This is my first time writing about football, call it soccer if you feel like it. But three things make me surprisingly qualified to write about this particular game, the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final, where Spain barely squeaked past Argentina.

First, I have never written about football, but I have spent the last fifteen years writing professionally about basketball in multiple languages. I have commented on the sport for major broadcasters and local NBA television coverage. Sports are sports. The ball is different, but human nature isn’t.

Second, I couldn’t care less about either of these teams or their stars. Messi is not my prophet. Spain’s tactics are not the wallpaper on my phone. I have no emotional investment here, which makes me the closest thing you’ll find to an unbiased observer.

Third, this piece is not really about football. Well, it is about football, but only as a vehicle. What fascinated me was what I learned about leadership and organizational management while watching twenty two people spend 120 minutes, plus a little extra, chasing around a very expensive piece of leather.

Spain did not become world champion simply because they passed the ball around like a hot potato.

In fact, if successful passes are your main measure of teamwork, I can make a pretty convincing argument that Argentina demonstrated outstanding teamwork as well. Their heliocentric style, where almost every team work revolves around one extraordinary player, has already delivered one World Cup in 2022 and came within millimeters of delivering another with a thirty eight year old legend still pulling the strings. That isn’t selfish football. It is a different version of teamwork.

Teamwork in sports is the coordinated effort of individuals who trust one another, sacrifice personal glory, and work toward a common objective. Teamwork is not passing the ball a lot, its everyone understand their role, execute according and trust the process. The difference between Spain and Argentina was never teamwork versus individualism. It was two very different philosophies of teamwork.

Let’s dig deeper

Spain under Luis de la Fuente built its game around absolute territorial control, both offensively and defensively. Relentless pressing. Suffocating counter pressing. Endless possession. They completed an astonishing 763 accurate passes in the final game.

Football is not basketball. You cannot simply dribble around for twenty four seconds until someone gets open. If you want to dominate possession, you pass the ball constantly. Spain held possession for sixty five percent of this match, generated twenty shots at target, earned nine corner kicks, and eventually wore down the magnificent Emiliano Martínez, Argentina goalie until substitute Ferran Torres finally broke through in the 106th minute.

Argentina’s system looked completely different.

Everything revolved around maximizing Lionel Messi’s creative genius while minimizing his defensive responsibilities. Most of the time he looked like he was casually walking around the pitch, almost detached from the game. Then, without warning, he exploded into space or produced a pass that looked physically impossible. That wasn’t laziness. That was controlled chaos.

The Argentinians were no slouches when it came to playing together. Argentina completed 357 accurate passes despite having possession only thirty five percent of the time. That works out to a completed pass roughly every 7.06 seconds. Spain completed one every 6.13 seconds. So if passing a lot means teamwork Arganitia’s front bumper is touching Spain tail lamps in this race. The difference is there, but hardly the gap between teamwork and no teamwork.

So if you are a manager, a business leader, or simply someone looking to ride the football fever into your next motivational presentation, don’t be lazy. Don’t point at Spain’s passing statistics and call it a day.

There are much better lessons hiding beneath the surface.

Trust the process

Spain’s plan simply did not work during the entire ninety minutes of regular time. Did they suddenly abandon everything and yell, “Forget it. Give Yamal the ball and everybody get out of the way”?

No.

They kept doing exactly what brought them there. Another sixteen minutes passed before persistence finally broke Argentina’s resistance.

Business is full of similar moments.

Your organization rolls out a new software platform or introduces a better process. It feels awkward. It is slower. You spend an hour wrestling with it and accomplish almost nothing. Finally, frustration wins. You quietly reopen your old Excel spreadsheet, finish the task in twenty minutes, and tell yourself you’ll try the new system next time.

Next time never comes.

The new process never takes root because the old habit is always standing in the corner, waving at you like your old comfy leather armchair. Athletes experience exactly the same temptation. Under pressure they naturally fall back on movements and instincts they have practiced since childhood.

Spain’s willingness to stay committed, even when nothing seemed to be working, is exactly what put them on top. Organizations that chase immediate comfort rarely build long term resilience. Delayed gratification is not exciting, but championships rarely are.

Create leverage

If you aren’t slightly terrified of facing Lionel Messi in a World Cup Final, you are either not paying attention or your confidence has crossed into fantasy.

Argentina also brings something else to the table. Psychological warfare.Intimidation. Gamesmanship. Straight up dirty plays and Occasional theatrical collapses that deserve their own category at the Oscars.

Spain never allowed itself to become Argentina. They understood exactly who they were playing, stayed disciplined, and let Argentina slowly become its own worst enemy.

Eventually it happened.

In the ninety third minute Enzo Fernández charged into Spain defender Pau Cubarsí. Already carrying a yellow card, he earned himself a red. Realistically, he could have been sent off fifteen minutes earlier. Spain never chased revenge. Never copied the aggression. Never joined the performance art. That created leverage.

Business works the same way.

When things become difficult, resist the temptation to mirror your competitor’s behavior. If another company cuts ethical corners, don’t race them to the bottom. Stay true to your own identity and let their weaknesses eventually become visible.

Sun Tzu would probably approve.

You still need individual excellence

Excellent teamwork alone rarely gets you across the finish line. Eventually someone has to produce something extraordinary.

The winning goal will always be remembered. Nico Williams delivered the header that perfectly set up Ferran Torres to finish. Commentators immediately nicknamed it the “Header of the Gods,” a clever nod to Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God.” It was beautiful.

But the moment that stayed with me happened at the opposite end of the field. Teenage defender Pau Cubarsí produced a defensive masterpiece in the final minute of extra time, intercepting one of Messi’s laser guided crosses less than a meter from goal. This kid sees football two or three seconds before everyone else. Without that intervention the game probably goes to penalties, and with Emiliano Martínez standing in goal, Argentina would have liked its chances very much.

Cubarsí already plays with the composure of someone twice his age. Ice runs through his veins.

Leaders often make the mistake of suppressing exceptional performers in the name of equality and harmony.

Healthy organizations need stars. Sometimes your superstar is the salesperson who closes the impossible deal. Sometimes it is the engineer who prevents a catastrophic failure. Sometimes it is the quiet analyst who spots the existential risk before everyone else. The point is the same.

Let excellence breathe. Don’t punish people for becoming bigger than the job description. The best teams are not afraid of extraordinary individuals. They know exactly when to let them shine. Because sometimes one exceptional performance is the final piece that turns years of planning, discipline, and teamwork into victory.

Don’t confuse activity with progress

Spain completed 763 passes, Almost twice as opponent, I see this snippet in LinkedIn everywhere. A casual observer might conclude that passing was the goal or If you only glanced at the numbers, you might conclude that Spain won because they are really, really good at passing the ball.

Passing was simply the mechanism for manipulating space until the right opportunity appeared. Many organizations fall into exactly this trap. Meetings become the work. Dashboards become the work. Status reports become the work. Someone proudly announces that the team held forty steering committee meetings, produced twelve executive updates, and created a dashboard with thirty two performance indicators. Wonderful. People get busy producing activity that looks productive but creates little value.

Spain wasn’t trying to complete 763 passes. They were trying to create one high quality chance.

Business leaders should ask themselves:

“Is this activity creating leverage, or are we just passing the ball around because it feels productive?”

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In the real world, even after all the planning, all the teamwork, and all the brilliant individual performances, you still may not win.

But you dramatically increase the odds of being the last one standing.

And that is usually the only advantage worth chasing.

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Relying on your book-loving friend to suggest the hottest read, scouring Goodreads or The StoryGraph for something new to sink into, or even showing up to your local book club pretending you totally finished the assigned novel are still the main ways reading enthusiasts discover new meat to dig their teeth into.

But me? I’ve always preferred the rabbit hole approach.

The whole “Do you have something similar to The Day of the Jackal?” routine with a slightly overwhelmed bookstore employee who slowly realizes he made eye contact with the wrong customer just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

So I started building my own personal reading guide using vibe coding. I’m an engineer, but not the type that writes code. I’m very new to this world. Which honestly made the whole thing more dangerous. Like giving a power drill to someone who just watched two YouTube tutorials and suddenly believes he can renovate a kitchen. But I did not any way.

Here is my thought process

I don’t believe there are any great works of art that weren’t built on top of something else. Creativity has always been part archaeology, part theft, part tribute. Drake digging through Afrobeat to find the bones of his next megahit. Michael Jackson put together pieces of his dance vocabulary from Bob Fosse performances in The Little Prince. Michael Jordan studying the airborne poetry of Julius Erving. Mark Knopfler dissecting the fingerpicking style of Chet Atkins.

None of that devalues the work that comes later. If anything, it makes it richer. Art is basically one giant relay race where every generation grabs the baton and adds a weird little flourish before passing it on.

Rick Rubin touches on this idea beautifully in The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“The source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available.”

So I figured, why not build something that treats books the same way Spotify treats music recommendations, except deeper than the usual “if you liked this, try that” algorithmic shrug.

How it works

This is the first thing user sees.

It starts with book title and its author. Very simple interface. Not much to it. You click “Map!” and the magic machine does its thing. Bear with me on why I called the button Map. Software naming is one of those things where your brain decides something at 2 a.m. and six weeks later you’re still defending it like a constitutional amendment.

This is what the app spits out, it gives user a plot summary with a button that reads it aloud for you. I even matched the AI text to speech accent to the author, which may be either a brilliant detail or a sign I’ve gone too far. Probably both.

Below that, it gives key information like publication date, genre, links to places where you can buy or listen to the book, and even what I call its visual legacy. Were there major film adaptations? TV shows? Screenplays inspired by it? That opens another lane for people to discover stories they might enjoy without realizing they were spiritually connected all along.

But then comes the main attraction.

Map. Or shall I say Lineage Graph

This is how I imagine book lovers actually discovering new books: not through bestseller lists, but through timelines of influence.

The selected work sits in the middle. On the left are books that may have inspired it. On the right are books, films, or screenplays that may have grown out of it. Literary family trees basically. Some branches are noble and elegant. Some looked like they survived a lightning strike.

I even experimented with assigning percentage scores to signify how strongly connected two works might be. The app evaluates several categories, though if I’m being honest, I’m still not entirely sure what the final math is doing behind the scenes. Which means I’ve officially entered the proud tradition of modern tech founders building systems they themselves cannot fully explain.

One of the most fun parts is that you can click any book or screenplay on either side of the map, and it jumps to the center. Then the whole process starts again for that work. You can travel backward and forward through chains of influence for hours, hopping through literary history like a time traveler with an overdue library card.

But that’s not all.

I also added analysis cards for every ancestor and descendant. Each card gives a quick breakdown of how the two works are similar and how they differ. A short plot description, genre labels, and notes on any visual adaptations or related media.

What Now?

I originally built this app for my own use, but if you want give it spin, here’s the link. You can log in using your Google account to get to Google AI Studio environment. I still haven’t figured out how to turn it into a proper standalone website yet. Google studio made deployment surprisingly easy, but the unknown economics of publicly deploying something AI powered still scares me a bit. One viral Reddit post and suddenly I’m selling my kidney to pay AI token fees.

That aside, I genuinely think every bookstore in the world could use something like this on a kiosk to help obsessive readers discover their next obsession. Because most recommendation systems today don’t really understand influence. They understand categories.

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Generational trauma, also known as intergenerational or transgenerational trauma, is the idea that the effects of a traumatic event do not stop with the person who experienced it. The emotional, psychological, and sometimes even biological echoes of that trauma travel forward, quietly hitchhiking their way into the lives of children and grandchildren.

I was born in Iran in the 70s. My childhood came with a front row seat to one of history’s more abrupt cultural whiplashes. One day I was playing tag with my female classmate in the schoolyard. The next thing you know, I am standing in that same yard chanting “Death to America.” Same playground, completely different script.

It felt like stepping out of a romantic comedy at the movie theater to refill your popcorn, opening the wrong door on the way back, and accidentally walking into a different auditorium that is screening a very intense historical horror film about a seventh century Islamic caliphate. By the time you realize you are in the wrong movie, the doors are locked and you are already part of the audience.

My dad lost his job as a teacher because he did not look Islamic enough. His crime was refusing to grow the revolutionary beard and refusing to lose his necktie. Facial hair and looking like a hobo had become a loyalty test.

My school became segregated. Not just boys and girls. Religion too. Overnight childhood friendships were sorted like airport luggage into different conveyor belts. My non Muslim friends and classmates eventually fled the country with their families.

Daily life slowly turned into a long list of “no.”
No Walkman outside.
No walking your dog in public.
No shorts while playing in the street.
My mom was forced to wear a hijab.

And that was just elementary school.

Then came eight years of war. I spent junior high and high school with the background noise of a conflict that seemed endless. My older brother get drafted and sent to the front line. My school building was demolished by Iraqi Scud missiles. That tends to ruin the mood of a math class.

University was its own strange theater. According to Islamic regime rulebook normal interaction between men and women was forbidden, students developed an entire underground culture of awkward and sometimes ridiculous workarounds. Parties were illegal. Friendships across genders were banned. Music, movies, magazines all had to pass the government’s taste test. Imagine a shitty version of Soviet thought control.

At one point I lost the privilege of playing basketball for three months at school because our principal believed basketball was a gateway drug to break dancing! If you were a teenager in the 80s you might admit, quietly, that he was not entirely wrong about the break dancing part. Still, banning hoops felt excessive.

During all my formative years I constantly felt like an outlaw. Anything I wanted to do was illegal, suspicious, or morally frowned upon according to someone with a Kalashnikov, a beard and a holy book in hand. There is actually a song about this fucked up situation by the band Kiosk. When your life experience becomes a rock lyric, you know things are strange.

I could keep going. The menu of trauma is long. Consider it a cocktail with many ingredients. The kind that would qualify anyone for urgent care at a mental health clinic.

The irony is that I still consider myself lucky. I did not lose a close family member during the war in the 80s or the revolution of 79. I was not imprisoned or executed because the regime did not like my beliefs.

Well, hold on. That is not entirely true. I did get arrested a few times and spent a couple of nights in a morality police jail cell because I had the audacity to attend a party. Apparently mixed gender dancing was considered a threat to national security.

But compared with what happened to many others, I still count myself among the fortunate ones. Eventually I managed to leave Iran when the opportunity came.

Think about that for a second. What kind of place turns leaving your birthplace forever into an act of good fortune? When exile starts to look like winning the lottery, you know the country has some serious problems.

Now I live in Canada and I am raising my next generation here. And this is where the trauma cocktail shows up with every trigger, usually when you least expect it.

I cry when my daughter scores a crucial three point shot in her school game and the whole gym erupts with boys and girls cheering together. Not only because I am proud of her. Of course I am proud of her. I cried for myself. Why was I robbed of this ordinary feeling? Why was something so simple such a forbidden luxury in my own childhood?

My daughter goes to her university’s St. Patrick’s Day bloc party and the police in the city of Waterloo are busy making sure everyone has a safe and fun weekend. Their job is literally to help the party go smoothly. All I can think about are the house parties we had where morality police raided the place and arrested people simply because boys and girls were in the same room dancing.

Even now I feel uneasy when I see a police car. Fireworks make me instinctively jittery . Talking trash about my elected officials still triggers that ancient reflex that says someone might knock my door and face retribution.

It’s Not Her War

Last night I pointed at the television. The news was showing war again in the Middle East. I asked my daughter, who has never been to Iran, what she thought about what was happening there.

She shrugged.
“Daddy, I know Iran is messed up.”

She grabbed her water bottle and disappeared into her room.

And suddenly I felt conflicted.

Did I fail as a parent? Should I have told her more stories about my life? About what people in Iran have lived through over the past fifty years? Why does my kid not know, or seemingly not care, about what is happening in the country where her parents were born?

But then another voice answers back.

Why should she?

She is an ordinary Canadian teenager. Why should she carry pain and emotional baggage of a place half a world away? Should she feel responsible for her heritage, even if that heritage is soaked in trauma?

How does trauma actually work in a parent?

Trauma is not just a bad memory. It is more like a glitch in how the brain processes threats. When something truly frightening happens, the brain switches into emergency mode. For many people that emergency setting never fully turns off.

The body stores the reaction.

A smell can trigger it.
A sound.
A tone of voice.
A facial expression.
Sometimes even someone’s outfit or uniform.

Because the memory was never processed normally, the brain reacts before conscious thought has time to catch up. If a parent grew up surrounded by fear or instability, they may unknowingly teach their children to be hyper vigilant or emotionally guarded.

These survival habits slowly become family culture. And that is the tricky part. What once helped someone survive can quietly turn into a family tradition that no longer serves anyone.

That is generational trauma.

So should you pass your trauma to the next generation?

There is a real argument for it.

The logic goes like this. If we never speak about what happened, it will haunt us in secret. If we own the story, we control the healing. Some cultures ritualize collective trauma. They turn memory into something intentional.

In Canada many Indigenous communities use healing circles and storytelling as a way to process the trauma of residential schools and colonization. The goal is not to let those experiences disappear into silence.

