Weddings, of course, are one of the most joyous occasions, especially when you have the privilege of deeply knowing the bride or groom. Each wedding has its own shape depending on the rich traditions each family brings to the ceremony or the personal flair they put on it.

Over time though, the weekends begin to blur together, from the “for those of you who don’t know me…” speech openers to the perfectly mediocre steak that made you realize you should’ve opted for the salmon or the chicken.

(Note: neither of these weddings offered steak and the food was exceptional)

During a wedding, if you listen hard enough, you can always come away with a few nuggets of wisdom.

At the wedding last weekend, the groom’s dad ended his speech with “Mazel Tov to my paisans,” welcoming the new Jewish family members into the Italian fold. The best man and other best friend Al even had to acknowledge the quality of this line later in the night before giving a regaling speech of his own.

But this past weekend in Idaho, the officiant, Eileen, a family friend of the groom, said something that hit a lil bit deeper:

You can find plenty of people to take to a party or a big trip. Find the person you want to spend a Tuesday with.

At a wedding, the grandest gesture of love we have, she reframed marriage as a validation of small life decisions. That the often (egregiously) expensive party we throw is in recognition of two people who will spend the rest of their lives enjoying the mundane with each other, from taxes to laundry.

Eileen meant it for the person you’ll spend your life with, but the question travels: is this something you’d want to commit to on a given Tuesday? The job, the person, the project.

We’re all a little fucked up, endlessly exposed to everyone else’s best days on the job, in love, life, wishing for all of it.

Very rarely are you wishing for someone else’s Tuesdays.

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Liz had framed a piece of art from 4 year old Liz and proudly displayed it in her kitchen. It was a conversation piece and, of all the art in the nicely decorated apartment, the only thing my girlfriend and I can remember.

Most importantly, it inspired us to reach out to our parents and discover what little Pete and Kay had created all those years ago.

Much to our delight (and the delight of our parents!) some of our work has been preserved. We spent some time flipping through the work we made as a child, the things we wrote, the grave misspellings, and of course, the art.

To no one’s surprise, Kay’s art was simply spectacular and borderline prophetic.

Kay rediscovered a self-portrait of her and a big dog, which is convenient because she now loves hanging with my big dog Cece. This is now sitting framed on the wall of our apartment and has really livened up the room if I do say so myself.

Me on the other hand…

To think a five or six year old put together this beautiful piece of art! My use of negative space and color at this age can only be described as exceptional. I’m taking this home from my parents’ house this week and preparing to hang it up in my apartment.

Jokes aside, this exercise of digging through our old work was pretty rewarding.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few weeks (and honestly the last few years) really doubting my work at every corner. Turning art / design / creative tech into a full-time gig meant forgoing the free and easy lifestyle of creating to create something, and it made every self-critique a bit harsher.

As I’ve become accustomed to sharing my work, I’ve measured its worth not on the joy that it brings me to make, but the views and attention it commands. Even now, I’m launching this new Strava short project into the world. I love making them, and friends have been genuinely hyped about them! And still, I can feel a video's view count deciding for me whether any of that excitement is real.

Yet, of all the art I’ve seen on the walls of apartments or in offices, I remembered a 4-year-old’s piece framed behind a kitchen sink. And instead of new flashy prints, Kay and I are decorating our apartment with pieces of ourselves.

The work was made in an elementary classroom by children without a care in the world, preserved by parents who were beyond proud of their kids' work. No audience, no metrics, not even a second draft. As Martin Scorsese once said to Bong Joon Ho, “the most personal is the most creative”.

So I frame my self-portrait not because it’s a work of art, but because it’s a reminder from 6-year-old me to 29-year-old me that joy is worth more than view counts.

Ask your parents what they’ve kept from many moons ago. You may discover you had a knack for negative space or knew you’d love a chonky dog.

You may also discover something worth hanging on your wall.

This is week #113 in a row I’m posting! If you like my writing, leave a comment or reply to this email !!

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My mom did everything she could to help us kiddos learn basic math ahead of the curve when we were younger.

So when it came to long division practice in 2nd or 3rd grade, we'd have an entire page to show how we'd divide 132 by 12, but yung Pete was quick with it in his head and would just write 11 (phew, I still got it).

But the teacher would give half credit with a big “show your work!!” in red.

This, of course, was to discourage cheating off your neighbor. But it instilled a lesson in me from an early age.

If you cannot show your work, the answer is far less valuable.

This past week, I spent time talking with a friend and successful creative technologist about some copying we’ve seen out in the wild.

We talked about our own experiences of people taking our ideas and projects from our work and passing them off as their own, how this is happening everywhere, and the broader implications of this down the road. We both agreed that it’s easier than ever to see a video of someone’s work on the internet, throw it into Claude and replicate it within a few hours. Whether we like it or not, you retain very little ownership of your work once it’s out in the world.

Admittedly, sometimes the copycat is even better than the original work, and yet it can still fail. Why?

Because it is far easier for someone to replicate your answer than your work.

People care about the story, the imperfect prototypes, the wacky rants, the struggle. It is the journey, not the destination, that people fall in love with. And the same journey could never be replicated twice.

The audience is like your second grade math teacher. They do not care about you getting the right answer, they demand you show your work in big red letters.

A product or app or whatever the hell you make with no journey, no story, no work will only, at-best, receive half-credit.

And look, momma said I can teach myself anything. But with an abundance of resources at my disposal, I don’t even have to. I can learn what’s trending, the best practices, how to avoid all the mistakes before I even get started. I have the best tools, and creating something has never been easier.

