As an Atlantic wave forms into what could very likely become Tropical Storm Dolly within days of the legend’s passing, I can’t help but think about the force of her life and her impact. Everyone’s writing tributes (as they should) and reflecting on different parts of her life and career: her ability to take country mainstream, her fidelity to her own values and strategic obfuscation of political questions, her investment in the development of the Moderna Covid vaccine when time was of the essence, and her longer term investment in youth literacy through Imagination Library. She was a legend and a Queen, and she was also a lot of things to a lot of people. And at this moment, I’m thinking about how she made it okay to be a living paradox. What could be more human?

Her words (and lyrics) were often simple and to the point, but also packed with deeper meaning. Her roots were humble in the extreme, and she never tried to hide them - she just dressed them up in rhinestones and glitter. She joked, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” and embraced all the makeup and cosmetic surgery it would require to look that glam as an octogenarian. As tempting as it is to call this a contradiction to the simpler things she said she valued most, is that the truth?

I have no idea what was really in Dolly Parton’s head or heart, but her own words paint a picture of a carefully curated public image designed to serve as art and armor. In this way, she taught us to be authentic while also being deliberate with our boundaries. We did not own her - she shared herself with us. In today’s world, where there’s a high degree of visibility into people’s lives, but authenticity is harder to come by, there seems to be this tendency to either over expose, or over curate. It’s tough to strike a balance, especially when you’re aiming for impact, but that makes it all the more crucial.

Maybe, like Dolly, we should all be so true to our wildest visions of ourselves that the way we show up in the world is almost too big and too bright to be believed. We should be caricatures of our joy and inspiration.

And then, with just the slightest scratch to the surface, our true complexity becomes apparent. We have complicated backgrounds. We have flaws, and we can laugh at them. We can be afraid and unafraid, simple and complex, salt of the earth and stardust.

We can be a little more like Dolly.

My kids always want to talk at bedtime. Other parents have said the same, and I’m sure it has something to do with prolonging sleep, and something to do with the fact that it’s a great time to get a parent’s undivided attention and process the day. Whatever the case, it’s the moment when my kids are most hungry for connection. Because I’m human, I have to battle the impulse to rush the process in order to get to the point where I can shut off my brain and binge a show, and I really do try to be present. But we also can’t let it drag on forever (we. are. so. tired.) so I’ve thought a lot about how to get the most out of that brief window of opportunity.

I could spend an hour talking to my kids about important things during the day, and they would absorb maybe half. Less, if it’s on the car ride home from school. I could spend 5 minutes talking about them and they’d overhear and internalize every word. And I can spend 10 minutes at bedtime giving them mental models and mantras, and they honestly seem to stick. So, knowing that this is prime time for building solid human beings, I spend this time on metacognition: thinking about how we think. What skill could be more important in life?

When I walk in the room, my priorities are as follows:

1. Connect. I just lay down in their beds and snuggle but I’m guessing that won’t last forever. Will report back when we reach the stage where that’s no longer viable.

2. Repair. Whatever went off the rails, now’s the time to fix it. Apologize for things that were handled poorly. Explain why conflict occurred. Seek understanding. Ask questions. Resolve it and go to sleep unburdened by the day.

3. Recap. Specifically, ask what made them most proud of themselves that day. Then ask what was hard. Don’t tell them what you observed, unless they really can’t think of anything. You’re trying to build the muscles for self-analysis (accountability) and self-acceptance (generosity). This is especially big for my child with perfectionistic tendencies, but they all need it. This is where he practices being generous to himself. It’s also where he practices expansive thinking. We can revisit certain things and play around with framing them differently and see how our feelings change. Maybe his little brother wasn’t out to get him. Maybe he was. Maybe losing that game sucked but also maybe the season was awesome and that matters more. It’s an exercise in cultivating curiosity and generosity and observing how looking at things from different angles changes how we feel.

BY THE WAY.

Raising kids who can be accountable for their behavior and generous to themselves is probably the most impactful thing we can do if we want to create a safer, more peaceful world. I’m serious. I say this as a Mom and as a former diplomat who worked on conflict transformation, peace and security. Hurt people hurt people. Healed people heal people. People who can hold two truths (that they are imperfect and accountable for repairing their mistakes, and that they’re still inherently valuable and worthy of love) are secure people. They have no need for false bravado or the kind of performative strength we see from so many (fragile) leaders across sectors. This is really important for all people but especially crucial for boys, who statistically receive less support and guidance with their inner lives (read Boymom by Ruth Whippman to find out why) individually or collectively, and whose outward displays of confidence often mask a lot of fear (am I good enough?) and uncertainty (will I be loved?)