Jewish communities may have the most structured example of this. Through education, ceremony, and cultural memory they ensure that generations born long after World War II still understand what happened in Europe. The idea is simple. If you forget history, history might feel encouraged to repeat itself.

But there is also a powerful argument against passing trauma forward.

A child’s brain is a sponge. When parents share their trauma, they may accidentally traumatize the child as well. The child can absorb fears and reactions that have nothing to do with their own life. Instead of a fresh start, the child inherits the survivor’s anxieties and triggers. A healthy mind gets infected by an old wound.

There is also the question of identity. A young person should be defined by their own interests, their talents, their dreams. Not by what happened to their great grandfather in Europe in 1945 or what their parents endured under an Islamic regime in Iran.

And there is one more danger. Constantly revisiting past injustice can produce bitterness or something psychologists call learned helplessness. A new generation may start believing they are permanently damaged or disadvantaged before they have even tried to succeed.

There is no clear cut solution for this.

Some traumas shape us so deeply that pretending they never happened is impossible. A child raised by an alcoholic parent might create very strict rules about alcohol for their own kids. That experience becomes part of their parenting compass.

But a parent who grew up under a dictatorship may not actually have much practical advice for a child growing up inside a stable democracy.

All I know is this: Do not dump your trauma on your kids simply to make them more grateful for what they have. Gratitude is a beautiful thing. But it should not arrive wearing the heavy coat of someone else’s nightmares.

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I started this Substack as an outlet for whatever is rattling around in my head. A place to defrag my mental hard drive, make sense of the chaos, and throw those thoughts into the void in case someone out there is wrestling with the same questions. The fact that I jump from one subject to a completely different one is not a feature. It is a diagnosis. My attention span and emotional radar get yanked in every direction by things I care about.

And right now, I do not care about anything more than what is happening in my country of birth, Iran.

People in Iran are done with this shit. No one buys the fairy tale of reform fixing the Islamic regime anymore. With mass killings, more than thirty five thousand people killed just in two days in January 2026, the regime has crossed its Rubicon of its bloody existence. At this point it is globally understood that without foreign support and event military action, this regime is not going anywhere. Any nation willing to get involved naturally wants a smooth transition after the fall of Islamic regime, which means creating a common leadership alternative among the opposition that most Iranians can at least tolerate, if not fully love.

One loud voice in that space is the monarchist movement, centered around the Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah’s son. While he consistently insists on a democratic and non secular system of government, one of his followers most famous slogan is “Death to three corrupt: Mullah, Chapi, Mojahed.” Roughly translated, Death to Islamic ruler, Death to leftists, Death to MEK, a political group built on a bizarre mashup of misunderstood Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.

Mullah and Mojahed listed in the trio of hate for monarchist makes sense. Monarchists blame them for the 1979 downfall of the Shah, and people inside Iran have zero sympathy for either group. The mullahs are the regime people are dying to overthrow. The MEK spent decades managing to be on the wrong side of history at every possible moment, often openly against the Iranian people. That part is clear.

But what exactly is going on with the obsession over hating the left?

Call It What You Want, the Pahlavi Monarchy Was Leftist!

If you define the left as a progressive current that prioritizes progress over tradition, economic equality over inherited privilege, and social justice over moral theater, then the fifty three year run of the first and second Pahlavi dynasty from 1925 to 1979 was not a casual flirtation with leftist ideas. It was a full commitment. By any honest standard, they were practicing what much of the global left was still arguing about.

Free public universities were not a slogan. They were built. The oil industry was nationalized, with all its ups and downs. Social insurance and healthcare systems were created where none had existed before. Vaccination networks reached across the country. Artists were publicly funded because culture was treated as infrastructure, even though some label it cultural hegemony of decadent west. Pension systems covered both public and private sector workers. Land was redistributed away from feudal landlords. Women were given the right to vote in a society that had been told for centuries they should stay silent.

All of this unfolded inside one of the most traditional and deeply religious societies on plant, with all the hassles and roadblocks thrown by Islamist clergies .

So how did we end up here, with modern day monarchists treating the word “left” like it is a contagious disease? The answer may be uncomfortably simple. Their definition of “left” has less to do with policy, outcomes, or history, and more to do with a badly remembered enemy from another era.

Drinking gasoline and calling it whiskey: A quick history of the Iranian left movments

The first organized left leaning political forces in Iran emerged in the 1920s, heavily influenced by Russian revolutionary socialism. Socialist ideas arrived alongside constitutionalism and later took formal shape in communist organizations tied closely to the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Iran came out of this environment, borrowing liberally from Bolshevik movements next door.

In the 1940s, these forces consolidated into the Tudeh Party of Iran, the Party of the Masses. Founded in 1941 after Reza Shah’s abdication, Tudeh became Iran’s strongest communist organization. It aligned itself openly with the Soviet Union and attracted labor organizers, intellectuals, and progressive nationalists. For a short time it operated legally, expanding unions and publications, until the late 1940s.

After an alleged assassination attempt on the Shah in 1949, the party was banned and pushed underground. Despite occasional resurfacing in the 1960s, Tudeh never regained real political influence under the Pahlavi monarchy and never missed an opportunity to prove it functioned more like a foreign branch of Soviet Unions than a national movement.

By the late 1960s, as Shah elected more despotic stance a new generation rejected parliamentary politics altogether and turned to armed struggle. The Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas emerged in 1971, a Marxist Leninist group inspired by global anti imperialist movements. It later fractured into factions, Majority and Minority, Maoist and Guevarist, reflecting ideological chaos rather than clarity.

Things got truly unhinged in the mid 1960s with the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as MEK. They blended Islamic imagery with Marxist rhetoric and somehow convinced themselves this made sense. Their intellectual gymnastics inspired heavily by Ali Shariati teachings, who argued that Marxism could not liberate the Third World and that Islam itself was a revolutionary ideology. According to Shariati, private ownership was the root of all human suffering, and Islam could function as a modern political ideology.

The latter two groups joined forces with Islamist, along with other factors, helped bring down the Pahlavi monarchy in 1979. Once Khomeini consolidated power, he systematically eliminated his former leftist allies. What survived was a hollowed out MEK that fled Iran and found refuge in places like Albania. In modern Iranian politics, the leftist movement is the equivalent of a old and faded skid mark on asphalt after you crash your dad’s car at sixteen. A reminder of a bad decision, not a viable direction.

The collection of this mental shit show is what many Iranians came to know as “The Left.”

Iranian leftist ideology never really delivered for the people. Its energy was a power struggle masquerading as fighting evil of imperialism or fantasizing about a monotheistic classless society (Whatever the hell it is). At best, they were idealists who wanted justice but could not escape deeply ingrained religious conservatism or fanboy fantasies of Stalin. At worst, they were cult-like actors blindly playing their Cold War roles as necessary idiots.

The royal blind spot that cost Shah everything

While they never shied away to be a dictator Mohammad Reza Shah and his father, Reza Shah, were among the most progressive leaders of their era. You could label half their reforms as socialist by any standards. And yet, Mohammad Reza Shah despised the left.

That hatred likely began on February 4, 1949, when Nasser Fakhr Araei, a Tudeh Party member, attempted to assassinate him during a visit to the University of Tehran. The attempt failed. The response did not hesitate. Tudeh was immediately banned.

Sharing a 1,690 kilometer border with the Soviet Union, combined with a long history of Russian interference in Iranian affairs, gave the Shah legitimate reasons to fear leftist movements (You can call it agents of red). Add the expectations of the United States, his primary ally, which wanted Iran to act as a barrier against expansion of communism and soviet access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. During his forty year reign, somewhere between three hundred and four hundred leftist activists were executed.

The Islamist figures, however, had a very different relationship with the Pahlavis. Religious figures held enormous influence over public belief but remained politically adjacent rather than dominant. Until Khomeini, modern Iran had never experienced a religious government. Monarchies understood that deeply religious societies required careful management of clerical power, not confrontation.

Mohammad Reza Shah pushed modernization aggressively, sometimes stepping on traditionalist grand Ayatollah’s toes, especially with reforms like women’s voting rights. But overall, he treated the clergy as allies. One symbolic example says it all. In 1953, he founded the Royal Book of the Year Award, the first of its kind in the Middle East. One of its categories was Islamic philosophy, essentially a peace offering to religious elites in Qom. One of winners this award in later years was Morteza Motahari, a theoretician and a Mullah who would later become one of the architects of the Islamic Republic. He won for his book The Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism. The irony did not stop there. The Shah frequently appeared at major religious events, visited Mashhad and the tomb of 8th Shiite Imman, and insisted on building a large mosque inside the University of Tehran, a symbol of modernity. That same mosque later became a hub for Islamist propaganda during the 1979 revolution.

The Shah fought “the left” obsessively while underestimating the very forces that would destroy him. That was the fatal miscalculation.

Death to three corrupt: Fighting ghosts

The monarchist movement of 2026 crawled out of historical hibernation on the back of real pain, real blood, and real rage. It was fueled by popular uprisings and chants of “Pahlavi will return,” a slogan less about nostalgia and more about desperation for an alternative. That part was organic. Predictable, even. But somewhere along the way, the slogan “Death to three corrupt” took center stage especially among Iranian diaspora. Mullahs, fair enough. MEK, sure, they have earned their permanent exile from relevance. And then there is the left, dragged in like an old enemy from a war that ended decades ago.

This is where things stop making sense. The left being cursed in that chant is not a living political force. It is a fossil. A vague memory of the Tudeh Party, half remembered guerrilla groups, and Cold War paranoia that refuses to die. It is less an ideology and more a superstition, passed down without inspection. The chant treats the left as if it is still lurking in alleyways, plotting revolutions, when in reality it barely exists as an organized force inside Iran or the diaspora.

Reza Pahlavi supporters use this slogan as ideological shorthand, a kind of political compression algorithm. Say it fast, say it loud, and skip the thinking part. But the more it is repeated, the more hollow it sounds. When “socialist” becomes a casual insult, it exposes not confidence but confusion. It raises an uncomfortable question about whether those shouting it actually understand what they are rejecting, or if they are just repeating inherited fears without checking the labels.

This is especially absurd considering history. Free education. Universal healthcare. State backed pensions. Public universities. Cultural funding. These were not Marxist experiments smuggled into Iran. They were core pillars of the Pahlavi modernization of the land. The monarchy did not fall because it was too socialist. If anything, it collapsed while trying to suppress imaginary leftist threats while empowering the forces that actually replaced it.

In this framework, ideology matters far less than loyalty. Question inherited legitimacy and you are instantly branded a leftist. Ask for democratic guarantees before pledging allegiance and you are upgraded to socialist, or even Marxist, without the courtesy of a definition. The words stop describing ideas and start functioning as warnings.

When ideology is reduced to a loyalty test, it loses all meaning. What survives is a familiar authoritarian reflex, the need to discipline dissent by naming it, isolating it, and shouting it down. In the end, this is not a rejection of leftist thought. It is a quiet reproduction of the same instincts monarchists insist they are fighting against, just with different slogans and better tailored suits.

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Iran’s Islamic regime crossed a line during the January 2026 popular uprising, and once you cross a line like that, history does not let you walk back. In just three days at the peak of the crackdown, the regime reportedly murdered more than 20,000 unarmed protestors and injured tens of thousands more. These are not abstract numbers. These were people with morning routines, unfinished texts, half lived plans. The full scale of this massacre is still unknown because the regime pulled the plug on the internet and international communications across the entire country, a silence that continues even now. Yet the few videos and personal accounts that escaped were enough. Enough to shock the world. Stories rivaled the death and destruction of Siege of Leningrad by German and heroism that reduce Anne Frank’s diary as a footnote. Enough to trigger an outpouring of solidarity that felt overdue and painfully insufficient at the same time.

This uprising did not come out of nowhere. It is another chapter in a long, bruising story of people fed up with how they live under Islamic regime. In 2009, the Green Movement erupted after widespread allegations of a stolen election during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection. In 2019, Aban e Khounin, Bloody November, followed a sudden 200 to 300 percent overnight increase in fuel prices. The regime responded by opening fire indiscriminately, killing around 1,500 people and throwing the country into an internet blackout. In 2023 came Woman, Life, Freedom movement ignited by the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini in so called Morality Police custody. That moment was not just protest, it was a rupture. A total rejection of compulsory hijab and the clerical system itself, led by Gen Z and women who had already decided they had nothing left to lose. With each uprising, the message has become clearer while the violence has grown more savage. They want the Islamic regime gone. Not reformed. Gone.

Late December 2025 and early January 2026 marked something new. For the first time, this uprising had a foreign backer, at least in words. The United States Administration officially announced “Keep Protesting, help is on its way” . The twelve days of war during the Iran Israel conflict in the summer of 2025, including US strikes on enrichment facilities inside Iran, did something unexpected. It stripped away a myth. Everyday Iranians saw how exposed and fragile the regime really is when confronted by foreign power who is determined. That realization changed the emotional math. On top of that shocking arrest of Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, and his wife from deep inside his heavily defended compound in Caracas by US forces captured Iranian’s imagination. This is why many Iranians and members of the Persian diaspora around the world now look outward for military option to break the regime’s grip. To outsiders, it sounds unthinkable. To many Iranians, it feels like the last door left unlocked.

This is why people are not just tolerating foreign military action inside Iran, they are hoping for it. Not humanitarian aid. Not statements. They want surgical and targeted missile, fighter jet or drone attacks. Anything that dismantles the system’s command centers. People track US carrier strike groups moving toward the Middle East with a kind of desperate reverence, like watching the horizon for rescue ships that may never arrive. They refresh Flightradar website obsessively, waiting for Iranian airspace to clear, interpreting empty skies as a sign that maybe, finally, something is about to change.

Persia, The mean street of the old world

Persia, today’s Iran, was never colonized the way India or many parts of Africa were owned by empire, but it has rarely been left alone. The land has been conquered, invaded, and reshaped by outsiders who made decisions on behalf of the nation, often with catastrophic consequences. From Alexander the Great’s invasion between 334 and 330 BC, which collapsed the Achaemenid Empire, to the Arab Muslim invasion of 633 AD that ended ancient Persia and replaced Zoroastrianism with Islam. From the Mongol devastation under Genghis Khan and Hulagu to Timur’s campaigns that followed. Even in the twentieth century, Iran was not spared. British and Soviet forces occupied the country during World War II to cut Nazi’s access to resources, forcing Reza Shah Pahlavi to abdicate and installed his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi has his successor. Then came Operation Ajax, the CIA and UK backed coup removed democratly elected Mohammad Mossadegh, the hero who nationalized Iran’s oil industry, and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Shah who fled the country and, by many accounts, wasted Iran’s best chance at democratic future.

Even the rise of the Islamic regime is, at least partially, blamed on America’s abandonment of the Shah, an arrangement that allowed Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic Republic to take root. History taught Iranians to distrust foreign powers. That is what makes the present moment so tragic and so revealing.

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Why do many Iranians, despite long history of back stabbing, openly call for US/Israeli military intervention?

Because despair rewires logic.

A major mistake is assuming all Iranians want foreign military help. They do not. Many are deeply opposed to it, precisely because of historical trauma. They want change from within, not another externally engineered future. They feel anger when foreign leaders speak loudly and then disappear quietly. They have learned what empty promises sound like.

But there are others, many others, who have reached a breaking point.

There is a Persian proverb that says the cat does not catch mice for God’s sake. No one believes foreign powers act out of kindness. But when the house is on fire, you stop asking why the water truck showed up and how much it cost. When the regime is killing tens of thousands, cutting off communication, erasing entire neighborhoods from the map of the living, people stop thinking in terms of ideology and start thinking in terms of survival. Survival is the one language Iranians have been forced to become fluent in.

If an external force could stop the slaughter, even temporarily, that hope becomes intoxicating. When foreign leaders condemn the regime publicly, people cling to the idea that words might finally turn into action. This is not betrayal. This is exhaustion. Asking for foreign boots on the ground does not automatically make someone a traitor to homeland. For some, it feels like the last act of loyalty to a nation that is bleeding out.

This may be Iran’s moment to invent its own version of “Never Again

“Never Again,” Od Lo Od in Hebrew, was never meant to be a comforting slogan. It was a declaration born from the catastrophic failure of the international community to protect Jewish Europeans during the Holocaust. It was framed from abandonment. From the realization that no one was coming. It rejected victimhood and evolved into radical self reliance, then into preemptive action against perceived existential threats. Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor is often cited as an early expression openly state support of this doctrine. In his book Rise and Kill First Ronen Bergman’s lays bare how this philosophy translated into a machinery of targeted violence since birth of the state of Israel. It shows what “Never Again” looks like when it becomes policy.

At its core, the doctrine says this: you cannot trust the world to save you. History proves it. But the cost of this approach is immense. It demands a massive military industrial complex and normalizes constant violence in the name of prevention.

What can future Iran do not to ever see itself needed foreign military to save the country?

