Conquest a captive audience and corner a market.

Own a channel, disrupt a culture with an insertion order that buys you market penetration.

Seed the users and consumers with a sticky, viral message.

Traffick your assets.

Capture them with strong hooks and wide reach.

Increase your exposure.

Turn off the frequency caps, optimize by making them opt-out, not opt-in.

Target and retarget them again.

Churn.

I published a book about staying human in a world going AI in 2023, long before this current contentious discourse began that treats AI as scarlet letters to be sewed on people like Hank Green for “sinning” with it.

I wrote it while building creative teams inside of Reddit, foreseeing first-hand what was coming. In those pages and in talks I’ve given since, I have been a proponent of using AI for creativity conscientiously.

Here is my personal (and ever evolving) code of ethics for working with AI. If you don’t agree with me, do it better and write yours.

1) Decide upfront where you will and will NOT use AI.

Nowhere is an acceptable answer.

Everywhere is not, because that cannot be undone.

Your answer is allowed to change.

2) You get to decide what’s right for you.

Too many leaders are morally bankrupt.

Too many in the crowd react from mania.

Neither will tell you what’s right for you, only what is wrong.

Every choice can be argued as wrong when the systems we rely on are ethically compromised.

It’s not an answer on a binary, it’s a question on a spectrum.

Ask where you sit on the in-between and ask again every day.

3) Know AI’s dangers are real and that we don’t fully understand them yet.

Smoking causes cancer.

Social media causes madness.

We could not comprehend these dangers at their start.

For me, experimentation works better than abstinence. For others, it is different.

Accept the level of risk that’s right for you.

4) Use AI ON the work, not IN the work.

When AI creates for you, it sucks.

When AI reviews what you create, it’s good.

When AI helps you prepare to create better, it’s great.

5) Art is for encountering humanity.

People seek to experience people in art.

Without something human for people to encounter, the work is meaningless.

The line on what’s justified within what’s possible keeps moving, but if you can’t point to where your humanity is in the work, you’ve crossed it.

6) Marketing is for machines (online).

Discovery is now dictated by what machines want.

Resonance is still dictated by what humans feel.

AI can help you interface with AI to be seen, but only your humanity can help you be heard.

If something is 100% human, it’s art.

If something is 100% AI, it’s marketing.

Most everything online is something in between.

7) Know thyself.

Remember that AI is a mirror and use it accordingly.

Use AI to become a better you, not portray a best built by impersonating others.

Build a ‘Knowledge Base’ of your own work for AI to reference as you refine.

Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow; your humanity exists in the becoming.

Feed your values, not your vanity.

8) Surety brings ruin.

If you always agree with AI, something is wrong.

If AI always agrees with you, something is wrong.

If you believe you fully understand AI, you are wrong.

9) Find good friction and keep it.

AI speeds processes up, but some should be kept slow.

Slow is for perfecting.

Slow is for presence.

Slow is for pleasure.

10) Disclosure is decency.

Many people feel strongly about AI in created works they consume.

If you’re experimenting with AI, it’s honest to state it openly.

If that makes you uncomfortable, consider what you’re hiding.

FINAL NOTE: The digital divide is a privilege.

AI is a powerful tool for upward mobility.

Not everyone has access or acumen.

Not everyone who has access or acumen needs it.

The cost to use AI is high, so be considerate with how you use it.

My heart was pounding and my hands were dancing as I sat alone writing, pen to paper, in a hotel room blocks from the shore at Pike Place Market on a winter Seattle day in early 2024. After the scratching and popping sounds of the dancing pen gave way to the quiet accompaniment of the old building’s radiator, I read what I had written. These words were dangerous because they were honest. This was a time when even so much as whispering about Israel was the wrong kind of consequential, costing some who spoke of it too rashly everything.

So I folded the paper and slipped it into my pocket to stay secret, safe, and analog; not daring to let it be seen even in my digital drafts. I carried it around for months, only occasionally sharing it with a couple of trusted individuals I’d asked for advice on what to do with these words burning a hole in my pocket and my soul.

I don’t know if it was cowardice or conscientiousness that kept me from sharing my honesty back then. I do know that I resent how dangerous honesty has somehow become. I know I believe in the sacred power of words, but I have come to distrust the integrity of the information systems that carry them, monitor them, distort them, and destroy people for having thought and written them.

I’ve been wrestling with these words since I wrote them. So here they are.

You must understand that I am Jewish. I was raised in a Jewish community and I passed through the Jewish rites. To come of age as a Jew, you are expected to stand before your community and demonstrate a grasp of the power of words. When a child has a Bar Mitzvah, they are led to discover that there are layers upon layers of meaning to the words in the stories they’d been told their whole life. There are layers of meaning in the allegory. There are layers of meaning in how the words are vocalized. There are layers of meaning in how they are written, down to the shape, numerical value and esoteric interpretation of each and every letter. To become an adult is to understand the profound power of words as a force of creation and destruction.

Few people truly understand this, and there is an immensity of consequence when they do. John Steinbeck wrote 225,000 English words about one single Hebrew word plucked like a ripe fruit from the story of Cain and Abel: ‘timshel’ in his book East of Eden. It has sold over 14 million copies and is regarded as one of the greatest American novels of all time. All from wrestling with the meaning of one Hebrew word.

This approach is in keeping with a Jewish tradition called ‘midrash’ that invites constant reinterpretation and discussion of the words and stories we inherit to embrace these profound texts not as dead, ancient history, but as living traditions. I learnt as a child entering adulthood that Hebrew words specifically, in their primordial genius, are brimming with power other languages like English can’t touch, only describe. The devotional act of the copyists who write the Hebrew words into every reproduction of the Torah, the culture’s sacred scrolls, must hold devotion in their hearts and steadiness in their dancing hands as they faithfully transcribe letter by letter with total accuracy. One mistaken stroke and the entire draft must be ritually discarded and started again.

Within Judaism’s sacred texts are 72 different words to name the divine, each with their own distinct and profound meaning. In Genesis, for example, it is ‘Elohim’, roughly translated as ‘the many in the one’, who speaks reality into existence. In the English translations found as the ‘Old Testament’ in the Bible, each of these words, with all their complexity, wisdom, and nuance, are collapsed into one single word: God.

‘God’ may not be real, but faith is. Within faith is the totality of human promise, however we struggle to reach it.

Which brings me to Israel. As a child, I learned from the Torah’s stories that the name ‘Israel’ is given first to Jacob, a grandson of Abraham, after he spends a dark night wrestling with an unknowable being on the banks of a river across which he hoped to reconcile with his brother whom he’d betrayed by stealing his birthright. When dawn arrived and Jacob had yet to relent his wrestling, the being blessed him by renaming him ‘Israel’, meaning ‘to struggle with the divine’. It is never explained who that being was, though their divine authority to name is implicit. Jacob walked away with a new name and a new limp.

Jacob went on to father twelve sons whose descendants became the twelve tribes of Israel. Israel is the namesake of the Jewish people, inclusive of citizens of the political nation as well as those of the diaspora like me. We, a people who carry an understanding of the profound power of words to shape our reality, and have for our name the concept of struggle.

Based on how I was taught to read, there are tremendous layers to the meaning of Israel. Deconstructing the word itself, it is YIS-R-EL, written in Hebrew as יִשְׂרָאֵל (read from right to left). The YIS (יֵש) translates to ‘there is’ or ‘he will’ affirming a state of being. The EL (אֵל) is one of Hebrew’s many names for the divine, alluding specifically to might, strength, or power. It is the R that holds the key to the name. The R is the letter resh (ר) standing alone at the heart of the word, bringing an entire moral lesson teaching the meaning of struggle with it. The letter resh itself can mean either ‘wicked’ or ‘wise’, depending on how you speak it. The wickedness it denotes is a bankruptcy of faith that leads to a bankruptcy in life. The wisdom it denotes is redemptive, empowered by a faith in new beginnings earned when all is brought to a head. The two sides of struggle. The two sides of faith.

There’s an oft-cited depth psychology interpretation of Jacob’s story as one of wrestling with his shadow, confronting his own darkness. I find resonance with this even if only because it’s impossible to live and work online without encountering what I call Dark Israel; the most wicked face of what people believe that name represents. I often receive comments on my posts from people and bots going out of their way, unprompted, to describe how and why Israel is evil. This is a wrestling to claim the meaning of the name, to weaponize it with pain so that the word ‘Israel’ becomes synonymous with evil.

For me, the land of Israel exists on a distant continent on the planet just as this idea of Dark Israel exists on a distant continent in my psyche. It is a storm cloud rumbling at the collision of conspiracy and grievance, offering lightning flashes of horrors that have been and could be. I can only apprehend it by catching my own shadow of anger and fear. I have let cowardice lead, withering from it at times, as I did when I abandoned my own heartfelt words to my pocket, but I know that the ultimate task of my inheritance is to let inner courage lead and trust that I have the strength to stare it down honestly even if, like Jacob, I walk away with a limp.

The name Israel can be spoken to evoke the wicked or it can be spoken to evoke the wise. There is more to the Torah’s stories to be listened to and seen. Israel (Jacob) had an uncle, the first-born son of Abraham before his wife Sarah could bear. Call him Ishmael. For that is the name he is given after being heard by divine forces while crying out in the wilderness. Ishmael also had twelve sons. They went on to become the Arab Nation.

The name ‘Ishmael’ roughly means ‘divine listening’ (or ‘the divine hears’).

YIS-SHMA-EL

The structure of the name is strikingly similar to Israel rendered in Hebrew as ​​יִשְׁמָעֵאל and Arabic as إسماعيل. There is more to it. For those steeped in Jewish culture, the SHMA should be a deeply familiar and powerful word. It is the name of the single most sacred Jewish prayer, the one all Jewish people are commanded to recite and contemplate daily, to teach to children, to inscribe upon the walls of homes, on our hands, in our hearts, and between our eyes. It is often the opening and closing prayer of many devout Jewish ceremonies.

I’ll offer my translation of its words:

Listen, Israel (SHEMA YISRAEL)

What is divine is our strength (YHVH ELOHEINU)

What is divine is our unity (YHVH ECHAD)

How profound that “SHMA”, sitting at the heart of the namesake for the Arab Nation, is the name of the Jewish Nation’s most unequivocally sacred prayer. The eyes I was given to see the power of words in my Bar Mitzvah, my Jewish rite of passage, show me a pattern in this worth considering. Israelites and Ishmaelites. Jewish Nation and Arab Nation. We are bound together. We share in the sacred. The two names answer each other, and the prayer between them points across the river, from brother to brother. The first word Israel is commanded to speak every day is directed at the heart of Ishmael’s name: Listen.

And yet…the state of things.

It is plain to see the parallels in the origin story and the embedded meanings of the word Israel with the trepidatious state of the political reality of that name today. Israel. Israel. Israel. How overwhelming the anger its utterance brings forth today. In spite of the immensity of social pressures and angers to exhale words into the wind blowing each way, I won’t speak to claim any truth about the lived realities of people in a war-torn environment I don’t know myself first-hand. But I can wrestle with it and have faith that the Jewish people may not all be the first to struggle with how the meaning of Israel has changed, but we will be the last. I believe we will wrestle with this for generations.

I am part of a Jewish diaspora descended from a generation defined by a struggle of a different language’s name: kampf. Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, translated as ‘My Struggle’, labeled the Jewish people as wicked, leading to the systematic extermination of 6 million. To understand that proportionally, there are 15 million Jewish people today. It demanded of those who remained, like my grandfather, that they become warriors. Emigrating from Germany to America, he was drafted into the Army and traveling along the route of the southern France invasion, he became a spy behind enemy lines, killing people up close and personal, living by lying, and walking through the corridors of active concentration camps that held his family. Was it just? He became the man his time demanded of him. It was his rite of passage to survive and to wrestle intimately against the violence that gorged a gaping wound. I live with the privilege of distance.

