10 years ago. So yeah I’ve changed a lot. Overall though, I don’t really want to go back to 2016. For two main reasons:

1. Snapchat Public Friends: you could see who was snapping with who the most. This caused much anxiety for me. What do you mean, Sofia is snapchatting Derek more than me? I’m taking her to prom! Derek’s the back up QB! He’s not even first string??

2. Dumb Haircut: I had a dumb haircut.

After you read that list, wouldn’t you also agree and maybe ground yourself a little bit in the fact that 2016 wasn’t as great as we remember it?

My favorite thing about 2016 was that wearing a basketball jersey to a party was a symbol of taste, culture, and garnered the utmost respect from other party goers.

Can you imagine if you walked into your buddy and his fiance’s engagement party repping a Vince Carter Raptors jersey? People literally would do that but for your buddy’s grad party, which is the engagement party of teenage years.

I remember I was gifted a box of hand me down (hammy down?) (??) jerseys from my cousins. I remember looking at all the jerseys and being like yeah I legit don’t need to buy clothes ever again. I looked down and saw my Sperry Boat Shoes. I looked to my left and saw my Nike Calf Socks. I had my uniform ready from now until the end of time.

Now that I’m talking about it, there’s a nonzero chance I wear a basketball jersey to the next engagement party I go to. I’m also listening to 2016 hits right now on Spotify and “Sorry” by the Biebz came on. What an absolute powerhouse of electricity that song is.

You could have been born at any point in human history and you were lucky enough to be born the same year as the release of Coloring Book by Chance the Rapper. I still remember “dating” a girl that summer (we would go to McDonald’s every few days together and snapchat each other nonstop until we just kinda stopped one day) and just bumping “Summer Friends” like I was artsy or something.

By the way, that song is about losing your friends to gang violence in the South Side of Chicago. I was like “wow this is so true” as I drove through Lombard, IL going 45 in a 35 to impress my quasi-girlfriend and freaking out that a cop was posted up in the St. Pius parking lot on Meyers Rd.

In 2016, being “performative” wasn’t a thing. Now I go and read “Pride and Prejudice” at Elizabeth Street Garden out loud and it’s a bad thing.

In 2016, that was just being the literal man.

Idk where I’ll be in 2036. But I tell ya what, the blog about looking back 20 years ago on 2016 is going to hit like Blue Cotton Candy Vapor Clouds from a Box Mod Vape Device.

- jack

When I found out I would officially be a Balloon Holder in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I had to commit like 4 months in advance. This alone was a huge ask. There is nothing I love more than bailing on plans. Almost as much as I love committing to something knowing that I will eventually bail.

Not this time! I actually followed through on my commitment. That’s growth. That’s a lesson learned. And boy am I glad I stuck with this.

Being a balloon handler means you’re putting your body on the line to walk 2.5 miles with a group of 55 other people with one common goal. We’re getting this balloon across the finish line. One common focus, one goal, one team, one dream.

“STAY TOGETHER. DONT PANIC. SHOULDER TO SHOULDER!” This is what Captain Geoff was preaching to us as we got ready to take flight and begin the parade. I was assigned to back foot duty for the beginning of the parade.

Because of Luffy’s shape and configuration, his back foot was susceptible to dipping low and potentially hitting the balloon handlers. With that, I was assigned the duty of protecting the other balloon handlers from an inadvertent blow to the head, which could potentially concuss someone, and even worse, throw off the delicate rhythm of Team Luffy’s march down the parade route.

When you have an entire battalion in the same exact uniform, it really does snap you into a teamwork mode. Like, we’re all here together. We’re owning the means of production, in a sense………..

Anyways, one of the first lessons we learned, besides not to panic, was to run through any wind tunnels. When it gets especially windy and turbulent, that’s when we speed up. It’s an incredible lesson for life. The only way is through. When the goin gets tough, the tough sprint down 6th Avenue in 25 mph wind gusts.

Also, I realized that the crowd there is pretty much rooting for the balloon to go out of control and get ripped apart. Who could forget “The Barney Incident” of ‘97.

Every big shift of Luffy had the crowd picking up steam and cheering for its demise. It felt like I was in Cameron Indoor Stadium in front of a raucous crowd.

Stay calm. Don’t panic. Run through. Block out the noise. Return to your training.

In moments of panic, I wanted the balloon handlers to know I wasn’t going to let Luffy’s back foot hit them. I was reminding the team that I had it locked down. “It’s not even there. You aren’t getting touched, Gertrude. Not on my watch,” I said to Gertrude.

Halfway through the parade, one of the balloon handlers in the rear had gotten tired, and it was my time to shine. I tapped myself in to objectively the most difficult balloon handler position. Position 18B. If you know anything about balloon handling, you know 18B is an absolute ShitStorm. You have the rear foot, with minimal support from other handlers. That foot is shaking around, and you have to essentially anchor the rear of the balloon.

Being tapped into this position as a Rookie Balloon Handler is pretty much unheard of. It’s like bringing in a rookie closer for game 7 of the World Series. And I was Wild Thing.

The way we hold the balloon is with a “bone”. It looks kinda like two boomerangs taped together. But the whole point is that you either tighten the slack line, or loosen it, depending on how the wind is blowing.

In my position, I was pretty much reeling in Jaws the way I had to frickin’ keep giving slack or reeling in slack. A rhythmic dance. A salsa. Loosen, tighten, tighten, loosen, walk with it, pull it back. Reel it in, let it ride. Ride the storm.

Again, this is the hardest position on the balloon. But with Captain Geoff in my corner, and the trust of my partner Ben, I knew we could get this done.

It just goes to show, you are capable of more than you could ever realize. When I woke up, I certainly couldn’t imagine I would be closing out the parade in Position 18B. But look at me now. And of course I have to thank the fans and the 80,000,000 kids that were 6-7’ing at me.

And for the record, what a frickin loser move to tap out of position 18B? I legit couldn’t imagine giving up that position. If this float goes down, I want it to be on me. Like when the clock’s winding down I want the ball in my hands. To use another analogy, I’m going down with the ship. I guess I can respect the idea of not trying to be a hero if you can’t handle 18B. And it gave me the chance to secure my position in the hall of fame of balloon handlers.

As we turned for the home stretch, Captain Geoff told us there was potential that we never even had the parade. He said the wind gusts were going to potentially be too much. He didn’t tell us this until the very end, as we could see the finish line. He said how proud of us he was. He said he couldn’t imagine a smoother ride. As we all nodded in unison, we realized what we had just done.

As we wrapped up, put our costumes back into the laundry, and returned to our civilian clothes, we knew we had just done something special. Of course, the Luffy costumes came off, but we all hold a piece of that day with us. We return to our normal lives in our normal jobs in our normal clothes. Life moves on.