Iran’s “Never Again” does not have to follow that path . The Persian version of Never Again does not need to be written in blood or inforce by bullets . It can be written in stability, competence, and integration. Iran can choose to become indispensable rather than feared. Prosperity can be deterrence. A country that is central to energy flows, a safe and reliable transit corridors and technological ecosystems becomes too important to collapse quietly. The world would not protect Iran out of affection. It would protect Iran because its own economies, pensions, and futures are tied to Iranian stability.

And maybe that is the most powerful ending imaginable. An Iran that no longer waits to be saved. An Iran that survives not by threatening the world or begging for bullets, but by becoming essential to it. An Iran where “Never Again” does not mean mighty military, but the quiet, stubborn refusal to ever be dragged back into the dark again.

All of this can only be imagined after this murderous Islamic regime is gone. Not repackaged. Not softened. Not reborn under a new logo. Gone for good.

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Why don’t we learn from history? Power and incentives, Selective memory and “historical amnesia”, even Cognitive limits. Many reasons. One of them is that historical records and accounts are spotty at best. There is no solid documented evidence for most of human history and even when records exist they were often doctored, hand picked, or outright ordered by whoever held power. History is mostly propaganda, not memory.

But now that every part of human life is recorded in multiple formats, commented from different points of view and shared on the internet to stay there forever, this problem should be gone. Right?Heck no.

What if nobody feels responsible to keep the treasure trove of data? What if nobody has any use for gazillions of terabytes of archival material? Storage costs money. Attention costs money. If data doesn’t earn its keep, it gets evicted.

This is not hypothetical. It’s already happening.

Here is an example: Sports Illustrated was the pinnacle of sports journalism. Founded in 1954, right when sports media was becoming a serious thing, it was the first sports magazine to reach one million in circulation. Until 2018 it belonged to Time Inc. With sport fans losing their appetite to buy magazines and their focus to read long formats, it went downhill fast. It changed hands multiple times,even lost its publishing license temporarily in 2024, laid off almost everyone, and now exists on life support.

Jeff Pearlman, sportswriter and author of multiple New York Times bestselling sports books, worked at SI for seven years. He once said: “When I worked at SI, they had in their New York City building the greatest sports library you’ll ever see. Ever. This enormous room with columns after columns of folders, alphabetized. If you wanted articles about Mickey Mantle, there were five different folders. And not just articles. Notes. Reporters’ notes. You might find a coffee receipt stapled to a Mickey Mantle report.”

Pearlman said he once complimented a higher up about the library. The response was casual, almost bored: “Yeah… we probably have to sell it off pretty soon. Break it up or destroy it.”

Destroy it! Possibly the largest archive of sports history ever.

Why? Pablo Torre, another former SI writer and podcaster now, explained it plainly. “SI had something called the Vault. A long form archive. There was also the physical library in the office and an online archive. None of it was monetizable under the logic of young people don’t read or watch long things anymore.”

Monetizable is the key word.

Problem is shifted from how to capture history to who pays to keep it

Humanity no longer has a data collection problem. We are masters at collecting, categorizing, tagging, and recording information. The problem is that we only keep what benefits us right now in the form of money or control. Not what might matter later to someone we can not sell subscription. Future generations may desperately need to understand how we lived, thought, and where we mocked it all up.

Humanity no longer has a data-collection problem. We’re exceptionally good at capturing, categorizing, tagging, and storing information. The problem is what we choose to keep. We preserve data that generates money or power now, not what might matter later to people we’ll never be able to sell subscription. Future generations may urgently need to understand how we lived, how we thought, and where we got it wrong—but those records are the first to be discarded.

Sport teams aren’t collecting tiniest details of the game for the good of history of the sport. They collect it to find ways to win. Winning means more money for teams, leagues, sponsors, and broadcasters. The same data is sold to gambling companies who pay obscene amounts for precise inputs to protect the house by calculating up to milisecond winning odds for each props. This information will survive only as long as it remains profitable.

Personal data follows the same logic. The world’s largest corporations work day and night to understand our desires, fears, habits and beliefs through our online activities on their free search, social and communication platforms. They don’t wish to build the most accurate sociological record of mankind’s behavior for future historians, but to sell us stuff and influence how we think.

If data couldn’t be sold, social media wouldn’t exist. Even OpenAI which started as an absolute non profit turned to money making behemoth the second figured how to turn bits to dollars and dirhams. The minute these companies can’t find buyers for our behavioral exhaust, that’s when the servers go dark. Utility bills stop getting paid. Hardware gets scrapped. Buildings get sold. The record of our lives disappears like the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

The cost of holding on to data

I used to think streaming services like Netflix would eventually become the world’s archive of films and the most prestigious museum of art of motion picture. Add enough movies and shows and, over time, you accidentally preserve human film history.

I was wrong.

Every now and them I get emails warning me that this is my last chance to watch a certain movie or show before it leaves Netflix. Leaves to where? Are they deleting it? Apparently not but, depending on licensing situation and demand the show goes where all shows go to die. As per Netflix it moves the Asset from streaming server to internal archive server. It’s the closest thing to deleting the assetized title. Now, what if the cost of archiving assetized titles is no longer justifiable? Youtube calls this video hospice “Cold Storage” This is where older and less watched videos end their lives. There is no forever guarantee in Youtube user agreement promises.

It’s retail logic. Like journey of a fresh pair of sneakers. First the flagship store. Then smaller shops. Then outlet malls. Then bulk shipments to TJ Maxx. Then overseas. Then recycling.

Movies nobody pays to watch follow the same path. They don’t get archived. They fade into lesser known streamer and die quietly. Maybe only a future historian will want to watch 1982 Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Good luck finding a playable copy if you live in the year 2226.

If preserving humanity’s data is treated purely as a monetization problem, there will be no incentive to keep information that can’t be “used.” Imagine if Egyptian pharaohs hadn’t believed they should look rich in the afterlife and had scrapped all the stuff they owned before they die. Artifacts without obvious value would have vanished. In that case our understanding of ancient Egypt wouldn’t be a civilization—it would be hearsay.

How do we exit the Collect-sell-consume-delete/lost cycle of data

I don’t know enough to propose a precise technical solutions but years of working in public and private organizations make a few paths obvious.

Data as public infrastructure

Treat key datasets like roads or transit. Lets fund them collectively and maintain them accessible for everyone. We already do this with universities and open data programs. A Wikipedia style archive as a public utility is not radical. It’s overdue. Let’s build the library of Alexandria once again.

Less burdensome storage

Assets like Wikipedia are one failed fundraiser away from disappearing. The Internet Archive is one administration policy shift away from being turned off. We need storage solutions that reduce financial fragility. Cheaper, longer term, lower maintenance systems. Solar powered, autonomous, off planet if you want. Yes, it sounds like Skynet. But fragility is the bigger risk.

Incentives beyond monetization

Preservation needs non market incentives. Scientific reproducibility. Legal accountability. Cultural identity. Community memory. Grants, philanthropy, and regulation can keep data alive even when it doesn’t generate profit.

Micro level action

Use durable formats. Back up data in multiple locations. Contribute to institutional repositories. Support local archives. Preservation doesn’t only happen at scale. It also happens because individuals refuse to let things disappear.

The history of our time doesn’t vanish because it wasn’t recorded. It vanishes because it wasn’t profitable enough to keep. Because nobody could turn it into a product, a dashboard, a betting line, or a growth dividend for stockholders. Because it didn’t move ads, could not be used by AI models, didn’t trend, didn’t convert.

What survives is not what mattered most, but what fit the business model of its time. The rest gets labeled dead weight. Old folders. Long articles. Unclicked videos. Unwatched films. Data without a customer. Memory without a sponsor.

Future historians won’t ask why we didn’t know better. They’ll ask why we knew so much and chose to forget anyway. Why we built perfect machines to record everything, then trained those machines to delete anything that didn’t pay rent

Empires used to burn libraries to erase rivals. We do something more efficient. We let invoices pile up. We let licenses expire. We let servers go dark. No flames, no villains, no drama. Just a quiet “this content is no longer available.”

And when the record disappears, we’ll tell ourselves it was inevitable. That storage was expensive. That nobody was watching. That no one cared. But that’s the lie we tell after the damage is done.

The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable. We didn’t lose our history. We priced it out.

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Every January, people swear they’ll read more books—right after they sign up for a gym they won’t see by March. They want to get off their phones and get more intimate with books. But if the companionship of books is not something you grow up with, it’s hard. Books don’t magically become friends at fifty five just because you bought a tote bag from an indie bookstore.

There are skills, hobbies, and obsessions you pick up, or at least get comfortable with, when you are a kid. A lot of my friends play piano in their 50s. I like the idea of learning an instrument and I don’t feel dumb, but it looks like a massive undertaking. All my piano playing friends grew up in households where learning piano was a non-negotiable part of membership, like brushing your teeth or knowing where the light switches are.

For me, the skill I picked up in childhood was being comfortable with books. Reading. Having books around. Collecting them and what not. I learned to translate my interests into books. I loved cars and basketball as a kid, and later translated that love into reading and collecting books about what I already cared about. For me, books were a vessel. A form of entertainment. Not an objective to conquer.

What is the biggest impediment to picking up books if you’re not into reading?

The biggest hurdle is the advice people keep repeating. All you hear is “Go to the library or bookstore and pick up any book you like and read it cover to cover.” I am not saying it is wrong, but it is simplified to the point of being useless.

I see many downsides to this approach. First, it assumes people know what they like. Beginners usually don’t. Second, it somehow manages to make things worse. It turns reading into a test of discipline. “Cover to cover” frames reading as endurance, not curiosity. It overvalues completion and undervalues engagement. I’m not even going to get into cognitive fatigue or the uncomfortable truth that a lot of books are just not good. We already know this advice doesn’t work.

So, what do we do?

First, decouple being a reader from finishing books. Not all books are meant to be read cover to cover, or listened to, in the case of audiobooks, in their entirety. Kick out the endurance part and explicitly allow quitting. Encourage sampling. Don’t feel bad about owning a book where you only read your favorite three chapters and ignore the rest like they don’t exist.

Start with shorter wins. Short stories. Excerpts of actual books. Articles. A few page comic book stories. Even podcasts. Be format agnostic. Paper books, ebooks, comic novels, audiobooks, and now even Dolby ATMOS audio recreations. Surround yourself with reading material. That’s what I did, to be honest that was what my dad did.

I don’t look at books as one big category. I sort them into different classes, each with its own purpose and its own treatment routine.

Class One: Books that are not for reading!

I have books that are mostly decorative works of art. They sit somewhere between collectibles and toys. If you read them too much, you ruin them. Pop up books are technically books, but they are closer to sculpture than text. You can read what’s printed on their pages, but their real job is to exist, look interesting, and occasionally spark conversation among friends.

Class Two: Books you enjoy having

These are books that beautify. Lots of pictures, very little text. They connect to things you love or things that trigger nostalgia. You don’t need to read these books cover to cover. Just have them around and enjoy them as objects that quietly announce who you are without saying a word.

Class Three: Books you like to read, but not necessarily all of

Books are not your plate at the family dinner table when you where a kid. You don’t need to finish your plate including all the vegetables. Read any part you like. Read it again. Leave the rest untouched forever if you want. There are books you need to read, but not completely, and there is no moral failure attached to that.

Class Four: Books you read cover to cover and that’s it

Novels, biographies, comic books. Read them cover to cover, but never force yourself to finish them on a tight schedule. If you have a hard copy, fold it, tear the corners as bookmarks, abuse it. Coffee spills are welcome. Chicken wing stains are part of the experience.

These are books you can read or listen to multiple times. If you don’t feel like stopping to make notes, that’s fine. In a few months, you will forget the plot. Also fine. Never feel bad that in two years you don’t remember anything from the Steve Jobs biography or your favorite fantasy mega series. Nobody is tracking this. Enjoy it and move on.

Class Five: Books you want to read and re-read and read again

Nobody is giving out medals for the number of books you read in your life. There are books you read and reread and read again. These books are like watching Die Hard movies at Christmas. There is no shame to delve into adventure at Nakatomi plaza. Nobody asks why you’re watching the same movie again since 1988, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation. These books are mental floss. Your favorite song. Your escape hatch from a loud world.

Class Six: Books you need to devour, not just read

Books in the class don’t show up often. They change how you think. They answer questions you’ve been carrying for years without realizing you were asking them. These aren’t books you read, enjoy, and quietly shelve.

Treat them like coursework. Take each chapter slowly. Reread. Skip around. Look things up. Write notes. Condense those notes and let them raise new questions. Take your time. If you spend months on the same book, that’s not a failure—it’s usually a sign the book is doing its job.

I used to scribble in the margins. Then I moved to Google Keep and Notion. Now I break books apart using NotebookLM. I feed the book in as a source, build mind maps to move through ideas, create infographics, even make quizzes to test myself. I keep every note and come back to it. At that point, the book stops being something I “finished” and turns into an ongoing conversation.

Disassociate the phrase “reading books” from just “reading.” Read anything. Liner notes. Manuals. Long essays. Instruction sheets you accidentally opened and now can’t stop reading. Consume information in written or visual form without asking whether it qualifies as a proper book experience.

Disassociate the word “book” from something sacred that comes with invisible rules and quiet judgment. A book is not a contract. It is a container. Some containers you sip from, some you snack from, and some you live off for months. Surround yourself with books of every type and let them sit there, half read, unread, reread, and abused.

If you learn to love curiosity first, the rest takes care of itself. Comfort with reading sneaks in quietly. The love of books shows up without an announcement. One day you look around and realize you didn’t become a reader by finishing more books. You became one by staying interested.

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I have never experienced such a global hostility toward immigrants in my life. Even in countries built by immigrants and destined to wither without immigration. Places where new members of society are the lifeblood of almost everything good about them. That contradiction alone made me want to write my thoughts here, however disjointed, just to capture how it feels in a Q&A style.

For me and my family, immigration is nothing new. My parents were born in a small town in the south of Iran and migrated to the capital in pursuit of higher education and a better life. When I was a teenager, my older brother moved to Europe to study, ended up raising a family, and eventually became a European senior citizen. I got married and moved to Canada myself. I am lucky to live in one of the best and most diverse cities in the world. Almost nobody is originally from here, and that is precisely why it works a one of the most favored metropolitan in the world.

I want to try to compose some answers to dismantle common questions, attacks, and slander hurled toward immigrants everywhere these days. Even by other immigrants!

“If you want < Any new or misunderstood tradition or habit>, why come here? Stay back and do that.”

Migration is not an immediate mental or cultural reset. Even European settlers who escaped religious oppression at home built churches in the New World as the first thing they did. For them, church was the monument that gave their community an essence of identity. It was their flag of existence not what they escaped from. They brought their weird games, strange foods, bizarre outfits and peculiar habits with them. People who ask this question assume countries are museums, frozen permanently at the version they personally like, not living systems. People don’t migrate to preserve the past. They migrate into societies that explicitly claim to value innovation, freedom, and progress, and bringing both the good and the bad of the past can actually be part of that progress.

There are countries that are monolithic culture and make no claim of openness. I don’t believe those are among the top destinations for immigrants. But if a country advertises itself as open, dynamic, and democratic, then new ideas and traditions are not intrusions. They are the point. Telling people to stay back is really an admission that the speaker is afraid of change, not that change is illegitimate.

“This is a < Any religion> country. Go back to your own.”

This confuses history with ownership. Many countries have religious roots, but modern citizenship is not a sacrament. It is a legal and civic contract. If belonging depends on belief, then the country has already abandoned equality under the law. At that point, it is no longer a democracy. It is a gated identity club pretending to be a nation state. Don’t get me wrong, there are countries like that, and they are not subtle about it, but the data shows those are usually the countries people migrate from.

Also, religion itself has never been static or geographically pure. Faiths migrate, evolve, split, recombine, and argue with themselves endlessly. Just look at the explosion of Christian sects when European moved to the New World. If purity were the goal, shut down the borders today.

“The fact that you’re a citizen doesn’t mean you’re really A <Name a Country>.”

What is the criteria to prove someone is from somewhere? Geographical Birth place? Certain Genetics? Adopting traditions? Arguing for bloodlines, geography and genetics over law is one of the lowest debates out there. Unless explicitly stated in law, and in many countries it is, immigration and genetics are separate categories. Citizenship is the highest formal definition of belonging a modern state has. Only fools buy into the idea that because I play hockey, I am more Canadian than you.

If citizenship through naturalization is not enough, then nothing ever will be. Language, accent, skin color, ancestry. And when a tragedy happens, even in countries that define citizenship strictly by birthplace, suddenly a locally born bad person with the wrong skin color or religion is questioned. Belonging becomes conditional overnight.

These standards are intentionally impossible to satisfy, and the goalposts move no matter how much immigrants adopt their new home’s traditions. Once you declare citizenship unreal or insufficient, you undermine the entire system holding a country together. Why obey laws, pay taxes, or serve the public if legal membership is meaningless. Either citizenship matters, or the nation is just a tribe with paperwork. You don’t get both.

