When I started Basbas, we found product-market fit relatively quickly. Trading on the bohemian lifestyle of Ibiza culture, the club scene, a superior product, and premium positioning. We sold out our first drops in as little as a few hours.

It wasn’t product-market fit that proved to be our challenge. It’s what came after that. Tapped out of friends & family money, but too small for venture capital. A fast-growing trajectory, but no one with the right mix of spirits business thesis at the moment when it would have done us the most good.

To succeed, I had to do things that no founder should.

I cleared out my retirement funds, maxed credit cards, took high-interest loans, doubled down on friends & family, and cut costs until we were cash-flow break-even. But all of that slowed our growth. It was unnecessary, unstrategic, and made us vulnerable to things like unplanned tariffs, global epidemics, and logistics disruptions that had nothing to do with the demand for our product or the value of the brand. We were caught in a gap that only seems to exist in the spirits industry — tragically under-invested, and overshadowed by a growing but false narrative about the state of the category.

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I’ve helped raise money for maybe a dozen companies. In tech, investors compete for the best founders. In CPG, a little less so. In bars and restaurants, only the passionate few show up. In alcohol, the landscape is nearly empty.

Some funds have vice clauses and simply cannot invest. Others won’t move until you’re doing a million or two in revenue. The category is hard to diligence if you haven’t lived it. And spirits, like restaurants, tends to start as a passion project, which makes it easy for the professional investment community to dismiss. For all of these reasons and more, there is a canyon between the first friends & family check and seasoned category investors. Somewhere in that canyon, you’ll find some of the best operators you’ve ever met, running out of road.

I know this moment. I have lived it. I’ve been that founder.

When I started Solitary American, I made myself a promise. I would not become a professional mourner. I would not build a career cataloguing the disappearance of things I loved.

The loneliness epidemic is real. The slow death of our communal spaces is real. But documenting destruction without picking up a hammer is its own kind of cowardice.

So I picked up the hammer. Again.

This week, I along with a group of seasoned investors and operators launched Overproof Ventures, a fund focused on backing the operators building what I believe is the most important infrastructure of our time: the brands, venues, and experiences that bring people back into physical proximity with one another. Specifically in the spirits business and the spaces and systems that enable it.

Along with Alex Staniloff, one of the early investors in Olé and co-founder of The Beverage Collective, and Ha Nguyen, who has deployed and managed more than CAD $300M for McRock Capital, we see blue ocean where almost everyone in the investment community is getting the story wrong.

I’ve been citing this data to anyone who will listen. Sometimes here in this newsletter.

Scroll through Instagram for any amount of time and you are bound to come across some version of the same headline. Gen Z is done with drinking. The sober-curious generation. The wellness revolution. The death of the bar.

It has become received wisdom, repeated often enough that capital began to treat beverage alcohol as a category in structural decline.

The data says otherwise, and it’s becoming harder to ignore.

In the United States, the proportion of legal drinking-age Gen Z adults consuming alcohol jumped from 46% to 70% between 2023 and 2025. When you examine what they actually spend as a percentage of after-tax income, Gen Z is virtually identical to Millennials at the same life stage. The IWSR’s own chief operating officer said it plainly: much of the recent decline is cyclical, not structural, and is definitely not the fault of Gen Z.

They weren’t drinking less. They were drinking later.

Because, maybe you heard, there was a global pandemic that locked an entire generation out of the classrooms, dorm rooms, bars and nightclubs where interpersonal bonds form, responsibly if often in a lubricated fashion.

The data everyone was citing five years ago, and for click bait, continues to cite today, captured a delay in the socialization of the younger Gen Z cohort. Now that they’re entering and finishing college, often with classmates in the flesh, their drinking is largely on par with previous generations.

This. Was. Predictable.

And layered beneath all of this is something investors seem to have forgotten entirely: this category has historically laughed at recessions. Looking back at downturns since 1991, IWSR found that wine and spirits still saw growth during recessions, then rose substantially the year after each one ended. Between 1992 and 2022, liquor stores saw year-over-year sales declines just twice.

Goldman Sachs put it simply: alcoholic beverage consumption should be resilient during an economic recession because beer and spirits tend to be seen as affordable luxuries, or even staples.

A false narrative, repeated convincingly enough, drove institutional capital away from a category that was never actually in decline. That left a desert where informed capital should have been. Which means it also left us an ocean.

That desert looks even more attractive when you consider what is happening next door. Early-stage tech investing is entering a reckoning. A company can be the hottest app in the App Store one day and obsolete the next, rendered irrelevant by a platform update or someone’s afternoon vibe-coding session. The volatility is structural and it is accelerating.

Spirits brands do not work that way. A great product, a loyal account base, and a proven distributor relationship do not evaporate overnight. Many spirits are tied to a historical or geographical provenance, making the moats deep and wide. Some are produced with secret recipes that don’t have to be revealed and can’t be decompiled and reproduced by someone else.

