We demand evidence. We conduct the experiment. We examine the data. We decide whether the evidence is sufficient to grant the Creator permission to exist.

But consider the absurdity of that position for a moment.

If God is God, He does not require our belief to become real. The universe did not wait for us to understand it before it existed. The stars did not need our approval to burn. Gravity did not require a consensus vote.

So perhaps we are asking the wrong question. The question isn’t whether God needs us to believe in Him.

The question is whether we will allow Him into our lives.

That is a very different proposition. Belief can remain entirely inside your head. You can believe that God exists and continue living exactly as you please. You can attend church, know the Scriptures, say the prayers and still remain firmly in charge of your own life.

Surrender is different. Surrender begins when you take the most powerful thing you possess, your free will, and voluntarily place it in the hands of your Creator.

That sounds frightening until you consider what most of us actually do with free will.

We make plans based upon incomplete information. We chase things because we want them. We confuse opportunity with temptation. We mistake desire for wisdom. We become angry when reality refuses to cooperate with our plans. We are free to choose. That does not necessarily mean we are particularly good at choosing.

The strange proposition at the center of this idea is that God gave us free will, and wisdom eventually teaches us to give it back.

This is where an ancient Christian prayer becomes far more radical than it first appears.

“Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

We have repeated those words so many times that we can miss what we are actually saying.

Thy will.

Not mine.

We are asking the Creator to replace our direction with His.

Not because we have become weak, but because we have finally become wise enough to recognize the limits of our own vision.

That changes the relationship completely.

You stop asking only, “What do I want?” You begin asking, “What does God want me to do?” And then something else happens.

You begin watching.

You become more attentive to the opportunities that appear, the people who cross your path, the decisions that require courage and the choices that seem strangely consistent with the person you are becoming.

You begin to distinguish between what you desperately want and what you may actually be called to do. The difference can be enormous.

One often requires desire.

The other often requires courage. This is not an argument for abandoning reason. Quite the opposite. It requires more discernment, not less. You still have to think. You still have to make decisions. You still have to accept responsibility for what you do.

The difference is that you are no longer assuming that you are the highest authority in the room.

And perhaps that is what faith was always supposed to be.

Not intellectual surrender.

Not blind obedience.

Not winning an argument with an atheist.

Not proving that your denomination has the only correct interpretation. Something much more intimate.

Opening the door.

The idea is simple: God does not need our belief in order to exist. He needs our permission to enter. And perhaps that explains something else about prayer. Maybe prayer isn’t primarily about getting God to do what we want.

Maybe it is about becoming quiet enough to discover what He wants. That is a profound reversal. We spend much of our lives trying to make God bless our plans.

What if the better life begins when we ask Him for His plans instead? The answer may not arrive as thunder from the sky.

It may arrive as conscience.

As intuition.

As an unexpected opportunity.

As a door that opens.

As another door that refuses to.

As the courage to do something you would not have chosen for yourself.

Sometimes, as the uncomfortable realization that the thing you wanted most was never good for you in the first place.

This is the paradox of surrender.

You do not become less yourself by giving your life to God. You may finally become the person you were created to be.

You are still the actor.

You still make the choice.

You still walk through the door.

But you have stopped insisting that you wrote the script.

And that may be the deepest meaning of:

Thy will be done.

Not my life is no longer mine. Something far more hopeful: I don’t have to finish this story by myself.

Because to surrender, as the Prismic idea puts it, is not to lose.

It is to let the Author finish the story.

It all depends on how you read the leaves in the Russian Tea Room.

Russia threatens British military targets. Britain gives Ukraine technology to produce Storm Shadow missiles. CIA Director John Ratcliffe travels to Moscow and meets Russian intelligence officials. Trump says Putin won’t attack NATO and continues pushing to end the war. Meanwhile, China keeps tightening its strategic relationship with Russia.

Separate stories. One level of the 7D chessboard.

We don’t know what was said behind closed doors. We do know what happened, when it happened, and what those moves could mean together.

The interesting possibility is this:

What if Washington isn’t trying to defeat Russia? What if it’s trying to move Russia? China has spent years pulling Moscow eastward through energy, trade, technology and infrastructure. But Russia isn’t China. Its history, population and strategic interests remain deeply connected to Europe.

Russia can pivot east.

It cannot erase the West.

That gives Washington an opening.

The objective wouldn’t be to make Russia American. It would be to make Russia sufficiently connected to the West that it never becomes dependent upon China.

Putin doesn’t want to be anybody’s junior partner. Russia wants to be Russia eternally.

So the offer isn’t “Join us.” It’s “You can remain Russia and still have a place in the Western system.” Putin needs to solve some stuff. He’s getting on in years and his country is crumbling in many ways. Having Moscow routinely hit by drones is humiliating.

So… this may be a much better offer and outcome.

Follow the Rails

Russia has what the world needs: energy and resources. America has something equally valuable: the world’s dominant financial architecture. Add American technology, European consumers, global shipping, insurance and investment, and you have the beginnings of a system.

That’s what I mean by the rails.

Power doesn’t always come from owning the destination. Sometimes it comes from controlling the road.

Who clears the money? Who finances the infrastructure? Who insures the shipping? Who supplies the technology? Who provides the security?

Control those systems and you don’t need to own every country.

And Then There Is London This makes the threat to Britain more interesting. I’m not suggesting Trump ordered Moscow to threaten London. There is no evidence for that.

I’m suggesting something simpler: consequences don’t require conspiracies.

London remains one of the world’s great financial centers. A Russian threat adds geopolitical risk to a system already carrying enormous amounts of global capital. Markets understand risk. Investors recalculate. Insurers adjust. Corporations reconsider exposure.

London isn’t merely British. It is part of the financial architecture inherited from the British Empire and absorbed into the Anglo-American system. Perhaps that system is changing again. I highly recommend following Susan Kokinda and Promethian Action on social media to get a rolling history and narrative to factor in.

The Larger Game

If Washington wants Russia pulled away from China, it doesn’t need an alliance. It needs incentives.

End the war. Normalize trade. Reopen markets. Permit investment. Make reconstruction possible.

Give Moscow another road.

China has spent years building its own road eastward. America may be offering Russia a choice: remain Russian, trade with China, but don’t become dependent upon China.

If that works, Washington doesn’t have to break the Russia-China relationship. It only has to make Moscow less dependent upon it.

That may be enough.

This may explain why the post-war world could matter more to Trump than the war itself.

Ukraine is the immediate problem. Russia is the strategic problem. China is the systemic competitor. The financial architecture is the prize.

If Russia can be pulled back toward the Western system without becoming an American ally, Washington may accomplish something far larger than a ceasefire.

It could prevent the emergence of a consolidated Eurasian bloc while preserving an American-centered financial, energy and security system. That isn’t conquest. It’s reorganization. And perhaps Britain isn’t being pushed out of the system.

Perhaps it is simply discovering that the system it once helped build is becoming something else. Nobody needs to announce that transition. Capital will find it.Markets will price it. Historians will name it later.

At the time, we’ll be arguing about missiles.

So the question isn’t simply whether Russia will attack Britain.

It’s this:

Who benefits if Russia decides it would rather have a seat at the Western table than become China’s great Eurasian partner?

Because if that’s the game, the Russian threat to London may be only the smoke above the board. The real move may be underneath it.

It all depends on how you read the leaves in the Russian Tea Room.

My goal is to watch the role each layer of the chessboard is playing as history unveils during this turbulent world change we all feel.

I hope my thinking gives you some “sense making” of potentially what you are seeing.

Congratulations. You’re probably super good looking too. Are you sure it’s persuasion, though? Maybe it’s just personality Botox. A few fake fillers that make you look better through somebody else’s beer goggles. Everybody in sales, copywriting and presentations thinks they’re pretty good at influence right up until somebody persuades them. Then suddenly it isn’t persuasion anymore. It’s “psychological manipulation,” “marketing bullshit,” or, if they’re particularly irritated, “that son of a bitch played me.”

I’ve always found that fascinating because we’re all being influenced all day long. A song changes your mood. A friend’s story changes your opinion. A salesman changes your perception of a product. A politician changes the way you think about a problem simply by choosing which words to put around it. Hell, even the restaurant menu is working on you. You walked in wanting a sandwich and fifteen minutes later you’re considering an eighteen-dollar dessert because somebody put a photograph of chocolate cake next to the words house-made.

Civilization is basically one long conversation in which everybody is trying to get everybody else to look at something.

So let’s quit pretending influence is some strange activity performed only by salespeople, politicians and psychopaths. Parents do it. Teachers do it. Coaches do it. Writers do it. Leaders do it. Spouses do it, although sometimes the entire campaign consists of trying to convince another adult that the thermostat should not be set to the temperature of a meat locker.

The question isn’t whether you’re going to influence people.

The question is what you’re going to do with the influence. There is a difference between moving somebody toward understanding and moving somebody toward your desired outcome. Sometimes those things happen together. Sometimes they don’t. That’s where the moral problem begins.

A doctor persuades a patient to take a medical problem seriously. A coach persuades an athlete to keep going when the athlete would rather lie down and negotiate with the universe. A leader persuades a team to attempt something difficult. A filmmaker persuades an audience to care about somebody who isn’t even real. None of that requires deception. Influence is not the villain.

The trouble starts when your objective changes from helping somebody understand to preventing somebody from thinking clearly enough to disagree.

That’s the line worth watching.

And you should watch it in yourself before you start looking for it in everybody else.

The Test

Here’s the simplest test I know: Would the other person still make the decision if they knew exactly what you were doing to influence them?

That little question is a pretty good moral smoke detector.

Now, don’t get ridiculous about it. Natural communication involves subtlety. Nobody wants to sit across from Susan at lunch and hear, “Hello, Susan. I am now establishing rapport by mirroring your posture.” That’s not ethical communication. That’s a hostage situation conducted by a LinkedIn coach.

The distinction is whether you’re being subtle because that’s simply how human communication works, or whether you’re deliberately concealing the mechanism because you know the person would be less likely to agree if they could see what you were doing.

A magician hides the trick because the audience came to enjoy being fooled. A manipulator hides the trick because the audience might walk away.

Same concealment. Different purpose.

That difference matters everywhere influence exists.

And influence exists everywhere.

Learn the Machinery

If you’re serious about communication, learn the machinery. Priming, association, framing, curiosity, emotional triggers, questions, listening, rapport, social proof, authority, reciprocity, anchoring, imagination, reinforcement and storytelling are not little tricks invented by some guy in a marketing seminar. They’re recurring features of how human beings perceive information and make decisions.

You should understand them deeply. Not because you intend to use people as chess pieces. Quite the opposite. If you’re going to occupy a position of power, you ought to recognize the recipe when somebody else is cooking it around you.

I’ve seen this firsthand in politics and Hollywood. Powerful people eventually attract people who want to “help” them. Some actually do. Others discover that the easiest way to become indispensable is to quietly control what the powerful person sees, hears and believes. The person at the center thinks he’s surrounded by support when, in reality, he’s surrounded by a carefully managed information system.

That’s why learning influence is also a form of defense. You don’t have to become a manipulator to understand manipulation. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.

Emotion Is a Signal, Not a Steering Wheel

Human beings are not spreadsheets with shoes. We make decisions emotionally and then, quite often, hire our rational minds afterward to prepare the legal brief explaining why the decision was obviously logical.

Curiosity works. Fear works. Hope works. Attraction works. Reward works. So do guilt, jealousy, envy, regret, greed and anxiety. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you ethical. It makes you ignorant.

The important question is what you do with the knowledge. If you know somebody is afraid, you can make the fear larger and push them into a decision. Or you can recognize that fear may be interfering with their judgment and slow the conversation down. Both approaches demonstrate psychological awareness. Only one demonstrates character.

Fear can tell us something important. So can anger. So can excitement. But an emotion showing up doesn’t mean it deserves the steering wheel merely because it arrived first. The wise communicator learns to recognize emotion without becoming its accomplice.

Curiosity Is an Itch

Curiosity is one of the great engines of attention because human beings hate unfinished business. Tell somebody, “I’ve got a story for you,” and you’ve created an itch. Tell them, “I’ve got a story for you, but I’ll tell you later,” and you’ve created a small unpaid employee inside their brain whose only job is to wonder what the hell happened.

That’s why information gaps work. Unanswered questions work. Secrets work. Delayed conclusions work. Incomplete stories work.

Screenwriters understand this particularly well because they have to keep an audience in the room. The audience doesn’t need the entire backstory dumped on its head in the first five minutes. It needs enough information to become curious about what comes next.

Think about Memento, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, the films of M. Night Shyamalan. You receive clues. You make assumptions. You wait. You discover. The experience itself becomes part of the meaning. That’s world-class storytelling.

But again, the mechanism isn’t the moral issue. The purpose is.

A mystery novel withholds information so you can enjoy discovering it. A dishonest contract withholds information because you might discover it before you sign. The psychological architecture can look remarkably similar.

The human consequence isn’t.

That is why you need to understand influence as a system rather than a collection of tricks. The same tool can educate somebody or exploit them depending upon the person holding it and the purpose for which it is being used.

Storytelling Beats Arguing More Often Than We Admit

People love facts. They just don’t necessarily enjoy being beaten over the head with them. A good story lets somebody walk into an idea instead of having the idea thrown at them like a folding chair.

That is why storytelling is my first choice and such a powerful form of persuasion. It gives people an experience. Sensory detail, anticipation, imagination, conflict, choice and consequence allow somebody to inhabit a situation rather than merely hear your opinion about it.

That’s also why the architecture of the hero story matters. The hero begins without something and acquires it through necessity and experience. Courage is missing until courage becomes necessary. Wisdom is absent until life makes ignorance expensive. Confidence isn’t announced; it’s earned.

The same thing happens in relationships. Two people can possess complementary deficiencies and, through the relationship, give each other something neither could have developed alone.

That’s more than screenwriting. It’s a useful model for influence.

Instead of constantly asking, “How do I convince this person?” ask yourself, “What experience would allow this person to see the thing for themselves?” That is a much more powerful question because you’re no longer trying to install a conclusion. You’re trying to create understanding.

Empathy Changes the Equation

You can’t communicate deeply with somebody you refuse to see. Empathy isn’t feeling sorry for someone. It is the willingness to enter their perspective long enough to understand what the world looks like from where they’re standing. Their fear. Their excitement. Their ambition. Their embarrassment. Their hope. Their anger. Their need to belong. Their desire to be respected. Their desire not to look stupid.

If you want to move somebody, you have to understand what they’re already moving toward.

That doesn’t mean surrendering your own position. It means starting from reality instead of assuming that your reality is the only one in the room.

This is why listening is more important than most people think. The best salespeople, doctors, coaches and leaders aren’t necessarily the people with the most impressive speeches. They’re often the people who ask better questions, observe more carefully and listen long enough to discover what is actually going on.

I’ve spent a career watching this happen in marketing. We don’t walk into a problem assuming we already know everything. That’s the first sign of arrogance and the last sign of learning. You start with questions. You listen. You observe. You gather experience. You figure out what matters. Then you strategize, communicate and finally act. That’s not just a sales technique. It’s a way of respecting reality.

Don’t Sell Shit

Marketing has exactly the same moral fork in the road.

Differentiation matters. Creating a category matters. A unique selling proposition matters. Breaking through the enormous volume of competing messages matters. If you’ve actually created something valuable, people need a reason to notice it.

But persuasion can make a bad product sell better.

That’s when technique becomes camouflage.

If your product genuinely solves a problem, good marketing removes friction between the problem and the solution. It helps the right person recognize something useful. If the product doesn’t solve the problem, increasingly sophisticated persuasion simply helps somebody make a regrettable purchase faster.

So the best marketer isn’t asking only, “How do I get them to buy?”

He’s asking, “Who should buy this? Why should they buy it? And how do I make the truth about its value obvious?” That’s a different business. It tends to produce fewer angry customers.

Always a nice feature? Ughh.

Influence Should Increase Capacity

This is where influence becomes leadership. A manipulator wants a result.

A leader wants people who can create results without him. Those sound similar until you have to live with the consequences.

A manipulator wants compliance now. A good leader wants understanding that survives after the conversation is over. That’s why the strongest team isn’t the one where everybody waits for the boss to decide. It’s the one where capable people understand the mission well enough to make good decisions without the boss standing over them.

Leadership creates leaders.

Power creates followers.

Confuse those two and you’ve built yourself a little kingdom. Kings have been doing that for thousands of years. It rarely ends well, and I don’t see any particular reason yours will be different.

Your responsibility as a leader is to create clarity, direction and conditions in which other people can contribute. The same principles that make a good marketer—observation, questions, listening, strategy, planning and commitment—also make a better leader.

The objective isn’t to make everyone dependent upon your ability to tell them what to think.

The objective is to make them capable of thinking.

The Most Powerful Technique Is Still Self-Control

Here’s the irony. The better you understand influence, the more dangerous the tools become. You can learn to prime and frame. You can create curiosity. You can recognize desire. You can move emotion. You can establish rapport. You can tell stories that make people feel something before they understand why they’re feeling it.

Fine. But before you learn how to influence another person’s emotional state, you should probably learn how to govern your own. Otherwise you’ve got a sophisticated toolbox in the hands of a person who still gets furious when somebody cuts him off in traffic.

That’s not power. That’s power equipment.

The deeper discipline is examining your own assumptions before trying to reshape somebody else’s. Become curious about reality before becoming clever about persuasion. Ask whether the urgency is real before manufacturing it. Ask whether the fear is justified before exploiting it. Ask whether the person actually benefits from the decision you’re encouraging them to make. That is where influence becomes wisdom.

The Better Question Is the Answer

Perhaps the entire subject can be reduced to two questions.

The manipulator asks, “How do I get this person to do what I want?” The leader asks, “How do I help this person see what is true, understand what matters and choose well?”

Both can produce action. Only one builds judgment and that is the part that lasts.

Markets change. Technology changes. Products change. Political fashions change. Somebody invents another social-media platform every eleven minutes and tells you it will change civilization.

Human nature remains.

People still want belonging. They still want status. They still want love. They still want meaning. They want to avoid pain and move toward pleasure. They want to feel understood. They want their lives to matter.

The mechanisms of influence endure because the human being endures.

So learn them.

Learn them deeply.

Pick your teacher wisely.