“Don’t bring your problems here.”

Tech leaders want to send their AI chips to space because space is cold and chips get too hot. Imagine telling the chips, don’t bring your earthly thermal problems here. I mean, space. This argument assumes the host country exists outside global cause and effect. In reality, many so called foreign problems are directly connected to international policies, economic extraction, wars, climate emissions, and global supply chains that wealthy countries benefit from. I won’t get into blame game, but people don’t carry chaos in their luggage. They carry consequences. And global problems are, in fact, the main driver behind immigration.

Even when problems are personal, poverty, repression, instability, that is exactly what immigration systems are for. Selection, integration, contribution. The expectation is not purity. It is participation. Demanding immigrants arrive flawless is dishonest. No society was built by people with no problems. It was built by people willing to work through them.

“You’re only here for benefits or handouts.”

This accusation collapses under data and logic. Immigrants overwhelmingly work, usually the jobs nobody wants, pay taxes, and contribute more over time than they receive, often while being excluded from full benefits for years. Look at where immigration authorities search for undocumented immigrants. Soup kitchen lines. No. They raid workplaces, usually the hardest and least glamorous ones. If welfare were the incentive, the math would not work. Migration is expensive, risky, and disruptive. Nobody uproots their life for a modest safety net.

What this claim really expresses is resentment, not economics. It’s like going back to the 1621 Plymouth harvest feast and accusing the Pilgrims of showing up just for the food. It frames immigrants as takers to avoid confronting harder truths like labor shortages, aging populations, and systems that rely on newcomers to function. If benefits are the problem, fix the system. Blaming immigrants is a shortcut for people unwilling to do the math.

“You should be grateful and stop criticizing this country.”

This is pretzel logic, shout out to Steely Dan. If immigrants are supposed to be silent and avoid healthy democratic discussion, how exactly are they meant to become real citizens. Rents are too high, groceries are expensive, life is hard. These are not new complaints invented by newcomers. They were here long before us.

Gratitude is not silence, and loyalty is not obedience. Democracies do not survive on praise. They survive on accountability. Criticism is not ingratitude. It is contribution. People who do not care do not criticize. They disengage. Immigrants who speak up are acting like stakeholders, not guests.

That said, I will give you this. If the criticism targets the core values of the host country, that suggests the person picked the wrong place to move. The weather is too cold, standard Canadian bickering. Too many Asians in public places! Why do people with different sexual orientation have rights! These are attacks on core values like equality, diversity, and mutual respect. You don’t like gay Asians in parkas? Maybe Toronto is not for you.

Immigration is not a glitch in the system. It is the system working as designed (with all its flaws and built in racism, ageism and out right unfairness in many cases), even when it makes people uncomfortable. Countries that attract newcomers are not being invaded. They are being chosen. That distinction matters more than most slogans ever will.

The attacks aimed at immigrants are rarely about policy, numbers, or capacity. They are about anxiety, nostalgia, and the fear that the world is changing without asking permission from people who arrived earlier. Immigrants just happen to be standing closest to that fear, so they absorb it. Blaming them feels easier than admitting that economies shift, cultures evolve, and no generation gets to freeze time at its preferred moment.

Every society that thrives today was once accused of being too new, too mixed, too unfamiliar. Every tradition people claim to defend was once imported, adapted, borrowed or straight up sacreligious. The idea of a pure, untouched nation is comforting, but it is also fiction, and not a very good one.

If citizenship means anything, it means shared responsibility. To work, to pay, to argue, to complain, to build, and yes, to criticize. Immigrants do all of that. Not because they are guests trying to be polite, but because they are participants trying to belong. That is not something to fear. That is how countries stay alive.

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Michael Rapaport, C-Lister Hollywood actor, sport documentary filmmaker, and loud mouth podcaster, coined the word Skinny JeanIfication when described the new NBA culture. He was not talking about the fashion sense of NBA pregame outfits. His point was about the removal of roughness and the rise of a more gentle style of game where the slightest contact can draw a foul. Rapaport, who never mentally left the dog eat dog, blood and sweat era of the 80s NBA, uses Skinny Jeanification as a bad thing. He wants to see blood, animosity, and players ripping each other apart if referees allow it.

I do not totally disagree with the man, but I believe the less bloody version of sport has its own set of upsides. That’s why I don’t use his term and maybe invent Sissification as a new jargon.

Nobody Needed Sports

At the beginning there were no sports. There was survival and developing skills so you did not die. Running so you could hunt or escape. Throwing because missing meant starving. Wrestling because dominance mattered. When civilizations formed, the motive shifted. Sport became a display of strength, discipline, and status. The Egyptians boxed and wrestled. The Greeks formalized everything with the Olympics, turning raw physical contests into structured events with rules, judges, and national pride. Rome twisted it further. Sport became spectacle, entertainment, and political distraction on a massive scale.

After that, sports kept evolving for the same reason everything else evolves. Humans hate chaos and love hierarchy. Medieval Europe obsessed over combat sports because it fit their worldview and their power structures.

The industrial era created something that used to belong only to the elite and handed it to the masses: Spare time. In Britain they codified rules for modern games like soccer, cricket, and rugby because factories needed order, and free time created a demand for organized competition. Places like YMCA were tasked with finding ways to burn the excess energy of unruly young folks who, left alone, would absolutely up to no good. That is how we got basketball and volleyball.

Everyone Needs Sport

The first democratic sport, a sport for all genders and ages, was walking. People in the 1800s might not have called it a sport, but the reality was that everyone was walking everywhere. Then came something new fangled invention in the 1880s to 1900s. The bicycle. It exploded because women embraced it, turning it into a symbol of freedom, mobility, and early feminism. Kids rode. Adults rode. Seniors rode. Whole families rode. It was the first time you could see every age group doing the same physical activity for the same reasons.

In the early 1900s, swimming became the thing. Public pools made it accessible. Schools taught it. Cities funded it. This was probably the first sport where all ages truly participated in massive numbers. Then came the jogging boom in the 1970s. Running became a lifestyle. People young and old jogged together, and suddenly it was normal for sport to mean something other than hard competition or elite training.

Sport Industry Was Born

But as soon as sport transformed from people casually moving their bodies into the giant entertainment industry we see today, something shifted. A fork in the road appeared. Sport arrived at a three way junction and split into three branches. The normal version, the extreme version, and the version for the sissys. Take rock climbing. We have official climbing with ropes, belayers, and safety equipment. The nature version where people climb real rock faces. Then you have the nature version without rope, without protection, where one slip means game over. And on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, you have the rock climbing treadmill. A vertical conveyor belt with climbing holds attached. As you “climb”, the wall moves down at a set speed so you stay in the same place. Zero elevation gain. Zero danger. Zero chance of leaving an orphan.

The extreme versions are mostly for entertainment. They are great to watch but not exactly promoting public participation. In this piece I am focusing on the mellow version of every sport and why they are great.

What is Sissification of sport?

I used to play basketball as a semi pro in my college days. In my forties I joined a group of pickup ballers, most of whom had limited or absolutely zero organized basketball background. It took sometime for me to call our weekly balling sessions runs not practices or games. I had never played unorganized ball myself, so I did not know their world. The first thing they told me was that if you do not have enough players and go four on four, any pass to a fast breaker over the centerline is illegal. That was my first encounter with the sissified version of basketball. Then they added no chase down blocks, no charging, and no running jump while defending a layup in the air. What remained of basketball was a bunch of older men passing the ball and shooting set shots.

Now in my mid fifties I thank the God of basketball that the sissified version exists, because my entire purpose is to walk back to my car on my own legs, not on a stretcher.

So I want to breakdown these mellow versions into categories.

Miniature version of an existing sport

Some of these sports are simply smaller versions of a bigger sport. Sometimes you shrink the playing area, sometimes you shrink the number of players, and sometimes you shrink both. Table tennis is the obvious example. It is basically tennis if tennis had a caffeine overdose and started living on a table. You can say the same for futsal compared to soccer. Smaller space, tighter moves, faster decisions. These versions are not lesser, they are just more compact. They take the spirit of the original and remove the physical tax that scares off older bodies and casual players. Miniaturized sports keep the fun and ditch the injuries. There is a reason so many retirees play pickleball instead of chasing full court tennis rallies. Their knees simply do not sign that contract anymore.

Mellow Versions

These sports strip out the ego-heavy parts—the brute strength, the explosive power—and keep the pieces anyone can do at any fitness level. Think about Putting Golf. Smashing a ball 290 yards down the fairways is for the freakishly gifted or obsessively trained. But almost anyone, at any age, can practice the slow, controlled art of rolling a tiny ball ten metres into an even tinier hole. The barrier drops, the game stays. You’re leaning on jokes without tightening the logic. Clean it up, keep the punch, remove the fluff, and stop talking to the reader like they need baby steps.

Speed is where most sports betray you. Agility, power, fast-twitch heroics—that’s the stuff that destroys joints. You can’t reasonably expect a 60-year-old to sling a fastball without risking a week in physio. So how do you keep older players in the game? You slow the entire thing down on purpose. That’s the genius of Wiffle ball. It’s baseball with the danger dialed way down. The hollow, slotted ball kills your velocity no matter how hard you try to crank it—like dropping Michael Phelps into a pool of molasses. Same principle behind one of the fastest-growing sports on the planet: pickleball. Slow the projectile, shorten the court, lower the physical cost—and suddenly entire generations can play the same game again.

Hybridization and Creating Alternatives

The goal of some of these sports might not be slowing the pace or preventing injuries .It’s often more about accessibility and equipment. Take ultimate frisbee, for example: it’s basically golf without golf clubs or a golf course. With a little creativity, you could even play it in a park using trash cans as targets. Staying on the golf theme, there’s footgolf. All you need is a football and some designated “holes”—or targets—to aim for from set distances. I didn’t even know footgolf existed until recently, but I realized I used to play something very similar in my elementary schoolyard, using backpacks as makeshift goals and trying to kick the soccer ball through them.

Then the version that is not even pretending to be the original

These are some of the funniest ones. I’m not even sure what the point of these “sports” is, but the people who do them clearly have a blast. Take Hobby Horsing—yes, it’s real. No horses involved, just athletes jumping hurdles while riding a wooden or stick horse. This quirky activity originated in Finland and has gained recognition as a sport, particularly popular in Scandinavia, Germany, and the UK. Strangely, participants—mostly young people—perform movements and techniques similar to real equestrian disciplines like show jumping and dressage. Other oddball examples in this category include baton twirling, Parkour-lite (obstacle-based dance sports), and artistic cycling.

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Sissified sports are not an insult. They are a response to reality

Healthy people age. Bodies get stiff. Risk tolerance plummets. Time becomes precious. And here is the truth nobody likes saying out loud. If people only had access to the brutal, full throttle versions of their favorite sports, most of them would stop playing altogether by age I am, if not earlier.

These low risk, low impact sports tear down the age and fitness barrier that eventually kicks every athlete in the teeth. As a lifelong baller, I cannot imagine the day my body taps me on the shoulder and says you are no longer built for this. I know that day is coming. Bodies have no mercy. But I refuse to be pushed out of a gym or off a court just because my knees hit their expiration date. I want to be involved in anything that even smells like basketball. Throwing a ball into a net in any shape or form is something I will always sign up for. Maybe it is ego. Maybe it is identity. Maybe it is both. I built a big part of who I am on being a baller. I want to keep buying sneakers that I swear I will hoop in. I want the gym bags, the basketball shorts, the little rituals that make me feel connected to the game. And when I get older, I will happily show up for whatever version of basketball is left for me, even if it looks ridiculous now. If it keeps me on a court a couple times a week, if it gives me even a small taste of the game I grew up with, then that is enough.

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By now you have all seen that viral clip of the frazzled professors losing his mind, banging his head against a wall, screaming at flabbergasted students to never use ChatGPT. Will that stop fresh minds from using the most tempting technology ever invented? No chance.

In this piece I am unpacking how I use of AI in different stages of my writing workflow for Substack and why I think anyone who wants to benefit from AI should do the same.

Why some creator may be reluctant to use AI

We have all been there. Fountain pen aficionados once warned that ballpoint pens would ruin the exquisite art of penmanship. Adobe Illustrator was supposedly going to destroy the craft of image making. Digital cameras were the death of photography. MP3s were the end of reel to reel magic. None of that happened.
Alright, maybe penmanship took a hit, but not because of cheap plastic pens. Typing took over.

To me the value of art or any product of creative process is not about the choice of tool. It is not about how hard something is to create or how much pain suffering the creator endured. It is about success that piece is to communicate information and express emotions to intended audience.

But AI is different from pens, keyboards and cameras. Keyboard, pen and digital camera dont have the mind of their own to create something out of nothing. Once you know how to use them they produce exactly what you want. AI is a different machine. If you do not tame it, it will grab the steering wheel and take off on its own to a place you have no idea where. The final product might look human, but it may not be what the writer, painter or musician ever intended. The audience loses the connection to the person behind the work. This is where we end up with a slop.

The key is knowing how to discipline AI tool so it helps create what YOU want. Preserve YOUR own tone. Not just a mimicry of A human tone. Elevate what YOUR brain is trying to articulate.

Here is my writing workflow and where I employ AI to help:

Step One: Form The Idea.
Usually it starts with a question. A challenge. An irony. A common belief that has lost its vigor. Conflicting thoughts. Sometimes I challenge my own long held beliefs. The idea might spark anywhere: staring out the commuter train window, walking the dog, in the shower, hoovering my room while listening to a sport podcasts or laughing with buddies over a few pints.

Step Two: Kick It Off Old School.
Here comes my mental dump. Pen and paper first. No rules. No spell-check. No tidy paragraphs. Just a reckless flood of thoughts pouring straight from the brain onto the page. Some pieces arrive in one furious burst; others drip out slowly over days. Either way, the goal is the same: empty the mind before shaping the message.

Step Three: Here comes the AI, sort of
I started researching what I wrote with AI help. Testing the strength of the columns of this literary cathedral I am building (What a grandiose metaphor! I always wanted to use this phrase). Things like: Is modern Europe the birthplace of racism or is it much older? Why do some Republicans hate electric cars? What I discover can sway the original idea in new directions, which means go back to step two for more mental dumping. I’m still not typing the full article yet.

Step four: give the mind a shape.
Still pen and paper. I draw a mind map or flow diagram to structure the piece. Where to start, how to build the argument, where to drop the big piece of the puzzle, and how to package everything into one cohesive discussion. It is like turning scattered Lego pieces into recognizable subassemblies. Not polished, but finally resembling the big idea. With the map ready, then I start typing.

Step Five: Typing Stage.
Google Docs. You cannot get more basic than that. This is where those sub assembled Lego bricks go into place. Shifting layers, swapping words, making sure the original idea stays alive. I keep one eye on the screen and one eye on my map to ensure the flow stays intact.
Once I finish, I read it from the top. Adjust words. Trim bloated sentences. Move paragraphs around to make the story breathe. I often use an online thesaurus to find the exact word I want. Honestly, that website has upgraded my writing more than any AI ever did.

Step Six: Define AI Boundaries
Never let AI run wild. If you give it no reins, the horse decides the journey. You must build a strong prompt before allowing that black box to mess with your writing. Never just say “Improve my writing” and hand over raw text. For every piece, I craft a detailed prompt with strict boundaries, commands and context such as:

Where it will be published
Fix grammar, spelling, punctuation
Do not change my voice
Preserve my metaphors, tone, and personality
No clichés or Dashes
Do not shorten or summarize
Keep the structure and flow
Don’t create bullet point

I basically create a cage so AI does not turn my work into generic buzzword mush.

Step Seven: Let The Monster Loose.
Prompt ready, AI warmed up. Time to hit go. If you don’t like the look of what it give you do it again with more detailed promot

Step Eight: Quality Control.
Despite all the instructions, AI might still twist words, shift meanings, invent counterarguments, or spit out random nonsense. I review side by side: original vs AI. Line by line. Don’t automate the human oversight.

Step Nine: Title Time.
I usually start with a working title, but the better ones show up somewhere in the chaos of writing. Then I run them past AI — not to choose for me, but to sanity-check the cringe factor and throw a few new ideas into the mix. Titles are landmines: get one wrong and the entire piece feels like it’s wearing the wrong outfit. AI can assist here, absolutely. But never hand over the steering wheel.

Step Ten: Visuals.
If I have images or graphics, I use them as is or create them myself if possible like this article about my trip to Barcelona. If not, AI can help. The hardest part is giving a truly detailed prompt so the image does not look like a cursed fever dream.

What works for me might work for you

AI is the missing link that finally bridges my ideas to the English page. It doesn’t replace my voice — it refines it. It catches the awkward phrasing, sharpens the tone, and rescues me when my patience for endless self-editing runs out. It’s the 2000 grit sandpaper on funky dresser I assembled in my garage.