But for one brisk Thanksgiving morning, we were soldiers. We were a team. We were legends. We were heroes. We were balloon holders.

- jack

This is what I saw last night, by myself, at Webster Hall in NYC.

Zulan is a DJ. She has, I think, 3 songs of her own that she’s produced. Her whole set, like many DJs, is remixing and transitioning other songs. She consistently sells out venues across the world, including last night at Webster Hall.

The EDM, house music, DJ scene has always been unfamiliar territory for me. The extent of my knowledge ranged from my high school buddy who was DJ’ing (shoutout Meridian) to the college dudes that would play Soundcloud remixes at The Red Lion at the University of Illinois.

The DJ/Producer world takes a lot of heat and is more scrutinized than any other genre in my opinion. For example, Zulan, takes massive criticism in her comment sections on Tiktok. They yell “DJ Press Play” from the depths of her Tiktoks, insinuating she doesn’t have any real talent, she just hits “play” on remixes and songs people already know. By the way, Zulan has like 300k followers. It’s a big reason for her success. Videos from her sets do crazy numbers.

To be completely honest, I feel like I was more on the side of the “DJs aren’t really doing anything during their live sets, why would I want to go see that.” I wouldn’t say I was going as far as convicting these artists of being talentless, I just figured if I wanted to go to a concert it should be for a live music, instrumental kinda gig.

A side note: I have been hearing more and more advice from people on embracing the unknown. Other people would call this “being curious”. But saying “be curious” is pretty much meaningless. A much more realistic application is to go towards the stuff that isn’t recognizable to you. Because it will 100% lead to you learning something about yourself or the world.

With all of this pre-existing data, I decided to embrace the unknown and go to a real life, big time DJ gig for the first time in my life. Alone.

Within 10 seconds of me stepping into line, a kid was already getting kicked out of the show. I don’t know what he did, but seeing a tall skinny kid with a dumb haircut

get kicked out while also being aggressive with the bouncers is such a satisfying experience. It’s borderline impressive to get kicked out of a show before the main performer gets on stage. So, congratulations to that kid. And sorry you didn’t get to see Zulan.

About 7 seconds after that exchange, some kid tried to get into the venue with a backpack full of stuff in it. I legit couldn’t believe this kid thought there was a world where the bouncers were just gonna be chill with him bring in an entire backpack filled with unknown substances. He literally looked like backpack kid from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. It was an insanely large backpack. Like I think if it were TSA he would have had to check the bag.

Needless to say, he did not make it into the concert.

Now that I had made it inside the concert, it was time to grab a beer and enjoy the show.

I made my way into the venue to see the set up. It was literally the DJ and then a bunch of people around the booth strategically placed. This also included individuals directly next to Zulan.

This was my first witness of the Tiktok-ification of DJ sets. It was seemingly set up for clip farming. Like they had set this up with the idea of posting social clips of the DJ set onto Tiktok. It gave the feeling of a house party. It was awful for anyone not in the hype crew next to her, because she was not elevated enough to see her at all. The elevation was reserved for the people back there to fill the space of the wide shot for the Tiktok clips.

And there I was. I stood in the back to give myself some breathing room. And I just got to observe. The audience for DJ sets is always a bit younger than the John Mayer concert audience I have been predisposed to. With that said, the crowd was rowdy but not disrespectful. Perhaps a function of the 18+ ordinance in place for the venue? Maybe.

I was happy that I didn’t have to get in there and keep the crowd in check. For some reason it felt like that would have been my duty as a solo attendee. Gotta keep everyone in line. Like a crossing guard in middle school. Which was something that I was. I remember they used to put me at the “Hot Corner” of Elizabeth and Maple because they knew I was the best at being cross guard. Nobody got hit by a car during my watch. They call that a perfect game in the biz.

My biggest skepticism heading into the concert was that it would not be worth the price of admission to listen to someone DJ. Let me make this very clear: nobody in this crowd was paying to listen to songs, they were paying for the energy, the vibe, and the party that was being curated by Zulan.

That was the biggest realization for me. I realized last night that the people yearn so desperately for shared experience, and they NEED an outlet for it. Zulan, although she’s playing other people’s remixes, provides the space and outlet for people to have a shared experience like this.

Say what you want about DJs or whatever, but you cannot deny that the energy of the room and the pure happiness and excitement from these audiences is top tier. It’s just a fact. You’re going to this DJ concert set thing to party and have fun and dance. The DJ is just the maestro of sorts.

If anyone could do it, everyone WOULD do it. But since that’s not the case, I have a hard time defending anyone who would say that DJs are like stupid or dumb or talentless. Clearly there is some talent there, right? Like would people pay hundreds of dollars for me to queue up spotify songs? I don’t really think so.

Now speaking on my solo experience, I absolutely knocked it out of the park from start to finish. I got some great footage of the concert, got to move to different vantage points to get a different view whenever I felt like it, and I interacted with zero people. And I had one Kona Big Wave. And I didn’t need to use the bathroom during the concert.

Nobody bothered me, nobody made fun of me (to my face, that I know of), and I got to see something I haven’t seen before.

Embrace the unknown.

- jack

I need to start this off by saying there is no broadway musical or live performance that can give you the entertainment that comes from a random middle aged man freaking out on a gate agent at an airport. I witnessed this for the first time in my life. I, like all of you, had seen the freakouts on social media, but getting a front row seat was simply incredible.

To set the scene, my flight got delayed, then we got deplaned, and there was a limbo period for about an hour where we didn’t know whether the flight would cancelled or not. This was the same fate for like 5 other flights. It was chaos and people were freaking out about trying to get other flights blah blah blah.

Okay let’s jump into what happened:

It was like 3 notches below what watching a boxing match or UFC fight must feel like. In one corner, you have “Doug”, the 42 year old, 310 pound man trying to get home for Halloween so he can go trick or treating with this kids. Doug is the representative for the entire Angry Mob of hopeful travelers. In the other corner, you have “Luciana” the 58 year old United Airlines gate agent. Luciana has been in 84 of these interactions in her career.

Doug can’t figure out “the app” that Luciana keeps redirecting him to. Luciana is backed up by an even older colleague. Let’s call him “Mikey Airplanes”. Mikey Airplanes is acting as Luciana’s security detail, reminding the angry mob that it’s actually Luciana’s break time, so she needs to leave.

”aye, listen, youz guyz need to back up. luciana’s break is comin’ up and she’s gawta go”

You can imagine the angry mob was not necessarily pleased with that answer. Doug, although irrational, is still in good graces with the angry mob. The angry mob may not necessarily agree with Doug’s approach, but his firecracker attitude is at least eliciting a response from Luciana. What this mob doesn’t know is that while they’re focusing their energy on a dead-end cause, other travelers from earlier cancelled flights are booking flights for tomorrow morning, and the angry mob will not be able to book another flight for at least another day as a result.