My grandfather had to stare down oblivion. I don’t. I must stare down remembrance. Both are wrestling with the realities inside Israel’s name. When my grandfather stepped onto the beaches near Cannes, he came with a gun in his hands and death on his mind. When I stepped onto the beaches at Cannes, I came to shake hands, make speeches, and lead meditations.

And like so many others of his generation, he would hardly ever say a word about any of it. Like so many others of mine, I talk relentlessly about and examine everything. I parse through every meaning and lens through which I can find to understand, I suppose, the scars of collective humanity I’ve inherited. I hold it as a blessing passed down across generations carried by a faith that it has meaning and will lead somewhere. One generation cuts stone for the next generation to build foundations for the next generation to gather in a temple.

The war and the Holocaust within it shattered the world. From the reform synagogues of the American diaspora, a generation of survivors reached back into the ancient language and took up a modest old Hebrew phrase and spoke it anew: ‘tikkun olam’, meaning ‘to repair the world’. For most of its history it had been a legal term, a kind of communal housekeeping. But Jewish mysticism held an older vision that creation and destruction are bound, and that the creation of the world itself began with a shattering as vessels of light broke and scattered across the world. As the nation of Israel was in its infancy, these words gave the scattered people of Israel a renewed identity and spiritual mission to aid all of humanity: gather the shards. This was a quiet seed planted in a world wrought by wickedness but watered by wisdom. Our struggle is not resolved with clenched fists, but open hands.

Hurt people hurt people. It’s a vicious cycle that continues seemingly without end, until it is broken by a higher power than the one that created it. Some would look to God to be that higher power. I look simply to faith. It takes faith to lay down arms and reach out an open hand. It takes faith to repair broken bonds from betrayal back to brotherhood. It takes faith to believe violence and hatred can end.

Jacob walked a road to and from the river where he confronted the hurt between him and his brother. At the other end was the ground on which he slept and saw a vision of a stairway to heaven we call ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. He was called to return to that place by his faith, but only after he had reconciled with his brother to end their cycle of suffering. There, with the renewed wisdom of forgiveness attained, he left wickedness behind and mounted a stone to establish a temple to be built upon by each generation. He named it ‘Bethel’ (בֵּית־אֵל). BETH like the letter (בֵּ), meaning ‘house’ and EL (אֵל), as in his uncle Ishmael’s and in his newly given name, meaning the divine. A house of the divine. A house of faith. A home.

So as I contemplate all I feel and think with this word - Israel - my heart beats hard in my chest and my mind spins from the gale force winds of social pressure blowing in conflicting directions. I ask myself, as one who lives with that word as a namesake: to walk toward the fight upon whose banks my darkest adversarial visions wait? Or to walk toward forgiveness where home is made from repaired broken bonds amongst the reconstructed shards of shattered faith? One of these paths carries with it the earned meaning of the Israel name. The other continues a struggle. They each offer an eternity. I know it is only my right to answer for myself, but there is power in speaking my answer to you.

From my seat in the diaspora, I see an Israel whose meaning has been carried to me by warriors, and which falls to my generation to carry as healers. Warriors fight to protect what they love. I understand this as I can from my privileged place and I honor the strength. As I consider my words and my actions, I am reminded by Jacob’s struggle that strength without softness produces more pain. Our struggle is to reconcile and to expand the aperture of what we remember as our story and take responsibility for the totality of its past and potential future; to be conscientious of a birthright not just received but also given; and if earned, to pass on once again. In that way, we might claim our wisdom when others speak our name.

Until then, I wrestle with my faith and work through the stakes of the words I write with my hands, offering the promise of honesty as only I can. I can’t honestly say that I feel safe saying any of these things, but it seems that is the rite of passage I must take to find my softness through my strength.

Call me Israel.

The following is a re-post of a reflection I’d shared a few weeks ago on other channels. It seems a timely reflection following my first Father’s Day this weekend, for which I also took the time to briefly record and post a song I’d written for my daughter. I hadn’t written a song in ten years. This song and this writing together nicely describe the backwards and forwards and the up and down of becoming a parent.

New father of an 8 month old baby girl.

Writing this from bed while recovering from some kind of flu after absolutely crashing out due to a bad sleep regression week that gave me a sightline to my breaking point past which sanity ends and only madness remains.

I’m fortunate to have a wife I can confide in, vent to, and lean on when I get to a state like this. We’ve worked hard to set a foundation of communication that gives space for each other’s struggles without judgement (albeit not without vulnerability and the wounds that can come from it). We know she, as mother, has been enduring a significant trial entering parenthood. We also know the realities of learning how to become a parent have been hard for me too in a different, less severe, though still significant way.

I pretty much crashed out this week at the tail of end of my 2 week nights & morning shift (that’s been our system of alternating). I was stuck in a pretty low frequency of the experience and she held a high frequency of gratitude and wonder to help lift me out of it. I was just really in quite a negative headspace and sort of needed to take out the trash in my mind by opening my mouth and blabbering for a minute.

A big part of our discussion was the posts we see on the parenting subreddits and content online. There’s a balance to this stuff. It’s helpful to see other people expressing their struggles because it shows you that you’re not crazy for feeling that way too. But the difference between medicine and poison is dose. I think I took in a bit too much of other people’s despondency and let it become my own. That accelerated the spiral.

This phrase, “early parenthood is like appreciating a sunrise while trying not to drown” came out of our conversation and I find it to be helpful in its honesty as well as for the crack it leaves open for the light of gratitude and wonder to come in.

A new child is truly a sunrise. Every day they become more themselves. New colors of their personality emerge. New textures of their awareness meet yours in moments of profoundly tender recognition. It’s a privilege to behold the gradual emergence of humanity, your humanity, in such pure form.

And yet…hahaha. And yet. It’s like an 80/20 rule. 20% of the time are those moments of utterly sublime happiness. 80% are crying fits and diapers and messing up and not knowing what to do. There are so many acute and protracted feelings of drowning in the work of it all. Especially if you, like my wife and me, do not have a family support network around to help. That’s why the operative word in this phrase is “trying”. It’s not that you’re drowning. It’s that you’re trying not to.

My wife encouraged me to surrender. This is hard for me in my hyper vigilant nervous system. She also uncovered that I’ve been hitting the rough edge of a deeply held childhood belief that I need to be competent or even exceptional to feel worthy of love (I mean, wow).

And so the invitation is to surrender. Surrender what? My health? My ambitions? My identity? I know those are the egoic defenses of who I was before this threshold trying hard not to let go. I think perhaps it’s more about what you surrender to.

I remember my swim lessons at summer camp as a kid. You learn to tread water and you learn how to float. There’s a way of leaning back and just letting the water hold you. You can only do it if you embrace the uncomfortable of letting the water occasionally wash over you. It’s just like those little aggravations that pile up and feel big in early parenthood. The hardest part of learning how to float though is releasing that tension in your neck and letting your head drop into the unknown in a way that aligns your back just right to keep you riding the surface of the waves.

It’s hard to let go like that…but once you do, all you can see is the sky.

Most organizational values are folklore.

You know the kind. Five words stenciled on a wall in the lobby. “Integrity. Innovation. Ownership. Excellence. Teamwork.” Words that nobody can recite from memory, that contradict a thousand small decisions made every single day, that mean everything in the all-hands and nothing in the moment a hard call actually has to be made.

I want to make an argument that sounds strange at first and then, I hope, becomes obvious: values that aren’t coded aren’t real.

And I don’t mean “coded” like software. I mean encoded — pressed into language, ritual, and repeatable practice until they live outside of any single person’s head. If your values only exist in someone’s mind, they disappear the moment that person leaves the room. Or the company. Or simply gets busy.

That’s not culture, that’s folklore. Folklore alone doesn’t survive contact with growth.

What religions figured out thousands of years ago

The word cult sits at the core of the word culture. Like it or not, religious traditions are the most successful culture-scaling technologies in human history, and they have a great deal to teach anyone trying to organize people around shared meaning.

It took more than good vibes for religions to scale and shape the world we live in today. They scaled by building what amounts to an operating system for meaning and crucially, one that spread through media. Watch the progression, because it maps almost perfectly onto how any durable culture propagates:

First, speech. Stories told around fires. Commandments spoken aloud. Oral repetition that turned belief into something a community could carry in its collective memory.

Then, inscription. Tablets. Laws carved into stone. Durable agreements that no longer depended on any one storyteller staying alive. The meaning outlived the messenger.

Then, the book. A portable canon. A shared reference point you could carry across a desert or an ocean and still be pointing at the same thing as someone a thousand miles away. This is the moment a belief system becomes truly scalable, when it fits in a bag and reads the same everywhere.

And now, the network. Meaning spreading through protocols, platforms, and algorithms. The medium changed again, but the underlying move didn’t.

This is the GameStop part of the story, by the way. When a loosely organized online community can coordinate a financial event that rattles Wall Street, you’re watching the same ancient mechanism of shared meaning, encoded in a medium, spreading through a community running on new infrastructure, and doing so very rapidly at modern speed. The protocol changed, but the physics didn’t. Through daily long-form megathread group discussions on Reddit to ‘apes together strong’ memes to mass downloading of day-trading apps, a small group of people motivated millions to believe what they believe because of the language, tools, and rituals they formed to deploy it.

Across every one of these eras, the successful traditions did the same thing. They didn’t just believe things. They coded belief into the body of the community: words you repeat, routines you reinforce, and a canon you can point to when things get messy (as they always do).

That last part matters more than it looks at first glance. A canon isn’t for the good times. It’s for the conflicts. It’s what you point at when two people who both want the best outcome disagree about what the best outcome is.

Three lines worth keeping

If you strip the idea down to something you could put on an index card, it comes to these basic lines of cultural programming code:

• If it isn’t documented, it isn’t teachable. You cannot onboard someone into a feeling. You can only onboard them into something written down.

• If it isn’t practiced, it isn’t believed. A value you profess but never enact is just a preference you’re announcing. People read behavior, not posters.

• Culture is your standards, repeated. Not your standards stated once. Your standards repeated, until repetition turns them into the default.

The hard question for leaders

So here’s the question I’d put to any leader, and especially to early-stage founders, because this is exactly the window where it’s cheapest to get right and most expensive to ignore:

Do you actually have values? Or do you have a handful of words on a wall and a thousand daily behaviors that contradict them?

Most founders, if they’re honest, land somewhere in the second category, not because they’re cynical, but because they never built the encoding layer. They had the beliefs. They just never codified them.

The good news is that the fix is almost embarrassingly simple to start.

The one-page move: “How We Decide Here”

Make a one-page document. Call it How We Decide Here. Put four things in it:

1. What we prioritize under pressure. Not what you value in the abstract. What wins when two good things conflict and you can’t have both. Speed vs. polish. Growth vs. margin. The honest answer to “when we’re squeezed, what gives?”

2. Who decides what. Decision rights, written down. Who owns which call. Where the buck stops on what. Most internal friction is not disagreement about the answer, it’s confusion about who gets to give it.

3. How conflict is handled. The actual mechanism. How disagreement surfaces, how it escalates, how it resolves. A culture without a conflict protocol might seem like it avoids conflict when really it just drives it underground until the subtext simmers.

4. What “good” looks like. Concrete standards. A shared picture of quality, so “good enough” stops being a matter of individual taste and starts being a thing you can point at.

That’s it. One page. This is the programming code for your culture.

It’s not exhaustive and it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be real. Small enough that people actually read it, specific enough that it changes behavior, and durable enough to point at when things get messy.

Why this is worth doing now

Because once your values are written and practiced, they become portable. And portability is everything when you’re expanding.