I used to feel like a sculptor hacking away at a block of stone, breathing dust and frustration just to reveal a single clean line. Now, I sketch the vision, shape the emotion, and let a precise, tireless machine help bring the sculpture to life. I traded my chisel with 3D printer. The creativity is still mine. The intention is still mine. The message is still mine.

And honestly — if the final work moves people, who really cares whether it was carved by hand or printed with better tools?

Why I believe you should use AI to improve your writing

If English isn’t your first language… if your writing confidence is shaky… if you fear making a silly mistake and having people judge your intelligence… and especially if you don’t have an editor in your corner… don’t let any of that silence you.

Your ideas deserve daylight.

So use the tools available. I use AI to clean up my writing, sharpen my thoughts, and get out of my own way. There’s zero shame in that—great writers have always used editors. Now we just have one that works 24/7 and doesn’t charge by the hour.

And if you find a smarter workflow than mine? Even better. What matters is that you keep writing — instead of staying quiet.

The election of Zohran Mamdani, a 32-year-old New York Assembly member, created a flurry of juicy headlines and heated conversation from all political corners. Oddly, most focused on him being Muslim—which is, frankly, a bit “been there, done that.” Muslim mayors in non-Muslim-majority big cities? Ask London and Rotterdam; they’ll send you a postcard. Even in the U.S., the novelty’s worn off—Abdullah Hammoud runs Dearborn, Michigan, without breaking a sweat.

But what caught my attention wasn’t outrage over his religion—it was his socialist streak. The guy calls himself a Social Democrat, basically a younger Bernie Sanders who might drop a freestyle between campaign stops. The dreaded “Socialist!” label, paired with promises of free buses, affordable childcare, rent control, and government-run bodegas, set some folks’ hair on fire—especially online. My own spicy back-and-forths with people raging about his ideas made me realize something: most of us toss around these terms without really knowing what they mean. So, pull up a chair for this not-so-humble Q&A.

“We all saw how socialism and communism got wrecked—why is this guy bringing it to New York City?”

Fate of the old Soviet Union is the poster child for “socialist-communist” disaster. They called themselves socialist/communist, but in practice, it was more Palpatine, Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin running the galaxy from the Death Star than “power to the people.” Think centralized bureaucracy, top-down control, a handful of elites calling all the shots and who ever says boo get the bullet or Gulag. Real socialism means workers owning and running the means of production—factories, land, resources, the works. Wealth and power spread by contribution and need, not by who’s in the club.

Socialism -workers own the means- even exists in the west without so much shenanigans . Check out Bob’s Red Mill—an employee-owned company since 2010. Or Publix Super Markets, where workers start earning company stock after 1,000 hours on the clock. Even professional sport clubs like FC Bayern, Barcelona and Real Madrid are run by some flavor of non profit socialism.

So what did the USSR do instead? The dirtiest bait-and-switch in history. After the Bolshevik Revolution, workers’ councils (soviets) were supposed to call the shots. Then Stalin entered stage, and—poof!—real worker power vanished. Private property was gone, sure, but everything landed in the state’s hands, run by a tiny political elite. That’s not worker ownership; that’s state ownership without democracy.

Hitler also consider himself socialist! He named his party National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) famously known as Nazi Party. Unlike his buddy Stalin who nationalize everything in old Russia Hitler kept big German corporation like Krupp, IG Farben, and Siemens privately owned but closely controlled by his iron fist. He was able to hold it together until he decided all the means of production in all of Europe belong to his party. That did not go well.

And that’s why USSR and NAZI communism or socialism flavour face planted so spectacularly. But let’s go deeper.

“Marxism is a bullshit; it never works in the West. Capitalism’s fine—why mess with it?”

First off: Marxism isn’t a government system. It’s a theory—a lens to watch how society ticks. Karl Marx, with his partner-in-thought Friedrich Engels, structure history as a constant cage match between the Haves and Have-nots. The “Bourgeoisie” own the means of production; the “Proletariat” sell their labor to survive. Bourgeoisie wants more and pie gets smaller for Proletariat. Sooner or later, the tension snaps and shit hit the fan. Marx’s solution was give workers control over means of production and the wealth they create. Get rid of class and everyone is owning and labouring.

He predicted workers’ revolution back in the 1840s—but he did not live long enough to see it actually happens. Closest thing to what he predicted, Lenin and the Bolsheviks brought his ideas to a mostly peasant Russia in 1917, remixing Marxism for their own setting. Marx expected industrialized countries like Britain or Germany to lead the charge—but history had other plans.

Even America had its lite version of workers revolution moments. The Gilded Age -the time of guardrail free capitalism - was pure chaos: Robber barons running the show, prosperous industry, rampant poverty, and 16-hour shifts. Capitalism like a 14 year old driving moonshine runners in the dirt road of Appalachia. The super rich idea of share the wealth was charity. Workers fought back—the Great Railroad Strike (1877), Haymarket Affair (1886), Pullman Strike (1894). But instead of overthrowing capitalism, they negotiated with it—forming unions, not revolutions.

Was Marx wrong? Not really. Pure capitalism is about as stable as a Jenga tower on hood of a Nissan Patrol with broken suspension. Few decades later capitalism strike back. The Great Depression proved it—mass unemployment, bank collapses, misery everywhere. That’s when governments started believing when Marx said pure Capitalism is not stable the dude was up to something. FDR’s New Deal brought Social Security, unemployment insurance, public works, and banking regulations—a social safety net to keep the system from imploding.

Marx wasn’t some deranged dreamer; he saw the cracks. Even smart capitalists like FDR heed to his warning. You don’t have to hand private corporations over to the people, but you do need to make sure the lower classes can actually live a modest life in a wealthy society. The strength of a thriving society is reflected in how it cares for all its members.

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“Free buses, rent control, government groceries, daycare—come on, that’s for the reds!”

Not quite. These ideas already exist in democratic western countries:

• Free Daycare: Finland and Sweden cover most costs; Canada offers subsidized daycare and free government run preschools JK and SK.

• Rent Control: Germany limits rent hikes, Sweden keeps prices stable, Scotland adds tenant protections and freezes during crises.

• Free Bus: Luxembourg went full throttle—nationwide free transit since 2020. Germany has pilot programs too. Canada largest mega city make transit free for kids and some teens.

• Price-Controlled Grocery: Philly’s Greengrocer program brought affordable produce to food deserts. France, Italy, and Spain have capped basic prices during crises.

“Who’s footing the bill for all these freebies Mamdani promised? If he taxes the rich, won’t they just bail?”

In NYC there is New York City resident income tax that collected through State in addition to other levels of income tax. This is Currently ranging roughly from 3.078% to 3.876%, and the revenue goes directly to fund city services like schools, police, sanitation, and transit support. The U.S. has a progressive income tax—the more you make, the more you pay. Pretty standard across the Western world. So, if Mamdani somehow found a way to strong arm NY state legislator to bump taxes on the rich by a couple of percent, does that mean billionaires will flee?

Plot twist: the ultra-rich don’t actually have any “income.” They play a different game—Invest, Borrow, Die.

• Invest: Pour money into stocks, real estate, companies. Watch it grow.

• Borrow: Don’t sell (that triggers taxes in many levels). Just borrow against your assets. Banks will hand you money because you’re rich. That load is your debt, nobody can tax your debt.

• Die: Keep borrowing until you die. Your heirs inherit at the new market value, and all those gains? Poof—tax-free reset.

So yeah, a 2% income tax hike barely grazes them. And corporations tax? They already park profits offshore—Apple, Google, Microsoft, the whole gang. Ireland, the Caribbean, Luxembourg—they’ve all hosted American money vacations.

Long story short: the rich aren’t going anywhere. Even if NYC went rogue and tried taxing net worth or unrealized gains like Norway did, a mayor can’t make that happen. Relax. The billionaires will stay.

“Capitalism and socialism are not compatible, don’t mix greek yogurt with my stew”

History has a funny way of mixing capitalism with socialism, sometime out right communism: every time capitalism hits a wall, they reach out to socialism toolbox to find patch kit. They find funny names for the tools they use. Remember when General Motors became “Government Motors”? Obama bascily nationalized the biggest automaker overnight to save symbol of old American capitalism. He did not call it nationalization, frame it a "Emergency Loans & Capital Injection”. When socialism stalls—China’s the perfect example—capitalism rushes in to keep the show going. Sure, don’t mix greek yogurt with your stew but keep it close on your dinner table.

So, here’s the big takeaway:

• Socialism isn’t shorthand for “Soviet Union.”

• Marxism isn’t a recipe for disaster—it’s say vast inequality sooner or later F you up. To fix the damn thing you don’t even need to use his solution.

• Modern social policies aren’t radical—they’re capitalism’s life shock absorbers.

• History is gloriously messy—and smart governments borrow shamelessly from both sides to keep the system running.

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Back when I was in engineering school, I had this huge assignment: Enhance a layout plan for a efficient production floor. It was a big deal — tons of technical drawings, endless calculations, and my final grade practically hinged on it.

I went all in with my trusty Casio FX-4800 calculator and felt pretty confident I’d nailed it. When I turned in my carefully crafted assignment — neatly typed, with detailed layouts and charts drawn using my beloved Rotring technical pens — my professor started flipping through it. He barely skimmed the pages. Didn’t even glance at my calculations or the flow of the layout — the parts I thought were genius.

Not twenty seconds in, he said, “You won’t get far with this kind of presentation.”

Presentation?! What the F. He didn’t even comment on the clever layout enhancement I made or how much waste I’d eliminated using that fancy slanted conveyor belt. Space is money, and every extra meter of material travel is burning cash — that’s what he drilled into our heads. And now he’s talking about how pretty my booklet looks?

He noticed my irritated face but didn’t flinch. He expected it.
“Nobody’s going to hear your message if you can’t catch their attention. Doesn’t matter how good your work is — you’ve got to get past their wall of distraction first.”

I’ll admit — his feedback didn’t sit right with me at the time. I figured if my work was excellent, it was the audience’s job to notice it. The cream rises to the top, right? Even if it’s wrapped in a bland, no-frills package.

Yeah, well. Boys, I was wrong.

Every communication fails if the receiver doesn’t actually receive the message — no matter how brilliant or useful it is.

Later in my career, I learned that professional charts, slick infographics, and well-structured arguments still don’t guarantee that your message lands — especially in big organizations. You might capture attention for a moment, maybe even hold it, but you won’t leave the impression that your message matters.

You remember the famous information life cycle?
Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom.

You process data to get information, process information to get knowledge, and process knowledge to create wisdom.

What they didn’t tell us were the actual ingredients needed for that transformation.

Sure, machines can process data all day long — algorithms, subroutines, you name it — but the second you want to feed that into a human brain, you hit the slippery slope of attention span. And that span? It’s flickering like a dying candle in the wind of social media.

But the one tool that still works — that still plays nice with human brain chemistry — is storytelling.

Why Does the Human Brain Love Stories?

Because the brain didn’t evolve to memorize data tables — it evolved to remember, interpret, and survive through stories. When data is packaged inside a story, it lights up more parts of the brain than raw facts ever can.

Here’s what’s going on under the hood:

Neural coupling:
When we hear a story, our brains don’t just process words — they simulate experience. If someone describes “a warm fire,” your sensory regions for heat and sight activate. Data alone triggers language centers; stories trigger the motor cortex, visual cortex, and emotional circuits.

Emotional tagging:
The amygdala saves emotionally charged info for long-term storage. A story gives data an emotional handle — that’s why people remember “a farmer who doubled his yield after fixing irrigation” better than “a 100% productivity increase.”

Cognitive efficiency:
Stories reduce mental load. The brain loves cause-and-effect — it’s easier to track one flowing narrative than ten disconnected facts.

Pattern recognition:
We’re wired to seek meaning — who did what, and why. Stories deliver that ready-made framework of intention, conflict, and resolution.

How to Become a Better Storyteller

Alright — we’re not talking about writing novels here. We’re talking about storytelling as a leadership and communication tool — especially for technical people who need to influence teams or organizations.

Here’s 5 practical tips how to build that muscle:

1. Translate data into human impact.
Facts and metrics don’t persuade — context does. Start with the effect, then explain the cause or solution.
Example: For every chart or process, add one line — “This means our customers wait 2 minutes less” or “This prevents 3 rework cycles per year and saves this much $$$.”
That single line turns information into motivation.

2. Frame problems as journeys.
Engineers think in processes, but audiences respond to progress.
Structure your message like a mini-story:
Start → “Here’s what we faced.”
Middle → “Here’s what we tried.”
End → “Here’s what changed.”
Example: In a presentation, describe each improvement as a short before → challenge → after sequence.

3. Use real examples, not abstractions.
Words like “efficiency” or “alignment” are too vague. People remember specifics.
Example: Instead of “We improved quality control,” say “Last winter, one contractor skipped a check — this fix prevents that exact issue.”
Specifics make your point tangible and credible. Risk, then Reward.

4. Anchor your message with visuals and metaphors.
Even technical audiences love imagery. It makes complexity relatable.
Example: “Think of this as the seatbelt of our QA process” or “It’s like a traffic light for decision gates.”
Use metaphors that clarify without dumbing things down.

5. Shape narratives that reinforce culture and values.
Influence isn’t about words — it’s about alignment. Tie your message to shared purpose: safety, quality, reliability, public service.
Example: When sharing a win, say, “This shows what we value — getting it right the first time.”
Stories like that quietly shift group behavior.

When you master storytelling, you stop sounding like someone who just reports data — and start sounding like someone who leads.

And in a world drowning in information but starving for meaning, that might be the rarest skill of all.

Imagine a world where nobody ever told you about the brilliance of Pablo Picasso—and then someone handed you one of his early paintings. Would it knock your socks off?

Or picture this: an alien lands in Shanghai and spots a Xiaomi SU7 parked next to a Porsche Taycan S. Without knowing anything about “German engineering,” or which one copy the other would it prefer the Porsche? I bet our alien friend would walk straight up to the SU7 and look for its keys.

Context, story, and the meaning we attach to a painting, a gadget, a book, or a song often shape how we value it far more than the object itself. A piece of music can sound ordinary until we learn it was written by a legend on their deathbed. A simple sneaker becomes priceless the moment a celebrity signs it. We like to think our tastes are rational, that we judge things purely on quality or craft, but in reality, we’re swayed by narrative—the story behind the thing, not just the thing.

If we could somehow strip away all that noise—the marketing spin, the nostalgia, the cultural heritage, the invisible emotional weight—and evaluate objects solely on merit, it would be a radically different world. Imagine art judged only by its technique, or products valued only for their function. But that world doesn’t exist, and maybe it never will. We live in an economy of perception, where fame amplifies worth, hype distorts truth, and meaning—real or manufactured—is what ultimately sets the price.

And yet, this impossible social experiment did happen—by complete accident—in China. And the results were jaw-dropping.

Let me tell you how this impossible experiment unfolded:

Before the 1980s, Chinese youth were insulated from western music. Only a handful of artists, like The Carpenters or John Denver, were sanctioned by the Communist Party (I don’t know what red round in The Country Road). The list of Western musicians who actually performed in China back then? Just two: French electronic pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre and a British pop duo called WHAM!.

Chinese music lovers had no access to western sounds—and more importantly, they were completely cut off from the western hype machine. If you are and everyday Chinese in the 80’s, John Denver was a bigger name than John Lennon.

Then came a strange twist in the 1980s. As China set out to become the world’s factory, it needed raw materials—metal, plastic, anything. Western cassette manufacturers had warehouses full of unsold tapes they couldn’t dump as music, so they destroyed them—partially sawed through the cassettes to save the wear and tear on table saw blades, leaving a neat notch across the tape to render them “unplayable.” By that transformation the cassettes were no longer a cultural product and limitations that come with. These were then sold as scrap plastic to China.

China imported tons of these busted cassettes, intending to recycle the plastic. But along came a man named Professor Ye, who realized these “plastic scraps” contained the entire archive of music that no one in China had ever heard. He figured how to salvage the tape with a little bit of handy work and a new housing. Professor Ye began selling playable tapes, calling them Dakou (loosely translated as “cutout”). People started to buy recycle plastic in bulk themselves, repaired them, swapped them, and soon an underground black market of western music cassettes sprang up across large Chinese cities.

Imagine a lifelong listener of patriotic anthems and revolutionary operas—there were reportedly only eight legally broadcast nationwide—suddenly finding a copy of Dark Side of the Moon in a pile of trash.

Meanwhile, in the West, record companies were swimming in cash and overproducing tapes by the millions. Even megastars like Madonna and MJ had warehouses of surplus stock—some of which ended up “cut through the playhead” and shipped off to China as recycling material. Chinese have steady supply of best the west could offer through recycle plastic.

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What emerged was the largest decontextualization experiment in history. Chinese listeners suddenly found themselves consuming a completely unfiltered stew of sound: heavy metal riffs colliding with reggae basslines, electronic pop tangling with hard rock, punk chaos bleeding into jazz, and yes—even yodeling echoing through the chaos. There was no order, no genre hierarchy, no gatekeeper to tell them what was “good” or “trash.”