Some days, I feel the pull to skip that journey entirely. After all, the same “right answer” is there whether or not I fumble my way through the work or prompt my way to replicate what’s working, right?

Maybe. But the value has never been in getting it “right.” Value is somewhere in the page worth of long division.

So the question has flipped from what destination is worth focusing on, to which journey is worth enduring?

Yes, supportive friends are one thing (and I love everyone who supports me), but I left that first video a little dejected.

This idea is so awesome, why didn’t people on the internet feel the same way?!

‘lil recap here. Last year, I embroidered a pair of shorts with my Strava data. Specifically I embroidered every training run leading up to the New York City marathon (white) and the race itself (orange) along with stats of my total mileage (also orange).

Since then, I’ve been iterating on another pair with my more recent data, tinkering with each run’s design and the size of the embroidery. A lot of time has been spent on scrap fabric, adjusting stitching patterns and getting everything lookin’ good.

I figured once I got the design in a good spot, the rest would take care of itself.

The idea, then and now, is simple: what if we wore the work we did, if the seemingly innocuous run around your neighborhood, the 5 miles on a random Tuesday, could be immortalized in a pair of shorts.

After the video flopped, I kept telling myself to give it a little more time, that people would just get it. But this idea is novel, and I was making people do the work of getting it. The design wasn’t the problem. My communication was.

So I asked for help. Friends suggested better focused images of the shorts, a bolder print, a few specific shots.

This past week I went out and tested a few Trial Reels on Instagram to see what stuck. And for the first time, a few strangers got it.

In Sam’s case, she even jumped to that exact idea I had a year ago, putting a race’s training block and the result side by side (tbh kinda spooky how spot on it was)

Of course, there’s a greedier version of me that wished this video popped off with a billion likes and millions of comments like “woooaahhhh this is so cool and Pete you’re so handsome”

But there’s something satisfying in getting the message partially right for the first time and feeling understood by some new folks :P

I am out of my depth: picking up shorts from the local Goodwill, learning to embroider, accidentally ripping them, and slowly turning pairs of shorts into a record of my runs.

But now I gotta get back to work :D

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A few weeks back I reflected on a hundred weekly Substacks in a row and realized that Substack, in a way, has become my memoir. And just a few weeks before that, I acknowledged that I’ve kinda lost my way with writing altogether.

My Sunday writing ritual has turned into something I do out of habit, but I don’t feel as confident in the topics I’m writing about. I’ve tried to combat this in a few ways: thinking about topics earlier in the week, leading with more personal topics, leading with more industry topics. At the end of each week, I’ve still felt less and less confident about the topic I’m choosing to write about. Not because I believe the topic is necessarily bad, but because I lack a certain conviction in one topic over another. A real strong why I want to write about that thing.

As I sat down to write today, I had a few competing topics I was thinking about:

1. The Hank Green controversy and the unbelievable amount of hate some people get for using A.I.

2. This interaction between Sam Altman and Alex Hirsch, and how some people deserve some of the AI hate they bring upon themselves.

3. The champagne in my fridge for two years that’s never been popped, despite my girlfriend and I having several reasons to pop it. We just always put it off until the next reason to celebrate.

4. A family vacation up in Maine and hike with my parents, and how quality time with family is life’s greatest gift (take notes Mr. Sam Altman)

With the blog being “Re:Pete”, it means it’s just about things I am working on and thinking about. That’s super broad, so anything from my week can make its way in here. I have no strong filter for any of the above ideas.

So that’s where I turn to you, the reader. There are a few thousand of you reading, and I’d love to hear what you think. What’s a piece of writing of mine that’s stuck with you? It could be a whole piece or just a sentence or two. Feel free to leave a comment, reply to the email, text, or DM me your thought!

Probably a bad sign that I'm looking for conviction by asking others for their opinion. But here I am, asking anyway :D

This is week #110 in a row I’m posting! If you like my writing, leave a comment or reply to this email !!

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As a drummer you have the immense responsibility to keep the band in time throughout the show. It’s a different pressure than the guitarist hitting a nice riff or the singer hitting the high note.

You’re also positioned at the back, usually obscured by your bandmates, and in some cases forgotten. But that view from back there is unique to you.

This past weekend my band Bimbo Summit sold out The Mercury Lounge, a sentence a year ago we could not have imagined to be true.

Casey sang in front of a crowd for the first time, opening the night with a song to surprise her husband on their one year anniversary, getting choked up while the whole crowd was in awe of our bass player turned guitarist and singer. Everyone’s looking up at Casey as she sang on stage, but I was the only one in the room with a direct view of her husband Ryan’s face and oh boy was he proud.

Sarah performed a song about how her late mother and father met years ago, and I could only play along as loud as I could to make sure this banger of a tribute had the energy and life it deserved.

Anne brought to life the album she produced, fully integrated backtrack running through the front of house (i.e. playing the song out of a speaker) and seeing her manage the show from her computer to give the band its first complete show.

If the drummer is the train’s conductor, then I got to watch the engine run.

We even had two new members join us for the show, Tyler on the bass and Emily on the violin for a few songs, adding a texture to the songs and to the personality of the band we didn’t know we were missing.

Sarah’s dad’s band opened. Casey’s parents’ band opened too. Two sets of parents playing the same stage as their kids, in the same night. A Family Affair as we called it. We got ready with them in the green room before and got rowdy with them after. For a night we were all kids living the same rockstar dream.

My best friend’s entire family made it, and friends from college who I hadn’t seen in over five years were able to see us play.