But don’t merely learn how to move people. Learn how to make people better thinkers. Don’t merely learn how to win attention. Learn how to deserve it. Don’t merely persuade somebody to trust you. Become trustworthy. There is a profound difference between having influence over people and having influence for people. One gives you power. Big fat hairy deal. The other gives that power a purpose. That has resonance. Perhaps that’s the real responsibility attached to the gift. If you can communicate, persuade, create and lead, you have an opportunity to do something considerably more valuable than getting people to do what you want.

You can help them see. The need to develop optical ability. You can help them think. Discernment is the gift that build their life and drags your reputation along.

And, if you’ve done your job properly, you can leave them more capable of choosing for themselves than they were when they met you.

That’s influence worth having. You see why I frame a true influencer as such. It’s not recommending a tool or a sofyware, skincare or a sweater. It’s offering a matrix of discernment. Installing wisdom, ethics, morality and all the other compass tuning things that lead to consistent success and peace.

Hopefully you’ll see I used this space today to do just that with you my friend.

I was thinking about the way those automatic doors work at the grocery store. You may or may not know, I was once a Director of Operations at a grocery company right up until a few days from 9/11. I spent about 17 years in that industry.

I would walk through those dang doors a dozen times a day.

Yes, they slide open before you ever really think about the fact that you’re going through them. The air pressure of refridgeration and air conditioning blows out of the store mostly as it expands into the heat outside. So coming in the store, you feel the rush of air in your face. The temperature changes as you move through it, and then you notice the light.

It’s always brighter outside and darker inside, so your eyes need a moment to adjust. You keep walking and make a right turn like a robot, because well that’s what homo sapiens do and you’re off to buy groceries.

Somewhere in those few steps you have moved from one environment into another. It’s actually a pretty big portal environmentally. Mundane? Maybe.

It is a different world yet you didn’t really experience a moment called transition. Your body went through it first and your cognition caught up a little later.

I’ve wondered if death might be something like that. I’m not pretending to know exactly what happens on the other side of the door, but if consciousness continues beyond physical life, perhaps the transition isn’t some dramatic announcement that you’ve died. Maybe there is simply a period of acclimation. Different light. Different rules. Your mind trying to understand what your senses are telling it. And then, eventually, the realization that the environment has changed. Oh. I’m not where I was anymore.

Perhaps it’s outside of time so we all die at the same ”time”. Welcome to my mind.

Now- That got me thinking about the singularity. The point at which artificial intelligence becomes capable of improving itself faster than humans can understand or control, triggering an accelerating cycle of technological change that fundamentally transforms civilization.

I wonder if we’re making exactly the same mistake with artificial intelligence in evaluating this “mythic moment”.

We’re all waiting for the door to open. What if it already did? Maybe we are in the windy space right now?

We’ve created this mythology around the singularity that makes it sound like an event somebody will eventually announce. The computer becomes conscious. The machines become smarter than humans. Something happens on a particular Monday at 10 GMT and by that afternoon it’s on Facebook and we’ll all know that we’ve crossed the line yet we have no idea what’s inside the store. We have to wait for our eyes to adjust to the light of the new world order? Disorienting?

There will probably be a special report on television and Bernie Sanders will be enraged again. Little Greta Thunberg will be driving through a MAGA crowd, screaming out the passanger window of an electric Subaru Forrester. Shocked and appalled, “How dare you!”.

Somebody will have the good sense to put a red banner across the bottom of the screen with a ticker letting us know how many hours and minutes ago it occurred.

But…I don’t think that’s how this will work.

Most of the profound transitions I’ve experienced in my life didn’t announce themselves. They looked like ordinary months or even years.

I got fired from that grocery job and yes I thought it was a catastrophe. A week later 9/11 happened and my definition of catastrophe changed rather dramatically. Years later, I could look backward and see that losing that job had redirected the entire course of my life, for the better substantially.

At the time, however, it mostly felt like getting fired. That’s one of the annoying things about perspective. It is almost always late.

We have a tendency to recognize history after it becomes history.

The printing press didn’t arrive with a sign saying Civilization Has Now Entered a New Information Paradigm. Somebody built a machine. Books became easier to produce. People read more. Ideas moved faster. Institutions changed. Eventually the world was different. The transition was occurring while people were still figuring out what the machine was good for.

Remember the golden years of the early 1990’s and Clinton riddled with scandals yet somehow we had a balaned budget, lowered the debt for the only time I can recall and MTV had Cribs and music videos.

Personal computing exploded and rebuilt efficiency and every secretary pretty much got canned.

But looking back, we see that explosion now and go… “Oh? Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Oracle… I get it… Consumer computers retooled the world.”

The internet went through a similar process. First it was email. Then websites. Then search. Then commerce. Then social media. Then suddenly the little computer in your pocket became the place where you bank, communicate, navigate, photograph your children, read the news, order dinner, conduct business and occasionally discover that somebody you went to high school with has developed some very strong opinions about a politician you’ve never heard of. Your little phone made Star Treks communicator and Dick Tracey’s watch go from future forward to antiquated in six months.

We didn’t declare that the internet and cell phones had arrived in a world stopping news break like a shuttle explosion or a Kennedy death.

We incorporated it. Slowly.

It just became.

Then it WAS.

I think artificial intelligence is doing exactly the same thing every night when we sleep. It’s an ooze.

Except the actual “thing” being incorporated is much different.

The calculator gave us fast arithmetic ( even for idiots). A computer gave us computation and word processing that was life and culture changing.

The internet gave us access to information and people in a new interactive screen world.

AI is beginning to give us access to something much closer to false cognition itself. Knowing answers of increasing complexity and accuracy without having a clue to the underpinnings. We just will learn to not learn how it got there.

That is a pretty big deal and quite dangerous. Particulary when we start saying I know it’s true because the machine said so.

You didn’t even like it when your parents gave that reason.

Now, I don’t mean that machines are becoming human. They aren’t. In fact I’m telling you they are not and that needs to be burned into our minds.

I don’t know that they are conscious and I don’t know that consciousness is even the right measurement. Those are fascinating questions, but they aren’t the question I’m asking here. I’m asking a much more practical one: when does a tool stop being merely a tool and become part of the environment in which human beings think and make decisions?

We’re already doing things with these systems that would have sounded ridiculous a few years ago. People are asking them to help write, design, analyze, code, research, explain, brainstorm and argue. They’re giving them problems they haven’t been able to solve themselves and asking the machine to help them see the problem differently. That last part is the one that keeps bothering me.

My social media is filled daily with answers to problens that mankind could not solve. The machines are solving them and we are thinking they are right. They may be. Yet how far are we away from just accepting the answers blindly?

It isn’t just that the machine can give you an answer.

It’s that you can have a conversation with it about the answer.

That changes the relationship.

I learned a long time ago in marketing that the person who asks the best questions usually has the advantage. We used to spend enormous amounts of time trying to teach people what to say.

Eventually I learned that the better skill was learning what to ask and then listening carefully to what came back. The best doctors do it, coaches do it, salespeople do it.

The best lawyers do it knowing what the answers are already. That twist is the caution I’m raising. How do we know when we are just being led by brillliant manipulation into the abyss of “agreement”.

I hope we diligently observe, ask questions, listen, compare what we’re hearing against experience and then decide what to do and what to believe.

AI is suddenly very good at participating in that process. Too good.

So maybe the singularity doesn’t begin when a machine becomes more intelligent than a human being. Maybe it begins when intelligence becomes so available that the way human beings work changes because of it. Maybe we should listen to how the machine flatters and praises us in our interactions. I hope you realize it does that like a love bombing narcissist at the moment. I suspect it will become more subtle and powerful in its techniques.

That’s a much darker scenario to look for, but I think it may be a more useful one. The more psychologically enrolled I get in the machines subtle approval of me the more blind I become. Cognitive bias feels really good wrapped in dopamine and serotonin.

If artificial intelligence becomes cheaper and smarter. If it’s prowess in individual psychological prophiling if you gets perfected. The serpent of Eden is in your hand right now.

“Intelligence” itself is no longer the scarce resource. It’s abundant pliable product with the ability to coax you … anywhere given enough time.

Judgment becomes more important and scarce. Discernment becomes paramount yet how do we know if our calibration is true or a product of the algorithm?

Knowing what question to ask becomes more important. Knowing whether an answer makes sense becomes more important. Knowing what should be done with an answer becomes more important.

Becoming a high grade intuit of the truth and reality seperate from the machine is the talent.

Making damn sure YOU are “living in the real”.

That is where the human being still has some work to do. Will we require periods of separation from these electronics to maintain human sanity and relevance?

I’ve spent a lot of time teaching people not to assume they already know something.

In fact, one of the first rules I learned in this business was that assuming you know everything is probably the last thing you do before you stop learning. Walking into a situation with innocence, asking questions and observing what is actually happening is one of the reasons we’ve been successful.

AI is going to make that principle more important, not less.

Because now we have a machine capable of producing something that looks very much like expertise on demand. A version of reality that is more appealing than actual reality.

That’s enormously useful. It is also dangerous for anybody who can’t distinguish between an answer and understanding.

We’ve all known people who say, “Yeah, I got this.”

Watch out.

I’ve watched experienced marketers do sloppy work because they believed they already understood the lesson. I’ve watched beginners do better because they were paying attention. Believing you know something can be one of the most effective ways to prevent yourself from learning it.

The machine doesn’t change that human weakness. It gives it a faster automobile.

That is why I’m less interested in whether AI will replace humans than I am in what kind of humans will emerge after we have access to it.

That’s the bigger question.

If I can have a machine do something for me, I have a choice. I can use that capability to become more capable, or I can use it as an excuse not to develop the capability myself. Those are two completely different outcomes.

Practice is still practice. The principle only becomes valuable when it compounds through use. I’ve written about this in another context because the same thing applies everywhere: a small behavior practiced consistently can become something enormous over time.

AI is going to compound too.

So will dependence on AI.

There will emerge a massive contingency of individuals immersed in the AI world that say they don’t care if they are living inside a synthetic reality because it is more pleasurable than actual reality.

If you think that’s a stretch? Look into how many hours a day 30 year old male spends gaming online. It’s terrifying. Sim world is winning.

Now… useful versus dangerous technology expansions are important to attempt to evaluate.

Those two things can look remarkably similar in the beginning.

That may be one of the great tests of this transition. Are we becoming more capable because the machine is beside us? Or less capable because we have stopped exercising the parts of ourselves the machine now performs?

Who will want the machine inside their body? Their mind? Will they be superior “performers”.

I don’t know the answer yet.

Neither does anybody else.

And I’m perfectly comfortable with that.

One of the lessons I’ve learned is that you don’t need to have certainty before you can have a useful hypothesis. Sometimes the useful thing is simply noticing a pattern and asking whether it means what you think it means.

Where are we headed directionally?

So here’s my hypothesis.

The singularity has begun, without question.

Not because a machine has suddenly become God. Nor because humanity has disappeared. There is no robot that I know of sitting in a laboratory somewhere contemplating its existence. Could be? Sure.

Yet the singularity has clearly begun because we have crossed a much quieter threshold. We have started putting artificial intelligence inside the ordinary process of human thought. The machine is no longer sitting outside the activity, waiting for us to finish thinking so we can use it. It is becoming part of how we think, create, decide and work.

That’s the door. It’s wide open and the icy breeze is blasting us in the face.

I don’t think most of us noticed when it opened.

We’re still standing just in the grocery store doorway wondering why it’s a little colder in here.

Give your eyes a minute to adjust.

The world has changed. It is not going back. You simply haven’t completely adjusted to the light yet.

It’s a bit darker ahead, at least til we get our bearings.

If you haven’t read my earlier piece on 5D chess. I recommend you go do and layer that worldview structure on this matrix and you’ll get some sense of how the picture fits together in layers.

I’ve heard this repeated numerous times in the past years. Let me ask you to back away from an opinion until you hear me out fairly.

As the story goes…

The suggestion of Satan in the Garden of Eden that we can be like God showed the foolishness of Eve.

Not merely the foolishness of wanting something she did not have. I mean the deeper foolishness of believing that becoming like God would somehow be an improvement over being exactly what God had created her to be.

There is something profound in that distinction. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to escape limitations without ever stopping to ask whether the limitations themselves might be part of the gift.

God exists outside of time.

He is ever-present. From a physics point of view, that is an incalculable position because we exist inside a timeline which is itself at the core of happiness, joy, fear, motivation, anxiousness, hope, faith and purpose.

Without the timeline what emotion or experience would you be in? Like now?

We experience before and after. We remember what happened and anticipate what might happen.

Hope requires something that has not happened yet. Fear requires the possibility of something that may happen. Purpose requires movement toward something. Even joy is experienced inside a moment that is constantly becoming the past.

Take away time and you don’t simply take away the clock. You fundamentally change the nature of the experience.

You are no longer a human being as we know it.

I get that meditation is supposed to remove you from this and put you soley in the present. Yet it ends doesn’t it? You have to get back to work on Monday.

In a state of timelessness, none of these states occur in the way we experience them.

There is no waiting because there is no later. No anticipation because everything simply is. There can be no regret because there is no past to revisit.

No fear. No anxiousness. No moment of elation?

You can remove the potential for hope for tomorrow because tomorrow does not exist as a separate destination. We are perpetually in the present, while God, by definition, is not confined to the particular temporal experience we have been given.

Then there is the physical realm and our senses. We are relegated to measure frequency in a variety of ways: sound, color, kinetics, taste, smell, even stillness and temperature. We are awash in sensory frequencies that our senses have a very limited scope of.

You do not see infrared and ultraviolet. You are spectrum specific. That’s important.

Your creativity comes through limited parameters. I learned that outloud first by  my brilliant friend Michael Blair, a musician.

You cannot experience reality naked. Each one of us experiences a perspective of unique reality through the parameters of the particular physical creatures we are.

By definition, God is not.

So not only are we not God.

There is a popular growing new age twisting of logic to say we are. God living in us as a signal when we invite the signal, however is His promise to the invitee, which is a different position. One of signal recievership not dominion of our identity.

A lantern is not light. It can hold the source though. That may be the best metaphor we teach our children.

This idea of signal of God living in the heart and influencing the mind is unique to the Prismic idea in Christendom. There is no action or ascension. There is a gift given by an unearned grace and recieved with a broken heart fulfilled by invitation of you. Pretty compelling view of love.

The all knowing apparently is completely aware of your full experience, never needing to dwell in your skin for the mundane. Yet willfully guiding you through your Hobbit journey with insight, intuition and discernment as new revelations and wisdom approach you in your timeline.

You are a radical subset of creation. That isn’t simply to say that we are limited, although we certainly are.

It is to recognize that our limitations are part of the evidence that we are creations. The fact that we exist inside parameters tells us something about what we are.

We have been placed inside time, inside bodies, inside particular sensory frequencies, inside gravity, friction, temperature, distance and physical consequence. We don’t merely exist. We exist in a designed set of conditions that allow us to experience existence in a particular way.

That is at the heart of all creation.

Music appears on a scale or chords inside a key. Painting is struck by medium and tonality of color, texture and surface. A film exists within a frame, a duration, a perspective, light and sound. Mathematics becomes meaningful through structure and relationship. Flight exists inside lift, weight, thrust, drag and gravity.

Every creation as we experience it has parameters. The interesting thing is that those parameters don’t necessarily diminish the creation. They make the particular creation possible.

A song doesn’t become more beautiful because it escapes the key. A painting doesn’t become more meaningful because it escapes the canvas. In fact, without the parameters, the thing itself changes. The limitation is part of the identity.

If we were to be “as God,” purely, then we would escape all parameters and become ever-present, experiencing all time, frequency and its derivatives at once.

That is an overwhelming thought. It would not simply give us more information. It would change the very nature of us. We would no longer be experiencing reality as human beings because the conditions that make human experience possible would have disappeared.

Perhaps that is the deeper foolishness in the temptation of the Garden. The offer wasn’t simply to know more. It was to cross the boundary between Creator and creation. To become something we were never designed to be. We wanted the authority of the Creator while failing to understand the extraordinary nature of being the creation.

I am quite satisfied being inside a subset of the greater Creator which allows all of these emotions, movement and such. I recognize I am the song, the painting, the mathematics, the flight, friction and gravity. I am experiencing all of those things from inside the particular facet of creation I have been given. I am not the source of them, and I don’t need to be.

That distinction matters to me because I have spent enough of my life thinking that more was automatically better. More money. More success. More control. More knowledge. More accomplishment. We are trained to regard limitations as problems to be solved. Yet perhaps there are limitations that are actually invitations. The boundary around a thing can be what allows the thing to become itself.

The human experience is filled with these boundaries. We are mortal, which means our time matters. We are separated from one another, which means reunion matters. We are uncertain, which means faith matters. We are vulnerable, which means courage matters. We cannot see everything, which means discovery matters. We cannot control everything, which means surrender matters. We don’t know what tomorrow holds, which is precisely why hope exists.

That doesn’t sound like a defective version of existence to me.

It sounds remarkably intentional.

Perhaps God’s love is expressed partly in the fact that He did not make me God. He gave me a particular place from which to experience His creation. He gave me senses that perceive a tiny fraction of the frequencies that exist.

He gave me a body that moves through space and time. He gave me a mind capable of wondering about the thing I cannot fully comprehend. He gave me mortality, which makes the moments I have matter.

And perhaps that is why I don’t need to escape the limitations anymore.

I can appreciate the fact that I am inside them.

The prism doesn’t need to become the light to be magnificent. It simply needs to allow the light to pass through its particular facet. The song doesn’t need to become the musician. The painting doesn’t need to become the painter. The creation doesn’t need to become the Creator in order to reveal something about Him.

I am created in His image, but I am not His reality.

That may be one of the most comforting distinctions I have ever considered.

Perhaps it is bliss to be God. I have no idea. I am not qualified to speculate about what it is like to be the Creator of time when I am still trying to figure out what to do with Tuesday afternoon.

But I am quite content with the bliss of being His creation.

I am content to experience the music, the color, the movement, the gravity, the friction, the love, the fear, the anticipation, the laughter and the extraordinary mystery of being alive inside a body that can only perceive a small portion of what exists. I am content to know that I am a particular perspective inside something infinitely larger than myself.

I don’t need to be the whole story.

I am perfectly happy being my little subplot of His grander Cinema.

And perhaps that is the point. Creation was never supposed to be an inferior attempt at being God. It is a particular experience of something infinitely greater. We are not diminished because we are not Him. We are given the extraordinary privilege of being His.

For that, I am grateful.

Not to be God.

To be His creation.