So, bedtime is going to take some energy. Make tea and lock in, because it’s also the moment where the biggest gains are made, for all involved. I usually leave each room (and keep in mind I’m doing this x3) feeling like I understand my kid a little better, and I did my best to give them the tool(s) they need that day. Moreover, even if I leave absolutely puzzled and defeated (it happens a lot) and they have zero interest in the tools I can offer, I can at least feel confident that we were curious observers of our own thoughts and feelings, and by observing them, we’ve created a degree of separation so we aren’t ruled by our impulses, reactions, and feels. I honestly wish someone had helped me with this when I was a kid.

And I wish for every kid to go to sleep with the knowledge that they cannot behave like a$$holes, and also, they are loved.

It was released in 1993 and little did we (young Millennials) know at the time, but it would sort of define our generation. We’ve experienced so much change, and we are not enduring it passively. True to our brand as the first generation to blog and vlog and publicly self-reflect, we have questions.

I’ve been processing a lot of those questions here (chief among them, what does it mean to be a public servant or build a life of service?) and now I’m launching a new project alongside a very good friend. This new project is the product of 20 years of friendship and very little planning or coordination. We’re just leaping right in to do what we both love to do: Try to be good humans, raise good humans, and make others feel less alone. It’s not replacing the publiCaition or the Public Service Project. That work continues on with the help of some brilliant young collaborators.

This is an invitation to join us. If you like what I’m writing, you’ll like what my friend Meg is writing even more. Our podcast is just a good hang, and we’ll bring on guests who can teach us things about the topics that interest us: everything from youth sports to women’s health to the EdTech space.

Our new Substack and Instagram and podcast are all linked here, and I’m pasting an intro post below so you can avoid a click and hopefully decide that joining us is in fact worth a few clicks.

Please share this free resource/community/home of good vibes with your friends, and reach out to let us know what else we should cover!

-Cait

Generation Why

In the process of noticing this little seed of an idea, watering it, figuring out what it might need to come to life, and how it might not be a flower to admire but instead a vegetable that feeds a lot of other people and therefore cannot belong to me, or us… in the middle of that whole process, I realized how truly perfect it is that we are Generation Y.

Y is close to the end of the alphabet. It’s near some kind of conclusion, but fortunately, also close to a new beginning, too. I am not above a cheesy metaphor. We, too, have been living in a space of endings and beginnings for our whole lives, and to some extent, that’s just being human. But in our case, fellow Millennials, it’s happened in such a big way that it would be weird not to take notice of how it’s shaped us.

We witnessed the end of one millennium and the beginning of another, hence the name. I remember how momentous that felt. There was a lot of concern about what would happen to all the computers if the Y2K catastrophe manifested as imagined, but alas, they just flipped to 00 and all was fine. Always one to embrace a momentous occasion, I resolved that I would do the first cartwheel of the new millennium in my living room, which was a weird choice since I was neither good at cartwheels, nor in a living room with a ton of space, and of course the year 2000 had already arrived in other time zones. But I did it anyway, and to my 12-year-old self, it was the right way to enter the new era.

We are, of course, close to the end of the alphabet that defines each generation and I believe we’ve done a great job of passing the baton to Gen Z. Their gratitude is evidenced in their theft of our fashion, wired headphones, and aversion to answering the phone. We are the makers of Gen Alpha, and while we have some valid concerns about their uptake of Italian brain rot, we have rooted our parenting strategies in actual human psychology and for this we say, you’re welcome. They are unafraid of therapy and they appear to treat social consciousness as a fact and not a choice.

In more subtle ways, we are at the end and the beginning of so many eras in human history, which seem to come at us like pages flipping ever more rapidly - faster than we can read them, sometimes. We were becoming aware of ourselves and the world just as 9/11 occurred, and we had the jarring realization that we (as Americans) did not live in a bubble. We watched our country (and our generation) go to war, and not in the clear-cut, romanticized way of the greatest generation (and by the way, what a title!) but in the complicated, morally relativist way that would become the new norm for the foreseeable future.

I was 16 years old when I had my first opportunity to board a plane and leave my hometown for a young leaders week in Washington. We visited Congress, where some old man (I seriously have no clue who it was but surely a Congressman?) gave us an impassioned speech about how, as Americans, we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. That stuck for obvious reasons. We walked the halls of the U.S. Senate, searching for big names and stumbling across a little known freshman Senator by the name of Barack Obama. We participated in an exercise where we were invited to write our opinions, as the youth of America, on the Patriot Act. And man, did we have questions.