In the moment it was easy to get tripped up on a few wrong notes and falling out of time with the backtracks. Common wisdom suggests that these things don’t matter to the people listening, which was proven true (nobody had a fuckin’ clue we were out of time when I asked afterwards).

What mattered more was that this memory wasn’t something we could have lucked into in any sense of the word. We had to work our way to earn it, through rehearsals and meticulous planning and playing in a few dingier bars, and put other parts of our lives on hold to make some music.

We were all motivated by some love, of music or each other, to work this hard. It’s a complete 180 from the last time in my life I was performing music seriously: for a judge in a damp, empty room to be scored from 0-100 for a chance to be an All-State drummer. All I can remember is how disappointed I was for scoring a 99. No one else ever heard me play that piece.

A few days before the show I saw my brother perform a show of his own with his band and sing his original songs. I studied the drummer closely and nodded along at some of his awesome fills, and sung my damn lungs out for the hooks I could remember.

It’s an honor and a privilege to play with these damn Bimbos.

This is week #109 in a row I’m posting! I hope it inspires you to play or go see some local music this week.

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I asked around, and some pals leaned in with practical tips on what could have been better. Mainly it was to show the shorts more prominently and tie the project to my existing audience of creative technologists. All of it seemed pretty obvious in hindsight.

For months I’d been planning the best way to share it. A series of videos telling the story of learning embroidery and tinkering with the design, building toward shorts people might actually want to buy for themselves. I didn’t have the exact design all this time, just a first concept and a very ugly proof of concept I shared a few months back at an art show I did.

Far too late did I realize I was trying to write the story I wanted to tell before doing the work, imagining and scoping out how the whole thing would progress before getting my ass to work.

I fell in love with fantasizing about the finished product, about how it might make people feel, instead of putting thread to fabric and beginning to make stuff.

So when I actually sat down to shoot the video, I quickly realized I had no idea how to film myself behind the machine, let alone explain the process. I couldn’t even remember how to wind a bobbin.

Failed about ten times, unwinding and rewinding the thread by hand, trying to remember how a machine I already own actually works.

I keep having to remind myself that in my past project my laziest reel, the one I never bothered to polish, is the one that went viral. It was just a close up of the work, nothing too flashy. Raw and in the moment, not manufactured and overly explained.

The real work and authentic moments will be more interesting than a manufactured dream will ever be. A story like this only gets told after you’ve already made the mess.

On the surface, someone going into a restaurant with a camera and recording their entire meal sounds like the least engaging piece of content in the world.

And yet, a handful of creators have found a way to make it work. I’m not sure who started the trend exactly, but the two accounts I keep coming back to are Sam’s out of Dallas and Ertan’s out of New York City.

Each video, they visit a struggling or seemingly empty family business they’ve walked by or that’s been recommended to them, sit down, order what the restaurant recommends, and chat with the owner a bit, asking how business has been.

On occasion, these owners will be vulnerable and share what they’re dealing with: raising rent, unexpected medical bills, or struggling to take care of their children.

These videos are extremely simple in nature and raw in production, but they end up changing the lives of these struggling families. After a video is posted, business booms, reviews fly in, and what was once an empty, struggling restaurant is revitalized.

The reviews are honest, and in a world where influencers and paid promotions dictate how we perceive businesses and restaurants, Sam and Ertan don’t take any payment. They often have to insist they pay for their meal when they return for a second video as thanks for all the business they bring.

In the past I’ve written about how our timelines are filled with divisive news and hateful content that drives engagement.

But these food reviews offer a slice of hope. These platforms allow stories of struggling restaurant owners to be heard, and for people around the world to rally support for people trying to make an honest living and bring good food to the world.

And das what America is all about.

This is week #107 in a row I’m posting! I hope it inspired you to go try a new local joint in your city.

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I shared it here on Substack, Reddit, and Instagram at the time. It initially got some good feedback along with a lotta hate.

Even more surprising it picked up a lot of traction a few months ago seemingly out of nowhere, hitting over 10,000 users just last week.

One person letting me know the application had become popular amongst Thai runners.

One of the beautiful things about the internet is that small ideas can reach the corners of the world just because, allowing art to spread and find it’s people (along with some really shitty stuff too).

I was chatting with a recent grad and talented animator this past week about career advice. And all I could say was:

Share your work

Share your work

Share your work

There is really nothing to lose with your work out in the world.

You may get some negative feedback or no feedback at all. You may learn you’re not exporting your work in the highest quality, or communicating it in a hard to digest way, or your VoiceOver sounds like you’re miserable (my personal problem).

By sharing your art, it can reach more people. And with more eyeballs on it, you increase your chances of the right person seeing.

It’s a flawed process, but it’s a miracle that you can share a 30 second video of your work and the world even has a chance to see it.

In entrepreneur land there’s a pissing contest over numbers. Fundraising rounds, growth metrics, and followers have been reduced to points on a scoreboard.

10,000 is a number like that. Easy to say, easy to forget one is a runner from Thailand who doesn’t even know who was the first to share the site with them in the first place.

This is week #106 in a row I’m posting and will tie back to some work I am doing with the Strava data again soon :D

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An objectively, eerily perfect marketing rollout to reach new demographics for a product seemingly doomed for the tech nerds.

Meta did the impossible and made the smart glasses sexy…

…and I fucking hate it.

The glasses at their core are the AI assistant and a camera embedded within, and are an expansion of their existing glasses product line. I take issue mostly with the discrete camera; they’ve made surveillance sexy and cool.