The Angry Mob, for all intents and purposes, was asleep at a wheel. Their fury and rage was blinding them.

You must be asking yourself, “Jack what were you doing during all of this”. I was documenting the occasion. Similar to how a photographer takes photos during World War II, I was documenting my own “Okinawa”. Except this battle wasn’t over the pacific ocean, it was at Gate 47 at Laguardia Airport.

In a stunning, theatrical, desperate attempt at a resolution, Doug dropped his phone on the desk of Luciana’s Gate Agent desk and said “YOU FIGURE IT OUT!” Doug’s display was a symbolic moment of detachment. He said, “it’s not my problem, it’s your problem I can’t get the app to work, and you’re gonna fix it”.

Doug then began to walk away, yet another act of defiance. After a couple of steps, Doug realized if he walks away he probably wouldn’t get to his end result of getting the app to work on his phone since he had left it with Luciana. Although powerful in the moment, this act of defiance was not as practical as he may have initially thought.

The commotion at the gate agent desk came to a screeching halt as a voice came over the PA system. The fate of United Flight 1867 (which included me and Geno) was about to be revealed. Would we get back on the plane and head to Chicago, or would our flight be cancelled, sending this group of travelers in to a potentially uncontrollable frenzy.

I couldn’t help but notice the striking coincidence that our flight # was also the year of the Alaska Purchase. When the US bought Alaska, it felt like a misappropriation of assets. What would we possibly need Alaska for? The viewpoint on Alaska was pretty negative. Alaska didn’t deserve that treatment? What did Alaska do to you? I couldn’t help but feel like this gate agent, Lucinda, was given the same treatment as people gave Alaska. Nobody wants to be the Alaska. Don’t ever let anyone treat you like Alaska.

With our fate hanging in the balance, silence moved across the room. You could hear a pin drop. What we would hear next would determine if we would make it to our destination for Halloween. These people were going to see family, meet up with friends, visit loved ones, go on first dates and maybe even fall in love. All the possibilities in the world were on the other end of this PA announcement.

OR, you could be looking directly at the scariest Halloween of your life and a date with destiny. Or should I say a date with the bench in Terminal A that you’ll be sleeping at waiting for your new flight. I think I saw someone do the sign of the cross and mouth “please God help us”.

The voice of God announced the inevitable reality that the Angry Mob was not ready to believe was real, even though deep down we all saw it coming:

Our flight was cancelled, and there was no other flights available tonight.

“you have to be f***ing kidding me”, whispered Doug.

In this moment, the Angry Mob realized their efforts would not yield any progress. They were helpless, and the energy and spunk that just consumed the room had been deflated. The fight was over. Alaska had won. The anger they felt could not fall on any subject. The almighty hand of God had struck down.

Secondhand accounts reported seeing groups of people still stranded at the airport the next morning. Although the bomb had been dropped, the community would feel the effects of this moment for days and maybe weeks. Similar to the Chernobyl incident, this moment would effect generations of bloodlines.

I will never forget what will now be remembered as “The Halloween Nightmare” at Laguardia.

- jack

I just got back from Whole Foods, where I picked up some groceries as well as a dozen blueberry mini muffins. To make me feel better about inevitably eating all 12 in one sitting, I’ve placed them in the kitchen. That way, I have to get up and go grab one and eat it. It feels way less disgusting/grotesque to eat them that way then to keep the dozen next to me at my desk. Life is all about perspective, which is a human truth that has manifested itself very clearly in my newest phase of life. The Wedding Phase

Everyone take a second to text me separately to congratulate me on that opening paragraph transition. Edgar Allan Poe, eat my shorts.

The Wedding Phase is simply the phase of life that begins when your first close friend gets married and you attend that wedding. The important note is that you must have at least 3 other “Save the Dates” in your pipeline within the next year. This is where I’m sitting right now, with at least a couple more “STDs” in my future. And I just now am learning why nobody has ever used an acronym for Save the Date.

*mini muffin break. so good*

One week ago my dear friend Chris Raider got married to my other dear friend Kate Giroux. It was a great time. Thanks for the invite guys. It was also my first “friend” wedding. I’ve been to plenty of family weddings, but friend weddings hit different.

Also, side thing, it’s pretty awesome that we’ve developed enough as a society where you can literally just send someone an apple pay payment as a gift for their wedding. Like we’ve all decided that handwritten cards with cash in them make zero sense anymore. Sure, we still send emails that end with “best, Jack” (your name is literally on the email already) but at least we’ve gotten one thing right.

The Raider wedding sent me into a state of self awareness and forward-thinking that was seemingly impossible prior. When I saw one of MY friends stand up there and get married, I had a “That’s So Raven” / “Jimmy Neutron” Brain Blast seeing into the next 10 years of my life. Friend wedding after friend wedding after friend wedding.

I have met enough people 5-10 years older than me to know every single possible trope around being in the Wedding Phase. For the sake of my audience, I will not repeat all of these back to you. I am sure you have heard all the same stuff. “uggghhhhhh it’s a destination wedding”……. “i cannot belieeeevveeee there isn’t a cash bar" ………. “i have the saaaammmee conversation with everyone there” ……….. “i am sooooo not looking forward to seeing the friends from college i haven’t talked to in 5 years”

POV you just said you weren’t gonna do the wedding trope thing and you did it anyway

But this friend wedding stuff is amazing. I mean, this wedding was great because I knew a lot of people there and got to see some actual friends I hadn’t seen in a while. And to be honest, I don’t mind the random interactions with people you haven’t seen since college and also will never see again. Like is that really what we’re complaining about? Talking to people while Bruno Mars’ hit single “24K Magic” plays in the background?

I’ll tell ya one thing though, something about me is I am going to lose my voice at a wedding. It’s so loud and I’m really keen on people hearing me when I say a funny joke, so I really am screaming across the dinner table and then double screaming if I am on the dance floor.

Another note, I need to do a better job of not busting out my best dance moves too early. I totally got too excited and was doing my A+ moves within the first 30 minutes. I canNOT be doing the Moonwalk while the dance floor is only still at 65% capacity and everyone is borderline still sober/coming back to life after their “grilled salmon”. And listen, the moonwalk is great, but I can’t overdo it. Easiest way to be dubbed “moonwalk guy”. Can you imagine being “moonwalk guy”? That’s like barely a step above “first guy to drop a glass beer bottle on the dance floor”.