For the sake of brevity I have to fast forward through the many other ruptures we’ve experienced as Millennials - endings and beginnings. Decades of war, complicating our understanding of what is just and sustainable and durable and what makes peace; a global financial crisis that hit, conveniently, just as many of us were graduating college with expensive degrees and uncertain paths ahead (Gen Z, you did not invent the post-grad panic); the struggle to buy homes or build wealth as the cost of life outpaced our earnings and the American dream felt more like a theory; a global pandemic just as we were deepest in the trenches of raising the next generation, with our focus now narrowed to surviving, not thriving; growing political divisions and toxic media practices and conflict across the globe; AI and the dual promise of efficiency and irrelevance.

And I did not even mention social media! My god, we were the lab rats and we owned it. We became bedazzled, bejeweled, connected, inspired, powerful in the ability of our young brains to rapidly adopt and assimilate new digital tools. We leaned into both the social and the media, and frankly, we let the second corrupt the first. We’re sorry. We see that Gen Z is lonely and we worry about Gen Alpha. We are forming coalitions, as we speak, to normalize asking the questions about all the trade offs facing these digital natives. We’re sending our kids outside and we’re trying to remember how to embrace fun, freedom, risk.

With all of this happening in our relatively short time on earth, how we could not be asking, Why? Why do we do what we do? Why do we value what we think we value? Why shouldn’t we make some changes?

And this is where I see magic. If there is anything I believe wholeheartedly, it is this: The power is always in the question. Worry less about the answers and more about asking the right questions - the inconvenient ones, most often - and you will find your way to better days.

So, fellow Millennials, this is the space we’ve created here for you. We’ve all seen some things, and we have questions.

My sincere hope is that this is the place where we can ask them, together.

<3 Cait

For more on Equimundo, head here: https://www.equimundo.org/

And for Gary's TED talk on revolutionizing the role of men in dismantling gender inequality: https://www.ted.com/speakers/gary_barker

I’m a control freak. Actually, I hate that term. I’m a competence and autonomy enthusiast with a strong need for freedom, a complicated relationship with patience, and a general aversion to group projects. And yet, I love the energy of other people, I am innately curious, and I like looking for what’s missing from a team or a conversation. I just don’t like when other people F up my shit. So really, podcasting is a dream.

The Public Service Project has allowed me to do something creative and community-based, on my terms. With a list of questions and sole editing authority, and the earned trust of my guests, I have been able to do all the things I love: Stay curious, interrogate assumptions, and look for lessons from interesting and admirable people. The idea occurred to me in February 2025, the show launched in March, and without anything to limit me besides my own energy reserves and the will to keep pushing, things went pretty fast. Can I keep going exactly the same way? Sure, why not. The interesting guests keep surfacing. The news keeps newsing. There’s a growing need (and appetite?) for deep thinking about what makes us who we are as people and policymakers, and how we can create ethically grounded and morally courageous policies. We have to learn to dare greatly by facing ourselves and the rest will follow. That story is one we have to keep writing.

But I’m one person. I’m not good at all the things, and I don’t have all the ideas. Yes, the podcast is a group project and each guest is my collaborator, and each story is a new partnership, but big picture, it only goes as far as I carry it. I’m beginning to feel that I might slow down, burn out, lose focus, or worst of all, the joy might die. So recognizing that I have gone fast alone, and it’s been real and it’s been fun but it hasn’t always been real fun, it’s time to see how far we can go… together.

The theme of the new year for me (and I’m thinking new academic year because the fall always gives me that fresh start, new vibes, cozy happy energy and January sucks) is letting go of control. To my husband, if you are reading this: I mean it. I’m trying.

And in that spirit, I want to say a little bit more about my decision to bring on interns to help with the production of #ThePSP Season 4, which I previewed in the last post. I’ve had the opportunity to bring on support several times before. People have seen the potential in this project and offered to help carry it forward and frankly, I didn’t have the bandwidth to transmit all the things I'd want them to know, or more honestly, the courage to trust another person with my baby. And that’s dumb, because it’s our baby - all of us who make it and listen to it and share it with our friends. I made it for the public service community (past, present, and future) and I’m not letting it grow because I’m tired and a little selfish, and that’s my bad. So challenge #1 is bringing interns on board, creating a healthy team culture, getting comfortable being uncomfortable, and letting the project grow up and grow beyond me.

I hesitate to even call challenge #2 a challenge because it’s actually a dream. I’m partnering with a very good friend to launch a brand new podcast with all the accoutrements - YouTube, Substack, Instagram, the works - and it’s not necessarily bigger than the Public Service Project, but… wider. It’s a whole ecosystem, it’s deep and fun and free, and it’s ours. We will share this from the beginning, and I can feel in my gut that we will go far together. What’s very fun and probably not as uncommon as we think is the fact that I haven’t seen this friend IRL since we were in high school. We’ve spent 20 years nurturing and neglecting and relying on a friendship that started in adolescence, carried us through the years when we were having babies and wondering about our sanity, and now here we are with adolescent kids, still wondering about our sanity. I can’t wait to share this one with you all - it’s everything.