In a world where anxiety is at an all-time high, people are partying less, kids are making less mistakes, the company who essentially pioneered social media and is often attributed for amplifying anxiety, depression, and self-harm among teens, is going to launch a glasses company to make anything recordable and instantly sharable.

People, especially kids, deserve the freedom to be imperfect and unobserved and this directly infringes on that.

I am not really anti-Meta as a whole. As with any powerful technology, it comes with a ton of tradeoffs, but this launch in particular made me feel upset. This nightmare of everyone having a camera on their face has been marketed to feel sexy and sleek and built for everyone. Yet we inch closer to a world where we’re always being recorded whether we know it or not.

It actually makes me respect another hardware company, Nothing, who put a red recording light on their phones to let people know they’re being recorded. It’s on by default. A small, yet consequential design decision that is a step in the right direction.

We were already partying less, already making fewer mistakes. And now the threat of being recorded anywhere means we never really get to fuck up at all :(

This is week #105 in a row I’m posting and a short one while traveling about this Meta launch.

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If you know Kay, you’d know her first love has always been dance. She grew up in the midwest but dreamed of coming to New York City to dance with the best and see some of the world’s greatest perform on Broadway and at Lincoln Center. For as long as I’ve known her, about three and a half years, I’ve known she wanted to keep getting better at dance.

For a few years I watched her dip her toe into different workshops, working her way up from modern dance to more intense ballet performances. In every previous show she seemed cool, calm, and collected.

This show proved to be an exception — she was n e r v o u s.

She rehearsed twice every night this week, once at the actual rehearsal and again at our apartment afterward, going through her own little notebook of cues and notes.

One day I came home to find the couch moved to make room for more dancing. I had never been so happy to see our home look so disheveled :’)

(insert picture here of the moved couch if I was smart enough to take one at the time)

For the first time in a long time, Kay was getting her ass kicked by dance, but she was working harder and growing more than she had in months, maybe years. She was dancing with professionals, people she’d only admired from afar in a passing Reel or Tok.

And yesterday she took the stage, on Father’s Day, and danced her ass off.

She kept up with the big dogs she'd been so intimidated by at the start of the week. I sat there with my parents and six of her friends who came to support her, all of us proud as all heck.

For those ten minutes I could see the little girl who dreamed of dancing in New York City recognize her dream, in the Peridance Theater on the corner of 13th and 3rd. After all those years of hard work, it was beautiful to be there as she pushed herself and showed she belongs on that stage with the professional dancers of New York.

It was an honor to watch. I’ve had so many people show up for me too, the big shows, the little shows, the first show, or the accidental-art-show-in-a-weed-dispensary-turned-disaster (story for another time). The people who witness the hard work are invested in your success too, and we forget how much they’re rooting for us. But it feels good to root for someone. A friend, a lover, family. Whether it’s a first gig in a dingy bar, an open mic, or a goddamn opening at MoMA, you show up.

It’s so easy to miss these moments, big and small. Whatever the reason not to go, it’s a small price for being there. I’m so lucky I didn’t miss this one.

I am so proud of and inspired by you, Kay, and I can’t wait for the next one in October :*

This is week #104 in a row I’m posting, and ya know what this one got a little sappy. SUE ME!

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I’ve lived here for 7 years and never seen the city come together the way it did for the Knicks winning the 2026 NBA championship. A collective joy in the streets, people dancing, watching games on projectors thrown up on the sides of buildings, packing out bars. Something out of a movie, something so distinctly New York.

Bandwagon fans or not, it was nice to see people root together for something. And in a time when we feel more hopeless than ever, to win something and have a little hope.

If you’re a sports fan you know fans more often than not hate the New York teams.

Typically New York’s teams have the biggest budgets, attract the biggest free agent signings, and watching them collapse brings people great joy.

Not these Knicks though.

Something about this team captivated the heart and soul of the city, and the country, with a ton of national media love for this motley crew. On their run to the finals they pulled out improbable win after improbable win, several 20+ point comebacks, breaking modern analytics by winning games they were projected to lose over 99% of the time.

This Knicks team did not quit. And there’s a huge difference between losing and quitting.

Because had the Knicks quit, New Yorkers wouldn’t be hanging off the fuckin’ street signs and dancing on their fire escapes.

Side note: For what it’s worth, I’m not even a Knicks fan, I renounced my fandom back in 2010 to root for DeMarcus Cousins and the Sacramento Kings (he’d drop like 50 points and get ejected it was so electric). The Kings suck and last year fired their head coach Mike Brown, who is now the head coach and champion with the Knicks lmao. Cursed ass organization.

A week ago I wrote about a devastating debut of a year-long project at Tribeca Film Festival. tl;dr a lotta shit broke and it was an embarrassing and long hour.

Coulda rolled over and quit right there, fallen apart, but instead we picked our asses up and rebuilt part of the show and mended the broken pieces in 10 days, and did our second show this morning after the Knicks won the chip last night.

It went super well and the theater was buzzing. People were yelling mid-show they loved it, laughing, sharing their phones with each other. This year long journey had fully manifested for the first time and it was beautiful.

(That or maybe the theater was riding the collective high from the night before)

A lot of times on Escape the Internet I feel like we’re down 20 late in the 3rd quarter.

And, admittedly, that’s not really where you want to be.

But in the words of Jalen Brunson after their historic Game 4 29-point comeback, the largest in NBA Finals history:

Maybe I’m insane for drawing a parallel to this basketball team. But it is really cool to see people come together around them, and it was nice to see it on a way way way way way way way way smaller and intimate scale as people rallied around us today.