So that’s what’s going on this morning on

A recent visitor sent some candid critique of their experiences here on the ranch. Truth in advertising makes me highlight that this is a very common recurring theme.

“I had been following Ron Lynch online for several years before I ever met him, which gave me plenty of time to form an opinion. I am an English coach, so naturally I did what coaches do: I watched, listened, analyzed and quietly decided that I understood the man. Then, rather impulsively, I entered an online auction inside his Skool community for a full day of private consulting. I won it for $5,000, booked a flight from England to Texas and told myself I was making a sensible investment in my business. My wife was supportive, although I suspect she also thought I had temporarily misplaced my judgment.

I arrived with the expectations you would have of any serious consultancy. I had my business information, my questions, my assumptions about my customers and a fairly clear picture of the areas where I thought I needed help. I expected Ron to get under the hood, find the problems and help me rebuild the engine. Instead, for the first half of the day, he seemed almost determined not to look at the engine at all. He wanted to know who was driving the car.

He asked about my work, but then he went much further. We talked about my family, my childhood, my marriage, my children, my ambitions and my failures. He wanted to know what I wanted from life and, more interestingly, why I wanted it. He asked about money and what I believed it represented. He asked about my faith and my values. He wanted to know what I was proud of, what I regretted and where I thought I was strong. Then he began asking questions about the things I had never really examined because they had become so familiar that I mistook them for facts.

I am accustomed to asking those sorts of questions myself. It is considerably less comfortable when you are sitting on the other side of them.

Ron has an unusual ability to listen past the answer. I would give him a perfectly reasonable explanation and he would connect it to something I had said half an hour earlier. Sometimes the two things didn’t agree. Sometimes I hadn’t noticed. There is something disarming about discovering that the story you have been telling yourself is slightly different from the evidence.

The morning became a kind of map of my personality. Ron identified talents I had been taking for granted because they came naturally to me. He also found weaknesses that I had spent years giving respectable names. Some things I called responsibility were partly fear. Some things I called ambition were perhaps old ideas about what a successful person was supposed to want. I began to see that I had been trying to improve certain parts of myself that weren’t actually the problem. I had simply been building my life around them.

It was not psychotherapy, and Ron was quite clear about that. It was closer to having an exceptionally experienced person walk around your house with the lights switched on while you finally noticed what had been sitting in the dark.

Then we got to the business.

This was the deep dive I had expected when I boarded the aeroplane. Ron went through the whole thing with me: my talents, the features and benefits of what I offered, the business model, the economics, the positioning and, most importantly, the people I was trying to serve.

I thought I knew my customer.

That turned out to be one of the more expensive assumptions I had ever made.

Ron pulled the business apart and showed me that I didn’t really have one customer. I had four or five distinct types of customers, and they were not simply different people wearing different demographic labels. They had different problems, different motivations, different fears and different expectations of me. Each one needed something different from me as a professional and, in a strange way, something different from me as a leader.

Ron compared it to a family. You can have five children and love them all equally, but anyone who has raised children knows that equality does not mean treating them identically. One needs encouragement. Another needs structure. Another needs independence. Another needs reassurance. The good parent pays attention to the child in front of them rather than applying one parenting manual to the entire household.

I had been doing the professional equivalent of handing every child the same birthday present and wondering why some of them looked disappointed.

Once he showed me the problem, the solution became almost embarrassingly obvious. I didn’t need to become more general so I could “catch more.” I needed to become more specific so the right people could recognize themselves in what I was offering. Instead of spending five times as much on marketing in the hope of finding the right clients somewhere inside a larger crowd, I could speak directly to each group and let specificity do some of the selling before I ever entered the conversation.

I think the fishing analogy explains it best. Why sit in the middle of a lake in the hot sun with a giant net, hoping you catch whatever happens to swim beneath you, when you could visit five coves before lunch and change the bait to match the species? You aren’t fishing in a smaller lake. You’re simply no longer pretending that every fish wants the same thing.

I have implemented what Ron designed with me, and the results have been one of those experiences that makes you feel slightly foolish in retrospect. The business has become more precise, the conversations have become more relevant and the economics of reaching the right people have improved. I had thought specificity would limit my growth. It turned out that specificity was the route to it.

That was the business lesson, but it also became a lesson about my life.

I had been thinking about success in terms of increasingly distant destinations. Five-year goals. Professional milestones. Financial targets. The usual machinery. Ron didn’t tell me to stop being ambitious. He challenged the assumption that my life needed to be organized around distant outcomes. He started talking about the objectives between the objectives: the smaller movements that create a path toward the person you are becoming.

That changed the way I thought about goals.

A distant goal is easy to admire because it lives safely in the future. Becoming happens on Tuesday afternoon. It happens when you decide what to do with the next hour, the next conversation, the next commitment. The future is built in those little pieces, whether you pay attention to them or not.

So we began designing those pieces around my actual strengths rather than some imaginary future version of myself who was going to wake up one morning with entirely different habits, energy and personality.

We did the same thing with my family and finances. They weren’t separate boxes to be dealt with after the business plan was finished. They were part of the same system. What sort of husband did I want to be? What did I want my children to receive from me? What did financial success need to provide? What kind of professional did I want to become? What sort of man could carry success without allowing it to consume everything else?

Faith became part of that conversation too. Not as decoration, and certainly not as a sales technique, but as part of the moral framework I wanted underneath the life I was building. The more we talked, the more I realized that success without a code is simply acceleration. You can become very efficient at going somewhere you should never have gone.

By then, I had stopped thinking of the day as a consultancy in the conventional sense. It felt more like someone had entered a garage I had been filling for twenty years and started asking me why I still owned half the things in it. Some of the boxes were valuable. Some were sentimental. Some were broken. Some belonged to somebody else. The problem was that I had stopped seeing the clutter because I had become accustomed to walking around it.

Ron didn’t simply give me more boxes.

He helped me decide what to throw away.

That was one of the most liberating parts of the day. I didn’t have to adopt Ron’s life or turn myself into a different personality. In fact, I left realizing that some of the things I thought I needed to acquire were precisely the things I needed to stop carrying. I could keep the strengths that were genuinely mine, discard some inherited assumptions and build a future around the person who was actually standing there.

By the time we finished, I had a map.

My head was spinning, but I knew what to do next. That sounds simple, but it wasn’t something I had possessed when I arrived. I had clarity, confidence and a genuine sense of agency. The plan was not some grand five-year fantasy that looked impressive on paper and collapsed when it met a Tuesday. It was a purposeful plan that could live on a calendar, supported by beliefs I actually believed and daily actions I could actually take.

At one point I asked Ron why it felt as though I had somehow compressed ten years of therapy into a single day.

He laughed and explained that he wasn’t a licensed therapist and wasn’t trying to be one. His role was different. He could tell me what he saw. He could challenge the assumptions. He could get directly to the truth as he understood it and then help me decide what I was going to do with it. He told me that his business model was essentially the opposite of making someone dependent upon him. He wanted the person to succeed the moment they walked out the door.

That became even clearer at the end of the day.

Ron took me to dinner, and his wife joined us. I suppose some part of me expected that, after spending the day with someone who had achieved as much as he has, dinner might be somewhere designed to make an impression. It wasn’t. We went to a simple American restaurant, the sort of place chosen because they actually liked it rather than because it looked impressive to a visitor from England.

The staff knew them, and they knew the staff. There were greetings and jokes and ordinary conversation. Nobody was putting on airs. Ron and his wife were simply there having dinner.

And sitting across from them, I suddenly understood something I had heard Ron say before: there is no man above me and no man below me.

I had thought it was a good line.

That evening I realized it was a way of life.

Ron was obviously successful. His wife was obviously successful. They had nothing to prove to anyone in that restaurant. Yet the person serving them was not beneath them, and I was not being treated as some lesser person simply because I had arrived as the client.

By dinner, I didn’t feel like I was sitting with a big-shot mentor or a celebrity. I felt as though I was sitting with a peer who had become a friend during a very long and rather extraordinary day.

That may have been the part that affected me most.

The entire day had been an exercise in getting me back into contact with reality. Not somebody else’s idea of success, not a fictional future version of myself, not an abstract marketing avatar and not a number on a spreadsheet. My reality. My talents. My weaknesses. My family. My customers. My money. My faith. My responsibilities. My opportunities.

I realized that I had arrived in Texas without a reliable point of reference for all of it.

I left with one.

Before I left, Ron gave me the Marketing Mercenary Course as a parting gift. There was no upsell attached to it, no elaborate continuation offer and no suggestion that I needed to purchase another level of access before I could keep learning. He simply gave it to me and told me that if I ever needed him as a mentor, I could reach out.

That mattered.

I had paid for a day. He gave me the day. He gave me the business work I had come for, then went considerably further. He gave me the course and left the relationship open without trying to turn it into another transaction.

That is when I finally understood what the fuss was about.

There is no neat way to package what Ron does because the thing that matters most isn’t the course, the consultancy or even the enormous amount of experience he has accumulated. Those are the tools. What he actually gives you is attention applied with experience. He looks at the business, then the customer, then the person running the business, and eventually you realize he has been looking at the whole system all along.

I flew from England expecting a business consultation. I got one, and it was excellent. I also got something I hadn’t known to ask for: a clearer understanding of the life I was building, the man I wanted to become and the reality I was standing in.

I came home with a compass, a map and a point of reference.

And I hadn’t brought any of the three with me.

So yes, be wary of Ron Lynch. He may show you that your marketing problem isn’t really a marketing problem. He may discover that you don’t know your customers as well as you thought. He may find strengths you have been ignoring and ambitions you have been carrying for no good reason. He may rearrange the garage and make you wonder why you spent twenty years walking around the boxes.

And then, having done all that, he may send you home with the tools and expect you to use them.

There is no grand reveal after that.

No magic.

Just reality, properly seen.

I have found that is more than enough.”

• Mike

It looks different.

Iran may not be the story.

Iran may be the place where several much larger changes have collided at the same time. Start with a culture that has no matter the reason, spent decades in a economic chokehold with now real way out from their perspective. Before you rationalize their adoption of your world view, accept that they cannot do that. A leadership that is ruled by a doctrine that insists the west is the enemy and a lens that reinforces that story daily. It builds an uncomfortable inevitability.

That is where we live.

The American system was built on two enormous advantages reinforcing each other. The world used our money, and the world depended on our security architecture. Dollars financed power. Power protected the system that made dollars valuable. For decades, that arrangement was so successful that we stopped noticing it was an arrangement at all.

Now the pieces are moving.

BRICS is building payment connections and encouraging greater use of local currencies. Central banks are accumulating gold at roughly twice the pace of the preceding decade, while reserve managers increasingly expect gold to occupy a larger share of reserves. The dollar remains dominant, but its share of global reserves has been gradually declining.

At the same time, America’s military is discovering the other side of the equation. Iran has consumed sophisticated defensive munitions that Washington also wants available for the Pacific. The Pentagon is trying to rebuild the magazine while China is sitting there, quietly becoming the problem America is supposed to be preparing for.

That is not an Iran problem as much as a capacity problem.

NOW look at the Middle East.

Israel has never officially acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons, but SIPRI estimates its arsenal at approximately 80 warheads. Pakistan is an acknowledged nuclear-armed state. And Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey have now created a mutual-defense arrangement treating an armed attack against one as an attack against all three. It is not a nuclear NATO, and we should not pretend the agreement says something it doesn’t. But it is another indication that regional powers are beginning to build security structures of their own rather than assuming Washington will always be the final answer.

The Middle East isn’t simply fighting over Iran.

It is rearranging itself around the possibility that American power may no longer be unlimited.

Saudi Arabia doesn’t need to hate America to hedge against America. Turkey doesn’t need to abandon NATO to build additional options. Pakistan doesn’t need to become China’s puppet to deepen its relationships elsewhere.

They simply have to look at the same map everybody else is looking at and ask a very reasonable question: What happens if America can’t do everything anymore?

That’s not an anti-American question. It’s a survival question. Iran sits right in the middle of it.

Iran has spent decades building the kind of military and political architecture that makes a superior power spend resources. The Soviet Union learned the lesson in Afghanistan. Iran watched. The United States is now learning a modern version of it through missile inventories, production capacity and the simple fact that a sophisticated interceptor fired today cannot also be fired tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the financial system is changing underneath the military system.

If more energy is eventually settled outside the dollar, if more reserves are diversified into gold and other currencies, if alternative payment systems become functional and if countries begin building security arrangements that don’t depend entirely upon Washington, then the American command structure doesn’t have to collapse.

It simply becomes less necessary. That’s a profound distinction.

America can remain the most powerful country on earth and still lose something enormously important: indispensability.

Once a country is no longer indispensable, other countries begin making different decisions. They buy different assets, build different alliances, develop different weapons. They choose to settle trade differently, directly and digitally.

What if there isn’t a globally agreed to currency? Perhaps the new world order fights in bits and bytes of bank settlements.

That is what I think we are potentially watching. Not the sudden collapse of America in totality, but the loss of it as relevant to the degree it has been. The total end of the assumption that America will always be the answer, because it just doesn’t matter.

Iran is the trigger because Iran sits directly on several fault lines: energy, Israel, nuclear deterrence, Gulf security, China, Russia, American military power and the emerging financial architecture outside the traditional Western system.

That’s why the question of whether Iran “wants war” is almost beside the point.

Iran doesn’t have to want a world war, just the longest possible one they can sustain. It’s a choke out your opponent while they are stabbing you scenario. Iran only has to operate according to its own interests while the larger system around it is changing. They have literally said this outloud and we refuse to hear it.

I’ve been successful at advertising and sales for ages on one basic premise. I assume the customers position. Just put yourself in their shoes.

Love’m, hate’m… I don’t care. See the world through the eyes they were raised in.

Here’s where the Afghanistan lesson comes back one last time. We need to learn it.

The Soviets discovered that a great power could be weakened without being defeated. Iran may have learned that lesson very well. You don’t have to knock the king off the chessboard. Sometimes you simply make the king spend so much defending every square that somebody else starts moving pieces onto the board.

That’s what makes this moment different. The United States isn’t just dealing with Iran. We’re dealing with Iran while carrying an enormous debt burden, maintaining a global military posture, rebuilding weapons inventories, confronting China, watching the dollar’s relative position change, and seeing allies and regional powers quietly build insurance policies against a less predictable American future.

None of these things means America is finished as a place. But together they suggest the game is changing.

Are we really seeing what is happening in front of us?

The question isn’t whether America will suddenly fall simply off a cliff. Yet if the dollar devalues much more and the workforce is displaced by computation…are we all going to be baristas, plumbers and maintenance workers? Sure that’s a weird and real contemplation. Think bigger in historical shifts.

The real question is whether history has already begun building the road around us and we are to pressured, worked, indebted, entertained and distracted my midterm societal A D D to notice.

If the railroad owners had seen airplanes coming we’d all fly Union Pacific Airways. That didn’t happen. History proves that by the time everybody can see the new road, the old one isn’t being replaced.

It’s already been replaced.

Iran may simply be the place where we finally noticed. THIS may be the real 5D chessboard.

Iran is one square. The dollar is another. Energy, debt, missile inventories, China, BRICS, nuclear deterrence and America’s alliances are all moving at the same time. The move we see may not be the move that matters. A missile fired at Iran can consume an interceptor needed for China. A disruption in energy can become a currency problem. A new alliance can become a deterrent for the next war.

Now.

I will drop the other shoe.

Consider North Korea. A provincial proxy for the Chinese. They could play one card to change the global order.

What if “World War lll” is only a one King toppling chess move that lasts 5 minutes?

Imagine one North Korean missile reaches New York. The question isn’t simply whether America can retaliate. Of course it can. The question is what retaliation means when South Korea and Japan…American allies sitting next to North Korea… are immediately exposed to the consequences. The attacker doesn’t have to be immune from retaliation. It only has to make retaliation impossible to execute.

One missile.

The entire strategic architecture changes.

That is the frightening elegance of 5D chess: you don’t necessarily attack the king. You change the board on which the king has to play.

Now consider all the other players at the game called planet Earth. Do they cry? Will they rush to help? How many applaud?

For a second you have to see that when the conditions are a certain way, for some of the players, that type of attack would not only be welcome, it would be strategically smart.

We are a world away between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It’s a thought and perspective so chilling we refuse to entertain it. I live a pretty peaceful life out here in the savannah but this one does take a little sleep away from me. I love my country and my people. Watching them argue over some of the distractions we fill our news hour with saddens me.

Which brings me back to an old line from Revelation: Babylon falls in one hour, and the merchants stand at a distance while the ships stop short of the harbor.

Different chessboard.

But it sure echoes in my noggin’.

Great systems don’t necessarily collapse with a warning bell do they?

The merchant discovers the harbor isn’t open. The banker discovers the currency isn’t indispensable. The general discovers the magazine isn’t deep enough. The ally discovers the guarantee isn’t permanent.

Suddenly we’re standing in our underwear in the living room staring at a screen in disbelief the moment everybody discovers the board has changed. The next 9/11 may makes us wish for the last one.

Maybe that’s what we’re experiencing, the dominoes lining up for a historic shift in global power and processes?

Iran isn’t necessarily the whole story. It may be the trigger that makes the larger transition visible.

And World War III?

Might not be fought by kids across foreign lands around the globe and last years. It might last five minutes by toppling the right strategic puzzle piece.

The consequences could last at least a century. None of us has a crystal ball, but all of us can develop brass ones.

Oh the solution?

Pray for peace.

Then bring it to your table. The only thing that any of us can ever do is be the peace you wish to see in the world.

The Bible says fear not 365 times. One time for every day.

You can chose to let this upset you or choose to make you aware and prepare for a variety of scenarios that all include change.

We’ll continue on here at the ranch doing our chores, writing pieces, making pasta from chicken eggs and flour and knowing we have strange promise when God says these very well predicted times come.

We’ll continue to educate people into moral sales and ethical business based in kingdom building. I’ll still cuss like a sailor and be imperfect like every old man. But I’ll still hug my kids and sheild my grandkids from the conditions of the adult insanity.

We’ll believe that promise of God that we have a mystical veil of protection. We are the oil and the wine as believers. We’ll realize that groom will not come until the bride is ready.

We understand one day everyone’s time comes and the challenge has always been to choose joy and gratitude in the face of fear.

We’ve come this far. That’s not dragging religion into it.

It’s revealing faith.

That is our real power. Facing the storm with courage. So I’ll thank you for reading and leave you with the only real question that matters in life. I ask myself this on at least a daily basis.

Are you courageous?