Finally, a word on impact. If you, or anyone you know, has ever asked me for my podcast stats or analytics, please know that I’ve responded diplomatically and cursed you in my head. Not because I dislike you, personally, but because this. is. the. problem. This is where we go off course. When we start making things because they’re good and true and then become preoccupied with how many people they’re reaching, we start to cater to trends and not to our own intuition, and that’s a slippery slope, or a slowly shifting Overton window, and suddenly the process of creating is just ass backwards. So for each of these projects, the focus for me remains on felt impact: people who have been sincerely reached, spirits awakened, minds changed.

Then again, if my new partners want to swoop in and do better than I have at businessifying things a bit, I’m not mad at it.

I love fast, I really do. But I’m ready to go far.

I spent the morning sitting at my computer making the time and space to write. Nothing felt worth it. My notes app is full of ideas, but none felt exciting today. I wanted to write something about one of the central contradictions in DC: the fact that so many brilliant, optimistic, resilient people converge there to try to make a difference in America and in the world, and yet, so many seem to agree that the vibes are corrosive. Nothing really is as it seems. People stay because of possibility, and a lot of the time, despite the energy. And this isn’t party specific: DC is competitive. Information is currency. Power is in your face. Many Foreign Service Officers have told me that they count their Washington tours among their toughest. So many things are possible in Washington, but they’re not all good for the spirit.

So, feeling like I couldn’t capture everything I wanted to say about my complicated relationship with a city that has drawn me in more than once, I rallied the troops, told them we were having ice cream for lunch, and wandered into our new-old town. It’s old because we’ve lived here before, for many (important) years, but it’s new because we’ve only just returned after a 4 year hiatus. While walking down the street waiting for the ice cream shop to open (because apparently not everyone is choosing ice cream when it’s barely noon, although I can’t see why not) I came across our state motto: Esse quam videri - to be, rather than to seem.

And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the thing I have struggled to process. Careers in Washington are all about the perception of success, connection, influence. There’s a formula for it. A prestigious fellowship. Publications. Speaking engagements at events hosted by reputable institutions. It’s not all empty - I have done all of these things and found value in every one, but perhaps not as much as I was investing, and certainly not as much as it would appear on my public profile. Maintaining an image, especially one that is based on what you think others want from you, is not good for the soul. Further to the point, there are so many brilliant, underemployed people who are doing so much unpaid work in order to maintain their relevance or increase their employability and I think we need to be better about calling out how extractive that is, even if it is consensual.

So anyway, it’s no accident that my heart has pulled me back to a small town. A small town raised me, and while this motto belongs to North Carolina, it might as well belong to every small town I’ve ever spent time in. These places aren’t perfect, and they are plagued by the same toxic elements that poison our national politics, but I think small towns still value substance over appearance. To be, rather than to seem, is a virtue - a source of trust, and a gift.

Leaders of small towns cannot afford to fail. I recently learned that nearly every incorporated town or city in America is legally required to pass a balanced budget on a regular basis, whether or not politicians at the federal level have decided to hold the nation hostage and allow the federal government to shut down. Mayors and Town Council Members live in their communities, pass their constituents on the street, drink the same water and send their kids to the same schools. Failure is not an option. Compromise is everything.

And while it seems nearly impossible that someone who is sincere, has their priorities in order, is inflexible where they should be and flexible everywhere else - who is morally courageous and socially adept, inspiring but relatable, admirable and accessible, and not obsessed with power - while it may be impossible that a person like that would ever want or succeed in attaining great influence without being chewed up and spit out or irreparably altered, I still have hope. I think our country deserves leaders who care to be, rather than to seem. Who still know who they are. Who can tap into the earnestness and optimism that made this a special place, or a collection of special places.

I’m quite convinced that many of the lessons we need (in humanity, humility, and governance) live outside Washington, so I’m very excited to announce that Season 4 of The Public Service Project will focus on subnational diplomacy and state and local government, and it will be made possible by a collaboration between students from UNC Chapel Hill and Georgetown University (more later on why I think that’s so cool). I am so excited for the stories we will hear and the wisdom we’ll gather.

Stay tuned!

Stay grounded, and stay real.

Stick around at the end of this episode for a special visit from Maryum's mom, whose relentless courage and incomparable work ethic have rippled throughout her community and across the globe through her own service, and her daughter's.