A portable culture survives new hires. One of the biggest existential threats for any company is growth. Every time a company 10x’s in size, its culture goes through a revolution. So, the people who weren’t in the room when the unwritten rules got established come in looking for guidance. A strong culture survives growth periods when there are suddenly too many people for any founder to personally model the behavior for. A strong culture also survives crises, which is precisely when unwritten cultures tend to evaporate and everyone reverts to self-interest.

There’s one more reason, and it’s specific to this moment.

In the AI era, a documented culture becomes something your systems can actually align to. The same one-page canon that onboards a human can increasingly inform the tools, agents, and automations making decisions on your behalf. The companies that wrote down how they decide will be able to extend that judgment into their systems. The companies running on vibe alone will have nothing to hand the machine.

Worse, if you haven’t looked closely enough at your cultural codes, you might not know if you have one programmed to succeed or fail. Whichever it is, AI will get you there faster.

The medium is changing again. The methods with which we build meaning are the same they’ve always been.

Code your values, or watch them disappear the moment your leaders leave the room.

I keep a hidden spear up my sleeve.

It sits on the inside of my right wrist, a wedding tattoo, small enough that most people miss it and close enough to my palm that it will peek out from my shirt cuffs ever so slightly if I’m wearing a suit.

I’ve shaken thousands of hands. Maybe tens of thousands. In every exchange, even before I committed it to ink, the bear spear represents the energy I bring. Some people notice and ask me a question about it. There are layers to the answer, and which level I go to depends upon the depth of the moment their question brings.

I’ll share here and now an answer that will take us halfway to the bottom. It lives in a story that starts in a basement near Boston.

My tattoo is a replica of the original bear spear my father built back at our family home in Massachusetts. There I sat, a tiny kid, watching him from my perch on the plywood steps descending from our kitchen as he wrapped leather hide around a wooden shaft taller than both of us, tying an eagle feather below the top, crowned by a pointy spearhead. His figure was framed by the golden lamplight of his workshop, a light that always felt to me like safe harbor holding back the dark end of the basement whose shadows somehow, in my childhood imagination, held all the monsters that terrified me.

I asked him what he was making. He told me it was a bear spear.

I asked if it was a weapon. “It’s not a weapon,” he corrected me. “It’s a tool.” The bear spear, he taught me, is a tool for bravery. Then he asked if I knew how to use it.

“You throw it,” I said, miming a toss.

His belly threw a laugh. “No,” he said. “You walk with it.”

When you find the bear in the woods, or the bear finds you, you plant the base of the spear against your foot or a rock. You hold your grip and you let the bear charge. At the moment it rises up to drop on you, you raise the tip, and the bear’s own weight finishes the fight.

“You have to be the bait,” I whispered.

“You have to be willing to be the bait,” he said. “To know you are ready to die, if that’s what it takes. That’s strength. That is how you walk with shadows.”

Once I understood the idea that power arises where bravery and vulnerability meet, I found it everywhere humans manage to trust each other. The stage runs on it; every musician learns that a room ignores the flawless take and leans toward the player risking something true in front of strangers. The tarot table runs on it; after a thousand readings I can tell you the real ones begin the instant someone stops performing composure, and the reader takes the same risk, saying the true thing out loud before knowing whether it will land. The strongest moments in both rooms belong to whoever plants their base first, and the biggest transformations occur when someone in the room has the courage to let the monsters step forward and rise.

It means something that I inked this on my wrist.

The handshake is a ritual that runs on our beliefs about power. The story we tell about the gesture is that it began as a weapons check: you extended your open right hand, the sword hand, to prove it carried nothing. Strangers earned each other’s trust by exposing the exact part of the body built to do harm. What they find when they touch each other is a moment of intimate connection, feeling into each other’s energy and how it rings somewhere between vigor and calm. You can feel into a heartbeat if you let it in.

Every act of connection since has kept that gesture’s grammar; an offered, undefended surface comes first, and everything else follows from it. The deal, the friendship, the marriage. All of it downstream of somebody going first.

There was one more thing he told me in the workshop that day. The spear, he said, is a great unifier. “Everyone had bear spears.” My family’s ancestors from Europe and the ancestors of the American land we stood upon both walked with them, and both peoples had to learn the courage to fend off the beasts in the shadows that lurked between, and sometimes within, homes. We all walk with the same monsters. In that way, the tattoo on my wrist I see every time I shake a new hand is a reminder of the role I inherited in that basement. I protect with tools that connect instead of weapons that divide, which takes the courage to let yourself feel exposed.

I learned how true his teachings were a few nights before my wedding, a wedding my parents did not live to attend. I carried the original spear into a California desert and held it under the moon while the grief I had been outrunning finally charged. I planted my base and let it come. When it rose up over me, it hugged me like my dad. I cried, then smiled, then laughed, and then I walked into my marriage carrying the strongest thing I own. That story is told by the rest of the tattoo, the deeper depths for another time.

So the wound you armor over, the history you edit out of the room, the soft thing you’ve decided makes you weak: that is your load-bearing material. We all walk with the same ones, and the person willing to stand in the open in front of theirs gives everyone else permission to recognize their own.

Somewhere in your week is a room you’ve been rehearsing armor for. Walk in and plant one true sentence instead, the one you would normally cut. Plant your foot. Hold your grip. Stay open. The charge that comes next is the connection arriving.

That takes us halfway to the bottom, like I promised. Hit reply and tell me about the spear you carry; the vulnerable thing that turned out to be the strongest thing you own. I read every one, and the replies decide how far down the next story goes.

— ✦ —

This is a re-expression of the chapter, ‘We All Walk With The Same Monsters’ from my book, Which Way Is North: A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics available anywhere books are sold.

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a [hu]man. Nothing was ever created by two [hu]men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of [hu]man.” — John Steinbeck, East of Eden Chapter 13

I came across this quote last week because I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the first time for a few reasons. First, because I love a great book paired with a great place that blends well with it and this book’s Central California setting felt well paired with a weekend spent in Yosemite. Second, because for some odd reason that may or may not be inorganically connected to Netflix’s upcoming mini-series based on the book starring Florence Pugh, East of Eden has become something of a Reddit-darling, appearing repeatedly in threads asking for people’s all-time favorite classic novels.

Within that suspicion lies the foundation of my interest in this quote. Elsewhere in the chapter, Steinbeck goes on to assault the rise of machination and automation and their effect on our humanity. It seems, well ahead of our current algorithmic-induced malaise that for now serves as the capstone expression of that industrial process, creative minds with a hunger for greatness were already questioning the intelligence of the artificial. For Steinbeck, the original sin seems to live between people: person-to-person as is the entire construction of the tracks by which our online social media existence is laid. As I’m still only about a quarter the way through the book, I’m suspecting that this also serves as foundation setting for East of Eden’s meditation on the Cain and Abel theme.

This sentiment pairs well with another quote I’ve had ringing in my ears since I first heard it as a lonely teenager.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal, 17th century French philosopher

Together, these two ideas constellate a tantalizing description of the relationship between creativity and loneliness. Or rather, emphasize that perhaps what we call loneliness today isn’t loneliness at all. What’s been labeled 'The Loneliness Epidemic’ is a defining malaise of our time. The US Surgeon General issued a warning about it in 2023, citing that half of adults experience loneliness and that loneliness itself is as damaging to one’s health as 15 cigarettes a day.

Without dismissing the significance of the anxiety and depression people are feeling within the loneliness the US Surgeon General describes, I want to hold it alongside the sentiments being expressed by Pascal and Steinbeck. There’s a missing piece in the puzzle of our modern human condition and it’s shaped like creativity born from original thinking that happens alone. Further, I suppose this missing may be masked by the not-quite-right shape of digitized human connection our online experience has laid atop our daily lives.

We aren’t just being disintermediated from each other by the allure of addictive algorithmic design offering the allure (or illusion) of person-to-person connection, we’re also being disintermediated from our own quiet; from the richness of our moments of isolation when the preciousness of an original idea can emerge from the whisper of a lonely mind. Instead of feeling that spark, our hands are pulled up to our phones with a limbic impulse to check the feeds. How often, in a daily daze, I check my phone to find my mind absent, like purposelessly opening the door to an under-stocked fridge. That’s lethargy blanketing loneliness.

Facing down our loneliness, we should spend more time with each other, yes. Absolutely. We would also benefit tremendously from learning how to spend time with ourselves.

This is the impulse that burst out of me in a spark from my lonely mind in the isolation of 2020’s COVID and became the central thesis to my book, Which Way Is North: that what we feel as anxiety is an invitation into creativity, if we go into the feeling rather than avoid it. What I constructed around that idea was a handbook that accidentally but presciently, articulates a blueprint for human creativity as only you alone without another person or machine can achieve. As Steinbeck and Pascal said, there is preciousness to feeling into the texture of what we call ‘lonely’. I would call it sacred.

Steinbeck’s message, while nearly a century old, can be placed in a modern context. It can also be challenged a bit, because collaboration, while contained with discipline, was ultimately essential to his process. It’s oddly synchronistic, but as I got to this point in this writing I thought to look up how many drafts and editors Steinbeck had for East of Eden. He had one editor whose name was Pascal Covici. Supposedly, Steinbeck hand wrote a draft, had his wife Elaine type it out on a typewriter, at which point it was passed to Pascal for refinement. So there you have it. The preciousness of lonely creation at the core with layers of technology and person-to-person collaboration on top of it to produce a book that still sells fifty-thousand copies per year almost a century later.

Interestingly, Steinbeck’s creative process reportedly began each day with a letter to Pascal on the left page of his draft before he began properly writing his work on the right. It was a manner of removing throat clearing passages from his prose (a tough habit for any writer to shake) and helped him grease the wheels on that day’s creative direction.

I find it utterly fascinating how closely this tracks with a manner of approaching writing with the tools available to us today. While I have worked with many editors on articles and books, I don’t feel it appropriate to waste their time with writing such as this — newsletters and social media posts — that are the stepping stones to my ambitious projects more worthy of their employment. For those, I work instead with an AI as my Pascal; my editor and sounding board. First, critically though, is the necessity of having arrived at an original idea that has whispered from my lonely mind in a moment of isolation. If it’s an idea of considerable size, I’ll email an editor and write it out to see if they think I’m onto something or out of my mind (as I often am). If it’s an idea more suitable for a quick online essay, I’ll drop it into AI. Either way, it begins a dialogue that leads to the necessary step of gathering facts and ultimately into the authoring of a first draft, which I then hand back for further refinement that can be a tennis match with any number of volleys between drafts. The spark is mine alone. Everything after it is collaboration.

We have paths laid before us for discovering our creative potential. We have blueprints. The error with which people have been approaching creativity online is in the pursuit of shortcuts. Copying other people’s content or ripping trending posts off Reddit to repackage and rename as thought leadership or viral marketing has been happening for over a decade now. Today, people simply tell their AI to write for them. They might take the extra step of prompting in a voice and an audience to refine it from a marketing perspective, but that does little to refine it with meaning.

It’s funny how close the line is between our sins and the sacred. It’s drawn with desire as their common thread, much like how lust and love can often feel the same. What decides the difference…is patience, which requires a comfort with the loneliness in pause.

I’m so tired of being right.

The feeling of being right is the easiest thing in the world to sell you, and we keep buying. Swipe up to feel right. Right?

I’ve started publishing more this year and taking real positions on questions where people disagree all the way down. It feels good to say what I think in public. It has also put me in a lot more fights.

I like most of the people on the other side of those fights. The ones that are real humans, anyway. Give me someone with an actual mind behind the account and I’ll happily spend an hour working out how they got where they got, what they’re protecting, where the fear sits under the position. I’ll even lean into the vulnerability and feel through if they’ve poked at a hole in my logic. There’s a thrill to thinking to your limit and being found wrong. It makes the thoughts less lonely.

The feed would rather I just beat them. The algorithm rewards hot takes and hot tempers. Every swipe down the feed shows how easily a mean-spirited comment can take you viral. Even when I taste the temptation to lean in the other way and litigate to obliterate, a deeper anger bubbles up and stays my hand. I don’t like my emotions and my incentives being played.