I also was pretty hellbent on not taking off my suit coat during the wedding at all. I think for me, the second the suit coat comes off, you’ve announced to the whole wedding that you are definitely drunk and you are definitely trying to party really hard. I have no issue with someone that is partying really hard, BUT I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome if I’m not necessarily “in” the wedding. To me, the real partying is reserved for the people that are in the wedding or are like siblings of the people getting married or something. I don’t think it’s my place to be super outwardly partying my face off at the literal expense of the families that are joining together. Is that weird? Probably weird but it’s something I can work through if needed.

I really do love weddings and I think I crushed this wedding. Weddings are the best because it’s just a reason to see your friends that maybe you don’t see EVER anymore. And to me, I can deal with all the perceived “annoyances” that might come with that. God forbid I love love though!

With that said, when the band did the thing where they’re like “grab that special someone and make your way to the dance floor” I did almost puke out of embarrassment because people tried to do that thing where they bring together all the single people to join arm in arm in a circle. Spare me.

Stay tuned for the next wedding recap!

- jack

I can’t decide if I want to frame this as a cautionary tale, a self-promotion ballad, an inspirational story, or a romantic comedy. So, like all great playwrights, I’m going to attempt to do all of those things in one fell swoop, leading the reader down several different paths that don’t really tie together at any point and overall leave you very confused and uninterested in ever reading anything else I say. And then also I’ll do a ton of run-on sentences so that everything you read ends up not really making sense and you quickly forget what the point of the entire paragraph was about and the thing I teed up never really comes full circle.

Do you guys every feel super motivated to do something crazy and different and you plan it all out and then you wake up the next day and you’re like, “yeah I don’t really feel like it anymore.” Because I did that for like a year and a half straight from 2023-2024. I spent the beginning of my post-graduate career in 2020 all through last year learning about every single kind of industry under the sun. I even almost signed up for coding classes (that would have been so dumb knowing that AI made that useless).

I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with my professional career. I was looking for a crazy idea, a stroke of genius, to take me from risk consultant to billionaire playboy overnight. That’s how I thought it worked. I watched The Social Network, and that frickin Mark Zuckerberg guy and Justin Timberlake made it seem so simple. Uhh yeah, we’re going to just make The Facebook.

While I was going through this 18 month journey of trying to figure out my own path, G-Shock was building Breaking and Entering into a big time podcast/venture in his own way. It was something, but I guess neither of us knew what “it” was. I had been helping him with it sparingly but never had much ambition for it. I knew nothing about monetizing or building a business out of a podcast or content or even making content. I had never done that before. And shocker, neither did geno (shocker —> geno. not bad, huh)

But when Geno’s boss couldn’t go to the awards ceremony in New York where Geno was going to be given Young Advertiser of the Year, he asked if I wanted to take a free trip from Chicago to New York to attend. After that evening, we both kinda realized that the time to “go for it” was now. Let’s spend a few months figuring out what a business “might” look like. Let’s shop around some ideas to ad agencies. Let’s see what sticks. Regardless, the plan was simple. We gotta get out of our corporate jobs and build our own path.

100 days of working nights and weekends later, we ended up moving to New York City, raising $50k from 33 friends and family members (thank you so much) and giving ourselves another 100 days to figure out if a business could work.

We arrived at our 1 bedroom East Village apartment with a desperate rigor that only comes when you’ve staked your entire reputation, career, and net worth on a concept of an idea of what your own business might look like.

Speaking of the Zuck. I get that he is a lizard-human, but he does have a good quote. He said something like “you don’t have to know where you’re going, you just have to get started.”

Okay cool, now that’s taken care of. Thanks Mark. We’ll figure out the idea. But there was still one pretty important thing to me at that time: “what is everyone going to think of this? I’m going to be perceived as one of those guys that is an ‘entrepreneur’ but isn’t actually ‘preneuring’ anything”.

Looking back a year later, it’s so funny that I actually cared. But when I got started, that desperation fueled me to stop caring, because if I cared about what other people thought, it might get in the way of us being successful in our mission of building our own path. Build your own path. I keep saying that.

My first blog ever was super quick. It was just this Casey Neistat video:

In an interesting “full circle” moment. We were at an event that Casey Neistat spoke at last week. Could be the universe validating those original feelings I had and saying I’m on the right track. Or maybe millions of people look to Casey for inspiration every day and I’m not really that special or unique. Both can be true.

Now that the self-imposed, irrational feelings of doubt have been conquered, we need to build a frickin’ media company.

And all that means is pretty much making as much content as possible until you find something that works and then doing that content as much as you can and then figuring out another idea by trying out another million ideas and then rinse and repeat forever and ever. I actually think that’s pretty accurate and anybody in the media company game will tell you that.

I think we came up with about 75 different ideas for building the “business” though. Meaning, how can we make money off this. One day we were podcast consultants, another day we were new business consultants, another day we were advertising industry researchers. All of these different identities didn’t work.

^our 1st HQ/apartment. this gives me war flashbacks and it’s only been one year.

And then what seemed to catch traction and is the core of our business was the thing in front of our faces the whole time. We just had to be us.

When your job is to be yourself and create products that are as true to you as your weird, nervous ticks or your failure to pronounce anyone’s name right or your undying relentless pursuit of making people laugh, you have no competition. “Product-Market Fit” is irrelevant. KPIs are of no concern. Because your consumers can never replace you with someone else. Nobody is you!

With this idea figured out, and a continued focus on being ourselves, realizing nobody cares (casey neistat), doing everything for ourselves, and giving the value of our knowledge (mainly geno’s knowledge) of the industry, every business goal was smashed and everything took care of itself.

In retrospect, we were really solving a problem in our industry. Nobody in advertising was able to get their news/informational content quickly and with some entertainment involved as well so that they actually stayed engaged in the value of the news they were receiving. We only realized that after we started doing 60 Seconds of Advertising News. We started doing that because we thought it would be fun and we also thought it would be funny if we talked about as much as possible as fast as possible.

We also were extremely fortunate that Geno was podcasting for 5 straight years before this and knew every single person in advertising and all those people were willing to help us out and give up their time to be in our content.

I still can’t believe we were featured in the Wall Street Journal lol.

Okay great, now I can get off my high horse of talking about all the things that went great. What’s it actually like?

It’s hard as hell. It can be brutal. The highs are high but the lows are low, and when you’re high (not that kind of high) you feel paranoid (again, not that high) about impending dooms around the corner. It’s really hard to explain to people what you do or what your job is without sounding like a self-righteous asshole. “Yeah I’m building a media company. Yeah I’m a content creator.” that’s so lame. Like if I heard me say that to myself I’d roll my eyes and be like “okay so you’re a loser.” Lol. This is getting sad.