Access Human Rights First's recent report (referenced in the show) here: https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/human-rights-first-and-raices-release-new-report-exposing-systemic-due-process-violations-and-cruelty-at-dilley-ice-family-prison/

I remember a time, circa 2004, when the accusation of “flip flopping” was hurled against then Presidential candidate (and future Climate Czar - a topic on which he neither flipped nor flopped) John Kerry. First of all, what a wholesome time that was, in retrospect - for the most damning political accusation to involve having changed your mind. To be seen as someone who evaluated new information on a continuous basis and adjusted conclusions accordingly. Setting aside whether Kerry changed course in a way that signaled political expediency or moral fidelity, and acknowledging that the decisions being made in the early 2000s are now widely considered some of the most questionable (and worthy of reevaluating), inconsistency gets a bad rap. Is it deserved?

I’ve spent the past couple weeks packing my house (the result of a grand changing of my mind that I’ll get into later) and listening my way through The Curiosity Shop podcast with Brené Brown and Adam Grant. Theirs is an unlikely partnership, as they had a bit of a public kerfuffle back in 2016, and in retrospect, even that conflict was adorable because it sprang from a clash of well-supported and well-intentioned ideas about how to live and work and exist, and went off the rails because of misunderstanding and misinterpretation (and a failure to see the full context of Brené’s work, Adam.) But perhaps having sensed that we are all feeling exhausted by all the conflict and rigidity and violence in today’s world, like true Avengers, Adam and Brené have decided to join forces to do the one thing we truly need: To respectfully debate; to defend the ideas worth defending and reconsider the ones that don’t hold up under pressure; to explore, and sometimes change, their minds.

I changed my own mind in 2024, which feels like yesterday and also a lifetime ago. I’ve written about this a bit, and I will write about it a bit more, but please don’t consider this a full exploration of how and why I came to my decision to leave government. It’s truly just a tribute to personal growth and how awful it feels, sometimes.

Readers and pod listeners will know that I spent decades pursuing a circuitous route to public service, and I did it as single-mindedly and stubbornly as one can take a circuitous route. That being the case, I maintain a high degree of reverence for public service and public servants, and I have spent the past 18 months in conversation with them on my show. It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to point out that launching this project was as much about elevating stories that deserve to be known, as it was about satisfying my own curiosity about what makes public servants tick; how they experience their work; whether they’ve struggled with it; whether they’re like me. So it’s both a selfless and selfish thing, and I kind of believe that this is the thing about curiosity: We seek to better understand others in order to also better understand ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Launching the podcast was also about continuing to engage with the topics I spent years learning to discuss with some degree of credibility. This is why each episode is not only a tribute to the person, but to their work. I want to talk about their work, because in many cases, it was my work, too. And on a meta level, the work of making and sustaining a democracy belongs to all of us, and now is not the time to back away from that.

But I confused place with purpose, as so many of us do.

I thought that I had to remain close to Washington to stay relevant. I thought I cared about staying relevant. I internalized the anxiety of so many friends and former colleagues who were forcibly separated from their work (and the most direct practice of their mission and purpose) and I clung tight to every facet of legitimacy I maintained: some titles that conferred respect (and little compensation); affiliation with the best of the best; physical proximity to the heart of it all, even as I chose to turn in my badge and walk out the heavy doors onto C Street feeling an odd mix of grief and liberation.

Fast forward nearly two years, and I am proud of the Public Service Project. Proud that I have been able to repeatedly summon the clarity it takes to see what I need to do, and the courage to do it. To borrow from Brené, I’m proud of daring greatly, even (especially) when doing so felt awful, scary, vulnerable, exposed, or sad.

Daring greatly has led me to make the decision (along with my husband) to leave the DC area - a move that I thought surely a few of my friends and trusted advisors would question. Interestingly, they did not.

Will I ever have moments of FOMO once I’ve left the capital? Probably - that’s what makes it brave.

But I am also, again, following my gut and trusting in its wisdom, and it has never led me astray.

So, friends, I want to say two things on this beautiful morning: Dare greatly, live intentionally, question everything (and more later on how important this is to building resiliency into our relationships and our democracy). And despite the price John Kerry paid, do not be afraid to change your mind.

As the granddaughter of a South African anti-apartheid activist and the child of parents with a serious case of wanderlust, Sarah brings a unique perspective to all the big questions: How are young people impacted by conflict and politics? How are brains shaped by trauma? How useful and responsible is the CVE lens? And how can we all live our best lives? It's a special gift to spend time with Sarah, and to trace the threads of conscience and courage in her family across time and place.

Gil is an Arizona native, a lifelong student of Eastern philosophy and meditation, a black belt in Kenpo Karate, and a wilderness adventurer reaching 75 countries. His time spent studying with remote Tibetan lamas and mystics inspired a philosophy of enlightened self-interest that now guides his approach to social change with Rancho Feliz.