There is a tree in the Amazon called the acacia. It feeds a colony of ants a nectar that does more than nourish them; the chemistry is tuned to steer their behavior. The tree can move its ants to attack anything that threatens it and to tear down any sapling that competes for light. The ants, I imagine, believe they are the ones in charge.

We are closer to those ants than we like to think. The harder question is figuring out what our tree is.

The feed is a tree. The anger you feel scrolling at night is the nectar, and it is calibrated. (The longer you stay, the angrier and lonelier you tend to get, and that outcome is the product working as intended.) Self-righteous indignation is the most useful feeling a platform can grow in you, because it arrives wearing the costume of virtue. Hating the right enemy feels like having a conscience. This sense of being right is the easiest emotion in the world to harvest, because the person feeling it will defend the harvest as a moral duty. Just as any good, hard-working ant would.

Polarization keeps a strange fruit always in stock, someone to hate who is always nearby. Two sides facing opposite directions, certain the other is the problem, both of them rooted in the same soil and feeding the same tree. The story that there are only two directions and you must pick one is very old and very profitable to whoever is selling it. You can step out of that story without surrendering a single thing you actually believe.

Online, the whole fight comes down to two thumbs. The entirety of human consciousness seems reduced to a giant game of thumb wars. One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war: you lace the four fingers away, hold them still, and send just your thumbs into battle. That is the posture the feed wants from you. The phone is a thumb machine, and the thumb is the digit of the verdict, up or down, swipe or scroll, the oldest yes-or-no in the body. Thumbs up or thumbs down. We even base our emoji reacts on it. We took the most capable instrument in nature and trained it to pass judgment with the one finger built for judging, while the four that can reach out and hold another and do so much more sit clasped and idle.

There is one simple thing that separates us from the ants aside from the wonder of human hands, and it is the music we play with them. The ants move two ways, toward the chemical or away from it, and that is the whole of their world. We have something they never will. We can hear three notes struck together and feel two of them rearrange around the third. We call that harmony, and it is the feeling I seek when the feed has cornered me into two, into a world of red vs blue, left vs right, man vs woman, or any other binary that thrives on dissonance.

I learned a different way of thinking, listening, and thus being from playing music, and it has saved me from more bad replies than any breathing exercise ever has. It’s taught me a way to listen - to really listen and consider the why and the how underneath what is going on. I wrote about this method in the ‘Signal Processing’ chapter of my book, Which Way Is North. I’d like to share it with you here, now, because it feels as timely and urgent as ever.

Algorithms operate as a polarizing force. Like the binary of computer systems powered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they navigate your mood by serving you stories that flip the switch between two moves, agree or disagree, us or them, right or wrong. Music is not built in twos. A pattern of two ideas gives you only two ways to arrange them, Idea 1 then Idea 2 or Idea 2 then Idea 1, opposites and nothing else. That is the entire shape of an argument online.

Bring in a third idea and the arrangements jump to six. Now the ideas relate as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and that third one tells you how the first two are connected. A musician calls it a triad. It is the difference between a single flat note and a chord. Train your mind to hear in threes, then fours, then sevens, and the next time someone hands you an idea you stop reaching for its opposite and start hearing all the shapes that could circle around it.

To help bring this out of theory and into practice, I’d like to share with you a simple game you can play with your hands to evolve how you think with your mind. The hand and the brain grew up together, and they are still wired so tightly that working one works the other. We think with our hands nearly as much as with words; stop someone from gesturing and you measurably slow their reasoning. It is the same reason a note you write by hand stays with you longer than one you type. The signal runs both ways. The brain remodels around whatever the hands repeat, which is how a guitarist grows the strip of cortex that controls the fingers. You can pick the instrument up and train it on purpose. We keep memories of our music in our hands. So let’s play with it.

My guitar teacher taught this trick to me when I was in high school and I still do it almost every day. You can do it anywhere your hand can reach a surface.

1. Put your dominant hand flat on a table. Your index finger is one, your middle is two, your ring is three, your pinky is four.

2. Tap them in order, one, two, three, four. Congratulations, you’re making music.

3. Now work through every other sequence you can find. One, two, four, three. Two, three, one, four. There are twenty-four in all.

1-2-3-4 | 1-2-4-3 | 1-3-2-4 | 1-3-4-2 | 1-4-2-3 | 1-4-3-2 |

2-1-3-4 | 2-1-4-3 | 2-3-1-4 | 2-3-4-1 | 2-4-1-3 | 2-4-3-1 |

3-1-2-4 | 3-1-4-2 | 3-2-1-4 | 3-2-4-1 | 3-4-1-2 | 3-4-2-1 |

4-1-2-3 | 4-1-3-2 | 4-2-1-3 | 4-2-3-1 | 4-3-1-2 | 4-3-2-1 |

Keep a steady rhythm and find a groove, and go slow. Slow is where the training happens, and you can’t play it fast until you can play it slow.

The hands are a back door to the mind, and you are teaching yours to turn an idea over like a Rubik’s Cube instead of slapping the opposite back across the table.

So when the heat climbs up your neck and the reply writes itself, pause before you send. Look for the third idea, the one that holds the other two. Ask who profits from you feeling this strongly, right now, and read the thing that angered you one more time, listening underneath the position for the fear it stands on. You will usually find a frightened person where you expected a villain.

Next time you catch yourself in the feed, sure you’re right and they’re wrong, stop for a moment; stop drinking the nectar, and try hearing the music. How can you re-order the ideas to find the harmony in the in-between?

Somewhere in there, you’ll get a glimpse of a deeper humanity. I promise.

If you disagree, now you know I'd want to hear it.

I was in a monastery, maybe twenty years old, sitting across from a Zen master on a cushion. My father had been studying with him for years and was just wrapping up a week long silent retreat. They made me a deal. Play some music for the monks to help carry them out of the silence and in exchange, I got a meal and a conversation with the master.

As we sat eye-to-eye, the master looked at me with complete stillness and asked, “who are you?”. I answered with my name. He shook his head. I tried a Zen answer I’d borrowed from my father’s stories. He caught me, being able to see through my attempt at feigned enlightenment.

Eventually, his repeating of the same question, “who are you?” dug us down deeper to the essence of nothingness. No-thingness, to be more exact. To sit with that no-thingness, I had to confront the texture of some of my deepest fears, like getting sick. Dying.

In the depth of that anxiety, he took my hand and pressed my fingers to his throat. There was a lump there. It was his cancer. Of course, I’d been aware of cancer, but I’d never actually felt it. Just as he’d drawn my awareness out to touch the texture of my emotional fear, he drew out my hand to touch the physicality of that same fear.

Layer by layer, he’d been peeling back the mental, emotional, and physical fears that covered over my spiritual courage.

“How interesting is that?” he said. His face lit up boyishly with a grin. “We’ll see what happens next.”

I asked if he was scared.

“Of course I am. But what is behind fear?”

I thought about that flash of excitement I’d just seen. “Excitement.”

“And behind that?”

“Awareness.”

He nodded. “Fear is just the turbulence around the center. Take your seat in the stillness. See.”

Most of us treat anxiety as a problem to be solved, medicated or meditated away or muscled on through. Lessons like the zen master’s have taught me to think of it differently. Anxiety is stagnant creative energy. It’s not telling you something is wrong with you. It’s telling you there’s something for you to do.

Energy in motion is emotion. And emotion — directed, channeled, transmuted — is the source of everything humans have ever made. The difference between a paralyzed person and a productive one has nothing to do with the absence of anxiety and everything to do with knowing how to set its energy in motion.

Every great leap I’ve had in my life happened while I was scared. The first time I jumped off ‘The Tower’ into the lake at my camp. My wife and my first kiss. The first time I started doing professional tarot readings for strangers. The entirety of the process of writing my first book (which the story of the Zen master opens with).

The next time you feel an anxiety arrives, before you reach for your phone, before you push it away, try this: Name it, ask it a question, write down what comes.

1. Name it without judgment: “There is anxiety.” Not “I am anxious.” The Zen distinction matters: you are not the feeling. The feeling is happening within and around you.

2. Ask it a question. What is this pointing toward? What wants to be made from this energy? What story is this telling me?

3. Write down whatever comes. Even if it’s incomplete, even if it’s embarrassing, write it down. Or draw it. Use the energy of it to turn the wheels of whatever your creativity may be.

Instead of trying to solve the anxiety, try to convert it from stagnant energy into something that moves. In this way, you will experience what I believe to be one of the most important human truths: our anxiety is the essence of our creativity.

Keep a small notebook (physical, not a phone) on your desk or bedside table. When anxiety shows up, write one line: “What is this pointing toward?” and whatever answer comes. Do it for a week and look back. Most people find the same thing hiding in different clothes. That pattern is usually what you’re most avoiding and most called toward at the same time.

Take the next step and, once again, name it. Give the story a title so you can hold more easily. This is one of the most intimate ways you can discover how writing and reading are tools for thinking.

The Zen master never told me what was behind awareness. I think that was the point. Some questions are not meant to be answered once. They’re meant to be carried. Keep asking. Watch what it brings up.

— ✦ —

This is a re-expression of the chapter, ‘The Zen Master’s Cancer’ from my book, Which Way Is North: A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics available anywhere books are sold.

Watch the talk — “Owning Your Creativity in a World Going AI,” Samsung Global Creative Conference. The talk above is entirely human, delivered live on a stage. What follows is the same story in another form.

My parents gave me three gifts when I turned sixteen: A car. A guitar. A phone. Each one had a purpose: the car so I could explore the world, the guitar so I could express myself in it, the phone so I could communicate as I did.

For the car and the guitar, they required me to take lessons to learn each. “These gifts are going to change your life,” they said. “They are also a responsibility.” I had to take driver’s ed alongside my peers that made me log hours behind the wheel with instructors. I had to practice for weekly lessons with a guitar teacher in the back of a music store.

The Rites of the Road

When I was eleven, my dad drove me eight hours to the New York State Fair to see my favorite band at the time, The Wallflowers. In his old hippie van, he kept a crate of cassette tapes in the back with his swirly college handwriting on every label. He’d made them the hard way, recording broadcasts off the radio and waiting for the right song, or timing a needle drop on vinyl to get the transfer clean. Each tape was an act of discernment, a choice of this song and not that one, in this order, for this feeling. As we drove he had me fish around in the crate and pull up whatever I found, and he’d tell me who I was hearing and what it meant to him. Jethro Tull, Fleetwood Mac, King Crimson, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, which was appropriate for this rite of passage on the road, because we were on our way to see Bob Dylan’s son perform for the first time.

During the concert, about halfway through, all the lights went down. One spotlight dropped from the ceiling onto the keyboard player, who had one hand on the keys and the other reaching straight up into the air. They were covering The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” an enormous, pulsing vortex of a sound that swept the whole arena, and something happened in my chest that I had no name for, just a feeling. On the ride home I cranked the window down and rode the wind with my hand as that feeling echoed in my heart. I had become a musician, even though I didn’t know how to play yet.

So years later, when my parents gave me that car, that guitar, and that phone, they were completing a circuit on a loop of lessons that had been revealed with the cassette crate years earlier, though the phone, tellingly, came with no lessons at all. Tools are used in service of something, and that something has to come from you.

That was all at the turn of the millennium; the dawn of this brave new world. Today, a teenager is given all three gifts of exploration, expression, and communication at once in a single rectangle they can hold in the palm of their hands.

They are not given lessons.

I’m not complaining about kids today. I’m saying we are all kids right now, holding the new thing, and the new thing is AI.

The Magic of Technology

Rewinding even further, my dad gifted me a deck of tarot cards when I was seven years old. I’ve spent my whole life studying it, alone with books as well as through practice with teachers and eventually as a professional reader giving well over a thousand readings.