I am so tired. The team did a great job. It felt like the culmination of the first part of the journey.

We’re not even after a mountaintop, the journey just continues, more to learn and do, and we’re excited to do it :D

¹ Full article from the NYT here

This is weekly post #103 in a row!

Thank YOU 🫵🏼 loyal reader for regularly reading this good read. And welcome to all the new folks following along.

Please reach out with your thoughts if you enjoy reading!

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This past week I did.

I had the extremely fortunate opportunity to debut Escape the Internet at Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a video game designed for movie theaters, in which all 150 players in the theater are characters in a post-AI world, trying to heal themselves from brain rot through genuine human connection.

Our debut was, at best, a fun-filled shit-show, and as I’d put it, a failure.

How bad? Our surprise reveal of an audience member proudly displayed NOUSERFOUND on-screen.

Then we accidentally identified a man who said he was in a happy relationship as the one who was single and needed help on his love life.

And well, the game silently stopped working for a good 10 minutes, and I had to go to the front and fix it in real-time.

It was one of the worst ways to see several months of work come together and immediately, completely fall apart.

Failure is a funny word.

You can’t really accidentally be a failure and you can’t half-ass failing.

The pre-requisite to failure is trying. And every time you try something, you’re more likely to fail than succeed.

In that moment at Tribeca I wanted to crawl out of my damn skin, but now days later I hold my head up and am back to work to fix what was broken for the team.

Ironically there is a massive gap between my perceived failure and the audiences interpretation. Of course, family and friends in the audience won’t take a chance to absolutely kick me when I’m down! Well except a few of them.

After the show, several folks I had never met came to share their appreciation for how much fun they had, and that even though it did not go perfectly, they were impressed by the concept, the team’s work, and the direction of the show.

I smiled, said thank you, and honestly wondered if they meant it. Maybe they were just being nice. Maybe they pitied me. Probably a little of both.

Either way, I’ve got a week to fix some of this shit and fail a little less, we already sold out our second showing at Tribeca on July 14th ;)

This is post #102 in a row! After a grueling few weeks and a big ‘ole fuck-up at Tribeca Film Festival

Thanks to all the homies who read regularly and to all the new folks who follow along. Please reach out with your thoughts if you enjoy reading!

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A little-known fact about my pops is that he was a classically trained cellist, performing around the world before he decided he wanted a more stable living. So he went back to business school, got a job at a bank, and later met his boss and future wife, my mom.

For most of my childhood I knew very little about his cello days. I remember hearing him play a handful of times, meeting his old cigar-smoking teacher Harvey, and the stories about playing in Venezuela with one of his best friends, Pete.

When he retired a few years ago we were in the peak of Covid, it took him a little while to pick the cello back up, but he slowly found music again, started playing with old friends and new, and now practices almost every day for hours at a time.

A friend introduced him to the person organizing this trip. My mom and sister were sure hauling a cello to Sicily would be a disaster, and despite a few hiccups, I’m proud of him for finding music again, I feel like it’s given him a new lease on life.

I’m a musician too, not as skilled as my pops, but I drum in a (formerly) all-girls band, Bimbo Summit. I’ve spent so much time banging keys to write code that I forgot how much fun it is to hit the shit out of a drum. We’ve gigged around the city, even a near sold-out night at Mercury Lounge last winter.

As fun as it is to play, watching a song come together is even more magical. A feeling becomes lyrics. Those lyrics demand a chord progression. Add some drums and a bassline as a spine and a song starts to take shape.

We released our first album, Seeking Attention, this past Friday (you should listen). One goal of mine was to write a song for it, and I failed spectacularly. I didn’t set aside the time, and, as a result, nothing materialized past a fleeting lyric or two.

Instead, Sarah, our lead singer and main songwriter, rounded out the album with the final song, Southern Sky. It’s an homage to her mother and father meeting at UVA, and it came together while her mother was battling terminal brain cancer. Before she passed, Sarah was able to play her the song and it brought a smile to her face.

That same week, a friend’s jazz duo, STELLA., started to break through. Pedram, a friend and one half of the duo, has been open about the grind of getting people to listen, which makes it that much sweeter. Their music is built on jazz improvisation and modern house, and they’d been putting it out for a while before the world finally noticed, blowing up across Youtube and Instagram.

Making music is a difficult but sacred act, and putting it out in the world is incredibly vulnerable. Whether it’s finding the energy to pick up an instrument after years away, write a song to articulate the emotions you’re confronting, or toil away for years at being heard, it requires an undeniable amount of time and energy to make progress. To be heard, one cannot fake their love and dedication to the art.

I write this in the wake of a surprising announcement from two of the most influential companies in music. Spotify and Universal Music Group announced that users will be able to use AI tools to make remixes and covers of songs directly on the platform. The press release frames it as a win for artists: new revenue streams and new ways to go viral through fan-made covers.

This, along with applications like Suno, has turned the process of creating music, an arduous process usually done collaboratively, into an increasingly solitary task, replacing human voices and instruments with AI. Now, people listening to music will be able to recreate artists’ music in real-time while listening. Electronic music producer Diplo already staked his claim that AI vocalists are faster, better, and cheaper than any human vocalist (for what it’s worth, he’s getting dragged for this).

I don’t know what this holds for the future of music, but I know the act of creating it, the painstaking time to practice, to write, and share it with the world, cannot be replicated through these tools.

It is why I am so glad my dad had found it again, why Sarah was able to make a beautiful piece, Stella could finally get the recognition they deserve, and why I still have not been able to write a song.

This is post #101 in a row! Although I forgot to schedule send it last night lol.