Gil is joining the show to share his personal philosophy around Service, including the parts he thinks we generally misunderstand. He's telling is what he means by "enlightened self-interest," why he thinks we fall victim to misguided compassion, and how he is reimagining development with dignity.

Learn more about Rancho Feliz here: https://ranchofeliz.com/

And check out Gil's new book, Hope on the Border: https://ranchofeliz.com/hope-on-the-border/

CJ is here to dispel myths about peace studies, explain how (and why) countries negotiate at the UN, and tell us all about his childhood misadventure selling lemonade in China. His experiences as a "third culture kid" shaped the way he looks at the world, and approaches conflict management. This is a master class in multilateralism and a delightful chat with a person whose brilliance is only surpassed by his kindness.

The thing about adolescence (and toddlerhood, actually) is that it is fraught with irony. The more tumultuous you’re feeling, as a teen, the more desperately you need firm boundaries to push up against. You’re running into them because you’re wired to do that - to test the limits and discover things about yourself and the world. And the more outwardly obnoxious you are being, the more you probably need a hug. It’s this mismatch in behavior and needs that makes parenting through these rocky seasons so difficult.

So if I could mother America for a bit, here’s the advice I’d give:

1. Bullies don’t win in the long run.

You may look at them and think they have it all. You may even find that it’s not hard to be one of them. It seems effective. But the bullies always suffer, and if you don’t believe me, every good 90s movie will back me up on this. If they’re not reformed, they’re alienated or somehow defeated, and even if none of that occurs, they spend their lives in a constant state of anxiety, worried that someone will figure out how deeply insecure they really are, and how hard they work to try to stay on top. It’s depressing. Is that how you want to spend your one wild and beautiful life?

2. True friends hold us accountable.

Good friends tell us the truth, even (especially) when we don’t want to hear it, because they know we can do better, and be better. It’s a sign of love and of faith in our potential. Don’t run from a friend who holds up a mirror. They’re the real ones.

3. It’s ok for relationships to change.

If you’re not outgrowing certain relationships, are you growing? It doesn’t mean that you have to alienate anyone, but it is totally ok to reexamine a relationship and ask yourself whether you’re still aligned in purpose and vision. Your needs and your criteria will change throughout the course of your life. Some pals are meant to stick around for a chapter or two, and others will join you for the whole ride. Get really good at discerning which is which, and don’t cling to relationships that no longer serve you. At the same time, don’t burn bridges you might need to cross again one day. Also, see item 2.

4. Winners never cheat, and cheaters never win.

Again, I refer you to all great 90s movies. Integrity means doing the right thing (or acting in good faith) when no one is watching. The right thing is unclear sometimes; that’s part of life. Do the most right thing you can, with the information you have. Do not bend your morals for convenience and call it “strategy.” That’s how people lose themselves.

5. It’s quicker and easier to destroy than to build.

Think long and hard about breaking things. It is much harder to build something than to tear it down, and destroying anything without a plan to replace it (or better yet, salvage what works and improve what doesn’t) is short-sighted and self-defeating. There are moments in life that call for a revamp. Be thoughtful and methodical about it. Babies go around smashing things. Don’t be a baby.

And finally, go hug your Mom.

So I’m really not known for being cutting edge.

But I do see something that I am not totally sure everyone else sees at this moment, so I want to record it and perhaps, for once, be close to the front of the wave.

People are getting sick of the impersonal; sick of performing success; sick of upholding an image; sick of the algorithms and the platforms; sick of constantly seeking efficiencies; sick of feeling like both products and consumers, rather than humans.

I suspect that this is why Pinterest’s ban on phones at Coachella was such an enormous success. I’ve read commentary that suggests that it’s pure strategic genius: Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Make it feel different. Make it exclusive. Make it impossible to post content from the Coachella tent itself, and let the anticipation build, as influencers plot their posts and race away ready to gush over the experience of being unplugged.

I think all of that is true - human beings do seek novelty, and we have reached a time where being digitally unplugged, and connected to an in-person experience, feels novel.

But I think there’s more to this. It’s not just about zigging when others zag. It all goes back to Pinterest CEO Bill Ready’s philosophy regarding social media. He is deliberately building a brand that seeks to leverage tech for good (to inspire creativity, and to build community) while minimizing the bad (reducing the elements of social media that make it so addictive, so depressing, and counteract the many positives.) It’s a bold choice.

So is Bill Ready a master strategist, or a social visionary?