Tarot is a technology. It’s akin to an analog AI. You gain knowledge by asking questions and wisdom by studying not just how it answers, but how those answers are constructed.

In tarot, we learn the archetype in the card, The Magician. It teaches us how to discern between the sacred act of creation and the deceptive tricks of casting illusions. Both are foundational to the human experience. Our magicians are our artists, storytellers, inventors, performers, and entrepreneurs. In the audience, we want them to make us feel something with their illusions so long as we don’t see through the tricks by which we’ve been led beyond what’s real to what could be. When we are the magicians ourselves, we are tasked with learning the paths presented by various tools; the technology by which we would at first cast illusions and with mastery, become co-creators with reality itself.

That is why when I got to Berklee College of Music at eighteen, I arrived joking that it was the ‘Berklee College of Witchcraft and Wizardry’ (they did actually give us wands for conducting class, by the way). At the time I showed up, the professors were wrapping up the fierce debate over autotune, having found where to place what was once a stain on creativity into its niche within the creative process. This was happening just as Napster was forming a couple of blocks from my dorm and Facebook and Reddit were being built across the river, all together forming the next tidal wave collision between creativity and technology.

I came to deepen that feeling that music had given me in that dramatic moment at that concert as a kid and here, the spotlight was already sliding off the stage and onto the screen. It scared me. It made me angry. I was confused and so were my teachers, who had no more idea than I did what was coming, let alone what to do about it. The ground was giving way beneath our feet and a spectacle unfathomable was opening up in our skies.

What I’ve learned since, about that moment and every moment like it, is that the fear was just energy that hadn’t been set in motion yet. Anxiety is creativity that hasn’t found its direction. The ground giving way and the sky opening up are the same event, and the only choice you get is which way you look: Look up? Or look down?

I chose to look up. I followed what was interesting and ended up doing the last thing I expected after graduating music school, taking a job at a technology company. That company was Reddit, and the reason I think it chose me is a phrase written in glowing letters on the wall of its headquarters: Remember the Human. I don’t know how to code. But I know how to listen, and I know how to live a story and tell it, and it turned out that was the part nobody could automate.

Artistic Apocalypse

Online discourse, as it always is, is ruptured between greatly polarized perspectives on the use of AI in creativity, presently the debate rages strongly on AI’s merits with writing. On one end are the AI proponents who are near-evangelists espousing the incredible promise the gift of this technology brings. On the other hand, are creative purists who scarlet letter any writer who would dare stain themselves with the sin of dancing with this new devilry.

I have a big perspective to offer in this moment, and I’ve been offering it for years. In fact, the opening line of the jacket in my book reads: As artificial intelligence gains an increasing foothold in our work and our lives, the need to find and maintain our uniquely human creativity is growing more urgent. I wrote that in 2022 and released it in 2023.

I’ve been sharing this perspective for years now from a book and from many stages, and have felt it has been heard like a whisper in a storm of untempered, misguided rage. So I will share it again, but here I’m going to share it in three different ways.

First, in the Art

I watched a version of this play out in my own art form, recently enough to remember the contempt. Rewinding back before auto-tune, when the drum machine arrived, the musicians I respected called it soulless, a box of presets that would put real drummers out of work and bleed the feel out of the music. The Roland 808 sold so badly after its 1980 release it was discontinued. Then a generation that didn’t carry the grudge dug it out of the bargain bins, and the cold mechanical thing the purists had buried became the backbone of hip-hop, the boom underneath half the music you’ve heard this year. Sampling drew the same fire, dismissed as cheating, as a hollow trick, as not real playing, until it revealed itself as a form of composition with its own lineage of masters.

The fear is always that the machine will remove the human. What actually happens is that humanity moves. The soul didn’t drain out of the music; it relocated, from the wrist on the snare to the taste of whoever chose which break to loop and what to lay beneath it.

This goes back much further than my lifetime, and it was always artists at the front of it. The people who painted on cave walls were standing where we’re standing, and they were afraid too. To draw a bison on stone was an act of magic, a way of seizing a living thing’s likeness and holding some power over it, and a power like that is frightening to hold and frightening to witness. The camera met the same suspicion when it came, dismissed by painters as a lifeless mechanical trick with no human hand in it. Every tool that can make the work for us has arrived trailing the same fear, that whatever it produces comes out hollow, prefabricated, empty of the person who should have been inside it. And every time, somebody picked up the pigment the others thought was dangerous, pressed a hand to the stone, and said, in the only language they had, I was here.

This weighs heaviest on anyone who would call themselves an artist. Everyone holding the new tool carries both the gift and the responsibility, but the artist is the one we expect to make something true out of them. AI has lowered the barrier and raised the bar for creativity. Too many who decry the advent of this technology are only seeing the lowered barrier. They are missing the raised bar. An artist’s heart should ache for the broken ground as it leaps for the open sky. It is essential to see both. To clear that raised bar an artist has to stay curious where others turn contemptuous, hold onto what is theirs while everyone else chases the new thing, and find the discerning courage to walk the avenue the tool opens without losing the self who walks it. People faced the same demand at the cave wall forty thousand years ago, at the printing press, at the synthesizer, at the screen. What is this tool for, and what am I for?

Every great change is an opportunity to make meaning of your life’s placement at the forefront of human experience; to explore, express, and communicate to history that you were there when it happened.

Second, in the Idea

Plato saw a changing world and split it in two. There is what is becoming, and there is what always is. There are the new forms coming into being, and there is the experience underneath them that abides when you get quiet enough to feel it.

That split is the whole answer to the AI vs humanity question, as far as I can tell.

Technology is always becoming. AI is becoming faster than anything before it, which makes the disorientation larger and the question more urgent, but it doesn’t change the question. What always is belongs to you. The head makes stories; the heart just feels, and doesn’t try to explain. The most impressive AI can render, but it cannot conceive. It has no worries. It asks no questions. It has no dreams. It can think and make and explain, and still the feeling of dropping into the silence of a single passing moment is something it cannot touch. Your job was never to outrun it. Your job is to bring the one thing it needs and doesn’t have, which is taste. The particular flavor of your experience, your losses, your obsessions. An AI is another head that needs a human heart.

My dad understood this when he created with the technology of his cassette tapes. A playlist algorithm could have served me those same songs in any order, for any mood, for any stranger in the world, and it would have given me the music. It would not have given me the mixtape. The mixtape was his discernment, his read on what his son needed to hear across eight hours of highway on my way to the rest of my life. That read is the human element, and it’s the only reason any of it landed.

Third, in the Word

Nowhere is this argument louder right now than in writing, because nearly everyone has the tool and a great many are using it badly. Most AI writing is observably bad, and you can feel it inside of a sentence, the same way you could feel an early Instagram filter back when everyone found them at once and sepia-toned and vignetted every photo into the same warm mush. The filter was never the problem. People reached for the most obvious setting and called it finished. AI writing is in its sepia phase, and the people making the mush are using it the way the lazy and the naive always use a new tool, by asking it to do the whole job and publishing whatever it hands back. They are poorly trained magicians casting illusions full of obvious tricks.

It has also become a place to put a great deal of anger. Some of that anger is earned, but a lot of it is a free-floating wrath that needs a target, and the writer who reached for a machine is the easiest mark on offer, the newest name to put on the hit list of daily online contempt. Ironically, we live inside AI-powered systems engineered to keep us agitated, and we have to put that agitation somewhere. A culture trained to hunt for the next person to take down will always find a fresh stone to throw. The people carrying the wrath rarely understand the thing they are aiming it at. They just need somewhere for it to go. That is foolish, and it deserves the same forgiveness they deny the people they attack.

None of that excuses handing your thinking to a machine and publishing what comes back with no creative process or effort of thought. To ask AI to think and write for you is tacky and gauche, the literary version of the maxed-out filter. But there is a way to hold the tool that lifts the writer up instead of standing in for them, and it has to do with what writing actually is.

Think of writing as a grammar with levels. The first level is spelling, getting the letters right. The second is syntax, getting the sentence to hold its shape. The third is structure, where the real work lives and the writer has to become fluent in theme, in what the whole thing is actually about. A good writer draws a picture in your mind. A great writer sculpts, building something you can walk around inside. The page was always a flat plane that held the drawing. Used well, the machine becomes closer to a Euclidean space, a room with depth where an idea can be shaped from every side, and it lets a writer spend less of a life stuck at the bottom of the grammar and more of it sculpting near the top. This is where the sky is opening up to new, for now unfathomable opportunities of empowered creative process.

Don’t Let The Human in the Machine Become a Ghost

What matters, at every level, is that there is a human being to encounter in the work. The writer has to be fluent all the way up, from the spelling to the theme, and near the top they have to strike a spark of original thought that could only have come from them. A machine can carry you up the lower rungs faster than you could ever climb them alone. It cannot put the spark there. That part is still yours to strike.

Which is also how you know where the tool does not belong. There are forms whose whole reason for existing is the spark itself, the human reaching it alone and unassisted, and to bring a machine into those is to miss the point of them. Literature and poetry live there. Their value is not the finished object but the proof that one person went all the way down into themselves and came back with something true, in language only they would have chosen. Hand that to a machine and you have not made the work easier, you have erased the only thing it was for.

The same holds in music. A drum machine belongs in hip-hop and house, where it became a voice. Drop it into a string quartet or a straight-ahead jazz date and it reads as ignorance, unless a composer is wielding it on purpose to say something the form could not say without it. The covenant a form keeps with its materials is real, and breaking it by accident is not innovation. It is just not knowing where you are.

If your humanity isn’t present to encounter in your expression, how can it really be a creation that says to the world “I was here”?

Between Creativity and Commerce

Pop is where this gets interesting, and a little brutal. Pop, whether art, music, or culture, has always lived closer to marketing than its fans like to admit, engineered to catch attention and hold it. So when AI makes a pop song, it does not corrupt anything. It removes the last alibi. It shows you that a great deal of that music was already a product manufactured to capture your attention, now built faster.

If a machine can make it and nobody can tell, that was never art reaching for the spark. It was marketing wearing the costume of a song. In other words, it was made for money, not meaning. The visibility of the machine does not lower the work so much as reveal that it was always there in the manufacturing. The same should be said about any writing that trades inside the algorithmically guided attention economy online, including this very essay. The pithy social post and the slyly self-promoting “thought leadership” essay are built, by design, to catch an audience and grow one. They live closer to the promotional end of the spectrum that runs between marketing and art.

I don’t think we’re comfortable enough admitting how much and how often we “creatives” have been doing this. Let he without sin cast the first stone. To be a creative professional is to work at the intersection of what makes money and what makes meaning. Should we be so sanctimonious about the copywriting for ads that interrupt our television shows that are research-backed, optimized saccharine stories suitable for sustaining our attention? Or should we call it what it always was: not creativity, content…designed to keep consumers content.

What matters is less whether the thing was manufactured, because all of it is, and more whether a person’s humanity was in it amidst the tools when you read it, so that yours is not left cold and alone.

The opening line of my book is a single instruction, to walk the path out of your head and into your heart and find your voice in between. That’s the path. The machine can come most of the way down it with you now. It just can’t take the last step, the one into the heart, where the only thing waiting is whatever you actually lived.

The Ride Home

One of the deepest lessons in tarot is that there are no bad cards and that the light and shadow of each must be reconciled for your understanding to achieve mastery; evolving from a line between opposites into a circle of completion. The illusions of the Magician are not evil. They are reaching. We reach our hands into the dark the way a kid hangs an arm out a car window, feeling for something we cannot yet see. The light is the vision we gain from the process of learning what we can apprehend. This is where human folly, even at its most banal or self-serving, exists humbly as an agent of nature’s creative process. At our most arrogant, we think we are the hand when truly we are the pen.