Thanks to all the homies who read regularly and to all the new folks who follow along. A lot of fun work updates to share soon!

Follow on Instagram for other updates too :P

I started this habit to sharpen my storytelling and work up the courage to step in front of a camera. The camera courage eventually showed up, and I kept on writing anyway.

I’ve got no boss to PIP me, no standup to share tasks on, which means a lot of the time I fail to reflect on what I’ve done. Writing in public was not intended to do that.

When I started I focused on things I was noticing in the world, trying to sound like a capital A Artist.

I wrote those for the wrong reasons. I was trying to present myself as an expert, and it always felt kinda disingenuous. I am less an art guy and more a creative tech tinkerer guy. I like to wander museums but I don’t have a fucking clue what I am looking at most of the time, I’m more interested in the materials or the process behind a technical piece.

Over time the writing trended that direction, talking about my different projects and the perils of building work and sharing it with the world (Side note: I just realized I never announced Ahoy on Instagram, all that work to never even talk about something! WTF Pete 🤦🏻‍♂️)

And slowly but surely, this began to venture into more personal stuff. My favorite thing I've written is about not being able to speak to my girlfriend's grandma when I met her in Japan. Dozens of people reached out after reading it, saying it helped them understand language barriers in their own lives, or the ones their partners deal with in theirs.

The Monday deadline doesn’t care which bucket the week’s article came from, so the timeline ended up being whatever was actually top of mind, work stuff and life stuff sitting next to each other.

Scrolling back through it all is weird. I can see the arc from aspiring startup founder to artist to app builder to whatever I am now, and I can see it next to the personal stuff. None of it was ever thoughtfully curated which gives the story a real nice shape for pretty much only me to look back at. An accidental memoir of sorts.

And ironically, it’s been a nice way for friends to keep tabs on everything I am working on and doing too. I thought I was writing to reach this audience of pure strangers this whole time, but the most impact has been felt personally and with close pals!

As I sit here at 100, I wonder if I’ll write another 100. Sometimes this is exhausting and I don’t know. It’s sure as hell fun though.

This is post #100 — woohoo!! Thanks to all the homies who read regularly and to all the new folks who follow along. A lot of fun work updates to share soon! Follow on Instagram for other updates too :P

Kayla and Taylor, two close friends in college now engaged to be married, hosted me for a few nights (and my girlfriend for one) as we made a trip out here. The trip was in part built on the convenience of a conference Kay is attending, but in part because I feel guilty for missing the wedding of Kayla and Taylor in a few months (for I have another wedding of a near and dear friend).

I had half-expected the trip to be “polite”. Surface-level updates, the careful small talk of people who used to be close and are now mostly just catching each other up. After all, we were separated by a coast, and friends I used to run around Charlottesville, Virginia and spend fall break with now have built a life an entire country away from me. We have different hobbies, see different people, text only occasionally, and have seen each other maybe two or three times in five years.

I was set to land in San Francisco at 2PM on a Wednesday. I had asked for my friends’ address so I can either coordinate an uber or navigate public transportation. To my surprise, Taylor offered to pick me up, which is foreign to a New Yorker like me who does not own a car and cannot make the same gesture.

Despite my protests (“you’re too kind! it’s fine, I can uber”) and delays deplaning, Taylor picked me up at the airport. In that moment, I could only think of this post I’d seen a few weeks back:

I hopped in the car and we were quickly laughing about nonsense and deep diving into our latest music kicks, discovering we both independently had found and fallen in love with a group Kasablanca (shoutout T for the rec).

I settled into their guest room and found they had made plenty of space for me in their humble abode. Kayla came home from work shortly after, the three of us went out for a run, they pointed out their favorite spots and updated me on the latest gossip in their life.

Somehow, it had felt like no time had passed at all, almost as if I had hopped in a time machine.

That evening, we stayed up until 1 in the morning chatting, talking about our lives, the people we love dearly, and the futures we dream of.

The next night, we ventured to their favorite Burmese restaurant and they treated me to their favorite dishes. It’s not only a kindness you can’t repay, but one you can’t fake either.

Of course, when Kay arrived a few days after me, we picked her up at the airport too. We explored their neighborhood, hit their favorite spots, and enjoyed more conversations with her in tow. We saw the city of San Francisco through their eyes.

Kay didn't go to college with us, so watching her trade stories with two friends who knew a much older version of me was something I didn't expect to love as much as I did.

Ironically, on the morning of our last day staying with Kayla and Taylor, I came across this post titled The quiet grief of adult friendship by Pranav Jain:

Like Kayla and Taylor, there are many friends I strive to keep up. Some live in different cities or have even moved abroad, while others may live closer but our lives have diverged, and we just don’t see each other as much anymore.

This dilemma of reaching out to chat or meet over a cup of coffee, expending the emotional capacity and little time we have to share small talk updates is often one that we can seemingly put off forever. After all, every friend is perpetually a phone call away or just a subway stop down the road. We can catch them whenever, so instead we keep them at a distance.

And as a result, it’s easy for these days to never come. We lose touch, and over time, lose important pieces of our life to attrition.

I find it increasingly important to confront the awkwardness, even when it's the kind that's quietly hardened over time, where reaching out first means being the one to pretend nothing's strange. Reach out first anyway, share a memory or photo when it pops up on my phone, text them when I think of them.

Pranav sums this up perfectly:

Small actions like that text, phone call, or a coffee give friendships a chance to survive. And if they survive, they have the chance to bloom once more.

And the friendships that survive end up holding versions of you no one else remembers, the person you were before anyone in your current life knew you.