But holy shit does it beat sitting in a cube with zero interest in what you’re doing 9 hours a day. With zero opportunity to be creative. I need to remind myself of that more often. Every day feels like a grind at B&E HQ, but it’s also hilarious and it’s rewarding and it’s all those corny stereotypes. Ultimately, every decision I make or everything we do matters in the realm of our business. And I love that.

Call it the Facebook-ification of entrepreneurship, but my entire mind was wrapped up in the idea that “success” for a new business was raising a venture capital investment. Once you got that $5 million check, everything became easy and you did it. You got a ping pong table in your office. The epitome of achievement.

But nowadays, that just doesn’t appeal to me. I can’t imagine giving up a significant vested interest in the company and have to report to a board of higher-ups. I’m so thankful that our friends and family investors are so incredible. We have never had an issue with anyone, and they are fully behind us. They trust us. It’s awesome. We also update them every single week which is huge. That kind of communication and accountability goes a long way. Write that down!

One year later, we’ve surpassed every possible metric and expectation I had for us. To me, success was that this experiment led me to a more interesting full time job. I was not expecting in the slightest to now have two full time employees, a legitimate salary, and a TWO BEDROOM apartment in NYC. I truly don’t know how long this experiment will last. It feels like on any given day it could all just end. I constantly “hold on loosely” and try to enjoy every day. It’s been the most rewarding year of my life.

It’s a weird dynamic of feeling like we’ve done absolutely nothing but then you look back and you’re like woah a lot has happened. I rarely take a second to look back and see how far we’ve come in a year. And we really haven’t gone anywhere in the grand scheme of things. There’s so much more to do. The journey has only just begun. It’s such a small piece of time. One year! One year. You build your own path for a year and suddenly you’re very far from the paved path you originally were on.

And the best thing has been reminding ourselves that we’re literally just making fun videos. As Casey Neistat says, NOBODY CARES. That principle still applies. Nobody really cares that much about what we’re doing, so let’s do it for ourselves. to the next year of B&E!

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve earned the right to attend the Breaking and Entering 1st Birthday Party. Message me for deets.

So, whaddya think? Mentally stable, insufferable, right call?

- jack

The best part about being dumb and ignorant and naive is that you don’t have the wisdom to anticipate how hard or different or crazy a new thing is about to be. It’s probably my favorite part of being human. If I knew how absurd and chaotic and weird and borderline scary this past year would be, I would have never left my life behind to start a new company with my buddy Geno in New York.

And listen, I get it. I’ve been off the blog grind for a while. The unfortunate reality that you all need to figure out is that there is inverse relationship between the success of Breaking and Entering Media Company and my willingness/desire to blog. At least for now. Who woulda thought. And for those that are visual learners (Frank), here’s a diagram:

Let’s move on.

After spending almost 2 years in San Francisco and stops before and after those two years in Chicago, and now a year in New York, it is pretty clear that there is nothing in the world like New York. It’s a totally different species and it has a way of constantly keeping you in check right when you think you’ve gotten it figured out. Oh, no “fight or flight” moments on the subway? Rat in your apartment. No line for a bagel? Smelly homeless person on your stoop. Good weather outside for a walk? Motorcycle dudes revving their engine on max volume.

It’s a vicious, repeating cycle of the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. It’s not all too different from the experience running Breaking and Entering. More on that in a separate blog.

After a year, this vicious cycle teaches you that everything comes back to the average (law of averages alert! That’s TWO mathematical theories in one blog for those keeping track at home). So, you get really good at keeping calm amidst the (literal, in some cases) shit storm. And it’s not to say that you couldn’t possibly find inner calm while living somewhere else, but your inner calm becomes part of you much quicker because you get more experiences so much faster. At least that’s how it feels in my case. Or maybe im a PSYCHOPATH!!! HAHAHAHA. Side note: should I watch The Shining? I’ve always thought it was a super scary movie but it seems more like a thriller, per my tiktok feed?

By fully immersing into one of the more raucous neighborhoods, The East Village, I have smelled more smells, seen more things, and experiences more experiences in one year than a victorian child experienced in the entire duration of their 14 year existence. It’s a new normal, it’s a massive adjustment, it’s exactly what I was hoping for. “You wouldn’t last a day in the asylum they raised me.” Congratulations Taylor Swift on your engagement.

I have a theory I’m beta-testing

I think you should strive for every new year to be the craziest year of your life. I personally believe that means you did more new things than the previous year and you got out of your comfort zone more than you had in the previous year. Because what does “crazy” even mean? Outside of evil or illegal “crazy”, “crazy” for the normal person is just that you were doing a lot of different stuff. For a 27-year old fella like myself, now is the perfect time to have crazy experiences. This is it!!!! You have nothing to lose.

And that conclude the beta testing. Thank you for your participation.

Look at this visual

I feel like most people have seen this. But I think it’s cool. I feel like it encapsulates what’s happened since moving to New York. Being here makes it seem as if you can go in any direction you want and so much more opportunity is opened up to you. Deep down, it feels like that kinda played a part in Geno and I moving out here for Breaking and Entering. Just the idea that if (when) this company goes down in flames (it’ll be an epic collapse) that we would still have a good shot at landing a decent job in New York.

The trajectory of my life has completely 180’d in the last year. Reminder: I was doing risk consulting a year ago in Chicago. My life path was so clearly laid out for me. It would have been great, but it is genuinely insane that my new career path is so far gone from that it almost feels like that part of my life didn’t even happen.

In my next blog, I’m going to recap the last year of running Breaking and Entering, and how we’ve seemingly somehow started to figure it out. It’s crazy guys. I honestly have no idea how that happened. But anyways.

This year has been a year of really actually not caring about people’s perceptions of me and overall caring less about the opinions of other people that don’t really know me. In this gig, Geno and I put ourselves out there on the internet every single day. And again, similar to living in a shit storm, you get pretty immune to the idea of putting yourself out there.

I’ll also say this.

When you truly truly “go for it” (doesn’t matter what “it” is) you actually don’t have time or energy to think about what other people might think about you. Because, again, you’re too busy going for it. Then, one day, you wake up and look back and are like “damn, a lot has changed.” Then you keep going for it.

With that said, I’ll leave you all with one quote that has stuck with me this past year:

”Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself.” - George Bernard Shaw, Irish Playwright

alright ya crazy kids i’ll catch ya later!!!

- jack

When you reach the 2nd semester of your senior year of college, there’s a sense of urgency on a few different fronts. It’s like that hierarchy of needs triangle. First, you have to find a full time job, then you need to make a move on a girl you’ve always had a crush on, then you need to plan your post grad trip.