There were no music critics sharpening their pens to define taste, no radio DJs spoon-feeding catchy singles until they stuck in everyone’s heads, no MTV videos selling leather jackets and eyeliner as rebellion. There were no glossy interviews about the artist’s “creative process,” no Rolling Stone covers, no stadium tours where fans screamed their loyalty into existence. There wasn’t even a Billboard chart to whisper, “This one matters.”

Every song had to stand on its own naked merit, judged only by its emotional cache. A chord progression that made you ache or a lyric that made you grin had to carry the whole load — there was no backstory or halo effect to do the heavy lifting. And in that strange vacuum, reputations reshuffled like a deck of cards. John Denver could outshine John Lennon. Bob Dylan might sound like a man who should’ve been kept far away from a microphone. And some obscure Finnish metal band could feel like the most important thing since humanity learned to slice bread evenly.

That’s decontextualization — the act of pulling something free from the web of meaning, history, and mythology that usually props it up. It’s the difference between art as artifact and art as experience. When you strip away the packaging, sometimes you discover raw brilliance; other times, you realize the emperor’s got no clothes, just a marketing team.

Decontextualization lays things bare. The meaning — which is often bigger, shinier, and louder than the thing itself — gets amputated. What’s left is the raw sound, the unmediated punch of melody and rhythm, stripped of every borrowed halo.

It’s like deleting names, dates and places from résumés before a hiring manager screens them — leveling the field, sure, but also erasing clues that might make sense of the story. Or like a no-name car lot where all the badges have been pried off: you don’t know what’s a Porsche and what’s a Prius until you turn the key. Or peeling the labels off your clothes and realizing you’ve been paying triple just for the privilege of wearing someone’s marketing department on your chest.

In a decontextualized world, the rankings of what we consume may flip. What we worship now might fall flat; a Seiko 5 wrist watch would beat your dad Rolex you are wearing now simply because it’s the better watch for the money or every other sense.

I am ending this piece with this question for you —
Is that a fairer world to live in? Or do we get more satisfaction from the context of things we consume?

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Brandon Shaw, a US musician/DJ and the man behind the youtube channel Digging The Greats, revisit the story of chinese tapes -originally reported by RadioLab back in 2021, in his multipart thought provoking video, make sure your check it out.

We’ve never been here before.

When we invented the steam engine, machines replaced the craftspeople and rural workers who built things by hand. Then came automation — and it took over from those machine operators too. For centuries, the front line of man vs. machine battle was about physical labor. But now, something deeper is at stake. Our intelligence, our power to observe, reason, and create — the very essence of what made us humanly useful — is under siege. For the first time, our relevance itself is on the line.

So, if I’m a kid, what should I learn just to avoid becoming irrelevant in the future?

Maybe you need to be ridiculously lucky. Like me.

It’s 1981, Tehran, Iran. I was ten when my mom decided to sign me up for our local after-school English class. Why? Just because all the other kids from our street who went to the same middle school had joined that class. Did she have any vision of the future — that I might one day move to an English-speaking country? Zero. Nada. Nothing. She just didn’t want me to be left out. That was luck number one.

Tons of parents put their kids through seemingly useless classes that they forget everything they learn in a heartbeat but the key is what to do so the kid stick to it. Now, like any other mandatory piano, tennis, or swimming class kids are dragged into, I was not thrilled. Most of all the English class messed up my street-ball schedule. My teacher, Mr. Talayee, was a tiny, twenty-year-old guy with oddly shaped arms — but an unforgettable personality.

The teaching curriculum was standard across the board, but Mr.Talayee had a habit of giving students additional study materials that matched their interests. He believed nobody could learn English as a second language unless they did it through topics they genuinely liked. This teacher was my second luck.

One day, he asked, “Who here likes science fiction?”

As an avid Jules Verne fan, I raised my hand. He jotted down my name and after class handed me a note — a “receipt” to pick up some tapes from the class library. I went down to the basement where our makeshift library was. I gave the note to the librarian, who handed me four cassette tapes. The sleeves read: BBC Radio 4: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) — Six Episodes.

Back then, teachers encouraged students to tune into English-language stations on shortwave radio to hear how “real English” sounded and train their ear. But when we did, it was mostly news and boring local chatter — nothing a ten-year-old anywhere in the world would care about.

But my trust in Mr. Talayee paid off. I played the first cassette the minute I got home. The narrator began:

“This is the story of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor...”

I was hooked — not on the English language, but on the door that language opened to a world of wonder. While my friends and classmates dropped out of after-school English every semester and forgot whatever they learned by then, I kept going until there were no classes left to take.

My first job came years later as a live interpreter at an engineering seminar — not because of my engineering degree, but because of my English skills. That job defined my career because I got interested to subject of that seminar, Quality Management System. When I eventually moved to Canada, being able to communicate better than most educated newcomers from non english speaking countries helped me fast-track my career instead of starting from scratch.

So how did I know — or how did my mom know — that language skills would open doors for me and kept me relevant and employable?

Here’s another story on the same subject but with a heart breaking different outcome. Credit to The New York Times Daily Podcast: “Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow.”

It follows the rise and fall of the “learn to code” craze — the idea that if you learned computer programming, you’d be guaranteed a lucrative job in the future. Industry bigwigs launched a nonprofit called Code.org to promote coding in schools, sending out a viral message around 2013: If you code, you can be like Zuckerberg or Gates.

Slogans like “The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future” sold the dream hard. The pitch was irresistible: learn to code, change the world, and live the American Dream.

Millions of kids joined the “Hour of Code” initiative in US schools. Computer science got elevated in schools, backed by the National Science Foundation and big tech corporations. The coding mania was real. As reported in this podcast since 2012, the number of U.S. students majoring in computer science has tripled.

And for some — those who studied at prestigious schools and landed elite internships — it worked. They got the golden-ticket jobs the industry promised.

But fast-forward to now: big tech is shedding jobs left and right. Overhiring during the pandemic, a flood of foreign labor, and a pivot to AI and data centers changed everything. Less work is going to humans. Thousands are being laid off and replaced by AI — not just in customer service, but in pure computer engineering roles.

These kids listened to industry “visionaries.” They did everything right. They learned what was supposed to be the future. And they still got a raw deal.

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So how do you pick what to learn to actually secure your future?

How do you determine what society will need in ten or twenty years so you can invest your time and talent wisely? We don’t even know what most future jobs will be. We’ve learned that we can’t rely on universities — they’ll teach you whatever sells. We can’t rely on industry leaders either — they’ll pivot the second they smell something more lucrative and leave the rest of us in the dust.

So let’s get real about how to future-proof your human capital in a world where 60–80% of tomorrow’s jobs don’t yet exist.

Here are five strategies to might help your kids to survive — and thrive — in the future of work:

1. Anchor Yourself in Timeless Skills, Not Timely Tools

Principle: Tech will change, but human cognitive leverage won’t.

Invest in:

• Critical thinking and systems thinking — connecting dots across domains.

• Persuasion, negotiation, storytelling — the eternal human influence toolkit.

• Self-learning systems — learning fast and unlearning faster.

2. Build Adaptability into Your skills DNA

Principle: Don’t marry an industry — date your skill sets.

Invest in:

• Cross-domain experience (e.g., mixing public infrastructure with data analytics or sustainability policy).

• Short-cycle projects — consulting, contracting, freelancing — to sample multiple fields.

• Comfort with uncertainty. Be the person who moves first when the ground shifts.

3. Follow the “Meta-Needs” of Society

Principle: Don’t chase job titles; chase enduring problems.

Future-proof problem clusters:

• Climate adaptation & resilient infrastructure

• Aging population & healthcare logistics

• Urbanization & smart mobility

• Data integrity, cybersecurity, and trust systems
  Human–machine collaboration ethics and regulation

4. Build a “Portfolio Life,” Not a Linear Career

Principle: The full-time, single-employer model is dead.

Invest in:

• Multiple income streams — projects, teaching, advisory, content, investing.

• A personal brand and audience — your network becomes your future employer.

• Skills that let you sell your thinking, not just your time.
  

5. Attach Yourself to Exponential Technologies — But as a catalyst

Principle: You don’t need to be a coder, but you must speak the language of code and AI.

Invest in understanding (not mastering):

• AI, automation, and data literacy

• Bioengineering and climate tech (especially relevant if you’re in public infrastructure)

• Blockchain and digital trust frameworks

• Human augmentation and robotics
  
  

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The argument that “cars these days don’t have soul” — that the era of passion-driven design is long gone — sits in the same bucket as that age-old barbershop debate: “They don’t make it like they used to.” You hear it everywhere. Sports? (Kareem is the GOAT. No, it’s Jordan. No, it’s LeBron.) Architecture? (Ornate facades versus modern white boxes.) Movies? (Paul Newman versus George Clooney.) Music? (Classic Rock versus Mumble Rap.) Even clothes and hand tools get dragged into this nostalgia tug-of-war.

As a car guy, I want to unpack what people really mean when they claim today’s cars have “lost their soul,” and then leave you to draw your own conclusion.

So what’s behind this idea? Advocates of the “soulless modern car” camp—let’s be clear, this is belief, not fact—point to vehicles from roughly the ’60s through the early ’90s. Not Model Ts, but the golden age before electronics and safety/emissions regulations rewrote the playbook. They say those cars let you feel. You felt the road through the steering, the power in the throttle, the noise and vibration rattling your bones. Driving wasn’t just transport, it was a connection. Styling and even paint colors were designed to stir emotion. By contrast, today’s machines? Cleaner, safer, faster—but emotionally muted.

Let’s Go Through Some Facts

Cars are getting bigger, heavier, with more electronics.

Size, weight, and electronics directly affect how a car drives and how much the driver actually involve in driving. Cars are like humans—the bigger and heavier they are, the harder they move and change direction. That’s why the fastest, most agile vehicles on earth are smaller and lighter than whatever you’re driving. An F1 car is a metric ton lighter and a full meter shorter than your Honda CR-V. While the CR-V puts out maybe 190 horsepower, an F1 car has about 880 more.

More electronics also mean the car is more forgiving. Don’t know how to brake without skidding? ABS does it for you. Never learned how to stop fishtailing? Stability control got your back. Even steering—when you drive fast you’re supposed to steer more gently. You don’t know that, variable-ratio electric steering steps in and says, “Relax buddy, you’re too dumb for this, I’ll fix it.”

So yes—if “soulful” means the car leaves everything to you, then you’re right. Many modern cars assume you’re too unqualified to be trusted.

Exterior Styling Has Been Homogenized

No more heart-stopping silhouettes.

Here’s a quick test. Go to your nearest auto mall—those vast, paved graveyards of “brand variety.” Line up random cars from different manufacturers. Now throw 600-thread-count sheets over them so only the shapes and curves show. I bet you won’t be able to tell one from the other, especially in the compact SUV segment. Why? Two big reasons:

1. Trends.
Car styling follows fashion cycles, even when the trends are dumb. Think fins, pop-up headlights, vinyl roofs, chrome overload—each one had its moment. Today? Coupe-ified SUVs. Designers literally chop down the rear pillar of an SUV, slope the roof, and call it a “coupe.” The dumbest example: Volkswagen’s Atlas. If you buy the regular Atlas, you’re saying, “I need massive cargo space and a proper third row.” But if you buy the Atlas Cross Sport, the chopped-roof version, you’re basically saying, “I still need cargo space—but I also have enough money to ruin it just so I can look cool.”

2. Safety regulations.
Rules push designers into the same box—bulky front ends, thick pillars, higher beltlines. It leaves them with only the tiniest canvas for “creativity”: a squiggle in the headlights or a slightly different grille. That’s why when you look at a Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q8, Lamborghini Urus, and Bentley Bentayga, you’re basically seeing one car in four different suits.

Interiors: Slap a Screen On It

The inside isn’t much better. Almost every new car today gives you the same recipe: a four-spoke steering wheel, a digital driver’s cluster, a giant iPad bolted to the center, and some LED mood lighting strips. That’s it. Ninety-nine percent of interiors look identical.

Gone are the days when cars had personality inside. Remember when half the switches were overhead, making you feel like a fighter pilot just to turn on the fog lights? Or when a gauge cluster looked like it was pulled straight out of a Swiss watchmaker’s catalog? Even the most masculine part of the cabin—the gear shifter—is being neutered. Now it’s shrinking into a sad little nub or, worse, replaced by buttons. (Looking at you, Maserati.)

At least some traditional automakers still try to inject a bit of brand identity into their interiors. But the Chinese? They don’t even pretend. For them, cars are appliances. Microwave design. Steering wheel optional.

Who’s to Blame for the Bland-ification?

Let’s cut up the blame pie:

First Slice: Us the Consumers

Let’s be honest—we’re spoiled brats.

I was talking with some longtime BMW drivers about the new X3. Everyone was tearing it apart over… plastic trim around the inside door handles. Really? Bro, it’s a BMW. Who cares about the door handle trim?

Back in the heyday of soulful cars, you didn’t even get normal interiors. Take a ’66 Corvette: GM literally mounted the stereo vertically—because why not?—and customers loved it. Or a Lamborghini Countach, where you had to crane your neck to reach the AC controls, surrounded by a random grab bag of Fiat buttons and switches. No one complained. Why? Because the cars had soul. It was a freaking Lambo—who cared if it had Lancia turn signals or stitching that looked like it came from a high school home-ec project?

It was function follows form heaven.

Today? Consumers want everything. Comfort, space, luxury, performance, efficiency. You can’t sell a car anymore by saying: “Sure, it’s cramped, the seats are cheap, but damn—listen to that engine.”

Second Slice: Regulators

Safety rules force every design to bubble up with thick doors, chunky columns, and giant crumple zones. Emissions killed off big, soulful, naturally aspirated engines. Instead we get tiny high-compression turbo fours mated to CVTs that murder joy in cold blood.

To regulators: get off my V8’s back and go yell at the farting cows. Cars are not even the 3rd largest trouble maker for earth.

Third Slice: Automakers and their marketing squads

People love to blame the soullessness of modern cars on one culprit: SUVs. Big boxes on wheels. But SUVs aren’t some brand-new plague. The 1935 Chevrolet Suburban or the 1949 Willys Jeep Station Wagon (the civilian one, not the war mule) both fit the bill. The 1984 Jeep Cherokee (XJ) was the first truly modern SUV—but even then, they didn’t take over right away. Back then, SUVs usually had one job and one job only: get the village vet to the farm at 3 a.m. in a blizzard, haul soldiers through the mud of Alsace, or moonlight as farm equipment.

These rigs were cool and soulful until someone slapped the word Sport onto Utility and diluted the whole formula. Then automakers realized SUVs print more money than trucks. You can do the giant SUV (the Suburban, family elder statesman), the tiny SUV (Uber MVP, Toyota RAV4), or the SUV with a capital S (hats off to the Ford Raptor).

When Cadillac rolled out the Escalade—aka Texas’ Rolls-Royce—suddenly SUVs could be palaces on wheels. Porsche saw BMW cashing in with the X5 and launched the Cayenne. An SUV as a race car! Purists screamed, but sales replied: “Shut the hell up, I’m saving your 911.” That single move cemented Porsche’s future. After that, the floodgates opened: Bentley, Maserati, Lamborghini, even the prancing horse in Maranello said, “Perché no?”

SUVs sell because they check every box, not because they’re soulful. Soulful cars used to excel at one thing and let the rest be terrible. The original Land Rover Defender was phenomenal at roving the land; its owners didn’t care that the interior felt like a tractor cab. Cadillac used to build land yachts that floated down highways; nobody cared if a seven-meter Fleetwood couldn’t carve up a canyon.

Now? Every car has to be marketed as luxurious, sporty, efficient, stylish, and high-tech—all at once. Which means they rarely excel at anything. Why does an overland 4x4 need a “comfort” suspension? Why do we need a 600-horsepower, three-row Cadillac Vistiq? How late are these kids to baseball practice? Which mom is trying to set a 0–60 record on the way to soccer practice in her Rivian R2?

The truth is simple: people pay a lot for cars, so they want everything. And automakers, desperate to sell, give it to them. Soul doesn’t stand a chance.

Fourth Slice: Journalists, automotive vloggers, influencers

You know the scratch-test crowd. The folks who rap their nails on every dashboard to decide if it’s “soft touch” or “cheap plastic.” They measure cup holders with water bottles and check if the door pockets can swallow a laptop. If the original Honda NSX — one of the most soulful cars ever built — showed up today with its shiny, all-plastic interior, these people would torch it online before the first test drive ended.

And here’s the kicker: some of these YouTube auto-prophets have so much sway that one bad review can basically kneecap a new model. In North America and Europe, their thumbs-up is gospel. No blessing, no chance — doesn’t matter if the car is brilliant at the job it was actually designed to do.