It reminds me of this quote from the movie Shall We Dance, where Susan Sarandon explains why people get married:

And in this same vein, friends are your witnesses too. They witness the highlights and the lowlights, the good years and the bad years.

Kay and I only met a few years ago, but fortunately she got to know my tantrum-filled childhood through my family, awkward teenage years through my home friends, and my college self through those who endured it with me.

If a friend's been on your mind, that's the sign. Call them. Tell them I sent you, and that I said they'd be glad you did.

Note: After finishing the initial draft, an old pal, Tuz, invited me over to grill dinner at his apartment. We picked up right where we'd left off in our last conversation nearly 18 months ago, reminiscing about the dumb shit we did in college. All it took was a few texts and a couple of steaks.

Second note: Taylor jokingly asked about what I planned on writing about this week, sarcastically suggesting it should be about my awesome pals Kayla and Taylor. Well jokes on you two dickheads because I already had an inkling this was this week’s post from the moment you snagged me at the airport :D

This is weekly newsletter #99 (!!) in a row. If you’ve been reading along, thanks for sticking with me. If you’re new, subscribe below. I write every Monday about my creative work, tech, and whatever else is on my mind.

You can follow my work more closely on Instagram.

In the previous couple of months, I’d done such a good job of overcoming my fear of sharing my work on social media. I completed my arbitrary challenge to make and share a ton of art, learned a lot in the process, and made real progress in the world of social media.

Since finishing the series two months ago, I’ve posted two new videos, both for a partnership with Claude, and other than that, nada.

I’m working on a few bigger projects now, and the issue is that I’ve fallen back into the old habit of not setting proper deadlines to share.

I worry about two things that, as I type them out, sound stupid:

1. On selling my ASCII Aquarium, I worry the updates are useless. No one wants to see small progress on an idea I shared a few months ago.

2. On making a data-based apparel brand, I worry I open the door to copycats by putting my artwork and ideas out there.

Both these excuses are a damn cope.

The real thing underneath each is that I don’t actually know what counts as progress worth sharing on these projects, so I spin my wheels instead of moving forward, and then I don’t have anything to post, which makes me feel like I’m not making progress, which makes me spiral.

The challenge worked well because the unit of progress was obvious.

Make a thing, post the thing. That was the whole job. As a result, I made a lot more things and spent less time tweaking projects over and over before I felt comfortable sharing them.

The aquarium and the apparel brand don’t have that easily defined of an output. They’re long projects where the middle is mostly invisible work, and I haven’t figured out what a worthwhile update actually looks like for either of them.

They’re also different projects altogether. The aquarium has natural units to share if I bothered to define them, like learning a Fusion concept, printing parts, getting a prototype assembled. The apparel brand is murkier because the work is taste, iteration, and logistics with manufacturing partners right now. I don’t really know what a meaningful update looks like when you’re just giving an idea shape.

So the question I’m sitting with isn’t really how do I build in public. It’s what does a meaningful unit of progress look like for these bigger projects. Once I define those a bit better, I need to figure out how to share those updates with the world.

I know a lot of you reading this are making things too, and most of you are further along on the building-in-public thing than I am. If you’ve figured out what a worthwhile update looks like on a bigger project, I’d love to hear it. What do you share when you don’t have a finished thing to show?

This is weekly newsletter #98 in a row. If you’ve been reading along, thanks for sticking with me. If you’re new, subscribe below. I write every Monday about my creative work, tech, and whatever else is on my mind.

You can follow my work more closely on Instagram.

I had about 1000 followers on Instagram at the time, and I promised myself the only metric I cared about was that I posted 29 times.

My first post was a piece that reacted to light. Novel idea, relatively simple. To my surprise it was really well received, got me a few thousand followers, and I was off to the races.

Of the other 28 pieces, only 3 or 4 came anywhere close to that first one. After the challenge ended I took a break, then decided to revisit and make a trial reel with some old footage to see if it might find a new audience.

It didn’t do nearly as well. And then this comment showed up:

I kinda shrugged it off. The idea, many months later, still feels novel and beautiful to me. But it forced me to reflect, because if a comment like that had hit my first post in October and the post hadn’t taken off, I might’ve folded entirely. I might have changed my whole approach, or quit and convinced myself the work sucked.

Something shifted. I think I just feel more confident in my guy, because I’ve shipped enough now that no single comment can take the whole thing down.

It’s also why this comment specifically got to me, even a little. It wasn’t that the work was ugly or bad, it was that the work was nothing, that my phone does it. And the whole point of 29u29 was that the trying is the thing, so mat managed to attack the exact axis I’d been working on.

(As proven by me writing a whole newsletter about it, I’m clearly not mad!! You’re mad!! Not me !!!!!)

A lovely stranger named cheaterchintz replied to mr.m_mat under the original comment:

I’m just out here trying shit, and sometimes you gotta deal with a few m_mat_97s when you’re trying, but hopefully the internet gives you a cheaterchintz in your corner every now and then.

This little reflection brought me back to an amazing quote from the legendary A$AP Rocky:

This year I’m going to start experimenting with physical product and apparel. I have no expertise in either. I’ll probably be pretty bad with it to start, but I hope I keep my head held high and am not discouraged by the m_mat_97s of the world

(I am NOT mad)

This is weekly newsletter #97 in a row. If you’ve been reading along, thanks for sticking with me. If you’re new, subscribe below. I write every Monday about my creative work, tech, and whatever else is on my mind.