We need our fools to step first into mistakes so they can evolve into magicians. We need those magicians, shaped by everything their exploration cost them, to become the teachers for the next generation of kids trying to find meaning in why they are here.

On the ride home from that Wallflowers concert, with the window down, I asked my dad what he thought the meaning of life was.

He said, “Pass it on.”

Then he hit the play button on another of his mixtapes.

The technology will keep becoming. What you bring to it is the part that always is.

Without your humanity, there’s nothing to pass on.

________________________________

Now, back to why that video sits at the top.

The essay you just read is the same story carried further, written in collaboration with AI, the way I argue here the tool should be used. If the people who distrust this have a word for what they’re defending, it’s process, the slow human work that’s supposed to be the whole point. Good. Process is the whole point. Over the course of a week the draft went back and forth more than fifteen times, and every one of those passes was a decision: what to keep, what to cut, which thread to follow down, which sentence was lying. The machine never made one of those calls. It just let me make more of them, faster, than I ever could alone.

It also changed what I reach for when I pick up my phone. The hours that used to vanish into doomscrolling now go into this. The creative process itself becomes the thing I spend time with, rather than mindless content consumption. I still keep the analog ritual where most of my writing begins, in a paper journal, by hand. The machine sits beside that instead of replacing it. So this was never the absence of process. It was a new process that my past writing never had the chance to get, and a better relationship with the device in my pocket, an old craft moving up a level.

The talk already held these ideas; each thread just had more in it than I had pulled out before.

Working this way gave me a first reader I could think out loud with, and the conversation drew a fuller view of my own creativity out of me than I had reached alone. The clay we shaped was my own writing to begin with, and the sculpture I hope it impresses in your mind is my own writing in the end.

I have found the process of creativity to sometimes be a performance and sometimes be a craft. I’ve found AI to be helpful for the craft, but the first pass and the final performance, I believe, must be a fully human step.

The machine helped me sculpt, but the spark that started it and the taste that judged each line are mine. Whether you can feel me in the writing is the only test that ever counted, and you are the one holding the verdict. Watch the talk, reread the essay, do both, or do neither.

A war of cosmologies broke out at the top of the world. Most people missed it because the feed was full of engineered distractions. This war is the kind that happens when the people who hold the most concentrated power in human history start writing competing scriptures about what humanity is for. Today, there are new entrants to the holy wars. Tech oligarchs. Corporations. Algorithms. This is a war of manifestos as missiles.

In tarot, we learn of the ‘Hierophant’. They are the institutional authority. In the artwork of the cards, they are most often depicted as the Pope. The mystery the archetype invites you to consider is…who holds the keys of knowledge? And how do you choose to relate to that power?

In these modern times, many have - for understandable reasons - walked away from a relationship with religious institutions. The power of the Hierophant is that it is an archetype that remains in the human psyche regardless of such choices. The existence of authoritative (and authoritarian) figures in our lives is an absolute of the human experience. It’s a power many who seek power would try to claim. Today, that is a power sought by many.

What’s happening at the top of the world right now is a battle between Hierophants and it is not being covered the way it deserves, because the trending stories are about something else entirely.

The real narrative of this historical moment is being written in private lectures, in 5,000-word manifestos, and in 245-paragraph encyclicals that most people will never read.

The first manifesto

In October 2023, Marc Andreessen published a 5,200-word piece entitled the ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’. Written in short declarative lines like a poem, it repeated the phrase “We believe” 113 times. It is a creed. Its enemies list includes “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” and “social responsibility” — all named as part of a “mass demoralization campaign” against progress. Its most clarifying line: any deceleration of AI costs lives, and deaths preventable by AI that was never built constitute a form of murder. Speaking like a spreader of gospel, he writes with the fervor of a Pauline preacher:

Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

I am here to bring the good news.

The second manifesto

Then there is Peter Thiel. Beginning in 2024, he started delivering private, invitation-only lectures — sold out, off the record, no cameras — on the theological dimensions of the Antichrist. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory and thinkers like Francis Bacon and Carl Schmitt, Thiel argues that a technocratic leader exploiting fears of catastrophe to impose global control is how the Antichrist would plausibly emerge. He has described critics of technology and AI as “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” warning that overregulation could usher in the destruction of America and an era of global totalitarian rule. In March 2026, he staged his next lecture series near the Vatican itself.

The third manifesto

This morning, from inside the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical entitled, “MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”.

This is a historically significant document.

He calls the deepest danger of our era the “technocratic paradigm”: a worldview where efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value and human beings begin to see themselves as projects to be optimized rather than persons called to relationship. He argues that AI is not morally neutral; that it matters not only how it is used but how it is designed, and that a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. He frames the civilizational choice as: build a new Tower of Babel, or rebuild the walls of coexistence, writing passages likely to be long and widely quoted such as:

We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language, even a digital one, can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.

Three competing scriptures

Three manifestos. Three men with more concentrated resources than most nations. Three completely different answers to the same question: what is the machine for, and who does it serve?

Andreessen’s answer: the machine is Promethean fire, the philosopher’s stone. Anyone who slows it down has blood on their hands. Technology is the only god that actually delivers.

Thiel’s answer: the machine is the terrain on which the Antichrist will arrive — and the people urging caution are its advance guard. Acceleration is faith. Regulation is apostasy.

Pope Leo’s answer: the machine takes on the character of those who build it, finance it, and deploy it. Right now that character is being shaped by very few, for everyone. That is power masquerading as progress…and it ends, like Babel, in ruin.

What strikes me about all three is the register they’ve chosen: murder, Antichrist, the Tower of Babel. This is not the language of product roadmaps or regulatory filings. These are people who believe, genuinely believe, that the shape of the next century is being decided right now, in choices being made right now, by people with the resources to make them.

They are right about that.

The question that actually matters

The most important question isn’t which Hierophant you agree with. It’s how capable are you of hearing the distant thunder of battle over beliefs so you can understand what’s coming?

The Dalai Lama famously said in 2005, “If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.” That pronouncement rang strong as a voice of leadership. For one, it showed me that religious leaders have a seat at the table in how we discover what could be, not by truth as declared by their institutional pasts but by the methods with which they interrogate what is that reveals it. That is the where the compass of profound human morality points.

The dialogue between science and spirit, technology and morality, are bound regardless of what you do or do not believe. What matters is whether you’re willing to listen beyond your own biases and taboos to engage with what this moment is actually asking. Tune into not just the voices that already speak your language, not just the traditions you were handed, or rejected, or never had to think about, but to the ones that make you slightly uncomfortable. Can you listen the voices you’ve been filtering out because of what it would mean to take them seriously?

Perhaps for you that means listening to what the Pope has to say. Perhaps for you that means listening to a Silicon Valley VC. It doesn’t matter which direction you’re coming from, but I do care that you meet humanity in the middle where the dialogue needs to be. Let your own ears and eyes be the judge. Go to the primary sources. Read their words for yourself. Don’t let it be filtered through your feeds.

That discomfort is the work. That’s where the meaningful consideration actually happens. It’s not in the trending stories, not in the manifestos written for people who already agree, but in the private reckoning with what you actually believe humanity is for, and whether you’re willing to say it out loud.

The Hierophants at the top are having that reckoning publicly, in the highest-stakes terms they know. The question is whether the rest of us are having it at all.

Who are you listening to, beyond your biases, beyond your taboos, that is helping you answer that question?

Reply and tell me. I’m collecting these.

As I turn 40 today, I’m brought back to my memory of going to Space Camp as a kid.

What I’ve learned in life that would surprise that kid is the now obvious lesson that the world changes while you grow up in it.

We had more hope when I was young. I don’t think that’s just nostalgia at work coloring the past with a rosy image. No, I can see pretty clear-eyed in this moment of reflection that we used to walk around with a better belief for our future than the present twisted narrative we’re currently living in.

It’s okay though. We can get it back. It’s just a story we can change as soon as we remember our human right to have real ambitions. More on that in a bit.

First, I want to share more of what I saw amongst the rockets and astronauts at Space Camp. It all brought together a sense that we were going somewhere together. The single biggest piece of inspiration for me was the Voyager probes and their Golden Records. So much so, I wrote about it in my book.

NASA bolted onto the sides of these stones thrown into the beyond were golden records etched with information and recordings of the full range of Earth’s expression. The sound of a kiss, whale songs, Chuck Berry’s guitar, and the brainwaves of the project’s creative director as she sat in a chair and meditated on the complexity of love. It was a love letter to the dark. We are here, and we hope you are too.

Who knows what sort of intelligent life those records will reach, but they at least hit me as a kid and taught me the meaning of ambition. You might not know where you’re going in the darkness up ahead, and that’s all the more reason to send your best into it.

I know a lot of us are entering our 40s right now and posting our reflections. We’re Millennials. We navel gaze online. It’s what we do. We are among the first humans to digitize our lives on social media and we’ve been doing it since we stepped through the threshold with our college initiation. We’ve been living with the record button on ever since. Every opinion, every grief spiral, every dumb idea, half-formed thought posted at 2am, then later every think piece and public professional try-out to be taken seriously within our allotted posting character maximums.

However we’ve lived our lives, for better and for worse, it’s all being compiled into a less golden, more silicon record to meet this alien-feeling AI intelligence that has landed on our planet. No NASA curation for this vision. The AI of the future will render a humanity trained on our past, however we lived it as younger generations eschew making the same Millennial overly-online decisions. The machines will know what we said more than what we did or how we meant it.

Well, here we are, fellow kids. We’re at the halfway point on our journey along the expected human lifespan. How would you say we’re doing?

There’s a sort of homesickness for hope I think many of us Millennials feel in the basement of our souls on any given day these days. Yeah, I went to Space Camp. I wanted to take part in building the better future that the final frontier of space exploration pointed us toward. But also…the Challenger blew up the year I was born. The shuttle program started shutting down when I graduated college. Just one path of dreams amongst many for our generation that flipped the sign to ‘close’ in our faces right when we got to its doors. I feel for the younger generations, Gen Z and Alpha. To them, the doors were always closed. They never saw them open.

Now, as we sequentially step into what’s billed as the back-half of our lives, is this the moment we accept our decay?

It’s poignant that this year’s Artemis mission offered us all a reminder that our world lacks hope only when it lacks imagination. We can change it by remembering the world we were first given. Those younger than us don’t know how it felt to hope like we used to. We can bring it back. Perhaps that is the hidden music to our generational operatic drama; a profound shift out of destabilizing minor failures to return to our triumphant major form. Maybe our challenges have all been set in the frame of our cringey, cheugy naively youthful hope to tee up a perfect, authentic cadence at the end of our song. Or maybe we’re the bridge. There’s nobility in that, if we can dig it.

The dominant narrative today is that the world is collapsing. What if that’s not the scariest story? What if the scarier story is not that we’re all going to die, but rather that we’re all going to live and therefore deal with the consequences of our actions?

That actually demands something of us, doesn’t it? It would mean we have to confront our failure of imagination. We don’t have to imagine a better future. We get to. This is our time to step into our role as leaders of our world’s creation.

Maybe this turn into middle age isn’t the moment we accept our decay, but rather it’s the moment we step into our transfiguration.

I’ll be real: my thirties absolutely ripped. I got out of crippling debt. I became a father. I helped take a billion dollar business to an IPO. I published a book. I bought a house. I cut up dance floors all the way up and down the Pacific. I traveled to all seven continents. And not once through any of that, did I ever break a bone. I’m one of the fortunate ones, I know this…but god damn did I earn it. I’m ready to give myself permission to more than be, but to lead. I spent my thirties learning how to grow from a boy into a man. In my forties, I’m learning how to grow from a man into a father. That’s a different kind of masculine spirit.

Let me put it this way…I woke up on the first day of my thirties nursing an intergalactic hangover on the front lawn of a Hollywood character actor’s house in Topanga and got busy getting back to day two of a weekend bender with friends. This morning, on the first day of my forties, I woke up in my own house and after a lovely breakfast made for me by my wife, I got my ass up and I took out the trash.