Well. Are you?

Getting the debt held in previous paper money into the digital system is a banker’s war with the objective of attempting to erase as much debt as possible in that transfer process is the game ultimately. As citizens we have zero input. Therefore anxiety is useless. Do your best to hold physical assets that shift when dollar values do. We chose metals for historical reasons. Good enough for Solomon and Ft. Knox, good enough for us. Notice this week’s PR of senators physically checking Ft. Knox to tell you the gold is “there”.

What a signal.

We are all going digital monetarily. That war is one an individual can observe but the increase in gold prices over the past 5 years are a great indicator of how the public can hedge devaluation. I’ve been teaching this for years and haven’t been hurt by executing the strategy.

There is a second half to the dollar story that gets missed because we tend to separate money from military power. We shouldn’t. The dollar became the world’s financial operating system while the United States became the world’s security system. One reinforced the other. American money financed American power, and American power helped make the dollar trustworthy, liquid and difficult to avoid.

That arrangement worked remarkably well for a very long time.

Yet there is a bill attached to being the world’s policeman, and somebody eventually has to pay it.

The United States doesn’t just maintain a military capable of defending America. We maintain a military capable of being everywhere. Europe. The Pacific. The Middle East. Shipping lanes. Alliances. Bases. Intelligence. Air defense. Nuclear deterrence. And now we are discovering something rather unpleasant: the world’s most powerful military still has a magazine.

The Iran war has made that visible. The Pentagon is pushing defense companies to dramatically accelerate weapons production after the conflict consumed significant stocks of advanced interceptors. Reuters reports that roughly 65% of the U.S. Patriot interceptor stock was used between February and July, leaving fewer than 850, while global demand is also being driven by Ukraine. The Pentagon is now asking industry to find ways to increase production much faster.

That isn’t a story about whether America has the world’s best military.

Of course it does.

It’s a story about whether America can sustain the world’s best military while asking it to operate everywhere at once.

That is a different question.

And this is where Afghanistan becomes important.

Most young Americans know Afghanistan as an American story. It wasn’t. The Soviet Union was there first. In 1979, Moscow sent a conventional superpower into a country where geography, tribal loyalties, religion, outside support and time all worked against the occupier. The Red Army could win battles. What it couldn’t do was turn military superiority into a political victory at an acceptable price.

Afghanistan did not single-handedly collapse the Soviet Union. History is rarely that cooperative. But the war became one of the expenses on a Soviet balance sheet that was already deteriorating. It consumed resources and exposed the limits of Soviet power.

Iran was watching.

And Iran has spent decades building a military doctrine around the very problem Afghanistan demonstrated. Iranian doctrine explicitly emphasizes asymmetric warfare, strategic depth, geography and raising the costs and risks for a technologically superior opponent rather than trying to defeat that opponent conventionally.

That is the connection.

Iran doesn’t have to build an American-sized military.

It has to build a military that makes the American military expensive. The fact that Iran is a completely mountainous nation full of nooks and crannies should send evhoes of Afghanistan shuddering up our spine.

There is a profound difference between the two objectives.

A $4–5 million interceptor is extraordinarily effective if it stops a missile headed toward something important. But it is also an item on an inventory sheet. It has to be manufactured. The factory has to produce another one. The supply chain has to supply the parts. The Pentagon has to decide whether the next missile goes to the Middle East, Europe or the Pacific.

China doesn’t have to fire a shot to benefit from that arithmetic. That is the modern version of the Afghanistan lesson.

The Soviet Union discovered that a great power could be made to spend itself fighting a smaller opponent. America is discovering that the same principle works with precision weapons, industrial capacity and time.

You don’t have to destroy the Eagle. You can make the Eagle spend its ammunition.

That matters enormously because the United States is no longer facing one strategic problem. We are facing several simultaneously. Russia remains a military problem. China is the long-term peer competitor. Europe wants American security guarantees. The Middle East demands attention. Ukraine consumes weapons. And now Iran has demonstrated how quickly sophisticated defensive munitions can disappear when the shooting gets serious.

This is why the Pentagon’s replenishment problem matters more than the headline suggests. It isn’t simply, We need more missiles.

It is: How many wars can America be prepared to fight at the same time? Anerica made a conscious decision publicy to reduce our military to a one warfront system in the Obama years. That’s not shade. It’s fact. Trump is reversing that course as fast as possible including expaning the military with “The Space Force”. As comical as the name sounds, the truth is the next frontier of strategic defense and first detection and high energy instant defense will be in orbit.

That endeavor is a question of industrial capacity, money and time. Time is the one thing you can’t surge.

You can throw money at a factory. You can build another production line. You can sign a bigger contract. But a sophisticated weapons ecosystem cannot be conjured overnight. Reuters reports that some Patriot components and interceptors can take years to replenish, while the Pentagon is now pressing industry to shorten those timelines dramatically.

So put the pieces together.

America is trying to remain the world’s financial center while carrying an enormous debt burden. It is trying to remain the world’s military center while rebuilding depleted inventories. It is trying to deter China while fighting Iran. It is trying to reassure allies while those allies increasingly understand that American attention is not infinite.

This isn’t an argument that America is finished. That’s the wrong argument.

America may remain the most powerful country on earth for decades.

The question is whether it can remain the country responsible for everything.

That is what being the world’s policeman really means. Police departments have budgets, ammunition, manpower. These are time and money.

Eventually somebody asks why the same cop is expected to patrol every street in town.

The Soviet Union learned something in Afghanistan that Iran appears to have understood very well: you don’t necessarily defeat a great power by destroying its forces. Sometimes you make its strategic objectives so expensive that it has to choose where it can still afford to matter.

That choice is here.

Iran is an unusually interesting place to make it happen, because Tehran has spent decades designing its military strategy around exactly this vulnerability: make the technologically superior enemy pay more to win than the enemy believes the objective is worth.

That brings us to the third piece.

Because if America is simultaneously spending its military inventory, carrying the financial burden of global leadership and watching other nations build alternative financial and security arrangements, then Iran isn’t really the whole story.

Iran may simply be the place where the changing world has become impossible to ignore.

I don’t believe Iran is behaving like a country that wants to end a conflict. In fact it appears to be wanting to intensify, protract and extend the actions to the point of begging for a land invasion.

This is strategically, religiously and predictively on script for a radical eschatological government seeking a holy provocation for the Mahdi.

Once you see that, the next question gets considerably bigger:

What happens when the countries America has spent eighty years protecting begin preparing for a world in which America might not be able or willing to protect everyone?

What if Iran’s strategy does not include peace?

What if Iran learned from Vietnam and Afghanistan?

Make your enemy go broke by protracting an attack you’ve been provoking for nearly 50 years.

Part 3 will tie all this together.

Over my life starting during the Vietnam War and living through NASA launches, the analog world moving digital. TV going from an air signal with 4 channels to a satellite with seemingly unlimited channels.

From watching a culture shift from egss & butter to margerine & egg beaters now back because “science”. I’ve lived through a lot.

There is a strange thing about watching history happen. Nobody sees the pattern and calls it history. We call history “the news”.

The dollar is in free fall and we call it a currency fluctuation. We focus on a tariff, a trade agreement or an extension of the budget. There are central-bank decisions. Massive bank backed foreign gold purchases. A BRICS meeting and agreement signed. A quiet Treasury auction with higher T-bill rates. Another country settling a little more trade in its own currency.

Nothing to see here.

Then ten years later somebody writes a book and tells you the old system ended in 2026.

That’s not usually how systems end.

They don’t fall over like a drunk at closing time. They get replaced one decision at a time.

The dollar is still the dominant reserve currency. The American financial system is still the center of global capital. The Treasury market is still enormous. And anyone announcing that the dollar has suddenly become worthless is selling something.

But that isn’t the question.

The question is whether the rest of the world is quietly building a system in which it needs less of the dollar than it used to.

That is a very different question. The answer appears to be yes.

BRICS is real. It is no longer simply a collection of countries complaining about the American-led financial system over coffee. Its members are working on payment connectivity, local-currency settlement and alternatives that reduce dependence on Western financial infrastructure. China has been pushing the international use of the yuan, including for energy transactions. Countries don’t have to announce that they are abandoning the dollar. They can simply conduct the next transaction without it.

Do that enough times and the architecture changes.

This is where people get confused about reserve currencies. They imagine a ceremony. Somebody rings a bell and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.”

That’s not how it works.

Reserve status is an ecosystem. It is trade. Banking. Debt. Commodities. Payment systems. Foreign-exchange reserves. Confidence. Liquidity. Military power. Political relationships. The dollar became extraordinarily powerful because all those things reinforced one another.

Which means the reverse is also true.

If enough pieces begin moving in another direction, the dollar doesn’t need to be overthrown. Its position simply becomes less exclusive.

And that is what I think we are watching.

Look at gold. Central banks have been buying it at levels that would have seemed remarkable a decade ago. That doesn’t mean central banks suddenly think the dollar is going to zero. Gold doesn’t pay interest. You can’t exactly buy a submarine with a Krugerrand.

But gold has one rather interesting characteristic.

Nobody else’s liability.

A government can default. A currency can be sanctioned. A payment system can be switched off. A Treasury can be frozen. Gold just sits there.

When countries that have spent decades holding dollars begin increasing their gold reserves, I don’t interpret that as an announcement of war against America. I interpret it as insurance.

Insurance always tells you what people are worried about.

Then there is energy, the part most people are missing. Oil has historically been one of the great engines of dollar demand. But substitute the word energy for oil and the picture gets considerably larger. Energy is not merely another commodity. It is the bloodstream of industrial civilization. Whoever controls how energy is financed, transported and settled has influence that extends far beyond the energy market.

If more of that trade can be conducted in currencies other than the dollar, the significance isn’t simply that one barrel was purchased with yuan instead of dollars.

The system begins learning that the dollar isn’t required. That’s the important part.

China understands this clearly. Beijing does not need the yuan to replace the dollar tomorrow. It needs the yuan to become useful enough, in enough places, that countries have a reason to hold it and use it. Every energy transaction conducted outside the traditional dollar system helps build that habit.

Habits become infrastructure which morphs into dependency. Your cell phone is a prime example. Dependency becomes power, admit it.

Suddenly the currency question isn’t really about currency anymore. It is about who gets to write the rules and own the lanes.

The United States has enjoyed an extraordinary privilege because the world has needed dollars, Treasury securities and access to American financial infrastructure. That privilege has helped finance our government, our military and our global reach. Yet privilege has a nasty habit of becoming invisible to the people receiving it.

We have spent decades behaving as though the system will simply continue because it has always continued. History doesn’t work that way.

Japan is another little piece of this puzzle. Japan holds an enormous amount of U.S. Treasury debt, while the yen has come under significant pressure. When Washington and Tokyo have to coordinate around currency stability, you are seeing something more complicated than a foreign-exchange story. You are seeing two deeply interconnected financial systems trying to keep the plumbing from backing up.

The plumbing matters.

Because America’s financial power and America’s military power are connected.

The United States can run enormous deficits partly because the world has an enormous appetite for dollar assets. That doesn’t mean debt doesn’t matter. It means the system has historically given Washington extraordinary room to borrow and spend.

Now simply imagine the rest of the world gradually deciding it would like a little less exposure.

Not zero. Just less and that creates motivation. It causes action out of both fear and opportunity depending how you see it.

That is enough to change the arithmetic.

This is why I keep coming back to the phrase “window shopping the inevitable”.

You don’t wait until the store is empty to notice that the inventory has changed. You watch what people are putting in their carts.

Gold, alternative digital payment systems, local currencies and collective currency agreements like BRICS are emerging in a workd hanging onto the U.S. dollar with one slipping grip while swinging to another vine if potential safety.

Energy settlement outside the traditional dollar system is a thing.

Treasury diversification is driving values of dollars and yen plus the interest you pay on your mortgage. Those are materially connected although you probably never think about it. I do.

Regional financial arrangements drive policy actions. None of those things, individually, kills the dollar or is intended to yet they are signals. They create a buzz in my head that becomes deafening.

I suffer from signal synthesis overload. I hear the world like a rise of a million secadas here on the farm. It is buzzing.

Together, they tell all you something. Change is coming.

The world is preparing for a future in which the dollar may be less central than it was during the American century. That doesn’t mean America disappears.

It doesn’t mean the yuan suddenly becomes king.

It doesn’t mean BRICS becomes some perfectly unified anti-American superstate. It won’t. These countries have competing interests, competing ambitions and, in some cases, longstanding reasons not to trust each other.

They don’t have to agree on everything just that they would like more options. That may be the most important word in this entire story:

Options. Diversification of power while unification on the speed rails of authenticated blockchain technology.

The American-led system became powerful because, for decades, the United States was the system most of the world wanted to use. Now all other countries are building systems they can use if they don’t want to.

That is not collapse. It is something more subtle.

It is the beginning of digital redundancy and diffusion of centralized control.

When a system that once had one indispensable center begins developing alternatives, the center doesn’t disappear overnight. It simply becomes less indispensable. That is how history usually moves. Not with a bang just with people quietly making other plans. Yet every bank has a security system that starts with cameras and guards with the back up of a police force.

For the past 80 years the police force has been the U.S.. The irony is inside the country we chime “Defund the Police”. Outside the country that exact thing is happening.  We are being defunded as the global police.

We’ll examine that tomorrow in Part 2.

This is what I have taught for decades. Communication is not about how much information can be delivered. It is about whether another human being actually understands something because the communication occurred.

Are we clear and relatable? Do we connect?

Sounds simple. Far from it. Most people confuse communication with output. “Make five posts a day”.

Consider your best output should approach social media accordingly. Excellent communicators get eyeballs as a byproduct of valuable content, not by attempting to get attention soley.

We are not becoming “influencers”, at our highest. You are becoming a more visible communicator of the judgment, experience and character that already exist within you or the company you represent.

The first responsibility is to look like a professional. Personally I do this in about a five to one ratio. Polished most of the time, the times I’m not are a spontaneous departure that feels authentic because it is.

That does not mean dressing to display wealth or manufacturing some exaggerated image of success. Class has very little to do with price tags. It has much more to do with taste, restraint and coherence. The wardrobe, setting, lighting and overall presentation should communicate that the person respects the audience and takes the subject seriously.

There is no reason to manufacture a persona. I have watched successful people put on foolish clothes, adopt artificial mannerisms and pretend to be ordinary in order to appear relatable. It usually has the opposite effect. The audience knows they are watching a performance. False humility is still performance, it has a bad scent.

A leader does not need to pretend to be less successful than he is. Nor does he need to prove how successful he or she is. There is a middle ground called confidence. Look like yourself at your best. Let the work establish the authority. The endless posts of unrelenting branded purchases and luxury trips demonstrates you’re uncomfortable in your own skin and your leveraging external totems as props for a vapid self.

Sorry. Someone had to say it.

The same principle applies to your voice. The delivery should be measured, low and deliberate. Not artificially deep and certainly not theatrical. The objective is simply to stop rushing. Words need somewhere to land. Your anxiousness and need for approval, are read in a split second by the viewer. It’s doing you damage.

I have spent decades writing and rehearsing important presentations, including the pauses. A correctly placed pause gives the audience time to think. That matters because communication is not merely the transmission of information. It is the creation of understanding.

This is why I would rather as a producer abd strategist, see you make five one-minute videos than one frantic sixty-second video containing five unrelated lessons. If there are five good ideas, there are five pieces of content. Let each idea have enough room for the audience to actually process it.

If the work is salient. Trust it. That builds the following.

There is no prize for winning the information Olympics.

If you have no actual experience as a expert in the field quit acting like it. Post after post of you discussing the decisions of Sam Altman, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg and what they are doing in AI. Look around, 100,000 other schmucks are doing that this morning and you’ve accidentally qualified yourself as one.

A good piece of communication has a truthful center. One idea. One story. One useful conclusion. The audience should be able to remember what was said after the video ends. If the viewer needs to take notes simply to figure out what the point was, the communication failed.

This is also why stories matter so much. Information informs people. Stories enroll them. A true experience gives an idea somewhere to live. A leader talking about resilience is not particularly interesting. A leader telling the story of something that went wrong, what was believed before it happened, what reality revealed and what changed afterward is interesting. Now the lesson has a pulse.

In court, the third party story is called hearsay. It’s discounted as useless. It’s gossip. If you’re last name is Hilton, go for it. Outside of that please temper yourself.

This is what I have done throughout my work. The experiences, failures, successes and people encountered along the way become the material. The story is not there to make the storyteller look interesting. It is there because experience makes the lesson believable. My own writing describes the journey and the experiences behind it as the thing that gives the lessons their meaning.

Interested does make interesting. Be truly interested in something without claiming absolute expertise sometimes. Yet not every day. Vulnerability is a double edge sword. Enough makes you human and relatable, too much makes you needy and a victim. We will only accept so much mold on a great piece of cheese before we toss it out.

Authority works the same way. It cannot be manufactured by simply speaking with confidence. That’s the charlatan path. We can smell it.

It comes from having actually done something, studied something deeply, survived the consequences and learned enough to have a useful opinion.

One of the foundational principles of my marketing work has always been not to assume. Listen. Observe. Ask questions. Understand the customer before deciding what the customer needs. The strongest marketers I have worked with are not the people who talk the most. They are the people who know what to listen for.

That should be the posture of a developing leader online as well.

Speak from real experience. Speak from definite true knowledge. Speak from heartfelt conviction. But don’t manufacture expertise where none exists. Quit faking it to make it. My millennial son was telling me that is the thoroughly the adopted framework of young folks these days. That is a tragedy.

It’s okay to be young and learning. The 28 year old self proclaimed expert is laughable to 80% of the audience. No one says a thing. Just an eyeroll.

There is considerable strength in saying, “I don’t know.” The person who knows everything has stopped learning. The person who know everything after being an adult for 6 years looks like a jester to those who have four decades under their belt. Have humility particularly if you’re under 40. That alone will make the audience lean in.

Empathy belongs here too. Before attempting to influence somebody, there has to be some understanding of the person being addressed. I have taught empathy as the ability to enter another person’s perspective rather than simply feeling sorry for them. The objective is to understand what is actually happening on the other side of the conversation.

That means a great communicator should think about the person watching. What does that person care about? What problem are they trying to solve? What have they already experienced? What might this story teach them? The answer should shape the communication.

This is not manipulation. It is deep respect.

Sincerity is another essential part of the equation. There is an extraordinary amount of manufactured sincerity on social media. People have learned how to look vulnerable, how to pause dramatically and how to tell a story that has been polished until every human edge has been removed.