Some people do a backpacking trip through Europe. Maybe you do a roadtrip down Highway. Some people go to Southeast Asia and get food poisoning.

For my friends and I, we landed on a roadtrip. For a few different reasons. One major reason was because it was the middle of covid and we couldn’t frickin do anything else. Also it was probably the cheapest and least complex of all the potential post grad trip options.

Like any sort of event or trip, I had to first get a confirmed “yes” from one of my friends before approaching the next. Then, that wave of momentum and FOMO would make it easy to get the final fellas into place. Before long, we had our 7.

Mac, Scott, Kindra, Geno, Ryan, Jack, and Peter were ready to set sail for the Grand Canyon.

It was simple, we rent an RV and drive to the Southwest US, stopping at some national parks along the way, do some hiking, do some nature stuff, do some camping, and land on the Grand Canyon. All with the comfort of our RV, which had a working shower. Isn’t that awesome? We could just shower in the RV! So nice. Anyways.

We were off and running. We drove through the night and landed at Great Sand Dunes National Park, then ended our first night under a mountain in Colorado.

Our first test with the elements came in the form of a sandstorm that brewed up at Great Sand Dunes National Park. It’s amazing how much fear a sandstorm can bring you. Especially for a guy like me, whose only experience with a sandstorm was via the song Sandstorm by Darude.

That sandstorm was our welcome to the NFL moment. In recalling those events, Ryan said: “I couldn’t see anything. I thought you all were gone. I thought I was the only one that survived the sandstorm.”

With a new lease on life, we continued the trip. We camped under the stars, we ate a million brats, and we hiked some of the coolest places in the world. One small note, we broke the shower about 2 days in. So you had 7 guys and zero showers for two weeks. We eventually found some RV parks to take some showers at, but nothing prepares you for an RV trip with no access to a shower.

Right before we went to the Grand Canyon, we stopped at Zion National Park. One of the coolest things you can do there is hiking “The Narrows”.

It’s a wild, borderline religious experience hiking through a river with thousands of feet of prehistoric rock on either side of you. It makes no sense to a fella like me from Lombard, IL.

Continuing on the journey, we finally arrived at the Grand Canyon. The night before, Scott made the decision that we would hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and all the way back up in the same day. Immediately we ran into Reddit forums to determine if this was smart. Everyone said it was a bad idea, don’t do it all, blah blah. But similar to how Google Maps tells you something is a 20 minute walk, you convince yourself it’s a 20 minute walk for AVERAGE people. And one thing about this group of 7 white guys that all grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and all went to a public big ten university is that we are NOT average.

So we did it. Grand Canyon, one day, one dream. It was like our Super Bowl. Speaking of Super Bowl, that Grand Canyon is a massive bowl. Wow. Also brutal side note is we lost my football in the Colorado River. I’m still mad about that.

After that, we swung over to Sedona to wrap up the trip. But then we got to a gas station in town and decided we didn’t really feel like being on the roadtrip anymore. So we drove home. On the way home, Ryan was driving through Oklahoma and I was the designated buddy to stay up with him and ride shotgun.

We got pulled over by the Oklahoma state troopers, and I was pretty much convinced they would just start shooting us. We ended up getting outta there with just a warning, which was a good thing, because we forgot that some of the guys had purchased edibles in Colorado (this was 2020 when weed was illegal in Illinois). Can you imagine if we got arrested for drug trafficking? Also I can’t get in trouble now retroactively right? Habeas Corpus? Statute of Limitations?

And then we got back home, dropped off the RV, and went on with our lives.

What I didn’t mention in that story was the 5,000,000 inside jokes, or the 40,000 conversations, or the 20,000 obstacles that come with a massive roadtrip. I barely remember what Zion National Park looked like, or how large the Great Sand Dunes were, but I still think about the roadtrip every time someone says the words “Coleslaw” or “leak” (inside joke you wouldn’t get it).

I think that was the only time in our lives where we could have done that roadtrip. We were so dumb and unprepared, but we did it anyways. Because it was fun. And also because who cares.

I think it’s important to do stuff even if just for the sake of doing stuff. Like I’m not really into hiking but I wanted to experience something with my buddies before we joined the real world and had to worry about getting married or getting promoted or whatever. We had a finite amount of time to seize the moment and we did it. It could have been anything, it didn’t have to be a roadtrip.

So, I urge you all to find your Roadtrip, whatever that is, and go do it just for the hell of it. You don’t need a plan, you don’t even need friends. Just friggin go. You don’t even have to explain yourself.

But if it is an RV trip, just make sure that your shower is fully functional ahead of time and before you sign a contract stating that you are responsible for any damages on the RV.

- jack

To be honest it’s been a crazy last couple of weeks. Geno and I went to Cannes, had a Wall Street Journal article written about us, and we even got some anonymous hate/love on the workplace message board site, Fishbowl. It’s been a whirlwind, and it’s equally exciting and scary. I really only have one big thought I keep coming back to and saying to myself: Keep being yourself.

The South of France was quite the experience. Geno and I, naturally, stayed in a crappy Airbnb that was far from the beach and where all the festival happenings were occurring. It was cool to get to experience what it’s like for the people that actually live in Cannes. It was not cool (literally) to have to trek into town and barely have air conditioning. All in all, what an experience. My only qualm is that the French have yet to adopt the “Cold Brew” or “Iced Coffee”. With that said, it allowed me to try something new. Espresso.

When Sabrina Carpenter released her song, Espresso, I thought “hmm. cool song. these lyrics make me uncomfortable.”

I had the opportunity to try espresso for the first time while Geno and I were doing our content series in Cannes. In between videos, I would knock out an espresso. It is hard to compare the feeling of having 3 espressos on an empty stomach because I have never consumed hardcore recreational drugs.

I unfortunately lost my voice within like 36 hours of being in Cannes. Solely from over-using my voice. I was considering enlisting the T-Swift tactic of not talking to anybody outside of my contractually obliged content, but that feels obnoxious. Thus, like a friend with bad breath being given gum, I was offered cough drops throughout the week.

One of the most important aspects of Cannes apparently is trying to get into these crazy club parties that occur late night every night. “You hitting Spotify beach for Cardi B?” was a common question. I actually can’t tell you how little these events intrigued me. I think if my friggin dawgz were with me I’d be all about it. But if I had to choose between “Jason Derulo” and 3 hours of sleep or not having a raging head ache while doing stuff all day, it felt like a simple choice.

Cannes is the most classic work conference of all time but with about a bajillion dollars put behind it. People are there to celebrate and party every night while pretending like they are driving business outcomes. Not necessarily a dig on Cannes, that’s how every big time work conference/awards thing is. But, like, I’m good.