Subscribe now

To get over my fear of posting videos of myself, I’d set an arbitrary challenge: 29 pieces of art before I turned 29. Part of the point was to time-box me and push me to ship work instead of tweaking it endlessly.

The approach worked, but to my surprise, one of my lowest-effort pieces ended up being the most viral.

Most of my reels had me interacting with the piece, explaining it live, with decent shots and crisp audio and a bit of a story. For this one I was building an ASCII aquarium on top of OpenGhost, an open-source display by Xander Chin.

The idea was simple: little fish made of characters, swimming around a small screen projected up via a Pepper’s Ghost effect.

I had a plan to film it properly. My friend Andi was going to shoot me showing people the fish and inviting them to take a look.

While I waited for him, I shot some b-roll on my phone and edited together the lowest-effort reel imaginable. It was just footage of the piece with some light music and text captions explaining how it works. My face isn’t even in the video.

I was too embarrassed to put it on my main feed since it felt so low-effort, so I used Trial Reels (an Instagram feature that only shows the video to non-followers), figuring I’d see if it played at all.

I woke up the next day to it exploding with thousands of likes and reshares overnight. I moved it to my main feed so my followers could see it too. The trial reel did close to 100x the likes and views of the “proper” version Andi and I shot, even though it was the same piece.

I polish things that don’t need polishing. The rough version did 100x what Andi and I planned. Waiting for something to feel perfect is just protecting me from publishing.

The 29 under 29 challenge is wrapped, but the harder version of this is figuring out how to keep showing people I’m tinkering and continuing to experiment with how I tell those stories.

I’ve got a few bigger projects launching in the next few months that’ll need the same kind of rough looks and frequent updates. The instinct will be to wait until everything is ready and feels perfect, and the instinct is wrong.

This is weekly newsletter #96 in a row. If you’ve been reading along, thanks for sticking with me. If you’re new, subscribe below. I write every Monday about my creative work, tech, and whatever else is on my mind.

Subscribe now

It was frustrating, but it was also a relief, because I’m trying to learn something I used to know.

I’m learning to run slow.

For the Kudos

Strava is a public leaderboard dressed up as a running and fitness community app, and I used to be way too competitive on it. I silently wanted my runs faster and longer than my friends’ runs, and that pressure, in all honesty, made me a much better and consistent runner.

It also burned me out.

I logged hundreds of miles at my threshold speed, which was convenient when training for a marathon. But I never slowed down enough for my easy runs, got injured late in the cycle, and bombed on race day 🫠

I remember a few weeks out from the race, knee pain flared up on what should’ve been an easy run, and instead of stopping or slowing down I pressed on and made it worse.

A few years later, I still haven’t gotten that version of myself back. I’m older, sure, but the real issue is that every time I try to run, I try to match old paces, burn myself out quickly, and end up running less consistently.

Running Slow

I’ve decided to actually fix this and started zone 2 running, which means jogging at roughly 60% of max heart rate, the pace that’s supposed to build your aerobic base without cooking your legs. Every elite runner practices it, albeit at a faster pace than I do.

A few years ago I was comfortably holding 7 min/mi. Now I’m jogging at 11 min/mi to keep my heart rate where it needs to be, and the people I used to gleefully pass are leaving me in the dust.

I posted it on Strava with a note that I was intentionally slowing down. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I felt like I had to defend the pace.

Surprisingly, a few people gave a shit. One friend commented their support, and another texted me privately that they felt inspired to see I was running slowly.

The hard part of running slow isn’t the running, it’s letting people see you be slower than you used to be. And even knowing that, when I’m getting passed left and right and my heart rate is still a beat or two too high and I need to slow down more or start walking, the ego flares.

It’s a quiet capitulation that even in something as small as running, I’m not as good as I once was.

Building Slow

A few months ago, I shared my spin on a custom hardware display, a small ASCII aquarium that lives on a little screen. To my surprise, people loved it and wanted to buy it.

The goal now is to go from the original open-source design into a more polished product, which requires 3D modeling and design skills I simply do not have in my bag.

I started the way I start a lot of things lately: asking AI to do it for me. I had some experience with Blender from animation work, and I’d seen a viral thread about someone building an MCP server that lets Claude edit Blender files directly.

I spent a few hours prompting it to model the dimensions I had in mind. It was fine, but it was hollow. I was trying to move fast through the most exciting but tedious part of the process.

I had defaulted to prompting the art. I felt kind of disgusted with myself.

Slowing down and teaching myself feels different than running, though.

With running, I know slowing down is right. The science is settled, every elite trains this way, and I’ve tried brute-forcing it and gotten hurt.

With 3D modeling, I don’t have that certainty. People are shipping things fast right now all over the damn internet, prompting their way through the design process and entire products. I genuinely cannot tell if I’m not using these new tools correctly or if I’m learning something they’re skipping. The disgust I felt was real, but I don’t know yet if it’s wisdom or just nostalgia for how things used to work.

Ultimately, I decided to close Claude and Blender and redownloaded Autodesk Fusion for the first time since freshman year of engineering.

I watched a beginner’s tutorial on modeling a bracket. It was a long half-hour, but it felt good to extrude things, play around with the sketch functionality, and successfully make the model. I was making progress instead of gambling a la prompt. I even bought a $20 extended course, happy to support the guy behind the initial YouTube tutorial.

I don’t know if this is the right bet, and maybe the people prompting their way through are going to lap me. But running taught me that the version of me who wants to go fast is usually the version that ends up hurt on the couch, and the shortcut feels unreliable in a way I can’t shake.

The slow path at least feels like something I can stomach.