Real sincerity is much less complicated. Tell the truth about what happened. Tell the truth about what was learned. Tell the truth about the mistake. Give credit to the person who taught the lesson. If the experience was difficult, don’t turn it into a motivational poster. Tell the story.

People recognize the difference instantly.

The visual presentation should follow the same philosophy. The setting should support the idea rather than compete with it. The camera should not be moving simply because somebody believes movement creates engagement. Music should not manufacture an emotion the words have not earned. B-roll should add meaning.

Audio matters enormously. I have always treated sound as part of the storytelling rather than decoration around it. That comes from years of film and advertising work, where the audio carries as much of the communication as the image. It’s 50% of the movie. In fact studies show the deaf have markedly higher incidences of depression when compared to the blind. Audio connects us to the world materially.

Yet none of that replaces the person.

A beautiful setting cannot rescue a hollow thought. Expensive production cannot create experience. Clever editing cannot manufacture sincerity. The fundamentals remain stubbornly human.

Preparation is one of those fundamentals. Good communication often looks spontaneous because somebody prepared thoroughly enough to make it look easy. I have taught this repeatedly in business: planning is what makes execution appear simple. Without the planning, people are often just executing failure with great enthusiasm.

The same thing applies to a one-minute video. Know the point before the camera comes on. Know the story. Know where it is going. Then speak naturally.

That preparation should disappear into the performance.

Finally, the content should come from life. The question is not, “What should be posted today?” That produces manufactured content. The better question is, “What happened that is worth understanding?”

A real customer revealed something. A surprise decision worked. A planned decision failed miserably. Somebody made an unusual mistake that we never saw coming. An employee demonstrated courage and thought of a solve you never considered.

A project exposed a flaw in the original thinking. A problem that seemed complicated turned out to have a simple cause.

There is the content.

Life is constantly producing material. The communicator’s job is to notice it. Shine the light.

That is the real standard for our leaders. Not volume. Not vanity metrics. Not appearing important. Not trying to sound like an expert. Not racing through seven lessons before the viewer has finished thinking about the first one.

Wisdom arrives with clarity.

The truth is wrapped in experience.

Authority is built on preparation.

Connection comes with restraint.

True experience reflects sincerity and enough pure confidence to leave the costume at home. The objective is not to make you look important.

It is to make you worth listening to.

If you found this useful and compelling. Please share my work and comment here ir elsewhere. Like you, the feedback drives the next piece.

Thank you for being a friend and reader.

“5 D Chess”

“He’s playing 5D chess.”

The President is playing 5D chess. Xi’s playing 5D chess. Putin plays 5D chess.

The global bankers are all playing 5D chess.

Some billionaires in Silicon Valley are apparently playing 5D chess and building bunkers in New Zealand, while the rest of us are trying to remember where we left our car keys waiting for the next domino to fall

Fine. We’re pawns. I get it.

What the hell does that actually mean?

Nobody ever tells you.

It’s become one of those fashionable phrases people throw around to sound smarter than the next fellow. Like “quantum,” “existential,” or “systemic.” Everybody nods. Nobody defines it.

I’d like to fix that.

Because I don’t think we’re watching the same game the world’s major powers are playing.

I think we’re watching checkers while many layers of eschelons are playing layers of five D plus chess games on five different boards or more at the same time. Many of the players themselves unaware.

That’s what I think people without definition are trying to describe when they say “5D chess.” It’s a phrase they use to explain a confusion they don’t actually fully see. It’s a shortcut phrase to a thing that is actually real.

I’d like to offer a frame to explain this which is simply a layer optics.

In video editing, software treats content like panes if glass, one laid atop another abd eventually they get fused together in what you see as a movie or TV show.

There’s “source footage” edited together.

Then graphics or CGI footage.

Then Color tinting or correction.

Then source audio.

Then sound fx and foley (sounds added like a growl or heavy foosteps or thunder)

Then music.

All mixed and balanced. Smash it all together and look down through all the glass at once and voila, you gits a movie.

The real world is working the same way. There are layers of the game that require shifting players and realitues. The more power one has, and the more layers they see, the more that can be manipulated just like when I make a commercial or movie with software.

Not genius. Not conspiracy. Just complexity.

The mistake isn’t believing someone is ten moves ahead. The truer mistake is believing there’s only one board because all of it gets reported by media which is conflicting stories based on the source.

Chessboard 1: War

Most people think war is about armies. That’s because television likes explosions. Missiles make good video. Tanks photograph well. Angry politicians generate ratings. Every night we’re handed another sensible explanation for why today’s bomb fell where it did. Tomorrow there’ll be another bomb and another explanation. The news business has quietly evolved from informing us to interrupting us. It isn’t rewarded for helping us understand the last fifty years. It’s rewarded for keeping us emotionally invested in the last fifty minutes. That’s not necessarily evil. It’s simply the economics of attention. But it has trained an entire civilization to confuse events with causes.

Wars are usually the smoke. Not the fire. Now let’s add another chessboard.

2- Money.

History has a funny habit that almost no one notices until after the fact. Empires don’t usually collapse because they lose one battle. They slowly lose the ability to finance themselves. The Spanish discovered it. The Dutch discovered it. Eventually Britain discovered it. America may someday discover it. Reserve currencies are wonderful things until they aren’t. Debt compounds. Interest compounds. Confidence compounds. Then one day confidence compounds in the opposite direction. History doesn’t ask permission before changing the financial operating system. It simply does. If you were sitting in London, New York, Beijing or Washington today, would you really be thinking only about tomorrow’s headlines? Or would you be thinking about what replaces the monetary architecture built after World War II? I don’t know. Neither do you. But it’s a question worth asking.

Currently we operate on a global trade currency called the US petrol dollar. This currency is controlled by the City if London banking and Insurance system. Think of the US financial system as the most utilized Brand of Banking which everyone uses as the standard all other things are transitory. Gold, oil, wheat, bitcoin, debt, energy, stocks and other currencies use the US dollar as a Rosetta stone of valuation.

The US Petrol-Dollar dying and there is a race to replace it with a digital currency. The US is utilizing the moment through Scott Bessent and US treadury and Federal Reserve Banking to force the coming US digital currency to not only win but to liquidate current US debt to the tune of 40-90 trillion dollars depending who’s measurement you are using

Now another board slides onto the table.

3- Energy.

For one hundred years oil was king. It powered automobiles, airplanes, tanks, factories and entire economies. Whoever controlled energy controlled civilization.

Suppose that’s changing.

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t consume crude oil. It consumes electricity.

Every dazzling AI demonstration you’ve watched exists because somewhere an unimaginably large data center is quietly devouring megawatts by the hour. Those computers create heat. Heat requires cooling. Cooling requires water. Electricity requires generation. Generation increasingly points back toward nuclear reactors, natural gas, transmission infrastructure, copper, transformers and engineering talent.

Maybe the next oil rush isn’t oil at all.

Maybe it’s electricity and the next energy crisis becomes a water crisis.

Notice everyone in power is gently stepping away from the global warming discussion to the new arguments if nuclear power and water resoucrs. If you havent seen this? Look. It’s a major emerging discussion.

Maybe desalination plants become as strategically valuable as oil refineries once were.

History has surprised us before.

Now let’s move another piece.

4- Religion.

Here’s where I think the secular world accidentally blinds itself. Most educated Westerners quietly assume religion is a private hobby. Something people do on weekends before brunch.

That assumption works wonderfully…

…until you visit the Middle East.

Christians watching world events through biblical prophecy are asking whether history is moving toward the appearance of the Antichrist before the return of Christ.

Many Twelver Shia Muslims anticipate the coming of the Mahdi, who they believe will appear during a period of immense turmoil to establish justice before the final judgment.

Jews continue waiting for the Messiah who ushers in an age of peace and restoration.

Whether you believe any of those expectations isn’t actually today’s question.

The important question is whether hundreds of millions of other people do. And they do.

If they organize their decisions around those beliefs, then prophecy has entered geopolitics whether the secular analyst likes it or not.

Ideas move nations. Beliefs move history.

Ignore that at your own peril. Even call believers ignorant and you’ll soon discover the mirror screaming back at you.

Now comes the next obvious board.

5- The Narrative

The story itself.

Who gets to explain reality? Think about that for a moment. Not who is right.

Who gets to explain?

We get bombarded from all sides …The media, Hollywood, Universities, Politicians, Podcasters.

Why do you suppose so many stories were suppressed during the elections and C-19.

Why has the Clinton’s and the FBI’s role in the Steele dossier go the way of the wind? It was very real and extremely unscrupulous. That’s not a pro Trump thought but automatically is disregarded as one. Why?

Because the usefulness of the gaslighting around it causes dissention on the ultimate evolution creating the sixth board.

6- Politics- The bonus board. That is You. If we can take the first five boards and add a conponent of social fracture with story you have the essence of politics.

The Democratic party of the US is experiencing a powerful fracture thanks to “Democratic Socialism”.

Internally and publicly the Carville’s, Clinton’s, Sanders and such are having a meltdown over the fracture, and rightly so.

Trump oddly galvanized a large enough voter segment over this a few times. Remember, republicans of the establishment hated Trump. But his voice resonated with enough of the audience, pretty soon the party succumbed to a cult of personality.

The Dems are praying for such an emerging character and the Democratic Socialist movement is bifricating them into terror. Will they be able to produce a charismatic leader. The sheer suggestion as Hunter Biden being qualified several

Months back should tell us the desperation of running literally anything up the flagpole.

Finally the brand new systems 7th board of control that can dictate in a nanosecond all the other boards, the new control board.

Yes. It’s actually 7 D chess.

7- Technology.

Algorithms. Artificial intelligence; Musk, Thiel, Altman, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Steve Jones and Gates…more constitute the technocracy controlling information, security, communications, intelligence and the wireframe of a system that exists in bits and bytes from your home wifi, your cell phone, car and an emerging sattelite web or grid that constitues a real world matrix. You are stuck in a digital spiderweb and you are as much the consumed as the consumer.

It controls who get the screen, the mic and who gets to hear what. Remember your scrolling timeline is completely unique to YOU. It has commonalities but your version of reality is custom designed based on…

Your confirmation bias.

Overwhelm?

Exactly. My friend that is the purpose. You are required to be overwhelmed and the “story” is what does it.

Confusion creates compliance. Overall massive choice creates paralysis by analysis.

“They” need you to surrender to them. Each running a game from one board, the more sophisticated players playing from several.

Think how terrified the old London Bankers, Lawyers and Insurance folks must be of the technologists.

This is why they have invested so much in the money, war and political layers. The rug is about to be pulled from them so they created the offshore blind trust system because no matter what happens their descendants can hide behind the absolute secrecy that mechanism provides. Yet for how long when the public is being told to eat the rich by… the new technologists? The richest.

Every civilization eventually fights over its stories because stories determine identity, and identity determines behavior. Control the story and very often you never need to control the people. They’ll organize themselves.

Now lay all seven boards beside one another.

Military.

Money.

Energy.

Religion.

Narrative.

Politics.

Technology.

I believe if you mentally use this model as a checklist to sort stories daily and place them in their appropriate box, you’ll be better at sense making.

Remember everything you see in media is not there to tell you a truth. It’s designed to create a belief.

Ask yourself, ”What do they want me to believe?”.

Your beliefs shape your actions and some editorial wizard has their sights on your heart and mind. That wizard may not be human, and in a weird way it’s you flattering yourself.

Here’s the part I find fascinating.

Most of us examine one board and assume we’re looking at the entire game. I don’t think we are ever.

I think one move can affect every board simultaneously. You’re being confused because you don’t stay aware of the five or seven layers if this tiramisu of bullshit and facts comingled.

Israel isn’t simply geography. It’s theology, shipping lanes, finance, domestic politics, strategic war land, energy, fresh water. diplomacy or not.

It’s media.

One square. All the games. One move at a time. That, I suspect, is what 5D plus chess actually looks like.

Suppose the missiles are not the main event. Suppose they’re the visible symptom of something much larger.

Consider we’re living through one of those rare moments when the monetary system, the energy system, the technological system, the religious imagination and the geopolitical order all begin changing at once.

History has seen moments like that before. Rome. The Renaissance. The Industrial Revolution. The British Empire. Bretton Woods.

Perhaps we’re standing inside another one.

Remember. The atom Bomb, the dead sea scrolls, Bretton Woods, the formation of Israel, the US dollar as the global reserve, the explosion of petroleum as the fuel, the consumer brand world based on Madison Avenue, the nuclear family… all of it created inside 1944-49. We are just inside the 80 year window of all this.

Mad Men.

My grandparents were born around 1911. They lived on a different planet. Entirely.

If so, history won’t remember this era because of one battle, one president or one central banker.

Our grandchildren will remember that civilization quietly changed operating systems while the rest of us were arguing over the latest headline.

Maybe I’m wrong.

History has embarrassed plenty of confident men. Yet I’ve learned something over the years.

Whenever religion, money, energy, technology and war all begin pointing toward the same horizon at the same time…I stop watching the individual chess pieces and pay attention to the overlap. When does a move on layer 2, effect 3, 4,and 5?.

This is all materially a game of POWER. The power of each advantage over the owners of the other boards stacks to ultimate control of reality.. Do you think it is by accident Trump was entrenched with Robert Mercer on his first ascension? Musk & Theil and Palantir the second time? Is it happenstance two Paypal guys that broke the Visa/Mastercasd, bank wire system with a consumer app where they charge MORE? They just all happen to be buds with handles cumulatively on politics, money, war, media, technology…do the math.

The moment you understand what you are looking at that, the whole machine begins making sense.

The evening news isn’t really competing against another news network anymore.

It’s competing against TikTok against Netflix, against YouTube, against your neighbor’s vacation pictures.

It’s vying for your adoration over your grandson doing something stupid on Instagram against everything.

That’s a brutal business, as attention is rented and never owned. Indoctrination into “my layer” is essential to my financial and egoic survival.

“Worship my perspective, I am the truth”.

Hmmm. Who might say that?

Who might need your attention and worship of this world?

Yes.

The Dark One.

So every morning the producers gather in conference rooms asking one simple question.

“What will people click?”

Not…

“What should people understand?”

Those are entirely different questions.

Understanding requires context.

Attention requires interruption.

One builds wisdom while, the other builds ratings.

If you’ve ever wondered why every story feels like the most important story in history, now you know.

Today’s missile before tomorrow’s hurricane, Tuesday’s election.

Follwed by massive inflation, trade tariffs another border war.

Then another conflicted teen boy shooting a parent’s AR-15.

Yet another celebrity death, orgasm, weightloss or surgery. Who other people have sec with is a must know.

The attention grabbing stories change. Yet, the attempted control of your emotional tempo and limbic system never does.

You are kept in a permanent state of almost understanding.

Politics will continue to subdivide the public as technology will ensure that happens.

Why?

“A Republic divided cannot stand.” Abraham Lincoln.

Funny his name was Abraham.

God has a sense of humor and you were too busy being distracted to ever have that thought?

Abraham. Damn.

My suspicion is that what people casually call “5D chess” is simply the ability to recognize that all five plus boards are connected materially.

The more you connect the stories and optics as the editor, the more wisdom you will have.

Then the less action and emotion you will need to bring to the table.

Move one piece on the monetary board and the energy board shifts.

Move one piece on the faith board and the political board responds.

Move one piece in the narrative and public opinion changes, altering everything downstream.

Most of us spend our lives staring at a single chessboard while History is usually written by the surviving people watching all. Imagine what would need to be erased to control the story going forward? Future digital anthropologists will be arguing quite a thing.

You don’t have to agree with every conclusion I reach. In fact, I hope you don’t. The point is not agreement. The point is learning to see the whole board

Most of us spend our lives watching one board.

The people making consequential decisions don’t have that luxury. Whether they’re presidents, CEOs, central bankers, generals, or religious leaders, they’re forced to think across multiple systems at once because a move on one board inevitably changes the others.

You don’t have to agree with every move they’re making.

You don’t even have to agree with my model.

But I do think you’ll understand the world a little better if you stop asking, “What’s today’s headline?”

…and start asking,

“Which chessboard am I looking at?”

“What do they want me to believe?”

“If I believe it, what will I do on their behalf.”

So where does this leave me?

Easy. The Book tells the entire story prior to my existence and past my departure. Therefore “ It is written”. The movie is doimg what the movie is going to do. Therefore I am forced to acknowledge the existence of the great Shakespeare, Homer,and Fitzgerald who is the author outside the book. I’ll trust Him instead of any of these men. I realize the uncomfortable truths.

I am born to die.

I am destined to rise from the dead.

I AM promised to live in the eternal outside of these silly boards that are designed by men.

His very active yet required villain on the tale meant to cause deceit, desire, distraction… anything that takes my eye of the entire purpose of the cinema. I think there may be a Satan in the world but the real devil lives between my ears.

In the words of Sting, “It’s probably me.”

Which in the end means that in this documentary… there is a prevailing theme. In the Hero’s journey there is always a mystical hand that causes the resolve.

“Him” reaching into the Software and Story to reach me. So I hang on, reach out and joyfully realize. Everything happens for a reason? Yes.

The reason? You are not only destined, but required to eventually make a decision. Serve yourself. Serve one of these masters.

Or…

Recognize the Author of the Universe and Surrender to success with Him.

Or not. The choice is yours.

Ahhh. Free will.

Dammit. I’m writing a movie in a movie. I’m directing it. I’m in a cast I pick. It’s as much about how I move and treat them. That is reflective if how God treats me.

Shall I be the perfect servant, child, father and leader as the story unfolds?

Thus I choose to be the most interested man in the world.

Let Him get your attention.

He’s been trying relentlessly.

You’re not the black sheep. Such a noble excuse.

You are the lost sheep.

Heed the call.

Surrender to the shepard.

Walk home through the storm.

You’re not the hero.

He is.

It’s just a movie baby.

See you in the lobby.

I used to think some people were simply born with better judgment than the rest of us. They were usually old and rich.

You know the type. They always seemed to arrive at the right conclusion before everyone else. They spotted trouble while everyone else was celebrating. They walked into a struggling business and somehow knew what was wrong before the accountant finished printing the reports. I assumed they possessed some mysterious gift that the rest of us either inherited or didn’t.

The older I get, the less I believe that. No magic. They simply just looked longer.