That’s why automakers keep pandering with gimmicks instead of passion. It’s turned into a circus of features meant to make vloggers clap like seals. My pet peeve? The flat-bottom steering wheel. Unless you’re in an actual race car, nobody needs it. Yet somehow, a Nissan Rogue with a 1.5 litre three-cylinder engine is rocking a wannabe racing wheel. Same with the mood-lighting gimmicks: pulsating LEDs stretched across the dash just to announce the AC is cooling. Cool party trick, but how about spending that budget on seats that don’t feel like they were stolen from a lawn chair?

But Here’s the Caveat

Plenty of automakers are still cranking out cool, soulful cars. The caveat? You can’t afford it.

Some old cars are unbelievably cool and soulful but it’s not every schmoe back then rocking one. In 1961, the Jaguar E-Type—arguably the most beautiful car ever—cost 2.6 times the average UK annual salary. Translate that today and you’re looking at £100k. And for that money now, you can grab the consummate sleeper monster AUDI RS6 Avant or a Corvette C8. If you feel fancy and majestic get yourself a Lexus LC500… cars with power, agility, styling to die for and creature comforts the E-Type could only dream of.

So let’s not act like everyone could afford soulful cars back then either. The best-seller in the UK the same year was Ford Anglia 105E—a car that looked like fresh goose shit—for £600. 1990 was first year of Honda NSX, dubbed as supercar for everyday purpose, only sold less that 800 unit in Japan while the streets were full of Toyota Corolla, Mark II, Carina, Crown and Corona. Basically sea of generic Japanese sedans. Germany with Mercedes 190E 2.5-16 Evolution II (1990)? same story, I can go on and on.

Now, Pony cars were the exception. A ’64 Mustang cost half the average annual US salary. That was an attainable joy. And today? Nobody stopped you to drive a new Ecoboost Mustang that still delivers plenty of fun, with way more safety, comfort, tech and performance, at roughly the same income-to-price ratio.

And if you’re the type who thinks a car needs to scare you half to death to have a soul? Get yourself a new Porsche GT3 RS, switch off every electronic nanny, and let 518 horsepower send power to two rear wheels and it remind you what mortality feels like.

Driving a soulful car means you’ve got to bleed a little. Take the Mazda Miata — to me, the absolute pinnacle of cool car. But here’s the deal: you sacrifice trunk space, you sacrifice back seats, and if your ego’s fragile about masculinity, you sacrifice that too. If your backyard sprouts hundred-dollar bills, then fine — grab an Aston Martin Valkyrie. Forget about comfort, human driver for this car was an afterthought; you need a checklist to start the car up, it’s about shaking hands with death on every 90-degree bend and calling it foreplay. And if you’re chasing the “overland king” badge, don’t bore me with your Range Rover flex. Get on a plane to Japan and buy a brand-new Land Cruiser 70 series WorkMate edition— No airbag (on some models), terrible vinyl seats, the whole farm-equipment vibe. That’s soul.

Here is your one and only take away: Soulful cars are still out there. The only question is: do you have the guts to commit?

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When I started my career as a young engineer, having a computer for every employee was still a novelty. The office had only a few PCs, those beige boxes, and the Epson dot matrix printer screech was the background music of our office. Later, we graduated to laser printers, and it felt like a printing bonanza. Emailing the results of our work to clients was still treated like mailing letters—everything had to be reviewed by the general manager and assigned a routing number before anyone dared to hit send.

Next came fancy print stations, giant machines that could collate copies, and scanners. Our office looked like it was taking long strides toward the workspace of the future. And then suddenly came the buzzword: Paperless Office.

The promise of the Paperless Office was shiny: save the trees, save time, nobody needs to print anything, share files created electronically on the local network (later on the web) and bypass printing altogether, collaborating on the proverbial cloud. Even training material—our main product—no longer needed acetate transparent sheets for overhead projectors.

We thought management would yank out all the printers by next quarter to reach paperless heaven. But the age of powerlessness never arrived, at least not the way we imagined. We still bought boxes of A4 sheets, installed faster printers, and purchased endless consumables. Even our office chats in the copy room—yes kids, we had entire rooms for those freezer-sized machines—only got longer.

Then Covid hit. Shorts and T-shirts replaced slacks and button-downs. Beanbags were in, ergonomic chairs out. Home-baked bread was in, sad desk lunches out. Nobody missed the commute—and in the mix, everyone forgot they couldn’t print squat! But nobody missed printing. Printing stuff for work was already a thing of the past. Honestly forcing people out of offices and the workplace proved to us that many workplace infrastructures are not needed.

That was the quiet culmination of the whole “Save the tree, save the dream” project (shoutout to my rhydonium-fumes-sniffing hero of rebellion, Saw Gerrera). The Paperless Office became real—not with a bang, but with a whimper—35 years after it was hyped as the next big thing.

I can see the AI revolution at work, the big replacement of human, that we’re all scared of follows the same life cycle, except it won’t take 35 years. It’ll be much faster.

Believe the AI hype—but know where we really are

Free AI chat tools are everywhere. “AI-make” tools—the ones that build apps in a jiffy—are becoming ubiquitous. Editing text, manipulating pictures, creating presentations—it’s all out there. Big and small firms alike are jockeying for position in a world where AI is unavoidable. Some countries even have AI ministers. Here’s a quick sample app I created to do part of my job.

But right now, it all looks like a sea of shiny LEGO pieces scattered across the floor with no instruction manual for building the 9,023-piece Death Star. Every piece looks like it could fits with the others, but the grand design is still foggy. We still slog through Outlook, MS Teams, SharePoint, Oracle, Slack, shared drives. For those of us dragged back to the office, nothing fundamental has changed. We’re still responding to emails, sitting through meetings, building PowerPoints (maybe a bit faster), doing calculations (sure, with AI double-checking), researching much faster, and writing reports with grammar-polishing AI.

AI replacing people? Still limited to call centers, basic document/image processing, and low-level code generation.

The promise of AI needs more than algorithms

It wasn’t the printing press alone that spread knowledge to the masses—it was the invention of movable type that closed the circle and it took 250 years ti ignite the age of enlightenment in Europe. It wasn’t black powder itself that changed the power dynamics of dominance—it was putting it inside a metal (or bamboo, if you’re ancient Chinese) tube to fire projectiles. Even then it took centuries for European to mix this tech with their naval power to usher colonization.

Take my own job, for instance. I conduct process compliance audits at a huge enterprise. Reviewing documents against standards and cross-checking for consistency between routines and processes? AI could handle that tomorrow. But then comes the fieldwork—walking around, interviewing staff, observing practices, checking evidence. None of that becomes “AI-able” until all of it becomes AI’s domain.

Sure, I can use AI to draft a checklist or clean up grammar in my reports—but that’s gunpowder for fireworks. What’s missing are the cannons and ships. Until AI can take over the whole cycle—document review, interviews, observations, judgments—my job stays human. As long as people are in the loop, they need to be trained, observed, and questioned. The real AI revolution won’t happen until humans step back completely—and that takes more than just smarter software.

We as humans have no reasons to step back and step out, until there is a solid reason.

It’s gonna happen when nobody’s looking

I’m not saying AI at work is going to fizzle like the Paperless Office—but until AI owns entire workflows, we’re just swapping out tools, not changing the game. Maybe it’ll take an external shock, like Covid was for paperless. Some condition that makes the “old way” impossible.

Picture this: You need to build and run things in a place that is hostile to human survival. Let’s say Space. If we remove humans, there’s no need to solve problems related to worker survival in space. That’s where AI shines—taking full control, A to Z. While we’re busy wrestling with earthly problems, one day we’ll wake up and realize the true AI workplace is already here, fully implemented.

Or let’s say you need work done in a very far place immediately—like somewhere a light-year away. With current space travel technology, it would take 1,000 years for the first worker to get there. Even if we cryosleep the poor guy all the way, by the time he arrived his knowledge and skills would be a millennium obsolete. This is where you use needle cast (a term I learned from the Altered Carbon novel by Richard K. Morgan) to send AI agents. While everyone is focused on solving problems of working in far places, full AI dominance happens overnight.

AI at work won’t roll in with fireworks, HR workshops, or a grand ribbon-cutting ceremony. It’ll seep in the way paperless did—quietly, invisibly—until one day we realize we’ve been living in it for months. The real shift won’t come from sprinkling AI on top of our old routines; it’ll come when the routines themselves no longer need us.

While we’re busy solving a different problem, or removing an impossible limitation—that’s when the moment lands. And it won’t feel like a revolution. It’ll feel like waking up in a new world that somehow built itself while we were too busy fighting bigger battles.

I’m well-traveled intercontinentally, but when I moved to Canada 23 years ago, my European escapades were limited to a handful of bureaucratic, soul-crushing trips. Until last month, when my wife booked Barcelona for our wedding anniversary.

Barcelona was her pick. I didn’t ask why not Paris. I just said yes—with one condition. Lots of my globetrotting friends burn through the entire Iberian Peninsula in a week: Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Porto—they’re basically marathoners in tapas form. I said, “Keep it in Barcelona, please.” I don't have a vacation to rest from my first vacation. I go to explore, get lost, and, if possible, smash my step record. All in one city.

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Of course, like any rookie in Barcelona, I went full nerd: pins on Google Maps, YouTube binges, AI queries, friends’ tips. Helpful, sure—but nothing beats boots-on-the-ground. And Barcelona? It was delivered. Every cliché is true…and then some. Architecture, food, weather, streets, vibe—check, check, check. Locals probably have their share of gripes about politicians and bureaucrats, but as a Torontonian who’s wrestled with crumbling sidewalks, lunar-crater potholes, and traffic purgatory, I’m here to highlight what Barcelona got right. Take notes, world.

A Genuine Walkable City

Europeans basically invented city walking. First, let’s agree: what is a walkable city? It’s where homes, shops, schools, and services exist in harmony, so you don’t need a 4x4 and a full tank to grab milk. It’s safe, comfortable, pleasant, and tied neatly to public transit.

Other than world class public transit the secret sauce is short blocks and frequent intersections. Grids, basically.

Except for the Gothic Quarter—built for Roman sandals and divine patience—Barcelona is surprisingly modern for an “ancient” city. Ildefons Cerdà laid out the grid in 1859—50 years after Manhattan grid and just a few ticks younger than Salt Lake City’s Mormon blocks.

So why does Barcelona feel like a walker’s dream while New York—arguably the most walkable mega-city in North America—still makes you dodge black Tahoes like they’re wild buffalo? Salt Lake’s gigantic city grid is practically built for Marathon man. Toronto has a grid too, but calling it “walkable” is like calling a Tim Hortons chicken wrap “fine dining.”

Here’s the kicker: I miss quoted, secret sauce, it's not just the grid. European cities prioritize people on foot. From an urban planning point of view that takes guts, money, and the kind of decisions that get mayors sacked and city councilors unelectable for life. Barcelona shows what happens when planners say: “Maybe people should matter more than cars.”

Two prime examples:

Waterfront Zen

Waterfronts are obvious people magnets. Barcelona shoved its waterfront highway under bridges and built a walkers promenade on top. Elegant, seamless, oddly calming. Exactly the opposite of Toronto’s QEW overpasses, where “urban design” means dodging trucks while squinting at the lake. Even our crown jewel, Queens Quay, gives more space to vehicles and streetcars than people.

Barcelona’s lesson is clear: if your city prioritizes cars, don’t call it “public space.” You’ve built a parking lot with benches.

Superblocks: Urban Wizardry

When Barcelona was done building those beautiful hexagonal city blocks my man Ildefons envisioned something strange happened. Dude did not count for cars, how could he? Carl Benz was only 11 years old then. When car added to the mix this configuration brought vehicular noise, fumes, and gridlock despair into people’s door steps. Their fix? Superblocks. Nine-block zones where inside streets are car-lite, pedestrian-heavy. Cafés spill into medians, kids playground smack dab in the middle of what used to be traffic lanes, and patios multiply like espresso shots. Think Rambla de Catalunya: patios, music, life. An occasional slow taxi or delivery van sneaks in, but that’s it. It has been proven by urban planners that when you narrow the street, traffic automatically slows downs. That's what they did, one lane streets for inner blocks.

Meanwhile, New York just pedestrianized West 33rd Street—one block, after centuries. Now in Barcelona more than half of the city is like that. Pedestrians own 80% of some streets, 50% of others. Cars are tolerated guests, rarely invited, often ignored. The genius isn’t just in reclaiming space—it’s in designing life to spill into the streets. Sit, sip, watch, breathe. Cars? Mostly irrelevant.

Weed Situation

I don’t mind cannabis existing legally. I just don’t want it ghosting around me like diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, or cheap cologne.

In Toronto, cannabis use is legal everywhere—parks, sidewalks, festivals. Catch a lungful whether you like it or not. While weed is kind of legal in Barcelona the city found a dignified way to cater to the herb aficionados while keep the air fresh. Public use of cannabis is illegal, private use is absolutely legal, legit sales are done through clubs, and you’ve got to register. In practice, it’s a gray-zone collective system: you contribute, they grow, you partake. Like firearms in Canada versus the U.S.—bureaucratic, slower, somehow more civilized.

I roamed packed hotspots—Barceloneta Beach, La Rambla, Passeig de Gràcia, El Raval (Barcelona’s Brooklyn-Bushwick mashup)—and didn’t smell a thing. Bliss. Private indulgence stays private, and public space stays breathable. Respect.

Alcohol in Public

North Americans dream of Europe partly because of booze freedom—drinking beers in parks and plazas feels like cultural jailbreak. Feels like Persian girls freed up from mandatory hijab: liberating, intoxicating, sometimes literally. But freedom often comes with the dark side—rowdy tourists, occasional public urination, and drunken karaoke on monuments.

I expected Barcelona to be one giant sangria circus. Wrong. In Catalonia, public drinking—streets, squares, beaches—is broadly banned, with fines steep enough to crush your tapas budget (€3,000 to €15,000). But Barcelona applies the law with creativity. Restaurants with licenses can extend onto sidewalks, promenades, even traffic medians. Suddenly, a whole plaza is dotted with tables, and waiters dodge Vespas to deliver your cava. It’s less “open container chaos,” more “civilized street festival.”

Toronto has a version of this that was promoted by the city during Covid-19 shit show, but in Barcelona it’s everywhere and part of culture. You don’t need a rooftop bar with $30 cocktails to feel like part of the street. You just sit down, order, and join the flow anywhere in the city.

Olympic Legacy Done Right

My memory of the 1992 Olympic Games is burned into my brain from our 27-inch Grundig TV: the Dream Team’s dominance, Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo firing a flaming arrow to light the cauldron, Carl Lewis winning his third consecutive gold, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé’s soaring anthem. I wanted to retrace it all. I didn’t expect much—Olympic venues usually rot like old movie sets.

Not Barcelona. Instead of letting facilities decay like Rio, Athens, or Sarajevo, the city folded them into daily life. The Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys now hosts concerts, track events, and even FC Barcelona while Camp Nou gets rebuilt. Palau Sant Jordi still fills 17,000 seats for concerts. The Piscina Municipal de Montjuïc—the iconic diving pool with that jaw-dropping skyline backdrop—still holds competitions, but now doubles as a public bar and café. Order a drink, enjoy the view, pretend you’re an Olympic diver.

Almost every venue has a second life. That’s not nostalgia—it’s strategy. They didn’t just build for four weeks of glory; they built for 30 years of relevance. Other host cities should tattoo this lesson on their foreheads.

Toronto, if you’re listening: take notes.

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Humans are funny creatures—our psyche follows the same rules that govern physics, whether we like it or not. Everything in existence wants to reach some sort of equilibrium. Doesn’t matter if it’s thermodynamics, mechanics, chemistry, or biology: heat spreads, motion evens out, molecules balance, bodies seek homeostasis.

And people? Same deal. The brain, built for survival, would rather not poke the bear unless absolutely necessary. That’s why you never hear a man—lounging on his sofa, Costco-sized bag of kettle cooked potato chips in one hand, Greek yogurt tub balanced on his lap, watching Game 5 of the NBA playoffs—suddenly declare:

"Hey honey, Now I go talk to neighbor about their teenage son smoking weed behind our garden shed everyday!"

That man is human equilibrium personified. If he were a space rock, he’d be flying at Mach 4 in a perfectly straight line, no change in its direction, no change of speed, no fuss. To demand him to abandon his resting position to go confront his neighbor is literally a violation of the laws of the universe.

And the same thing happens at work. Equilibrium there is called the status quo. Nine-to-five, keep your head down, avoid conflict, do what’s expected, let the awkward conversations slide. Why rock the boat? Why should you be the person who points to something that is “kinda working” into “definitely broken”?

Take the office annoyance—every workplace has one. Why confront her? Who’s to say the headache won’t actually get worse after the hard conversation? Maintaining the fragile balance often feels like the smarter move.

But here’s the catch: mediocrity isn’t stable. It decays. That’s not philosophy—that’s physics. The law of entropy says everything naturally drifts from order to disorder. Which means your comfortable equilibrium? Too long on the coach with a family size potato chip? Your place will fall apart.