The South of France is really really cool looking. It’s hard to believe that Cicero, IL and “Nice, France” are on the same planet. I’m extremely grateful to have been able to experience that. Shoutout Raven Public Relations.

Being back in America is amazing, though. I think it’s hard to navigate a foreign country for longer than like a week. I’ll probably never live abroad. New York is so cool. But I did love saying “Merci!” 5,000 times. Kinda started to get used to it. Merci! Merci! But yeah I think the French absolutely hate me.

- jack

We’re just gonna go off on a list here. We’re doing lists now. It’s like Buzzfeed style. “14 Times in The Office Where We Said ‘Yeah That’s So Me :D’”

1. People who are like “ugh im so old” are lame. Who cares dawg

2. “Life comes from you, not at you” - Timothee Chalamet in that one tiktok video we’ve all seen

3. I’ve learned more from Tiktok than any book I’ve ever read by far

4. Everything you’ve ever wanted in life is on the other side of a difficult conversation

5. If she likes you it won’t matter whether or not you “play it cool” with your text responses

6. Nothing good has ever happened while wearing a taco costume

7. Do NOT order a crunchwrap supreme at Taco Bell on April 19th, 2017

8. Drinking in high school is honestly kinda dope

9. You think you won’t get into running but you will

10. Life is all about just looking at the people 3-4 years older than you and thinking about how old they are, then doing that over and over every year forever

11. Sitting at a dinner for 3 hours was really not fun at all 4 years ago, it’s decently okay right now, and it’s gonna be my favorite thing in 4 years

12. You can only sing one karaoke song a night if you’re at a large karaoke bar and it’s not a private room situation

13. Learning all the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice is going to come in handy one da

    y

14. Nobody is too cool for sunscreen

15. Nice for What by Drake is still so good

16. If Mark Wahlberg was there, 9/11 wouldn’t have gone down like that.

17. When you’re long distance running, just run really slow and you’ll run farther

18. If you ever have to present in front of a group, volunteer to be the first to go

19. Apathy is the opposite of love

20. Never sign a lease for an apartment after only seeing it on Facetime

21. If you really want to get something done but you feel like you’re gonna procrastinate, just go to a coffee shop to do it

22. Life is just high school drama but with adults

23. Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouf

24. If the restaurant messes up your order, take that as a sign to explore a new menu item and embrace a potentially new food. That’s gotta be a deeper metaphor for something. Maybe I’ll learn that next year.

25. If you know someone tried really hard on a joke in the group chat, just throw them a “haha” no matter what

26. I heard someone say “You have no competition when it comes to being yourself” so that was dope.

27. A^2 + B^2 = C^2

- jack

I started the blog on August 24th, 2024 with this post that became the “ethos” of this writing pursuit.

Since then, I have done 74 blogs over the course of the last 9ish months. And if it weren’t obvious enough, I’ve pretty much posted everything without a hesitation or even a courtesy “grammar check” because I know nobody really cares. And I don’t mean that like nobody cares about me, I mean it like my “blog” is pretty much meaningless to everyone’s lives. Sorry if that was sinister.

And of course, it’s hard not to have my ego inflate when I have an immediate rise to stardom, to the tune of 1 new subscriber every 2.7 days. This of course includes the 25 people that I signed up manually, without their consent.

There have been highs and lows. Who could forget this absolute flop of a blog that brought in a whopping 81 views.

But how about some of my best performing blogs!

My personal most favorite blogs of all time:

That was fun going down memory lane. The cool thing is there are some throwback blogs in there that I don’t care to revisit for at least a few years, but may be a nice time capsule into my life at a very specific point of time. Perhaps I’ll look back on these musings with pride, or with disgust, knowing that was the time of my life when I was in a year long manic episode where I pretended I was running a business from Manhattan. It’s like a Fight Club-esque situation.

I could not be more appreciative to the 101 subscribers of the blog. It’s cool that you are force fed my ramblings on a weekly basis. You see the substack email come into your inbox, you read the first two lines of my blog, and you shove it away, swearing you’ll “read it at lunch”. Listen, I get it.

I don’t even read my own blogs half the time. That explains all the grammar and spelling mistakes you see.

If I keep growing that this pace, I will have 1,000 subscribers in about 7.5 years. At that point, I will either be living on the streets or living on a beach. Hell or high water. Reality is that I’ll most likely be in a modest apartment in a major city.

I don’t know if I’ve really learned much through this writing process. To be honest it often times feels like I’m writing into a void with the exception of a few key friends that give me props every now and again. That keeps me going for the most part. So thanks or maybe stop doing that, depending on how people feel about these blogs.

Oftentimes I have thought “maybe I should have some themes or a consistent series for the blog”, but then I remember the ethos of nobody caring and to just do this for myself. Nobody has ever been more selfish in the blogging game than me. I actually don’t care about any of you, which may explain my lack of growth and audience retention. But honestly, that’s your faults. Like step up and share a blog with a friend. Unless you’re gatekeeping, which is dope.

As the next 100 subscribers file in, please everybody be respectful of these newbies. But definitely rub in the fact that you got in early before I have some sort of scandal that ruins my reputation. Now is the time to enjoy the blog, because before you know it, it’ll mimic some sort of deep web counterculture propaganda machine.

Also I pranked you all LOL. I’m not revealing the top 5 readers, even though I know exactly where you all stand. Deal with it. Welcome to the thunderdome.

Cheers, and thank you all.

- jack

Here is the article. If you are paywalled, go to this site and put the link in and you’ll access the article for free. If you don’t feel like reading it, I’ll sum it up here:

Someone wrote an article about how 20-something year old girls that live in the West Village are all basic and do the same thing and dress the same and are pretty much ruining the neighborhood and culture of the West Village and apparently New York. It’s essentially an article written to get people mad, and it does a damn good job of doing it. This article has taken the city by storm, and everyone has felt the need to chime in with their opinion on Tiktok.

And I think that’s great. So, as a result, everyone is finally getting the reaction they’ve been long waiting for. And that reaction comes from me, a 26 year old guy that has lived in New York for about 8 months with pretty much 5 friends in the city and zero credibility or intelligence when it comes to the cultural history of New York City. Let’s get into it.

The older I get, the more I realize that life is just high school, but you’re older.

The West Village girl is literally just the coolest girls in your high school. They are on the dance team, they hang out with the football guys, and they have the coolest clothes and the best fashion sense. Considering I was a B2 level of popularity, I come from the unique perspective of earning the right to interact (on occasion) with these legends of the game. And guess what? I still live in the B2 level of popularity in the broader scale of humanity. I, of course, say this all in jest. I don’t actually think there’s a way to rank “popularity” outside of high school…. yeah….. right….