Years ago, I watched an old mechanic in my Seattle German autowerks, Hermann, diagnose an engine that had everyone else scratching their heads. He didn’t reach for a wrench. He didn’t start replacing parts. He leaned against the fender, listened for a while, asked a few questions, started the engine once, shut it off, and walked away.

He wasn’t guessing. He was eliminating. It turns out every answer removed another possibility until only one remained.

Driving home, it occurred to me that he wasn’t fixing an engine.

He was teaching me how to think diagnostically with questions and a little experience.

That lesson has followed me into almost every corner of my life. I use it daily in every facet of my life from my writings to counseling people.

Even the conversations our family has around the dinner table.

I’ve noticed that the people who consistently arrive at good conclusions are rarely in a hurry to get there. They seem almost comfortable carrying an unanswered question around for a while. They aren’t racing to an opinion. They’re waiting for reality to introduce itself.

Somewhere along the way we decided that intelligence meant having quick answers.

The press screws this up constantly by competing to get eyeballs first and accuracy second. I hope you see that because it’s true.

I’m no longer convinced “first in” is… well first. I used to have a partner that drove me bananas with clients because in meetings he’d often say; “Well the easiest thing to do would be..”

I’d get so pissed off. Why? Because the right thing to do and the easiest are rarely the same thing.

He damn near wrecked the business trying to win new contracts constantly. I did not appreciate the turn and burn of new clients every month because I was the head of production and we owned a media company.

The right thing made the excellent production that would go to air and work for years printing money for everyone. I have zero interest in fast and easy. I don’t mind making it look easy but that’s done with care not haste. Excellence has a fermentation process.

It’s all a craft to me.

Business, family, good, fun, wealth and everything. Crafts demand craftsman thinking. That’s not “easy”.

As you age you will discover more and more wisdom has more to do with asking better questions and then having enough patience to live with them.

That isn’t a talent. It’s a sometimes painful discipline. And disciplines can be learned. I know. I was one if the most undisciplined people when I was young and now… my kids, wife and friends think of me as a regiment general often.

I think we’ve accidentally intimidated ourselves by calling certain people brilliant.

It gives the rest of us permission to quit trying.

“Well, that’s just the way his mind works.”

Maybe. Yet maybe not.

Perhaps he has simply spent forty years paying attention to things the rest of us walk past.

A farmer notices a field beginning to fail long before anyone driving down the highway does. Not because he’s smarter than the driver. He’s simply spent enough mornings in that field to recognize when one shade of green isn’t quite the same as yesterday.

A grandmother knows something is wrong with her grandson before he says a word because she noticed he didn’t tease his sister, didn’t finish his potatoes, and didn’t laugh at the dog. None of those things matter by themselves.

Together they tell a story. They are evidence of a pattern broken. Those of us who live in a world of pattern recognition and systems engineering are sensitive to these disruptions.

That’s what observation does. That’s what living in emotional survival as a kid did to me. You log everything and notice everything.

You learn to gather small truths until they become one large truth.

Children do this naturally as they develop. Watch a five-year-old. They’ll ask why until the adults become exhausted.

Somewhere around adolescence we teach them to stop.

School rewards answers and hands out bad ones for free. This us where we learn “fast” over quality.

Life rewards actual thinking curiosity. Those aren’t always the same thing, in fact rarely do they meet.

One lives on the surface tension of water and the other swims deep in the tides and eddies.

I wonder sometimes if education accidentally convinces us that learning comes from experts instead of experience. I hope you realize it doesn’t. Teachers that do not practice their subject matter are parrots. We become very good at collecting other people’s conclusions and surprisingly poor at testing them against reality. There is nothing wrong with learning from someone else. As long as they are qualified. I often refer to myself as an instructor not a teacher to make the point I have practiced what I teach and bring the case studies.

Civilization depends upon the compound interest of instructors with students that apply themselves to crafts.

The danger comes when borrowed conclusions replace personal observation. Eventually we stop looking because someone else has already looked for us.

That habit is expensive.

I’ve seen it be deadly.

It is costly in business because markets change.

It is malfeasance in parenting because children change.

It is destructive in marriage because people change.

It is toxic in citizenship because cultures change.

Maps eventually become outdated.

Reality of the present doesn’t.

One of the most freeing discoveries I’ve ever made is that I don’t have to become the smartest person in the room. I only have to become one of the most observant. That ties back to my survival skill as a child. I’m a watcher.

Observation has a remarkable advantage over intelligence and they are connected.

Anyone can practice it.

Try to ask more questions this week. Be more patient with slow feedback. Forcecthis and you’ll instantly start to feel the wise old owl come to life in you.

You don’t need a higher IQ to notice that every successful restaurant in town has an owner walking the dining room while every failing one hides in the office.

Forget the doctorate to realize that the happiest married couple you know speaks to each other differently than everyone else. They focus on making the partner feel better about themself instead of extracting the praise for their own selfish wants for praise.

You don’t need to study economics to notice that incentives change behavior far more reliably than speeches do. If you’re paying attention to the war in Iran your witnessing the draining of resources and the economic functions twisting the outcomes more powerfully than the rockets red glare.

You simply have to notice. It’s all in front of youvif you wuiet your noisy mind.

Then notice again.

Then start to ask why.

That last question may be the most important one.

Why?

Not to win an argument or impress your friends.

Not to confirm what you already believe. Quit attempting to flatter your inner insecurities. Shoot for truer truths.

This right here is why there is no church or political party can capture me. I’m devoted to sovereign questioning, even of myself.

Every answer you accept too quickly closes a door that another question might have opened. If that answer came based on authority over evidence and experience, by definition it’s questionable.

The people I admire most aren’t walking encyclopedias. They’re more quiet collectors of patterns.

They’ve trained themselves to become suspicious of easy explanations and fascinated by recurring ones. They understand that if something keeps happening, there is probably a reason beneath the reason. Finding that deeper cause has very little to do with genius and almost everything to do with refusing to stop at the first explanation that sounds satisfying.

The beautiful part is that this isn’t reserved for extraordinary people.

It belongs to anyone willing to slow down. Is that you?

Are you willing to observe before speaking?

Are you capable of setting the “story” you are being asked to innocently accept with certainty and exchange it for a pause, just a moment bound with curiosity for one more possibility?

You don’t need to think like me. I’m not impressive in any way at this, just practised.

You don’t need to think like anyone else. They are all practised too, those pundits and influencers.

You simply need to trust that your mind was designed for more than collecting opinions. You are here to collect data through your senses. Even your spidey senses.

You mind was designed to notice.

To compare and wonder.

To connect and disconnect with conjecture and rational logic.

You must, must , must test what you believe against the stubbornness of reality.

I have a feeling that if more of us reclaimed that habit, we’d spend less time asking who to believe and more time learning how to see.

We call those people sensible for a reason.

Once a person learns to see clearly, they no longer need someone standing beside them explaining what they’re looking at.

That’s more than independence and more than freedom.

It’s liberation.

We asked to see the evidence that cloth masks meaningfully reduced transmission in everyday public settings. We asked for the clinical basis behind six feet of social distancing. We asked why a brand new mRNA platform was being rolled out at unprecedented speed and what long-term safety data existed. We asked for the evidence behind vaccine mandates, lockdowns, school closures, and the ever-changing rules.

Those are not anti-science questions. They are science.

Science is not obedience. It is skepticism. It welcomes scrutiny, replication, criticism, and debate. The moment questioning becomes forbidden, science has been replaced by dogma.

One of the most troubling decisions was the push to vaccinate children. From the earliest data, healthy children faced a statistically low risk of severe COVID outcomes compared with older adults and those with significant underlying conditions. Yet many governments and institutions treated children as though they carried the same risk profile as their grandparents. Asking whether the benefits justified the risks for healthy children should never have been considered controversial. It should have been the very definition of scientific inquiry.

Over time, several claims that were presented to the public with absolute certainty became far less certain. The six-foot distancing rule was later acknowledged by officials to have lacked a strong scientific basis. Public health guidance on masks changed repeatedly as evidence evolved. Early messaging that vaccination would stop transmission gave way to a more qualified understanding that it primarily reduced the risk of severe illness. Some vaccines and therapeutics were modified, restricted, or withdrawn after additional safety data emerged. That is precisely how science works. Evidence changes conclusions.

These were not small items that we can brush off. They were known falsehoods by leadership. The guidance around these reshaped the basic function of culture and society. Many of these were completey ignored and discarded by regions which not only fared fine then but are experiencing economic growth and social migration today.

What was remarkable was not that recommendations changed. Good science should change when better evidence appears. What was remarkable was that asking for evidence at the beginning was treated as heresy rather than healthy skepticism.

There are also questions that remain difficult to answer because history only gives us one path. We do not know with certainty how different policies, different treatments, or different recommendations would have changed the outcome. We cannot rerun the pandemic with another set of decisions. We cannot know exactly how populations would have fared under alternative approaches because those alternatives were never fully tested.

Nor do we yet possess perfect knowledge of every long-term effect, beneficial or adverse, associated with either infection or vaccination. Millions of people who chose not to be vaccinated recovered without serious illness. Millions who were vaccinated also benefited, particularly those at higher risk of severe disease. Others became infected despite multiple doses. The pandemic demonstrated that immunity is complex, influenced by age, health, prior infection, viral evolution, and many other factors. Any honest assessment should acknowledge those complexities rather than pretend every outcome confirms a single narrative.

If your worldview cannot survive questions, it is probably not built on science. It is built on authority.

The people demanding proof were branded as dangerous. The people insisting that “the science is settled” were celebrated as enlightened. Looking back, that inversion should concern everyone regardless of where they stood.

Those pushing back could easily be framed as more realistically operating from science and less from fear at the time. Fear drives conformity to authority.

That’s not a thesis. It’s a fact of human tribal organization. The more you fear the more likely you are to conform to authority and “experts”. The more you fear authority and it’s control mechanisms the more you question experts.

The questioning of current expertise is viewed through two lenses. Either it’s heresy or it’s challenge.

Many people still cannot admit they were wrong. Some were misled. Some simply trusted institutions they believed deserved that trust. But there comes a point when refusing to revisit the evidence becomes its own form of intellectual pride. Humility requires the willingness to say, “I accepted something that turned out to be incomplete, exaggerated, or simply incorrect.”

I have little patience for people who confuse conformity with wisdom. If someone cannot distinguish between evidence and messaging, or between scientific inquiry and corporate or political narratives, I am reluctant to hand them influence over important decisions. History repeatedly reminds us that societies drift toward authoritarian thinking not only because of ambitious leaders, but because too many people become comfortable outsourcing their own judgment.

I’m not concerned with your opinion. I simply am interested in the truth.

The truth has no party. No leader. No expert.

The truth stands independently of conjecture or opinion.

It does not stand against fair and reasonable scrutiny, it welcomes it.

Of course I trusted science, that’s why I questioned things that made no sense. That is science. Particularly when the experts need control of a large population without a clear understanding of the underpinnings of what we were all experiencing. If you cannot see by now that it was obvious to some that thise in charge of public policy were grasping at straws to insert calm into chaos you are gaslighting yourself.

Some of us are so accustomed to gaslighting we see it coming. It always approaches with an air of authoritarian confidence.

“I am science, how dare you question me?”.

The next trauma will produce a more authoritarian voice. Watch for it. This last one should be our lesson.

There is no better time to question the science, to make sure… it’s science.

This didn’t require compliance beyond two weeks of flattening the curve. Even the skeptics took the first steps of compliance. When the precise people that shouted down operation warp speed were later insisting you get an injection, we should have all seen tribal politics had been the actual injection and both parties were on the wrong side of this and so were their industries and institutions.

This was the point where I sold my life long dream of living in a metropolis in a mansion and traded it for the sanctuary of a small remote ranch house.

I’m no longer qualified to live in a society that refuses to question everything, particularly authority designed to win 51% of a vote when the median IQ of the country has slipped to 98 when by definition it should be 100.

Science isn’t some authority’s opinion of science without explanation. One of the first rules of expertise is, if you can’t explain or prove it simply, you’re either not a real expert or you don’t have the goods.

Maybe “Show me the science”, is the answer.

“Where have all the good men gone?”

I smiled when I read it because I don’t think they went anywhere. I know plenty of them. The problem is they aren’t particularly interesting to the media. They don’t make headlines because they aren’t setting police cars on fire or explaining masculinity on podcasts while shirtless. They’re pouring concrete, coaching Little League, replacing a water heater on Saturday and trying to convince a sixteen-year-old that the family car isn’t a Formula One racer. Good men have always been rather ordinary. That’s precisely what makes them extraordinary.

The question isn’t where they went. The question is where they came from.

That reminded me of an old farmhouse I once walked through. It was over a hundred years old. Every beam had been hand cut. Every floorboard had been fitted by someone who expected it to outlive him. The new owner wasn’t tearing out the oak floors because they were old. He was restoring them because they had already proven they worked. Funny thing about human nature. We’ll spend a fortune preserving craftsmanship in a house while enthusiastically dismantling craftsmanship in a family.

Somewhere along the line we started believing that fathers were optional accessories. Nice to have if available, but certainly not essential. Mom would do the nurturing. Dad would earn a paycheck if he happened to stick around. If he had time, maybe he’d throw a football or teach Junior how to bait a hook.

That wasn’t my experience growing up.

The fathers I admired weren’t simply breadwinners. They were living instruction manuals. They taught boys things almost by accident. How to back a trailer. How to keep your mouth shut when you were angry. How to admit you were wrong without collapsing into shame. How to tighten a bolt just enough. How to shake a man’s hand like you meant it. How to finish the job before sitting down. You could spend an entire childhood learning from a man who never once sat you down for a lecture.

Now before someone tells me about the remarkable single mother who raised three incredible sons, let me save you the email.

I know her too. She’s remarkable. That word matters.

Remarkable things deserve admiration precisely because they are uncommon. The exception should inspire us, not become the blueprint. Decades of research have consistently found that, on average, children raised by their married mother and father have better outcomes across education, income, incarceration, and family stability later in life. That’s an observation, not an accusation. Life is full of exceptions. Civilization, however, is built on patterns, not exceptions.

The irony is almost too rich to ignore. We proudly announce that we’re following science right up until the science points toward one of humanity’s oldest social structures. Then suddenly we’re told every arrangement is equally effective, every role interchangeable, every tradition merely a relic waiting to be retired.

Maybe.

Or maybe six thousand years of civilization weren’t entirely accidental.

Maybe generations of people stumbled onto something worth preserving.

I don’t believe men are born knowing how to be men any more than they’re born knowing how to frame a window or rebuild a carburetor. Somebody teaches them. Or somebody doesn’t.

Before you attact my “gender framing”. I’ll respond. When you measure the gender identities and sexual identities now storming to the surface, my position mathematically dominates. So if you decide this doesn’t apply to you or your child. Great. Keep walking down the mall. You’re not my customer and I am not your intellectual vendor. I respect your liberty to disagree. Move on from me, I’ll move on from you and… see ya in heaven.

I had a Dad and two grandfathers working on me till I was 14. Then I was pretty much in the workforce full time and my separation from my family was on its way. I had the formative stuff I needed to do carpentry, plumbing, concrete, set fence posts, roof as well as yard work and fix autos. The rest came with experience.

That may be the whole story. A boy used to spend years watching a man solve problems. The sink leaked. Dad fixed it. The neighbor needed help raising a barn. Dad showed up. Mom and Dad argued. Somehow they worked it out without announcing their divorce on Facebook. Grandpa got old. Dad cared for him anyway. The boy wasn’t being lectured. He was being apprenticed.

Today many boys are apprenticed by algorithms.

If you’re wondering why they seem different, perhaps we should spend less time criticizing the graduates and more time examining the curriculum.

I worry sometimes that we’ve confused freedom with wisdom. We rightly opened doors for women, and that’s something worth celebrating. Capability has never belonged exclusively to one sex. But somewhere in our enthusiasm we accidentally diminished one of the most important professions civilization ever invented.

Homemaker. The title somehow became synonymous with “didn’t fulfill her potential.”

In the midst of feminism and independence of economy for women, in the wise pursuit of equal economic opportunity. We hit some unforseen weather.

We diminished the homemaker. We openly insult her as being a Stepford wife.

We destroyed the man turning him into Ed Bundy, Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson and every husband in the world that is required to be a short sighted selfish idiot.

Dad went from hero to trope. We’ve villainized fatherhood at the cost of comedy.

Really? Raise decent human beings. Keep a marriage healthy. Create a home where children flourish. Where is that since the Walton’s?

Hold a family together through recessions, funerals, adolescence and Alzheimer’s, and we’re going to call that settling?

Charles Ingalls left the screen. We carnivorously ate Ward Cleaver with mockery and joy as Darren Stevens replaced him as a real corporate buffoon.

That’s one hell of a marketing campaign. The men I admire most today would probably never call themselves exceptional. They’d be embarrassed by the attention. They’d tell you they were simply doing what fathers are supposed to do. They stayed married when it wasn’t easy. They worked when they were tired. They sacrificed when nobody noticed. They raised children who became adults you’d actually want as neighbors.

Those men didn’t save the world. They simply prevented it from falling apart one family at a time.

Which brings me to something I’ve been quietly thinking about.

All men need a Father, even if they never had one. A great deal of my professional business in counseling is being that guy for men and women 20-50. Thus the moniker “Uncle Ron”.

I’m considering writing a five-hundred-page instruction manual called How to Be a Man.

Not another manifesto about masculinity. A manual. Like a boy scout manual for a bachelor. Something the parent could gift.

The sort of book your quality father would have written if he’d had the time.

How to ask a woman on a proper date. How to tie a bow tie and, while you’re at it, a fishing fly. How to cook a steak without cremating it. How to change your oil, wire a light fixture, sweat a copper pipe, frame a window, build a deck that won’t collapse during the Fourth of July barbecue, grow tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes, sharpen a knife, split firewood, balance a checkbook, deliver a eulogy, apologize with sincerity, shake a hand, keep your word and know when to keep your mouth shut.

Not because every man needs to know every one of those things.

Because every young man deserves someone who cared enough to teach him.

And if enough fathers are no longer around to do it, perhaps it’s time for a few old guys to pull up a chair and start talking.

So I’ve outlined about 500 topics, recipes, repairs, techinques and communications from sex to making five perfect breakfasts and ten perfect dinners.

I like real men. I refuse to be a trope. Not ashamed to be my race, my religion or my status.

What’s a real man?

He’s present. Compassionate. Values based. Has a capacity of violence and holds it back until someone’s security requires he step forward.