Maybe a bit of both. A quick glance back at human history confirms that the pendulum effect is real. We swing wide in one direction, only to swing back with equal force and velocity. It’s evident in our politics, our attitudes, our culture, even those fashion trends with which I cannot keep pace. It’s evident in political leaders’ successful pitches to return to some glorious era, to recapture the mythical past. But not in a “been there done that way.” Better. This is not just an American thing - it’s a global phenomenon and humans are remarkably receptive to it.

So the trick, then, is either identifying when we have reached the furthest extreme we are willing to tolerate, and are ready shift direction. Or if we believe humans have more agency than that, the trick is knowing when we are ready to co-engineer the pivot.

Either way, the signals come in the form of a sort of social malaise. This is, in my opinion, the reason why I think there’s merit to the increasingly popular argument that AI is going to be the quickest bubble ever. It’s coming to maturity at a time when we are already fatigued by the sprint to keep up with our images on multiple platforms, and living in a fully remote world during the Covid pandemic probably accelerated our disillusionment with the digital world, and we’re aware that AI can make our lives easier in so many ways but we’re also wondering if easier is better.

Is easier better?

If easy is the zig, let me zag here for a minute.

Why is Gen Z so captivated by “Grandmacore” activities like knitting and gardening and birdwatching? Because their entire lives have been overstimulating. They have been conditioned for distraction, and the stubborn part that lives in all of us said, WAIT! This sucks. And they could hear it because they’re still young and attuned to their intuition.

Why are Millennials moving rapidly through revelations about work-life balance and work-life integration and quitting the rat race in favor of custom designed careers that better accommodate all the things they care about? Because they (we) came of age at a time that was marked by great opportunity and great uncertainty. We saw that something has to give, and life is short, and this is why we started saying #YOLO.

The counterbalance to AI and automation is going analog, and I’ll be the first to say, I don’t like extremes. I hate binary thinking. I am just acknowledging that these are the opposing forces at play, and this is why we find that these issues are so polarizing - because the poles themselves are seeking to neutralize each other so we can hopefully, eventually, find our center.

I was raised by a contrarian, so even when I’ve gone with the crowd, I’ve scrutinized the decision first. I’m so thankful to have inherited this exhausting trait - or more likely, learned it from the best of teachers. What is the lesson in all of this word vomit?

Question everything.

Practice listening to your gut. It’s a skill you refine over time.

And if you’re the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and you have the power to influence the experiences of millions of users, all signs indicate that this is a really special moment. The right thing might also be the strategic thing.

Exciting news from this corner of the interwebs!

The Public Service Project is a semi-finalist for Best Society and Culture Podcast in this year’s Quill Podcast Awards! Now it’s time to VOTE!

This means SO MUCH to me, and I am so glad I decided to override my innate discomfort with asking for support in the form of nominations, because this community showed up, and that tells me something. Actually a lot of somethings.

It tells me that creativity and community are as powerful as I suspected they might be.

That others want to hear these conversations as much as I want to have them.

That doing a good thing - even a small good thing - is always worthwhile.

That you don’t get what you don’t ask for.

That you don’t have to know exactly where you’re headed in order to start. A good seed will grow into a strong plant, even if you’re not entirely sure which plant it will be!

That our thoughts and reflections are valuable on their own - not just when they’re leveraged to achieve a specific policy goal or improve a bottom line. They are the valuable thing.

That we are more creative, more inspired, more effective when we work together.

So thank you to all who have joined me on this ride over the past year, and special thanks to those who went out of their way to nominate the show. I have no idea how many people submitted nominations, but I’m astonished that we’re in the top 5 out of thousands of submissions in this category!

Now, let’s cross that finish line strong.

Please VOTE for the Public Service Project in the “Best Society and Culture Podcast” category. It takes 5 seconds, and voting closes MAY 8.

Please SHARE with your network.

And please keep listening - to the show, to each other, to your own intuition. Whatever you need.

THANK YOU!!!

His book (Golf, Cigars, and Scotch: Balancing Fatherhood, Friendship, and Fine-Living) is a tribute to his friends and a gift to his son. It's available through Kindle Unlimited, and in Paperback and Hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Golf-Cigars-Scotch-Fatherhood-Fine-Living/dp/1535601418

Ugh. This is the greatest parenting challenge I have faced, to date, and every other obstacle that could be a contender for that title is really just a different manifestation of this challenge:

How do we raise kids who are tough when they need to be, and also aware enough of their own inherent worth that they do not consistently martyr themselves for sports, grades, the acceptance of their peers, the praise of adults, etc? The world is beautiful, chaotic, and often unkind. They need to learn to be kind to themselves just as much as they need to learn to withstand the many pressures they will face in their lives.