That’s the energy I believe we need. And we need it from our men. Our billionaires have given us a fine display of a generation of supervillains. Here’s how I see it - and how I see it might surprise you. I think these bad men are doing their jobs. They’re playing the role of the villain and the role of the villain is to call the heroes into action. Oh, you’re better? Prove it. So…let’s prove it. Generationally. Let’s become the heroes their disgraceful presence demands. Not one, but many.

We are entering an era of meta-human potential. We can surpass our own expectations on every dimension of health, cognition, decision-making, and community coordination, but only if we believe we personally have the right to try. Are we going to let the greedy ride alone into their bunkers in fulfillment of their apocalyptic vision? Yeah, maybe. But that vision is built on our adolescent jokes. They can take with them their digitized clones of all of us at our most youthful and idiotic, trained by our biggest mistakes. They can keep the broken record while the rest of us create what’s golden. Let’s stick it out with each other on this planet to build a better world in our highest image.

I do believe the first forty years of life can be the ascent. Preparation. My first forty was the accidental record of a life lived before I understood what the record was for. The next forty are the delivery, and I’m making them deliberate. It will be worth it if only to leave behind a better trace for my daughter on who I was and what I lived for. Can I leave her clues to decode the challenges she’ll inherit from our past? I think so. I believe so. I know so. And so it will be. So it is.

In the months, years, and even decades leading up to this new decade, I’ve been working on my biggest projects and my biggest ideas in the background. Some I’ve been reluctant to share because of a strange shame around the scale of their ambition. That shame stays in my thirties.

Here’s a preview of what’s coming:

• A body of intellectual work to describe humanity’s long journey that I’ve been developing for years, finally with a name and a home.

• A couple of ventures I’ve been quietly building that are ready to meet the world — both teaching better ways for businesses to meet and make culture.

• A long-demanded online course that takes one of the oldest meaning-making systems on Earth and teaches it as a creative tool for the AI age.

• A writing project — and maybe an event series, maybe even a book — that names what’s actually happening to all of us right now and gives you something to do about it.

• Oh, and I’m composing music again. Me and my daughter wrote a banger of a song together just the other week (she can rock a mean tambourine)

That’s what forty gets you: you’ve lived long enough to think in decades. You gain a perspective that checks you into the long game so you can stop reacting to the world and start creating it.

So, a new future begins. Let’s see what we can give it.

✨ She meditated with The Beatles as they wrote the 'White Album' in India.
✨ She wrote songs with and started a family with Mick Fleetwood.
✨ She and her sister were the muses behind songs by Donovan, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Mick Jagger.
✨ She has a PhD in psychology and has spent her life inquiring about what creativity is, where it comes from, and how it relates to addiction; leaving us with decades-worth of transcriptions from her conversations with absolute icons of culture.

Behind great works of art are stories of good people.

Few people understand what this means better than our next guest, Jenny Boyd.

To explain who Jenny is, it's best to actually just read the bio from the jacket of her book, Icons of Rock. It reads, "Jenny Boyd is a former 60s model and the younger sister of Patty Boyd, who was married to George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Married to Mick Fleetwood twice. Jenny has been immersed in the world of rock and roll since her teens. As a rock star muse, Jenny even inspired Donovan and Mick Jagger to write songs about her, including Donovan's famous hit, 'Jennifer Juniper'. A good friend to The Beatles, she worked at their retail venture, Apple Boutique in London. In 1968, she accompanied sister Patti on the band's visit to Rishikesh in India, where they studied transcendental meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Hiyogi. Jenny co-wrote two songs for the band Fleetwood Mac, although the group's manager gave the writing credits to her husband, Mick Fleetwood. She earned a PhD in psychology and spent many years running an addiction treatment center in England. Jenny's critically acclaimed memoir, Jennifer Juniper, was published in early 2023."

We came together around the release of this book, Icons of Rock, because we share an interest in the inquiry of this question: Where does creativity come from? As Jenny has shared her story with me, that has been a bit of a through line for her. So in this conversation, I'm digging into the community level - the human level elements - of the creation of a culture that is absolutely mythic to me.

I grew up as a musician with a band striving for rock stardom. That entire story is one that was really burst into being by the story of the Beatles, by the story of Fleetwood Mac. And Jenny was there. That trip to India is the trip that created the white album. I mean, that is a monumental piece of art and culture. Her sister, Patti, is supposedly the inspiration behind the song, 'Layla'. That is my sister's name. So there is something deeply synchronistic in our coming together and having a conversation.

But for Jenny, these are her friends, her family. For so many around the world, the idea of these things as culture creates a distance from the humanity of what it is that created these inspirations for us. For Jenny to be a part of these scenes, a part of these communities throughout all of her life, and then have the wisdom to pursue a PhD in psychology, to do clinical work for addiction, and to then become an author asking these questions is an absolute gift to all of us.

She is providing us with a North Star to understand how does this happen? How do great art and great culture get made? And in this book, Icons of Rock in Their Own Words, is transcriptions of many conversations that Jenny herself has had with incredible luminaries asking them, what is it that's taking place for you on stage, in the studio, in the writing process? Where does that creativity come from?

That is her gift to all of our benefit. So drop in, give this conversation a listen.

This is Jenny Boyd.

Listen to the full episode on your preferred podcast platform here

How do you get to the place where knowledge is power when so much information is poison?

It starts with how you start your day. How quickly do you reach for your phone and start scrolling through the feeds? At which step from bed to bathroom to kitchen to stepping out in the world do you tune into the news?

One particular morning not too long ago, I started my day with a fresh cup of coffee in hand, mess of hair and bathrobe on, by opening up my front door and there it was right in front of me: a giant pile of shit.

How fitting of a metaphor for what has become that morning ritual of being greeted by the daily news..

This pile of shit brought something new to me. So in a way, it was literally news. I mean, first off, it almost certainly wasn’t mine. No, as best as I could tell, this was the result of wildlife displacement from the recent fires that had swept through LA and sadly scattered a host of critters big and small around our neighborhood. Those same fires had forced my wife and me to evacuate and return equipped with hazmat suits, power washers, and a crisp hyper-vigilant obsession with cleaning. Having only just recently completed scrubbing ash from every inch of the house, this pile of shit sat like a cherry on top, the punctuation mark, of an overwhelming sunday serving of anxiety.

Obviously it had to go. I grabbed a plastic big, scooped it up and tossed it in the bin, noticing how oddly crumbly it was from all the seeds embedded within it. That was when the hyper-vigilance kicked in. That was what sent the anxiety into overdrive.

What kind of animal did that come from? Maybe I should look up the risks. Within minutes of searching for information, I’d come to the conclusion that this may have been raccoon scat. This, according to the information I’d found, was very, very bad news.

You see…from what articles online immediately taught me, raccoon scat should be treated like radioactive material. Highly dangerous. Why? Because of the worms they carry that burrow into your brain and eyeballs. The eggs of which are small enough to become airborne if the scat is, you know…crumbly.

I mean….holy fucking shit. That’s what this was a pile of. Without delay, I took the immediate and logical next step of spiraling into a debilitating panic that incapacitated me for at least the next two days. It was over for me and my family. This would be my doom. Write it on my epitaph, my gravestone. Here lies Will Cady. He should have let that shit be. RIP (P.S. don’t touch the worms).

The spiral this information led me on was propelled, as they often are, by a deeper existential implication. Here was proof that Nature itself is hostile, cruel. The world is a place from which I must constantly be on guard from for my own and my loved one’s protection. To be a man is to fight back each and every day from the forces of evil that would deceive me. Even something as cute and benign as a trash panda is but a dangerous deception.

This, of course, perfectly describes the emotional contours of runaway hyper-vigilance still vibrating in my nervous system from the real and present danger of catastrophic wildfire. See, our feelings run primary to our facts. We choose facts according to our feelings. It’s not hard to find facts in this modern world to match the feeling that the world is a hostile and dangerous place. That doesn’t make it true, it just makes it more believable. It describes the, well, shitty state of hyper-vigilant mind, much of our culture lives in. Therein lies the poison.

To that, I ask a simple question that has become an everyday carry logical tool of mine: how is that working out for you?

It’s like Occam’s Razor, but for emotional beliefs rather than logical explanations. Not a determination of the most likely facts, but a determination of the most effective feelings. Let’s call it…Raccoon’s Razor:

Where Occam’s Razor invites us to ask, what is the simplest explanation? Raccoon’s razor invites us to ask…how is that working out for you?

In an infinite universe, measure the truth of a theory by its simplicity and the effectiveness of it by its results.

At the height of my panic, I was in a manic cycle of reaching for more and more information. In the age of AI, my primary resource has become ChatGPT, which had done a thorough job of describing all the details of my doom in a way that masterfully protected its own liability. Should worst case scenario happen, I could never say it didn’t tell me what was possible.

It was - and forgive me for giving a win to my home team on this - ultimately Reddit that saved my mind from shattering. My incessant searching of niche keywords only known to the raccoon shit initiated led me to a thread started by a man who had been on nearly my exact same emotional journey…and found his way out of it. A pile of comments had gathered up on this post over the years since from others who had come across this his story. It was like life raft for the lost at sea drowning in the very same emotional journey. Yes! Here was salvation. This man’s story was our sanctuary. Here is the rock upon which we would start our new religion.

I kid. Sort of. That probably is how such things happen. No, what this prophet of poop had discovered and come down the mountain to share with his asynchronous congregation was a very simple, and vastly researched new understanding: you’re fine. Everything is fine. Stop panicking. It’s not as bad as you think it is.

As it turns out from the abundance of links to research papers and reports that this comment section had led me to, there have been less than 40 cases of raccoon scat brain worms in the last 40 years. Each of which was, tragically, the result of behavioral disorders leading to children and the infirm eating soil. In fact, what the raccoons carry is a remarkable display of symbiosis that has even evolved to carry brilliant, graceful measures to avoid creating any danger to humans at all. Nature isn’t constantly trying to kill you. In fact, it does remarkable things to protect you.

This is all ridiculous. I know. Because my wife told me. Repeatedly.

That’s why I think it’s such a perfect example of the informational poison we all are having to deal with every single day in this modern media landscape. See, it’s easy to laugh at something like this. It’s not so easy to laugh at the consequences of the informational shit we eat everyday about news and politics. About religion. About gender and sexuality. Climate and economic collapse. It’s hard to find the funny in the daily routine of opening our doors to new piles of informational shit full of parasites eager to infect our brains.

How is that working out for us?

How do we get to the place where knowledge is power when so much information is poison?

Oy.

I do have a solution. Rather, a framework I’d like to share.

Your relationship with information exists on a bell curve. Picture a graph with a line curving up, rounding out, and then curving back down with low points on the side and a rounded high point in the middle. Shaped like a bell.

The vertical axis of this graph represents your emotional state, rising and falling down. The horizontal axis represents information, expanding out as you gather more.

At the low point, at the start of the bell curve, is ignorance. At the end, is empowerment. In between, is the emotional rise. Just enough information to pull you out of the bliss of ignorance, but not enough to push you toward the resolution of empowerment. Instead, it only gives you agitation.

Take a moment and consider…where does the majority of the media you consume put you on this bell curve?

Health tips from social media influencers. Newspaper headlines about the daily actions of politicians. Sordid tell-alls about the rich and famous. Updates about climate projections. Mishandling of beloved fictional franchises. Safety hazards for travelers. Clashes with protestors on the front lines. Issues with the food supply. Set photographs from upcoming films. Channeled messages from inter-dimensional beings. Refugee movements. Indictments for all manner of crimes.

Some of these things matter more than others. Of course. But of the information you are shown about ALL of these things, how much of it gives you enough knowledge to actually empower you? How much of it gives you just enough to give you an emotional rise?