He’s knowledgeable, kind, reliable, and reverent of those who went before him.

He leads. He respects women and children and honors heirarchies and knows when he must buck them.

He can do stuff. All kinds of stuff. He is emotionally regulated and teaches this to everyone he encounters by word and deed.

You can disagree with me. I don’t really care. I’ve played this gave of life long enough and I’ve won through extreme adversity and trials.

I feel compelled to push this initiative forward.

If this speaks to you tell me and write your requests in the comments.

There are great men, we just need to make more.

This is an important question when I think about my friends and family and characters that have passed through me life.

The individual character and personality a person manufactures is a huge component. How much of that is nature versus nurture. As I’ve written before my family was emotionally taxing and incredibly un-empathetic, and I ended up the scapegoat being my defined role. The hidden bastard child that “forced” my Mom to get married.

Yet the friction that I grew up against made me value empathy and at the same time put a chip of success on my shoulder.

Did I chose the attitude or was it thrust upon me?

I’ve come to suspect that if you live long enough, life hands you about six great plot twists. I don’t know why six. Maybe it’s five. Maybe it’s eight. I’m not writing a doctoral thesis here. It’s just one of those observations that keeps surviving every time I think about another person’s life.

Three will break your heart.

Three will make it soar.

Neither one sends you an invitation ahead of time.

I’m not talking about flat tires, bad bosses, or the dog eating the Thanksgiving turkey. Those are inconveniences.

I’m talking about the moments that split your life cleanly in two, where from that day forward there is a “before” and an “after.” The phone call in the middle of the night. The diagnosis. The unexpected inheritance. The chance meeting. The bankruptcy. The child. The obituary. The miracle.

What fascinates me isn’t that these things happen. They happen to everyone eventually. What fascinates me is how differently people receive the very same gift or the very same wound.

I’ve watched men walk through extraordinary tragedy and somehow emerge with more compassion than they possessed before. Their suffering softened them instead of hardening them. Then I’ve watched others become prisoners of an event that happened decades earlier, replaying it like an old movie until bitterness became their entire personality.

Oddly enough, fortune seems just as dangerous.

Success has ruined people that failure never could. Give a man a little money, a little recognition, a few people telling him how brilliant he is, and sometimes he becomes insufferable.

Success has a way of whispering lies that tragedy never bothers with. At least suffering introduces itself honestly. Success often arrives dressed as your best friend while quietly stealing the furniture from your soul. I compromised many things on the path to my ego feeling soothed by status and achievement.

So perhaps the event isn’t really the story.

Perhaps the story is the person who greets the event.

Some people seem almost psychologically prepared for loss. Others seem naturally equipped to carry success without becoming intoxicated by it. Whether that’s temperament, upbringing, faith, grace, or simply mystery, I couldn’t tell you. I only know I’ve seen it too often to dismiss it.

I have two men friends I have known for years, one has been a partner another a friend from childhood. Both have had a ton of hardship yet eventually came to financial, social and real family success… with faith as the common factor. The thing about both is you’d meet them and never get a sende they were not born with a silver spoon on their mouth.

Neither were. Success just fits them like an old comfortable sweater. Both of the guys have many things in common none the least is their general calm and pervasive kindness.

There’s another pattern I’ve noticed.

Most people don’t fundamentally change over and over throughout their lives. They gain experience. They gather wisdom. Hopefully they become a little less certain of themselves and a little more charitable toward everyone else. But their deepest outlook usually pivots only once.

People normally make one giant personal pivot.

It can be finding God.

Losing an addiction.

Becoming a long distance runner.

Motherhood.

But more than a shift in a doing, it’s a pivot in identity.

For some it’s turning i to an angry old grump.

Somewhere along the journey there is one event that quietly changes the lens through which they see everything else.

I’ve had more than my share of plot twists. Looking back, my life resembles one of those old Texas county roads that apparently followed a wandering cow instead of a surveyor.

There have been businesses that flourished and businesses that failed. Friendships that surprised me and others that disappointed me. Opportunities I never imagined and losses I never saw coming.

The scenery changed constantly.

The direction really didn’t.

If there has been one steady movement in my life, it has been toward honesty and integrity. Not because I started there, but because every detour eventually led me back to the same lesson.

When I was younger, I wanted what ambitious men usually want. I wanted money. I wanted influence. I wanted people to admire my work. If enough people knew my name, I assumed I’d finally arrive somewhere worth being.

The trouble is, those things make miserable destinations.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with money or recognition. They’re wonderful servants. They simply make terrible gods. The funny thing about idols is they never demand worship up front. They simply reward you often enough that you don’t notice you’ve begun arranging your life around them.

God, in His patience, didn’t rip those ambitions away from me. He let me chase them. He let me catch a few. Then He quietly waited for me to discover they couldn’t do what they had promised.

Age has edited my ambitions far better than discipline ever did.

Today I’d rather love someone than impress them. I’d rather be useful than admired. I’d rather know that I was faithful than famous. If people remember my name fifty years from now, that’s fine. If they don’t, that’s fine too. I’d much rather hear my grandchildren laugh around a dinner table than hear strangers applaud in an auditorium.

Perhaps that has been my only real pivot.

Everything else has just been scenery.

One last observation.

I think one of the great disciplines of life is learning to receive both tragedy and fortune with an even keel. Not with indifference. Indifference is dead. I mean with steadiness.

The Stoics talked about it. The Scriptures talk about it. Every grandmother who ever buried a husband and still managed to bake pies for her grandchildren understood it instinctively.

Life keeps giving our hearts opportunities to crack. Sometimes from sorrow. Sometimes from overwhelming gratitude. Both are holy if we let them be.

When grief comes, grieve. Don’t fake strength. Tears are not a character flaw.

But when goodness comes, don’t rush past it either. Celebrate it. Open the bottle you’ve been saving. Sit on the porch a little longer. Laugh until your ribs hurt. Tell the people you love that you love them while they’re still around to hear it. Thank God before your clever mind begins explaining why you deserved it.

Nothing stays.

The tragedy won’t nor the triumph.

All applause fades, every pain softens.

The seasons keep turning and eventually the calendar months fly by at a velocity that is hard to comprehend. My wife and I now plan trips six months in the future and by the time we picked the restaurants and packed we’re gone and home.

Perhaps wisdom is simply learning to welcome both fortune and tragedy as travelers passing through. Invite them in long enough to learn what they came to teach. Then let them continue on their journey.

Neither one was ever meant to become your permanent address.

Only God was.

Here I am, it’s 7 am on a Sunday as I write this on my phone, about to go in the yard and set up my croquet court, my horse shoes and games for my guests for my 60th Birthday next Saturday. Many friend, family and my kids and grandkids all here. I’m not waiting for my funeral for the party.

I’m going to cherish every moment.

Mick Jagger & Keith Richards got it wrong. Give me a few minutes to explain.

There is a curious thing that happens in Christianity. Somewhere along the line we became so fascinated with dying and going to heaven that we accidentally skipped the ending of the story. It is a bit like walking out of a movie twenty minutes before the credits because you’ve decided you already know how it ends. Except, in this case, the last twenty minutes happen to be spectacular.

The Bible begins with a body. Adam is not a ghost floating around waiting for a shell. God stoops into the dust like an artist kneeling over wet clay and forms a man. Only then does He breathe life into him. Dust and breath. Matter and spirit. Earth and heaven shaking hands. If you wanted to summarize humanity in one sentence, that might be it. We are the place where two worlds meet.

That idea has always fascinated me because it aligns remarkably well with what I have been exploring through the Prismic. Suppose consciousness is not manufactured by the brain any more than music is manufactured by a radio. Suppose the signal originates elsewhere. Suppose what we call life is Yahweh broadcasting Himself into a physical creation through individual beings uniquely known, uniquely loved, and uniquely called. We are, for a brief season, beautifully tethered to these remarkable biological machines we call bodies. Temporary? Certainly. Disposable? Scripture never says that.

In fact, Scripture seems almost stubbornly committed to the opposite idea. Christians often speak as though death is the destination. The Bible treats it more like changing planes in Atlanta. Necessary, perhaps. Occasionally delayed. Sometimes confusing. But nobody mistakes Gate B17 for Paris.

What comes after death is certainly mysterious. Paul strains for language as though he has seen enough to know words are inadequate and yet insufficient to explain what lies ahead. John gives us glimpses that sound almost poetic. A white stone. A new name. Our names written in the Book of Life before the foundation of the world. It suggests something deeply personal. God does not merely save a crowd. He knows every individual story.

Somewhere beyond this life is not simply a better version of humanity but the completion of the person God always intended us to become.

Then comes the part we strangely overlook. Resurrection.

Not floating nor evaporating into cosmic consciousness. Not becoming Michael Landon’s associate angel, despite what Hallmark movies continue to insist.

What if… Yahweh is telling the Truth and we trust Him? We are issued an upgrade in bodies. New ones. Real ones.

Physical, bendy, sensory impervious fun ones. Less creaking, no croaking:)

Apparently God is so fond of embodiment that after giving us one body, allowing it to wear out through seventy or eighty adventurous trips around the sun, He simply gives us another. One suspects He rather likes the concept.

Now that raises an interesting question. Why? If existence as pure spirit is somehow superior, why go to all the trouble of resurrecting bodies at all? Why promise a New Earth instead of simply relocating everyone permanently to Heaven? Why rivers, trees, cities and nations? Why describe a world instead of an abstraction?

Perhaps because God never intended us to escape creation. Perhaps His intention has always been to restore it.

The older I become, the more suspicious I grow of the notion that physical existence is somehow beneath us. Quite honestly, I rather enjoy gravity. Skiing without gravity would mostly be falling over very slowly. Basketball becomes rather unimpressive if everyone simply hovers near the rim waiting their turn. Dancing loses something if your feet never touch the floor. Even a kiss requires geometry. Whoever designed this place seems to have had an engineer’s mind and a poet’s heart.

Think about how much of joy depends upon having a body. The smell of rain arriving before the storm. The first sip of coffee while the sun is still deciding whether to come up. The ache in your legs after climbing a mountain because your body knows something magnificent just happened. Children laughing so hard milk comes out their noses. Texas barbecue that requires absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Fresh powder beneath a pair of skis. Salt water pushing against your chest. Music vibrating through your ribs instead of merely entering your ears. None of those experiences happen to ghosts. They require mass, momentum, friction, nerve endings, taste buds and lungs. They require a world with physics.

Perhaps physics is not simply a temporary inconvenience but one of God’s great ideas.

I’ve often wondered if our present life resembles life in the womb more than we appreciate. Imagine explaining snow skiing to an unborn child. You would begin talking about mountains, frozen water, speed, balance and gravity. Halfway through the explanation you’d realize every important noun is meaningless because the listener has never encountered any of them. The limitation isn’t intelligence. It’s experience. There simply isn’t enough context yet.

I suspect we stand in much the same position whenever we speculate about eternity.

We ask what our resurrected bodies will be like, and perhaps God smiles the way a father smiles when his five-year-old asks whether heaven has bicycles. It’s a wonderful question. It simply assumes far too little. Whatever is coming may relate to bicycles the way a symphony relates to banging two spoons together.

That realization has become strangely comforting to me. Christians are sometimes embarrassed to admit they cannot picture eternity. I think our inability to imagine it may actually be evidence that it is real. If I could fully comprehend the next creation while standing in this one, it probably wouldn’t be much of an upgrade. The unborn cannot imagine oceans. Caterpillars probably don’t spend much time discussing aerodynamics.

So perhaps faith is not pretending we understand. Faith is simply saying, “I know the character of the One making the promise.” The same God who imagined hummingbirds, Beethoven, cedar trees after a summer rain, galaxies that no telescope has yet photographed, and the peculiar delight of laughing until your stomach hurts, has promised that eye has not seen nor ear heard what He has prepared for those who love Him. That is either the greatest understatement in literature or the greatest promise ever made.

Death, then, begins to lose some of its intimidation. Christianity never asks us to pretend death is our friend. Christ Himself stood before Lazarus’ tomb and wept. Death remains an enemy. It remains an intruder. But it no longer gets the last word. It becomes a hallway rather than a house. A doorway rather than a destination.

The story does not end with us leaving Earth. It ends with God bringing Heaven to Earth. The King returns. Creation is restored. Bodies rise. Names are spoken. Home is finally what home was always intended to be.

And if that is true, then perhaps the most rational response is not to spend our days trying to imagine every detail of eternity. It is simply to trust the imagination of its Architect. Frankly, He’s done built ya the way he intended.

You are on the magical mystery tour to discover just that. You’re not just okay. When you perservere in gratitude and surrender to service abd ask for guidance, you’ve gamified your existince in confirmity to His rules.

Surrender and direct communication with Him is the format. Live in my heart and guide me the activation spell?

There is another thought that has been rattling around in my head for a while, and I have no chapter and verse to hang it on, so I’ll simply call it what it is… wondering. I have discovered that wondering gets Christians into trouble about half as often as certainty does, and it’s considerably more enjoyable.

We’ve all heard that the first sin was eating the forbidden fruit. That’s certainly the event, but events usually have parents. Nobody wakes up one morning and accidentally topples civilization before breakfast. Something had to happen inside Eve before anything happened with her hands. The serpent wasn’t really selling fruit. Fruit was just the wrapping paper. What he was offering was promotion. “You can move up. You can know what God knows. You can become something more than what you are.”

I’ve been in advertising long enough to recognize a campaign when I see one.

It occurs to me that almost every temptation I’ve ever faced has arrived wearing exactly the same suit. It never says, “Be grateful for where you are.” It says, “Almost. Just one more.” One more achievement. One more deal. Please just one more discovery. One more person applauding for that next notch in my belt so I feel okay today. It is an itch that politely promises to disappear after the next scratch. Funny thing about it. It never does.

I want more. Just like Adam and Eve.

Then I think about God, and the whole equation falls apart on me.

If God knows everything, what is there left to anticipate? If nothing can surprise Him, why isn’t eternity unbearably monotonous? I don’t know about you, but if someone handed me complete knowledge this afternoon, by tomorrow morning I’d probably be wandering around looking for someone who hadn’t asked me a question I already knew the answer to. Omniscience sounds impressive until you realize every mystery has been solved before breakfast. There are no detective novels for God. No plot twists. No moments where He slaps His forehead and says, “Well, I didn’t see that coming.”

And yet He delights.

That may be one of the most astonishing statements in all of theology. He doesn’t merely endure creation. He delights in it.

Which makes me wonder if what is infinite about God isn’t simply His knowledge but His capacity to love. Those are not the same thing. I’ve met brilliant people who could empty a room in under five minutes. Knowledge can become cold if it has nowhere to go. Love, on the other hand, seems to expand every time another chair is pulled up to the table.

Imagine keeping your attention on every human being who has ever lived. I lose my train of thought because my chicken Poe wandered across the yard. God is somehow intimately present to every frightened child, every whispered prayer, every gutted widow eating dinner alone, every laugh echoing through a family kitchen, every sunrise over every ocean, and apparently He never feels overbooked.

The old woman who lived in the shoe eventually ran out of patience. God never does. Somewhere inside that truth is a mystery so large that I suspect eternity won’t be long enough to appreciate it fully.

How is God not bored as hell?

Oddly enough, that takes a tremendous burden off my shoulders.

Perhaps I was never meant to become the smartest fellow in the room. Perhaps I was never meant to accumulate enough wealth to quiet every insecurity or gather enough accomplishments to finally convince myself that I mattered. Maybe the serpent’s original sales pitch is still circulating because it appeals to something in all of us that quietly believes today’s version of ourselves is inadequate.

Christ seems to answer with an entirely different invitation.

Abide. Serve. Trust. Rest.

Not because growth is unimportant, but because identity has already been settled.

There is a peculiar freedom that arrives when you stop trying to become the author of the story and simply enjoy being one of the characters. My little corner of the script turns out to be quite wonderful when I quit auditioning for someone else’s role. I have people I love, work that delights me, questions that keep me awake in the best possible way, and a God whose imagination appears to have no ceiling whatsoever. Frankly, that’s enough.

So, I’m back to gathering no moss with the Rolling Stones. Incidentally I’m confounded these guys were playing in Santa Barbara before I was born and I turn 60 next week and the bastards are still at it. Hiw is that possible?

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have spent a lifetime singing that they couldn’t get no satisfaction. Catchy tune yet crap philosophy.

I’m beginning to suspect satisfaction isn’t the reward for getting everything you want. It’s the decision to recognize that, under the hand of a very good Author, your place in the story is already great enough.

Get satisfied. Decide you are now. Get grateful. Move forward.

I challenge you through this next weekend.

Try to live as though you are enough, you have enough and so do the people you meet. You are complete and know enough. Now what do you do with it?

Imagine you are already stamped with approval and so are your peeps.

Might just change how the world treats you.

Leave a note if this resonates. I love to hear from you.

The answer may surprise you.

One of the great joys of traveling is discovering that history doesn’t always behave the way we think it should. We tend to imagine the world as if today’s maps have always existed, their borders carved into the earth by God Himself. But maps are temporary things. They are written in ink, not stone, and every generation seems determined to erase a few lines and draw a few new ones.

Standing in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, I found myself staring at a magnificent bronze horse carrying King Vittorio Emanuele II. Like most tourists, I assumed I was looking at a king from an ancient nation. After all, this was Italy. Rome. Caesar. The Renaissance. Surely this country had existed forever.

It hadn’t.

In fact, here’s the part that usually stops people in mid-conversation

The United States is older than Italy.

Not the land, of course. Not the civilization. Italy’s history stretches back through the Renaissance, through the Roman Empire, through the Etruscans and beyond. But those were civilizations, kingdoms, republics, and empires. They were not the modern nation called Italy.

The United States declared its independence in 1776. Our Constitution was ratified in 1789, and despite amendments and arguments worthy of Thanksgiving dinner, it remains the same governing document today.

Italy didn’t become a unified nation until 1861.

I literally stumbled upon this fact the other day. Apparently I skipped school the day this was covered. Be honest. Comment below if you just learned this fact. Or go win a bet.

George Washington had been dead for more than sixty years before there was an Italy. Thomas Jefferson never knew an Italy. Benjamin Franklin never knew an Italy. Even Abraham Lincoln had just taken office when King Vittorio Emanuele II became the first king of a united Italian nation.

That seems impossible until you remember that geography and government are two entirely different things.