So, if you’re the type who always break the status quo, initiate tough conversations, and refuses to coast—people might call you a psychopath or a genius. But one thing’s for sure: you’re the only one not mistaking equilibrium for progress.

How do we keep everything from falling apart: Engage in hard conversations.

So, what exactly is a hard conversation?
It’s any dialogue (sometimes a monologue, because the other person is left speechless) where the subject is uncomfortable, emotionally charged, or risky. Think of telling someone their behavior is off, or saying something about the organization that everyone knows but no one dares to say out loud.

It’s “hard” because it pushes people out of their comfort zones, shakes relationships, rattles org charts, or pokes at sensitive topics most would rather avoid. What’s funny is that many conversations that are easy with friends or family become hard at work. With friends, you’ve got a safety net of trust—your relationship roots run deep enough to weather the gusts of honesty. At work? Shallow soil. Colleagues don’t have time to know you—or worse, don’t care—so one bold comment can blow the whole tree over.

Why are hard conversations hard?

Fear of damaging relationships: You don’t want to be the jerk who opens Pandora’s HR box or ticks off a VP who still controls your pay stub.

Emotional blowback: Nobody wants a soap opera scene in the office. Tears, rage, theatrics—suddenly your “professional feedback” session looks like daytime TV.

Message distortion: You might raise a procurement failure to solve a problem, but the VP of procurement hears, “I’m coming for your job.” Congratulations—your carefully crafted feedback just turned into a live grenade.

Power dynamics: Giving feedback up the ladder, down the ladder, or sideways? Every move has retaliation risk. And don’t get me started on whistleblowing. Every company swears it protects whistleblowers, but in practice? Let’s just say my favorite basketball radio show used to have a segment called “Don’t Get Fired,” where hosts made honest observations about the state of US sports media - in which their employer was the largest one. Basically shit talking behind their company and the pro league who pay them on air.

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How to Handle Hard Conversations (and Which Ones to Avoid)

1. It’s a conversation, not a speech
Hard conversations aren’t hard speeches. Don’t lecture; pause and actually listen. You might learn something—and you definitely want to avoid monologuing while the other person stares into the void.

2. Lead with effect, not cause
Instead of opening with “You messed up the project timeline!”, try “What do you think are the top three reasons our projects are delayed?” It’s less accusatory, more collaborative, and keeps defenses low.

3. You don’t have to win every battle
Winning a war is great; dominating every minor skirmish is exhausting. Pick your fights. Make progress on one thing rather than attacking five problems at once.

4. Focus on behavior, not character
Critique what went wrong, not who they are. Hard conversations often feel like personal attacks when people take issues as character assassination. Extra caution when dealing with coworkers who are super proud of their jobs—check their corporate Kool-Aid tolerance first.

5. Pick the right setting
Public ambushes are a no-go. Departmental issues? Don’t air them at an all-staff meeting. One-on-one critique? Avoid dramatic setups like “Come to my office, close the door, and sit.” And definitely skip the laser-tag team-building scenario—it’s awkward, sweaty, and probably won’t end well.

6. Lead with curiosity, not accusation
Your argument might have holes. Use the conversation to uncover them together instead of presenting a full-frontal charge. Ask questions, explore, probe—discover before you dictate.

7. Stick to facts
Vague feelings, rumors, or remote possibilities? Leave them at the door. Hard conversations are easier when you anchor them in observable facts.

8. Don’t pile on
One problem at a time. If you think your boss has five issues in their management style, pick the one that matters most and deal with it fully. Multi-problem ambushes are just drama waiting to happen.

9. Balance honesty with empathy
Be clear, firm, and direct, but show you understand the other side. Acknowledgment ≠ agreement—it just makes the conversation less like a wrestling match.

10. Agree on next steps
End with action. Don’t let your courage go to waste—make sure your message is received and something changes. Otherwise, congratulations: you’ve just spent your social capital at work for nothing.

11. Practice makes perfect
Start small. Hard conversations don’t have to involve corruption, incompetence, or career-ending revelations. Practice on low-stakes issues—like giving feedback on a presentation or discussing minor process tweaks. Build muscle before you hit the big leagues.

Finally: Focus on outcomes.
If the only thing your conversation accomplishes is making someone squirm, skip it. Your goal is change, not chaos. Tackle issues that actually matter and can be acted on—lateness, performance, missing skills, or how someone communicates. Tough? Sure. Useful? Absolutely. Steer clear of personal landmines. Religion, politics, sexual orientation—these aren’t hard conversations; they’re workplace IEDs. Step on one, and boom. At work, just don’t go there. Ever.

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Last week my wife and I went on a getaway trip from Toronto to London, On and shores of Lake Huron with three other couples. A few hundred kilometers over a couple of days. I was the only one driving an electric car, so I had to be mindful of my state of charge. The last thing I wanted was to look like a drag on the trip while everyone else waited for my battery to fill up.

So, early in the morning of the second day, after about 250 kilometers and sitting at 65% state of charge, I figured it was best to charge up my Cadillac Lyriq to 100% before everyone else woke up. That way we could go anywhere without worrying about my range. Luckily, my hotel had a DC fast charging station with eight stalls. Perfect. I hooked up to an Electrify Canada Ultra 350 kW blistering-fast plug and let the electrons rip.

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This was my first time in two years of EV ownership charging outside of home. Nobody else was there — a good thing, since when multiple cars plug in, the average speed of each stall drops. My back-of-the-napkin math said it would take maybe 15–20 minutes to top off. The stall started roaring immediately — non-Tesla DC chargers sound like jet engines with all their cooling fans — juicing my battery. But to my surprise, the speed was nowhere near the 180 kW my car is supposed to take. So I settled in, alone, with my podcast in the empty lot.

Not even ten minutes passed when, just as the sun was rising, a second driver pulled up: a fancy white Mercedes EQS AMG. Didn’t know lawyers and CEOs wake up at 5:30 a.m. He hopped out and plugged in like a pro — no fumbling for credit cards, no double-checking connections. Smooth. Clearly, a regular user. The plug he chose was from a different provider than mine.

A bit of background on this car helps set the stage for what happens next. The EQS is Mercedes’ first real attempt at a fully electric flagship. On paper, it’s brilliant: cutting-edge tech, spaceship interior, silent glide. But in practice? Its futuristic styling scared off the old-money S-Class loyalists. These are the folks who like their cars big, conservative, and powered by a gas engine that purrs like a hummingbird.

So the EQS ended up caught in no man’s land of automotive market. Too weird for the traditional S-Class buyer, too expensive for the casual EV crowd, and cursed by the brutal depreciation that haunts almost every luxury EV. Which means anyone you see behind the wheel of one isn’t just driving a car — they’ve got a story. Because nobody “accidentally” buys an EQS. Specially the AMG version

I gave him a glance, then went back to my podcast. Tap tap on my window. It’s the lawyer/CEO guy.

“Good morning! Are you from around here?”
”No, just visiting.”

“Oh! You shouldn’t use Electrify Canada plugs. Too expensive. Try the one I’m on.”

Tips on saving five bucks from a guy driving a $200K Mercedes — golden.
I laughed. Wow, I didn’t know. But I’m already mid-charge, and honestly, I don’t really care. It won’t cost that much.

I figured that was the end of the conversation between two strangers at a charging station at 6:02 am Sunday. But no. He looked at my plates — which basically give away how long ago I registered my car — then started in:

“How do you like your car?”

Now, let me tell you, that is the most pointless question you can ask an early adopter. It’s like asking a Mac user in the early ’90s if they like their computer, or asking a Pixel user surrounded by iPhones if they’re happy with their pure Android experience. Early adopters are bleeding-heart tech romantics. Even if it’s painful, even if it makes no sense, they’ll defend their choice like it’s religion. It’s baked in.

But I was polite.
“I used to work at GM when this car announce. I liked the styling and the price, so I signed up. It’s been good to me since then.”

He peeked into my cabin and nodded.
“Nice. Beautiful design.”

Now I’m in a pickle. It’s like Dua Lipa complimenting your girlfriend’s figure. You have to say something nice back about Dua’s smoking-hot body without ruining your chances with your girl. This guy was driving one of the most luxurious cars on the market, and he’s complimenting my premium-but-not-supercar Cadillac. So I played it carefully:

“Yeah, it’s nice here. But I can’t hold a candle to your S-Class when it comes to materials and refinement.”

That was his cue. He lit up.
“Come, check out my car.”

So I walked over, and he started showing me everything his $200K palace on wheels had. His presentation was straight out of Doug DeMuro’s quirks and features playbook. He was on fire. And as he talked, my brain started hearing Mark Knopfler’s lyrics of Dire Straits song “My Parties” about that obnoxious party host showing off his mansion:

That's a genuine weathervane

It moves with the breeze

Portable hammock honey

Who needs trees

That's a brass toilet tissue holder with its own telephone

That's musical doorbell

It don't ring, I ain't kiddin'

It plays America the beautiful and tie a yellow ribbon

And on and on he went.

I tried to cut him off, politely:
“Yeah, that’s what you get when you spend $150K + on a car. Hopefully one day I can splurge like you.”

I didn’t realize that was his actual setup line, his spiel.
“I didn’t spend that much. I bought this used — $65K.”

Wait. What?
This man’s palace on wheels cost less than my middle-manager Cadillac?

He grinned and leaned in like he was sharing state secrets.
“That’s the game. You wait for the sucker to buy it brand new. Then a couple of months later, when negative press about luxury EVs value starts piling up, he panics and trades it back. The car’s basically brand new, maybe 12,000 km, still full warranty, but the dealer can’t move it. That’s when you pounce. Haggle it down even more, and boom — you own a half-price super-luxury car. Drive it for a year and a half, then flip it. Rinse and repeat.”

“But you still sell it for less?”

“Not much. Maybe $10K less than I paid. Works out to $850 a month to drive a car like this. I’ve done it twice now — this EQS, and before that a Porsche Taycan.”

Then he unplugged, turned to me, and said:
“Want to take it for a spin?”

I’m sure your mom told you never to get into a car with a stranger — especially one who offers you his Mercedes at six in the morning. But me being 6’4” and him 5’5”, I made the executive decision to accept. We drove a slow loop around the massive hotel parking lot. Yes, it was obviously luxurious and smooth — worth every penny of the $65K steal — but still weird. Who offers strangers test drives of their unsellable luxury EV at dawn?

At breakfast, I told my wife about my unsolicited Mercedes test drive. Naturally, she barked at me: Why would you do that?

Later, though, I thought about the lawyer/CEO and his motivation to open up to a complete stranger, spill his guts about his personal finance. You don’t see people at gas stations chatting like this. Filling up is too quick. Nobody compliments your Honda CR-V at the next pump while fueling their Ferrari. At least not in big cities.

But EV drivers? Different. Maybe because it’s still niche (unless you live in Norway). Maybe because buying one still feels like a leap of faith. When you meet another EV owner, it feels like you’re part of some unwritten brotherhood — or sisterhood. Even if your decision was questionable, even if you secretly regret it, it’s comforting to know someone else made the same leap.

Charging stations become spontaneous car clubs. You don’t need to explain the difference between Level 1 and Level 2, or what 800-volt architecture means. They already know. You are with others who share the same range anxiety, the overpriced car payments, the skeptical comments from friends:

“EVs aren’t ready yet.”
“The infrastructure sucks.”
“How do you do road trips in this?”
“Aren’t battery replacements crazy expensive?”

At a charging station, you don’t have to answer those shenanigans. You are at home.

EVs are like pets. Owning one gives you permission to approach another owner without looking weird or menacing. I know guys who get dogs just to have a conversation starter with women. People used to meet in bars. Then coffee shops. Then pet grooming studios. And now? Maybe charging stations are next. The future meeting point for lonely people with questionable decisions.

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I don’t consider myself a big dreamer—never had a grand vision in mind to strive for. Partly that’s my upbringing, partly the culture of not valuing dreams.

My family’s culture toward dreaming and achieving was more like driving a reasonably priced family sedan on a well-lit, paved road flanked by substantial guardrails. We were supposed to move at a parent-approved speed on this road to arrive where we were supposed to be. Becoming an engineer and finding a good job (not even opening my own business) was my well-lit road. Dreaming wasn’t even an option.

I’ve loved basketball for as long as I can remember, spending every night under Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook poster. I never dared to dream of being an NBA player, but my level of audacity carried me as far as the national team. Once I got there, though, there were no more roads. No more dreams.

Reading John Illsley biography My Life in Dire Straits, I discovered his late-1950s England was very similar to my own upbringing. He came from the middle class and was expected to follow prescribed steps that left no room - or need - for dreaming. But the magic of a homemade radio opened the door to the captivating dominion of music and led him to an unlikely path of becoming a rock star. He and his mates, who came from the same sort of background, went on to form one of the towering rock bands of his time. After Dire Straits—no more dreams.

But then a new dream appeared: Owning a pub.

What’s up with British millionaires and celebrities dreaming of owning a pub?

This is no shortage of who's who in the world of pub ownership in UK. Here’s a short list of famous pub owners I know (just a fraction of what’s out there):

Pink Floyd once prescribed what achievement looked like in their 1973 masterpiece Money from British point of view:

“New car, caviar, four-star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team.”

I know for a fact none of the band members bought any football teams. Sure, they had their fair share of caviar and plenty of new cars - and old ones if you're Nick Mason. Buying a football team may be a bit outside of someone in the entertainment world budget but owning a pub is doable. I have my own theory as to why none of Pink Floyd members ever owned a pub: Because they never played in a Pub… I don't think any pub goer can stomach a full 10 minutes of A Saucerful of Secrets.

Pub is the Goldilocks of celebrity side hustles—big enough to feel like an achievement, small enough that when it fails, your accountant only lightly weeps.

Of course, you could point to the usual reasons celebrities want to open pubs—diversification of income, brand expansion, lifestyle image and passion projects. No doubt some of these are true for a few. But in general, I don’t think “open a pub” makes anyone’s financial advisor’s top-three list. Jeremy Clarkson chronicled his own attempt to launch The Farmer’s Dog in the fourth season of Amazon prime show Clarkson’s Farm in excruciating detail. After watching, you know he had millions of other ways to spend his money that would have been less painful.

So let’s dig into the one reason that might really explain it all: Nostalgia and British tradition.

Why Pubs?

Pubs are more than just places that serve drinks; in the UK they are cultural anchors, holding together history, identity, and belonging. To own a pub is not just to run a business—it’s to claim a piece of Britain’s living soul. When celebrities buy them, they’re not really buying beer taps and wooden beams. They’re buying connection, memory, and permanence.

Symbol of “Homecoming”
Success often pulls people far from their humble beginnings—into mansions in the Hollywood Hills, recording studios in LA, stadiums in Berlin. A pub is the one place that feels immune to all that. It grounds them. It says, “I may be famous, but I’m not above a pint. I’m still one of you.” In that sense, a pub is less about divergence from celebrity life and more about return.

British Identity, Poured and Served
The pub is practically shorthand for Britain itself. Just as Americans romanticize diners or the French adore their street cafés, Britons carry the pub in their cultural DNA. It represents not just drinking, but storytelling, laughter, and the kind of social social lubrication only wood paneled walls and a few sticky tables can provide. For celebrities, owning a pub isn’t just personal—it’s patriotic, a way of laying claim to tradition itself.

Nostalgia for Simpler Times
For many musicians and actors, the pub is where the story begins: playing a first dodgy gig in a smoke-stained backroom, nervously chatting before auditions, or just nursing a pint with friends before real life sped up. Buying a pub is like bottling that moment before everything changed—before fame warped the ordinary. For some, the pub was more than just a hangout; it was the spark that lit their careers. The most famous example is Mark Knopfler, who found inspiration for Sultans of Swing one rainy afternoon in Deptford, South London, while enduring the dreadful sound of a Dixie jazz band in a half-empty pub.

Legacy & Permanence
Fame, however bright, fades quickly from memory. Songs go out of rotation, films get buried beneath new blockbusters. But a pub is made of brick and wood, often centuries older than the person who buys it. To tie your name to one is to anchor your legacy in stone. McKellen’s The Grapes, for example, has watched generations come and go—it will keep pouring pints long after Marvel movies are forgotten.

Ego + Accessibility
Of course, there’s an ego factor too. Owning a pub gives a tangible badge of status—something you can point to and say, that is mine. But unlike yachts or private jets, the pub is a democratic ego-trip. Everyone is welcome. Fans can literally walk through the door, order a pint, and feel like they’ve stepped into their idol’s world. The paradox is delicious: the pub is at once the celebrity’s power move and their act of humility.

Maybe the truest reason lies in this: pubs are Britain’s collective living room. They are places of gossip, first kisses, grieving toasts, football roars, family Sunday roasts, and half-baked dreams scribbled on napkins. For a British celebrity, no matter how high they fly, to own a pub is to hold the keys to that shared living room. It’s not just commerce. It’s communion.