Within the Millennial parenting experience is this constant tension: We sucked it up. A lot. We learned to endure discomfort and we built resilience. We also entered our careers and parenthood trying to do it all, as our parents modeled, and finding that the treadmill is set to high speed on an incline, and we’re running with the weight of student loans on our backs as we try to gentle parent our way to a future where our kids might stop and ask why they should hop on this particular treadmill in the first place.

We started to wonder what we were doing just as the Covid pandemic hit and we all flew off our treadmills and experienced the sudden stillness with a bit of fear and awe. Is this an option? Is this real life?

As it turns out, it was not exactly real life. But the veil had been pulled back and the realization that we were striving for excellence in all areas, to our own peril, well… it could not be un-realized.

At the same time as all of this is going on, we’re also immersed in many cultures at once (thanks to our level of connectivity). We’re members of small communities - parent groups, friend groups, work groups, and then there’s our broader national culture layered on top of that, and finally, a global culture that we all access with increasing regularity as information flies across the planet in the blink of an eye.

This multilayered cultural experience, and our constant access to whatever information ecosystems draw our focus, contributes to our experience of norms and public attitudes and a ton of conflicting information about human psychology and what it all means. So if you’re a mom or a dad in 2026, you have all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips and the unenviable task of sorting through it to decide what is useful, and what is not.

Among the useful things I have found is Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside platform and parenting toolkit, which gives us a framework for understanding resilience (ability to tolerate discomfort) and for allowing two things to be true at once. This means we can validate our kids (yes, you are tired, and that sucks) and still show up as the sturdy leaders and decision makers they need (and you are still going to school.) And FWIW, I am not sponsored by Good Inside; it simply saved me.

What becomes trickier is the fact that as kids get older, their problems become more complex. At times, it feels impossible to decide what is productive or neutral discomfort, versus destructive discomfort. It’s hard enough to do this for ourselves, much less for another person, whose inner wisdom we are trying to honor so they will honor it themselves, and whose butts need to get out on the field because they committed to this activity and they need to show up for their teammates. And I do think that for all the (valid) critiques of youth sports and the parents that make them way too intense, they are a wonderful place to figure out a lot of this.

This big, complicated question of how to support our kids came up in my earlier article on picky eating vs. disordered eating. We, as parents, are still responsible for providing rules and guidance around food for our son because we are the only ones in this particular relationship who are capable of doing that at the moment. We have to pilot that aircraft. But we also want him to be a pilot-in-training, so we cannot afford to dismiss or disregard his input. That’s the early flexing of the muscles he will need to be his own pilot one day. So essentially, we have to do the hard job, and tolerate/even encourage some degree of dissonance and rebellion in the person who’s the recipient of all our blood, sweat, and tears… because he is learning to be a self-sufficient human, not a robot. And that’s why parenting (and true leadership in all its forms) is not for the faint of heart.

This issue also comes up with minor injuries, and before I get a lot of criticism, I want to say that I do care very much about my kids’ safety and the health of their bodies and spirits. But they will get hurt sometimes, and whether that hurt means you walk it off and endure some soreness for awhile, or call it quits and retire to the couch, that’s a judgment call that again, is very hard to make for another person. Yet as parents, we’re called upon to do this every day. We are constantly assessing, looking for clues, and making the best decision we can with incomplete and imperfect information. We’re modeling that process, and we’re usually doing amidst a storm of our most beloved person’s distress. I’m bleeding! (It’s a tiny scrape.) I can’t! (You can.)

So how do we cultivate not only the resilience to endure discomfort, but the ability to discern what is worth enduring, and what is not?

Some of my greatest moments of pride were moments when I did a thing I felt almost certain I could not do, but I also didn’t really have a choice, and alas. I did it. And some of my other greatest moments of pride were moments when I chose to walk away from a thing that was not for me, without letting others’ expectations weigh on my decision; moments when I honored my own intuition and acted on my own inner wisdom. I would hate to rob my kids of either experience.

I suppose the question is, how do we help our kids develop the wisdom to choose? And how do we recognize that we cannot merely transfer over our own? This is not a new iPhone. We cannot sit next to them and move over all of our data in 36-42 minutes. They must develop their own inner voice and practice hearing it, as often as possible, before life gets louder.

I don’t have the answers. I think we can be transparent about some of our uncertainty - after all, being uncertain is part of the process of finding and accessing our wisdom. I think we can be honest when we make the wrong call, and course correct when it’s possible. I think we can be consistent in repeating this mantra to our kids: I hear you, I believe you, and this is what we’re are going to do. We can do our best to withstand their understandable frustration at what appears to be in conflict: that we honor their experience, but don’t let it direct the aircraft just yet - at least not all the time.

But more than that, we can ask the questions, of ourselves and each other, and do our best to live as we hope our babies will live: True to ourselves, valuing courage in all its manifestations: especially compassion, and grit.