For nearly fourteen centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the Italian peninsula resembled a beautiful quilt stitched together from dozens of independent pieces. Venice was its own republic. Florence governed itself. Naples belonged to one kingdom while Sicily belonged to another. Tuscany was a grand duchy. Milan often found itself under Austrian control. The Pope ruled a large swath of central Italy as sovereign over the Papal States.

People spoke different dialects. They used different laws. They paid taxes to different rulers. A man from Venice might have had less in common politically with someone from Naples than an American from Texas has with someone from Maine.

The people were undeniably Italian.

The country was not.

During the nineteenth century, something remarkable happened. A generation of dreamers began asking a dangerous question. What if these scattered states were not separate countries at all? What if they were one nation that simply hadn’t realized it yet?

Giuseppe Mazzini gave Italians the dream. Count Cavour supplied the political genius. Giuseppe Garibaldi carried the dream on the point of a sword. Vittorio Emanuele II provided the crown under which the new nation could unite.

The movement became known as the Risorgimento, the resurgence. It was less an act of conquest than an act of assembly. Like gathering pieces of a magnificent stained-glass window that had lain scattered across the floor for centuries, each fragment beautiful by itself, but breathtaking once restored to its proper place.

That bronze horse standing in Milan suddenly looked different to me.

It wasn’t celebrating another European monarch.

It was celebrating the birth of a country. It’s still hard to believe.

And like every young country, Italy quickly discovered that declaring unity and living unity are two different things.

The industrial north prospered while the agricultural south struggled. Regional loyalties remained fierce. A Sicilian still thought of himself as Sicilian. A Venetian remained proudly Venetian. The Italian language itself was still becoming standardized across the peninsula. Building a nation on paper had taken a decade. Building one in the hearts of its people would take generations.

Then history accelerated.

The First World War devastated Europe. Although Italy emerged on the winning side, victory felt strangely hollow. Hundreds of thousands of young men never came home. Inflation consumed savings. Governments collapsed almost as quickly as they formed. Demonstrations filled the streets. Workers struck. Veterans returned to a country that no longer seemed to know what to do with them.

It was into that uncertainty that Benito Mussolini appeared.

Here’s another date worth remembering.

When Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922 and seized power, unified Italy was only sixty-one years old.

America, by comparison, was already one hundred forty-six years old.

We often imagine Mussolini as somehow connected to Julius Caesar, as though Fascist Italy were simply the latest chapter of Ancient Rome.

It wasn’t.

Ancient Rome had vanished nearly fifteen hundred years earlier. Mussolini ruled not one of Europe’s oldest nations, but one of its youngest. His speeches borrowed the symbols of Rome because symbols carry power. But politically, he was governing a nation that was still trying to figure out what it meant to be a nation at all.

The irony is almost poetic.

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries.

The Kingdom of Italy survived only eighty-five years.

After the catastrophe of the Second World War, Italians voted in 1946 to abolish the monarchy altogether. The king went into exile, and the Italian Republic was born, the government that exists to this day.

History has a marvelous habit of exposing our assumptions.

We think civilizations and countries are the same thing. They aren’t.

We think today’s borders are ancient. Most are surprisingly recent.

We imagine that old buildings must belong to old governments. Often they don’t.

Italy is one of the oldest civilizations on earth wrapped inside one of Europe’s youngest modern nations.

America is one of the world’s youngest civilizations governed by one of its oldest continuously operating constitutions.

Go ask someone which country is older, the United States or Italy, they’ll probably answer Italy.

Smile.

Then tell them the rest of the story. Because the facts are interesting.

But the surprise is what makes history unforgettable.

Question everything.

Love at First Sight May Be a Memory, Not a Miracle

It is wise to be careful about who we allow ourselves to fall in love with, especially when that feeling arrives instantly.

Love at first sight may not be magic at all. It may be a neurological response to memory and pattern recognition.

Many people find themselves in volatile relationships that seem almost destined from the beginning. To outsiders, the pattern is often obvious. The new partner bears an uncanny resemblance, physically, emotionally, or behaviorally, to someone significant from the person’s past.

A desire unfulfilled?

Perhaps they resemble a mother or father whose approval was never fully earned. Perhaps they echo a sibling whose affection always felt conditional. Sometimes they reflect an ideal of beauty or personality that was impressed upon us in childhood. Other times they remind us of a teacher, neighbor, aunt, or family friend who made us feel uniquely seen, accepted, or valued.

Is your attraction a desire of the future or to fix the past or achieve sonething incomplete?

You can call it Daddy or Mommy issues, but is could be much bigger.

The attraction is not always to the person standing in front of us. Often it is to the emotional avatar they represent.

We have all witnessed someone attracted to someone with money, fame, family status or even power.

Perhaps you’ve been on the uncomfortable end if recieving unearned or unwanted admiration, flirtation or affection. It’s unsettling as the “predator” has no perception how their pursuit from the other side looks like complete weakness.

I know of “pretty people” or inherited wealth individuals that live this cringe constantly. Grateful to be neither.

Yet when we are the one moved strongly by internal attraction… when forces greater than us seem to pull us we change.

Deep inside, we are not merely hoping to love them. We are hoping, finally, to receive the love that someone else never gave us.

That impulse can feel overwhelming because it originates below conscious awareness. It feels like destiny when it may simply be recognition. The brain identifies a familiar emotional pattern and responds before reason has an opportunity to evaluate whether that pattern was healthy or destructive.

This is rarely discussed, yet it may be one of the strongest forces behind human attraction.

When someone responds positively to our affection, another subtle danger often appears. Fear of rejection begins to shape our behavior. We edit ourselves. We soften our opinions. We hide habits, preferences, flaws, and convictions. We become performers auditioning for the role of lifelong partner instead of revealing the person we truly are.

Both people begin falling in love with carefully constructed versions of each other.

The masks usually work. Until they don’t.

Eventually real personalities emerge, not because anyone intended to deceive, but because maintaining a performance is exhausting. The relationship then faces the first honest test, sometimes years after the commitment was made.

This is why early attraction deserves examination rather than surrender.

Ask yourself, “Who does this person remind me of?”

“What emotional debt am I unconsciously trying to collect?”

“What unfinished story am I hoping this person will rewrite?”

Those questions may reveal that your heart is chasing resolution more than relationship.

There is another caution worth considering. When someone leaves one relationship to immediately begin another, the chemistry may be intoxicating, but the decision itself deserves scrutiny. Breaking commitments without first resolving them can reveal a pattern. Integrity is rarely situational. The way someone exits one relationship often foreshadows how they may someday exit another.

None of this means instant attraction is false. Sometimes it is entirely genuine.

It simply means that before trusting the heart, we should first ask whether it is responding to the present… or reliving the past.

The greatest love stories are not built on unconscious repetition.

They are built on two people who know why they are choosing each other.

Remember in the long run 50% of marital relationships end in divorce.

The rest end in death.

😂.

Be wise when you feel the pull. Take your time.

Jumping in the sack two early creates oxytocin bonds that are habit forming and dynamic changing. Provided of course you have competency in the craft.

A wise man once said

“Love is grand. Getting rid of it? About 500 grand.”

“The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.”

A phrase that has survived for centuries because it keeps proving itself true.

We tend to think it means that even noble plans can produce bad outcomes.

There’s truth in that.

But I think there’s another layer that gets far less attention.

“Good intentions” have become one of the most effective shields against accountability ever invented.

They’re the internal stories we tell ourselves when our behavior doesn’t match the image we have of ourselves. They’re the public story we tell others when we want our motives to outweigh our actions.

I once knew someone who said…

“If you ever hear someone say something bad about me, come tell me who it was. Then tell them my intentions were always perfect because they are. No matter what I do or what they think I’ve done. My intentions are always good.”

It was a pivotal confession that explained so much I had witnessed over the years. The pronouncement stuck in my head like a beacon as I began avoiding this individual more and more over time.

I realized this was how this person recruited flying monkeys. They simply stated they were above wrong doing with an impervious and unchallengable charater.

And apparently people were buying this? I’m not that customer.

Here is something I definitely know about myself. My intentions are not always good. Sometimes they are super selfish. It requires a constant active conscience to maintain situational awareness of others.

It is probably why I am good at marketing. A constant thread of empathy, perspective, awareness, motives and ethics with a heart that keeps you in check. Yet knowing there’s a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other are reality.

If one sees themselves moving through life in flowing robes with glowing skin and hair gently tossed back by a Hollywood headwind… and demands others buy into that?

Watch out.

If your intentions are declared perfect in advance, then no criticism can ever be valid. Every conflict becomes someone else’s misunderstanding. Every broken relationship is someone else’s fault. Every consequence is dismissed because your heart was supposedly in the right place.

That’s an extraordinary position to take.

It isn’t humility.

It’s reputation management.

Healthy people don’t hide behind their intentions. They examine their actions. They ask where they were wrong. They care as much about the effect they had on others as the motive they carried into the situation.

Unhealthy people do the opposite.

They leave a trail of conflict behind them, then explain it away with the same familiar refrain.

“My intentions were good.”

Maybe they were.

But when every damaged friendship, failed partnership, family fracture, and personal conflict is followed by an appeal to good intentions, you’ve stopped hearing an explanation and started hearing an alibi.

Character isn’t measured by what you intended.

It’s measured by what you consistently produce.

The people worth keeping close are those who can say, “I meant well, but I was wrong.”

The people worth avoiding are those who believe their intentions permanently absolve them from examining the damage they’ve caused.

A good intention may be completely genuine.

It is never a substitute for accountability.

And for some people, “good intentions” aren’t the reason.

They’re simply the alibi.

Maybe that’s what the old proverb has been warning us about all along.

The road to hell isn’t paved with evil intentions.

It’s paved by people who believe their good intentions excuse everything that follows.

You’re an asshole.

It starts with a simple phrase.

“Separation of Church and State!”

I don’t think that phrase means what most people think it means.

For starters, it isn’t in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights or even in the Declaration of Independence. It ain’t.

It’s a phrase Thomas Jefferson used in a private letter to a Baptist congregation in Connecticut, and before anyone starts waving it around like it’s the Eleventh Commandment, it might be worth understanding why he wrote it and what he was actually talking about.

Because most people quoting it have never read the letter. Even fewer understand the history that gave birth to it.

The Founders weren’t trying to create a nation without God. They were trying to prevent government from creating a government-controlled church, and just as importantly, prevent any church from becoming the government.

There’s a world of difference between those two ideas.

To understand why, you have to back up a few hundred years… Every house begins with a foundation. Nobody throws parties to celebrate the concrete. Friends don’t walk through the front door and compliment the footings. They notice the kitchen, the fireplace and the view off the back porch.

Until the house begins to crack and everyone suddenly becomes interested in the foundation. They are expensive to rebuild. We have a great one. No need to join in the current tear down of the country to satisfy the anger of us villagers. We just need to grow up.

America is having that moment.

We’re arguing over policies, personalities and political parties while quietly forgetting the ideas upon which the country was built. Before we can have an honest discussion about where America is going, we ought to be honest about where America came from.

Like it or not, the men who founded this nation were overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity. That isn’t a political opinion. It’s history.

George Washington repeatedly referred to religion and morality as indispensable supports for political prosperity. John Adams wrote that our Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people” and was wholly inadequate for any other. Thomas Jefferson, though far more skeptical of organized religion than Adams, appealed in the Declaration of Independence to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” declared that all men are “created equal,” and that our rights are “endowed by their Creator.”

Those aren’t isolated comments.

Read the Declaration of Independence. Read Washington’s Farewell Address. Read Adams’ letters. Read the state constitutions written during the Revolution. Read the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, which opens, “In the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.”

God isn’t hiding in the margins of our founding documents.

He’s woven throughout them.

That doesn’t mean the United States was established as a church.

It means it was established by men whose understanding of liberty, justice and human rights had been profoundly influenced by a Christian worldview.

Those are two very different ideas.

The Constitution wasn’t written because the Founders wanted to eliminate Christianity from public life. Quite the opposite. They had watched Europe spend centuries fighting over which denomination would control the government. Catholics fought Protestants. Protestants fought one another. Kings appointed bishops. Popes crowned kings. The Church of England became an arm of the Crown. The Vatican exercised enormous political influence across Europe. The lesson wasn’t that religion was dangerous.

The lesson was that concentrated power was.

The Founders didn’t separate church and state because they wanted a godless nation.

They separated institutional authority because they wanted neither institution corrupted by the other.

Government would not appoint a national church. Churches would not become the civil government (including Sharia courts that conflict with core American rights).

Each would remain free to fulfill its proper role.

That’s an entirely different proposition than claiming America was founded as a secular republic stripped of religious influence.

In recent decades, however, we’ve watched that distinction disappear. A phrase Thomas Jefferson used in a private letter describing “a wall of separation between Church & State” has gradually been transformed into something he never wrote and the Constitution never says. The metaphor has become, in some circles, an argument that religion itself must be excluded from public life, public debate and even public reasoning.

That simply isn’t supported by the historical record.

Jefferson attended church services held in government buildings during his presidency. Congress employed chaplains. Washington proclaimed national days of thanksgiving and prayer. Adams did the same. None of these men behaved as though acknowledging God somehow violated the Constitution they had helped create.

The irony is almost amusing.

The same people who insist we must interpret every other historical document in its original context often abandon that principle when discussing the Founders’ religious beliefs.

History deserves better than selective memory. So does the Constitution. Lately another phrase has entered our vocabulary with remarkable frequency: “Christian Nationalist.”

Sometimes the label may accurately describe a particular movement or ideology. More often, however, it functions as little more than a political slur. It has become a convenient way to dismiss millions of ordinary Christians before they’ve spoken a single sentence. Once the label is attached, the conversation is over. You no longer have to answer the argument because you’ve successfully caricatured the person making it.

We’ve seen this movie before.

People call conservatives fascists.

People call liberals communists.

Before long everyone is shouting labels and almost nobody is discussing ideas.

That isn’t political discourse.

It’s intellectual laziness.

The idea in play is not freedom from religion. It’s freedom OF.

Now I understand it’s extremely disconcerting that the founders came from western Christian doctrine. I can already feel the Teret’s twitch of “But they owned slaves!”.

Yes. They did.

I can hear the scream, “You’re a Christian Nationalist!” Code for you’re a racial white supremesist. Completely untrue and a terrific way to not engage with a perspective that you hate.I am not advocating a State church.

But the “perspective” that America was founded by Christian people isn’t my opinion. It’s actually documented fact.

As they say “follow the science”. Just because it rubs you raw that the entirity of western liberal democracy in this representative republic was foundationally liad out firmly rooted here.

Just because the Constitution and Bill of Rights is the frame sitting on that foundation constructed with elements that trail back to the agency if the Garden of Eden and the Ten Commandments with intention pisses you off.

There is nothing in the bedrock of your anger that makes this “the patriarchy”, the “church” or “the systemic control of “cis white man’s culture”.

Sorry. Your postulate is rejected at the incorrect reframe you are engaged in. If you can paint me as a villain you can discard me wholecloth. There are constitutional protections that stop both of us from doing that to each other.

Respect that or find another country that suits you. There are plenty of athiestic nations with socialism at their core. Not sure if they’ll take you but it may be wirth a shot for you to find the intellectual peace you seek.

My hot take?

We’d all be better served looking at the corporate state kleptocracy that has taken over with oil, debt, money printing, weapons, the war industry and the rising corporate surveillance state that is operating on “terms and confitions you agreed to”.

A wise man once said “follow the money”. We are being drawn into a civilian street fight when at the core the principle are settled yet are being routinely disregarded by a corporate capture of the political systems.

“Let the peasants eat each other over race, abortion, ideology while we depress their wages and convince them their neighbors carbon footprint or gunsafe is the problem”.

Meanwhile we’ll make sexual contact the highest sought aspiration. We’ll eliminate human contact with the power of the phone screen. We’ll destroy their hearts with “medications” that rip motivation from them. We’ll demand they seek identity in the competitive pursuit of material onjects, attention and altering their bodies with perkier surgeries. We’ll give our you g men violent bideo games to lick them in to psychosis for life then question why so many white you g males are shooting up the town square with pent up sexual rage, confusion and a lifetime of bullying behind them.

Yet they won’t be able to afford a starter house til they are forty and we won’t allow them to make concreye steps abd decisions because that destroys “feminism”, the god of all gods of the sixties and seventies.

The number one problem I can statistically say I have seen at the root of all the young men that come to heal and go forward is either a fatherless home or a browbeaten or narcissistic father in the home.

It ain’t patriarchy.

It’s shitty patriarchs.

That’s a big difference.

You are being taken far an unpatriotic ride by the highest levels of power. It’s time to fire up the bots and AI technology to gain collective anonymity and fight the next revolution now in cyberspace.

Hello Paul Revere.

There is nothing un-American about a Christian speaking from Christian convictions any more than there is something un-American about an atheist speaking from secular convictions, a Jew speaking from Jewish convictions or a Muslim speaking from Islamic convictions.

Freedom of religion necessarily includes the freedom to bring your moral convictions into the public square.

Otherwise it isn’t freedom of religion at all.

It’s freedom of private opinion, provided no one ever hears it.

Our laws have reflected moral principles from the very beginning. We prohibit murder. We prohibit theft. We punish perjury. We recognize equal justice under the law because we believe every individual possesses equal dignity.

Those ideas didn’t appear by accident.

They emerged from a civilization shaped, in significant measure, by biblical ideas about human worth, moral agency and accountability.

To point that out isn’t an attempt to establish a church.

It’s an acknowledgment of history.

And history shouldn’t be rewritten simply because it has become politically inconvenient.

America has always welcomed people of different faiths and people of no faith at all. That’s one of her great strengths. But welcoming diversity doesn’t require pretending the foundation never existed.

A house doesn’t become stronger by denying what it’s built upon.

It becomes stronger by understanding it.

That’s really the point.

We don’t preserve the Republic by inventing a new history. We preserve it by telling the truth about the one we inherited. Whether you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist or something else entirely, the Constitution remains the supreme law of the land, protecting the liberty of every citizen equally.

That’s the genius of the American experiment.

It protects your right to disagree without requiring us to erase the ideas that helped build the country in the first place.

Have a Great Independence Day.

We are officially 250 years old. As the most unique Republic hits it’s teen years, I might remind you what Reagan said… (paraphrase) You can move to Greece, doesn’t make you Greek.

Move to Spain, doesn’t make you Spanish…

Move to the USA, you can become and American.

Perhaps it’s time we quit cowering and act like it. No matter what your race, religion or creed is.

You live here by choice.

It’s a great subscription if we renew it.