Hmm.

The hyper-vigilant emotional state I was in that morning was fueled by the real and imminent danger of the air quality in Los Angeles following the fires. Thankfully, enough information reached me and my wife fast enough to empower us to make the right choices for our safety. That very same information circulated in my social media feeds for weeks, well beyond the time it took for the toxicity in the air to stop circulating around our home. As the poison diminished in the air outside, the poison increased in the information online. The more time that passed, the more the information about the fires in feeds online was refined to emphasize the dangers for a broader audience and downplay the practical realities that determine who is and who isn’t actually affected. Like parasites, these information sources exploited real needs to fulfill their own desire to spread. It’s no wonder I was overwhelmed with anxiety at that time.

It’s not just coming from people in social media online. It’s coming from established brands and channels whose job it is to hold the public’s trust. Just enough information to give you an emotional rise. Not enough to empower you.

What happens when you’re on an emotional rise? You search, you scroll, you click, you share, you turn up the volume, you stay tuned through the commercial break. What happens when you’re empowered? You settle, you stop, you tune out, you turn off, you stop being so plugged in. Not as easy to monetize.

Think about which of these you spend more time in and ask: how’s that working out for you?

So what to do?

It’s imperative to recognize where you are on the bell curve at all times. Notice the emotional signature of the information that is being presented to you. Whenever you are being presented a story that gives you fear, anger, any activating emotion, interrogate whether or not you are being given enough information to be empowered or just enough to be used. That is where it becomes knowledge: when you know what you yourself can do.

I promise you, the vast majority of the time things are not as bad as they’re being made out to seem. Even in the worst of news, there is always more that once known, will empower you. I say that as someone who has been in the middle of terrorist attacks, catastrophic storms, violent mobs, multiple situations where people close to me have died, and everything else we have all collectively been through. It’s rare that things truly are worst case scenario and even when they are, there is always a path to something you can do. Information becomes knowledge becomes power when it helps you find it.

The news of the day is full of things to be worried about, whether presented to you from a pointy face in a sharp suit or blurry image in a viral meme. Who is giving you this information and why? Are they truly giving you the full story? You don’t know enough if you only know enough to be worried. Information that empowers is always available. It’s just not always easy to find. You’ve just got to decide whether its important to let it go and go back to ignorance or push on through until you find empowerment. The difference between medicine and poison is dose.

Audit what your information sources are doing to you emotionally. That is how you know when you’re hearing from an expert or an entertainer. Experts have the experience to empower you. Entertainers have the incentives to give you a rise. Too many of them are out there digging through our trash and leaving piles of shit at your door.

So the next time you start your day with an informational pile of shit - and let’s be honest, you will - take an inventory of the emotional axis. How is that information making you feel? Is it getting an emotional rise out of you? Is it doing anything to empower you? What beliefs about the world is it reinforcing? Place it on the bell curve of information and emotion. Put Raccoon’s Razor to it and ask…how is that working out for you?

Oh and by the way, I found out from my security camera that the pile of poo was from a coyote.

Listen to this episode of the 'Which Way Is North' podcast on your preferred platform below

I was at a gathering recently at the home of our next guest where someone said something so stimulating to my ears. They said, "a wizard knows the hidden paths." That was really interesting to me because this event itself was what could best be described as a 'gathering of wizards.'

Now, 'wizard' is a term that has been eclipsed in recent years by the term 'shaman.' When people are trying to describe a person of magic, they are talking about somebody that brings that magic and humanity to bear in service to their community and to the culture that they're a part of. Our guest for this conversation is a tremendous teacher of people like that...wizards.

What makes them a tremendous teacher is in the way they speak, the way they teach, the way they offer their knowledge. They share with a sense of childlike wonder, not with the cumbersome, burdened by the weight of authority sort of voice of a teacher that I think too many of us have grown accustomed to or have experienced in our paths through academia or our careers. No, this is somebody that exists in a state of awe and holds that awe for you. One who shares awe with you is a true teacher. That is the kind of teacher who can show you what an idea like 'hidden paths' really means.

An idea like 'hidden paths' is describing truths to life that don't have signposts, at least in the ways that we understand them. They're not drawn in the kinds of lines that you might see on a sign or on a screen or on a page. They're not so visible as much as they're...felt. By being in that place of awe, that place of wonder, a teacher of wizards is holding a bit of a compass for others to help them understand how it is that they feel and how they can behold the paths that might become apparent to them and guide them through their life. The way that I experience some of these hidden paths, is in the in-between of the perceiver and the perceived. It's a forgotten scent in a perfume as somebody walks past that brings you back to a core memory. It's a symbol, a color, a place, a breeze, something that evokes a deeper recognition of where is it that you come from and where is it that you're trying to go.

To the artist and wizard, these paths are out in the waking world. They are in the pages of books. They are in the master strokes that they see on paintings. This entire conversation that you're about to be a fly on the wall for is a teaching from one of the greatest wizards I know, sharing their awe about how they followed the hidden paths in their life, how they interact with the masters and the paint strokes that they have left behind for us to learn from. Through their sharing of their awe, they invite me and through me as you listen to this conversation, they invite you to be in that reverence of life with them.

Listen to the full episode on your preferred podcast platform here

What you're about to hear is an intimate search for humanity. In particular, it's a lot of me trying to understand the feminine part of humanity. This conversation took place at the very end of my almost decade run playing my role in building Reddit into the business that we know today.

On my very last day, I had taken a trip to London to speak at an event in Soho, and my last words as an employee of the company were, "my name is Will Cady, I'm from Reddit, we remember the human." Then I walked off the stage and basically hopped on a train from London down to Paris where I met this woman.

We spent the next few days just falling into each other in the potential of the question mark of whatever it is that comes next. Paris is an astounding city to do that in. It is a living museum of humanity. It in particular has this profound feminine undercurrent of love, eros, for humanity has this nurturing and sensuous perspective on the human story. That love for you humanity is captured in stone. It's captured in monuments all over the city.

Between lavish meals, we were running, we were walking, we were skipping, we were dancing, an we were riding bicycles all around the city. I have this one incredible memory of the two of us together, navigating through the rain, hiding under one umbrella. We had walked down the Champs Elysees towards this obelisk that we saw in the distance and it led us to this Atlantean looking fountain and this woman, she stepped out from the umbrella, she started twirling in the rain and as she was twirling we saw down an avenue from that strange Atlantean looking fountain, this Greek temple building. It was the church for Mary Magdalene. We walked up the steps to this to get out of the rain, which was getting heavier. When we stepped inside, there was a string quartet that was performing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. So we sat in the pews, we listened to this incredible musicianship and just absorbed the power of the architecture and the way that those sounds resonated within it.

When it was done, we stepped out of those front doors and there was a massive rainbow right in front of us. It was a moment that felt like synchronicity and blessing for being human. It felt very Mary-esque (for those that are familiar with that archetype) not just the mother Mary, but the Magdalene Mary. There are so many esoteric secrets and journeys to go into the meaning of human archetypes like those and they're all there for you when you walk the streets of Paris.

After that we settled in, got a bottle of Margaux, and we had this conversation for this podcast. For me, this conversation was one of openness and discovery of the experience that I don't know about...how it is to be a woman in this world.

Give it a listen. Hope you enjoy.

Listen to the full episode on your preferred podcast platform here

We have heard a lot about safe spaces. What about brave spaces? These are contexts in which you are allowed to explore what you feel before you know what you think without the weight of who you are. These are contexts that are vital to our becoming. These are contexts our culture lacks.

I've learned that one of the best ways to create these contexts is to empower people to be masters of their own identity. Let them decide what of their identity they bring in versus leave at the door. Then we can stretch out more bravely in our shared humanity to talk about what's going on.

My vocation is conversation. When you boil it down, that's what it really I do at base. I talk with people. Tarot readings, creative brainstorming, pitches and partnership proposals, even making music...it's all conversation.

I love conversation because I love humans. I see the best in people - and I believe that because of that, I get the best in people. When you and me converse, we're going to end up creating wonderful things together, even if only just a momentary idea or a laugh.

If you know me, and if we've talked, I promise you that I hold an image of you in my head and my heart that you would probably like...a lot. Even (maybe especially) if we have ever disagreed.

So with that, in defiance of the voices in my head that laugh at me and say, "the world does not need another podcast", I've decided to launch a podcast.

It is called 'Which Way Is North' and it unpacks the wisdom I packed into my book of the same name. Every episode invites the guest to be a master of their identity, deciding how they want to be referred to in the conversation. Then, we walk through the seven questions of Which Way Is North to find our way to the heart of who they truly are - at least in that moment in space and time where we've met.

You can find your preferred podcasting platform to listen to it here: https://whichwayisnorth.podbean.com/

If you like it, please consider following it, rating it, and sharing it.

You can expect to see a lot more content from me sharing snippets from these conversations in the podcast. To be honest, a big part of that is about reframing my relationship with the algorithm of social media spaces. There is something about prioritizing my IRL connections with people and then sharing what comes from that in social media feeds rather than seeking connection from people within social media feeds that feels like a right distancing of my relationship with the state of online culture today. That could change, but that's how I feel right now.

If you are interested in having one of these conversations, please let me know!

On my very last day, I had taken a trip to London to speak at an event in Soho, and my last words as an employee of the company were, "my name is Will Cady, I'm from Reddit, we remember the human." Then I walked off the stage and basically hopped on a train from London down to Paris where I met this woman.

We spent the next few days just falling into each other in the potential of the question mark of whatever it is that comes next. Paris is an astounding city to do that in. It is a living museum of humanity. It in particular has this profound feminine undercurrent of love, eros, for humanity has this nurturing and sensuous perspective on the human story. That love for you humanity is captured in stone. It's captured in monuments all over the city.

Between lavish meals, we were running, we were walking, we were skipping, we were dancing, an we were riding bicycles all around the city. I have this one incredible memory of the two of us together, navigating through the rain, hiding under one umbrella. We had walked down the Champs Elysees towards this obelisk that we saw in the distance and it led us to this Atlantean looking fountain and this woman, she stepped out from the umbrella, she started twirling in the rain and as she was twirling we saw down an avenue from that strange Atlantean looking fountain, this Greek temple building. It was the church for Mary Magdalene. We walked up the steps to this to get out of the rain, which was getting heavier. When we stepped inside, there was a string quartet that was performing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. So we sat in the pews, we listened to this incredible musicianship and just absorbed the power of the architecture and the way that those sounds resonated within it.

When it was done, we stepped out of those front doors and there was a massive rainbow right in front of us. It was a moment that felt like synchronicity and blessing for being human. It felt very Mary-esque (for those that are familiar with that archetype) not just the mother Mary, but the Magdalene Mary. There are so many esoteric secrets and journeys to go into the meaning of human archetypes like those and they're all there for you when you walk the streets of Paris.

After that we settled in, got a bottle of Margaux, and we had this conversation for this podcast. For me, this conversation was one of openness and discovery of the experience that I don't know about...how it is to be a woman in this world.

Give it a listen. Hope you enjoy.

This episode shares an overview of the seven questions structure of the podcast along with some stories about the podcast's creation and intention. As you listen, think about how you yourself might answer these questions right here and right now:

What is in front of you?

What is behind you?

What do you rest upon?

What shines upon you?

What do you receive?

What do you give?

What is in your heart?

As artificial intelligence gains an increasing foothold in our work and our lives, the need to find and maintain our uniquely human creativity is growing more urgent. This guide will ensure that you stay on course as you navigate through the complexity of modern times. It will help you open new pathways to creativity and equip you with tools for your personal and professional journey to becoming a conscious participant in creation.

Through a combination of essays, meditations, and memoir, Which Way Is North offers an illuminating journey into the interior of the human heart and mind, revealing how your inner experience informs who you can be and what you express out in the world.