For my Chicago friends, I’m guessing this would be the equivalent of “The Old Town Girl” or something like that. I don’t really know.

Anyways, this article is fantastic. It talks about all these girls that are actually so much cooler than me. They drink Iced Matchas or whatever and hang out with the coolest guys that work in finance and make a bunch of money. And then the article gets perspectives from older people about how much these older people hate these younger people. It’s one of the greatest rage baiting articles of all time.

The older people are like “these young people are so annoying!” and the young west village girls are like “um literaalllyyy this iced matcha slays *selfie flash*”. At one point in the article, an older person admits to telling these young-ins that they are trespassing because these young-ins are taking photos on the stoop of the Carrie Bradshaw apartment in the West Village. It’s fantastic.

But these are literally 23-26 year old girls and it’s amazing that they somehow have an ulterior motive to destroy the culture of New York City. Surely there aren’t probably a million different, more complex reasons behind why the West Village has changed and has evolved over the years with less culturally diverse people. But it has never been more clear that “Jessica”, the 23 year old from Connecticut that just graduated from Villanova, is the reason your neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.

I’m kinda sad because of the fact that I moved here too late in my 20s. I completely missed the window to be a corporate finance west village dude and earn the right to hang out with these apparent female celebrities that roam the streets of the west village. Sadly, my time to completely distort the fabric of an entire 250,000 person neighborhood has come and gone. Now I am merely another dot on the radar in a sea of other cultural nobodies.

It took me all of about 4 days to realize that the West Village was the cool kid neighborhood. All I had to hear was that Taylor Swift used to live there. Uhhhh yeah I imagine that’ll change the perception of the neighborhood. Can you imagine if one day, Pharrell moved into my hometown of Lombard, IL? Yeah that might move the needle.

The thing is, I can’t talk bad on the West Village Girlies, because if I do they will legit destroy me. They all have millions of tiktok followers apparently and apparently have more influence than Gandhi, the Pope, and Elon Musk combined. Can you imagine if I got called out in a Tiktok “Get Ready With Me to Go To Bayard’s Ale House”? It would be OVER! I would be shunned from the West Village for life. It would be tragic.

This crew is doing what we all would do in their circumstance. They’re prolonging college for as long as they can. Where they get the funding from? Probably their parents! But guess what? That’s none of my business. I can be envious, sure, but outside of that I don’t really care at all. Should I care more? Let me know. But I’m approaching this situation like literally everything else in my life. With a ferocious level of apathy that was previously unknown to mankind.

So with that, I love the West Village Girlies. Please don’t shove me in a locker. And just know that if Anna’s +1, Bradley, can’t make the drink deal next weekend at The Spaniard, I will gladly step in.

- jack

There’s like a million issues seemingly, but at the end of the day it comes down to “telecommunications” and a lack of staff to fix things. That is, of course, what the media and “big airport” wants you to believe. There are clearly deep rooted issues at play, and I think my plan to save the airport accounts for pretty much every possible issue. If I was working at Newark airport, it wouldn’t be going down like this. Reminiscent of Mark Wahlberg’s thoughts on 9/11.

Let’s get right into it.

A “Dibs” System of Air Traffic

These “telecommunications” clearly aren’t working at Newark. I don’t care how much “technology” you have. It isn’t doing the job. Let’s stop pretending that “AI” and “telecommunications” and “radar” is going to do us any favors at this point.

My solve is simple. As planes are approaching the airport, they call out “dibs” over the radar to determine the order of landing. Let’s say two airplanes are closing into the same runway, for example. Plane #1 calls over the radio to Plane #2 and calls “dibs!” prior to Plane #2 calling it. At that point, Plane #1 would then be the first to land at Newark, and Plane #2 would hold back. Pretty much the most simple thing ever.

The current way of doing things requires planes to talk to some guy named Ned at the flight tower using some sort of foreign, cryptic language. It goes something like this:

Plane 1: “uhhhhhh echo foxtrot tango melon boomerange 398548938rre9499wugeie5”

Ned: “yep, Echo 49 chicken nugget Hinge Tinder Bumble you are clear for landing at Wendy’s Big Bacon Cheeseburger 48 22 I-Right 34 Blast”

How does this make sense? How is this efficient? Then Ned has to tell Plane #2 all this information too??

The reason “dibs” works is that as a human being, you are instinctually obedient to the rules of “dibs!” as opposed to the rules of “listening to the orders of flight controller Ned”. To be honest, as a man, I would never allow another man tell me when I can or cannot land my plane. Let alone some friggin’ poindexter sitting in his little space tower.

This system eliminates the need for “the middle man”. If I know anything about “The Middle Man” it’s that we need to eliminate them! Nobody has ever been like, “you know what we need? A middle man!” Absolutely not! Dibs.

More “Crew” in the Airplane (think War Movie Airplane Crews)

Have you guys ever seen those war movies where the flight crews are like 8 dudes? A couple dudes in the cockpit, a couple guys on the guns, a guy that is the navigator, then a handyman sorta thing?

I think we need this kind of crew on every airplane. Let’s think about this for a second. What kind of country are we if we can’t even fly OUR OWN planes around the country without major flight safety issues? I mean, these fighter pilot guys were flying over Berlin in 1944 and were making it back and forth, but we’re barely avoiding collisions between United flight 875 and Delta flight 987 at Newark?

I think one key reason is that we don’t have the personnel we need on each of these planes. I want a navigator, I want a radio guy, and hell, I want a guy manning the machine gun in the back just in case one of those New Jersey Drones starts looking a little too extraterrestrial for our liking.

A fully functioning crew would be able to maneuver any sort of issue or safety risk with complete ease. And let’s face it, we don’t necessarily have a need for Air Force plane crews these days when we have unmanned drones dropping bombs in the middle east from 90,000 feet up.

Lean Into It

I don’t think it’s the worst idea for Newark airport to lean into the fact that they are the worst airport destination in the United States. Similar to Spirit Airlines model, just have every flight going there be a little cheaper, and lean into the idea that you are now the discount, low-class airport.

When you pull into Newark, you should expect nothing to work, bugs everywhere, fights with airport personnel, etc. BUT, prices will be cut, so you take what you get.

It’s almost like an amusement park. There is a little bit of adrenaline-inducing action happening at that airport. Like will be be flying in dark for this landing, will my pilot actually know where the landing strip is, do we even have a pilot today? All great questions that can lead to life-long memories assuming your pilot is able to touchdown in the great state of New Jersey.

Not every airport can be LaGuardia. And to be honest, there’s your slogan right there. “Newark Airport, Not Every Airport Can Be LaGuardia.”

So, there you have it. Take it or leave it, Newark. I just saved your entire airport in like 750 words. Now it’s up to you.

- jack