In the spirits business, strategic acquisitions often occur earlier than in traditional technology or consumer sectors. Yet dedicated capital at the post-product-market-fit stage remains limited. Many brands struggle to bridge the gap between early validation and scaled distribution — and we know this firsthand. The buyers are active. Diageo, LVMH, Bacardi, and their peers are hungry for brands that have proven product-market fit and built real demand.

Friends & family get you to proof of concept. Traditional VC wants to see $2M or more in revenue before they’ll return your call. The stretch in between — when a brand has proved itself but hasn’t yet scaled — is where almost no one is playing.

And there are major upsides to be had there.

That is the gap Overproof was built to close.

We built Overproof because the places where people gather, eat, drink, and talk to strangers are not an amenity. Neither are the brands that support them and the tech that enables them. They are infrastructure. The same way roads and schools are infrastructure.

They are not optional.

We are not experiencing a sobriety revolution. We are experiencing a loneliness crisis that suppressed the social occasions where people have historically chosen to be near each other.

The cure is not a wellness app, a $26 smoothie, or an ultra-processed protein bar.

The cure is for the founders of our generation to build the places, brands, and systems that will support the next generation, to invest in our communities, and to reap the rewards that come with blue ocean investing, especially when what we are building is bringing people together instead of dividing them.

The data shows the industry is healthier than the story. We’re betting on it.

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I’m as taken with the AI revolution as anyone. I spend weekends building entire applications on platforms like Base44 that solve problems I’ve been staring at for years. The internal tech I’ve built for myself has quadrupled my capacity. For product managers who know enough to debug code, structure an assignment and build out real-life user stories, this is the golden age. I am living in it.

But what truly has my attention right now is quantum.

You’d be forgiven if you missed the headlines. There weren’t many. The most significant validation of commercial quantum viability in history landed in November 2025 to almost no fanfare. No breathless cable news segments. No viral threads. The algorithmic attention economy was busy arguing about chatbots.

Meanwhile, eleven companies cleared Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, the most rigorous quantum evaluation program ever conducted by the United States government. The goal: determine whether a fault-tolerant, utility-scale quantum computer can be built by 2033.

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Several of these companies believe they’ll get there well before that.

Some Background

A classical computer thinks in bits. Yes or no. On or off. It works through problems sequentially, asking itself a long string of binary questions to arrive at an answer.

A quantum computer does something fundamentally different. Instead of working through that string, it leverages superposition to take trillions of guesses simultaneously, exploring an enormous landscape of possibilities all at once and arriving at the most probable answer at the end. It doesn’t walk to the conclusion. It jumps.

The catch is that quantum mechanics operates in probabilities. Sometimes the answer isn’t the most probable one. Errors creep in, and for a long time they crept in more often than not. The field needed a mechanism for error correction, a way to verify and stabilize results across millions of quantum operations. For years, this looked like it might be the wall that kept quantum in the laboratory forever.

It wasn’t. Error correction turned out to be a surmountable engineering problem, and in the last two years, multiple companies have made dramatic breakthroughs. That’s a large part of what DARPA’s evaluation validated. These aren’t theoretical architectures anymore. These are machines correcting their own errors at scale.

The other wall was physical. Quantum computing requires cryostats, cooling systems that bring processors to temperatures colder than deep space. Qubits are fragile things, and they need those conditions to maintain the quantum states that make computation possible. Cryostats get exponentially more expensive and complex the bigger you build them. More computing power means a bigger cryostat. It’s a scaling wall, and it’s the reason quantum has remained a laboratory curiosity for so long. You could build a quantum computer. You just couldn’t build one big enough to be useful.

One of the eleven companies that cleared DARPA’s evaluation is Photonic, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. They looked at that wall and walked around it.

Instead of building a bigger cryostat, Photonic builds smaller ones and links them together over standard telecom fiber. The quantum operations between qubits are near-instantaneous, and the photonic connections bridging the cryostats travel at the speed of light, limited only by the negligible friction of the fiber itself. When they need more computing power, they add another cryostat to the network. No bigger machine. No exponential cost curve. More nodes on existing fiber. They’ve turned quantum computing into a networking problem. And networking problems, as the last thirty years of the internet have shown us, are problems we know how to solve.

Photonic’s approach could deliver commercial, fault-tolerant qubits as a service within eighteen months. Not selling a quantum computer to the handful of institutions that can afford one. Leasing quantum computing to businesses the way AWS leases cloud storage. They just closed CAD $180 million from Microsoft, RBC, and TELUS. Microsoft had already invested in a previous round and came back. That looks to me like smart money doubling down.

The implications are not speculative. They are engineering problems with timelines attached.

Drug discovery. The molecular simulations required to develop new pharmaceuticals take years on classical computers. Applications like AlphaFold have accelerated the process, but the calculations remain exponentially complex. A fault-tolerant quantum computer could compress that timeline from decades into seconds. Not faster drug discovery. A fundamentally different kind, modeling molecular interactions at a fidelity that classical computing cannot achieve regardless of how much hardware you throw at it.

Cryptography. The encryption securing virtually every financial transaction, medical record, and government communication on earth is built on mathematical problems that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable timeframe. Quantum computers can. Google warned in February that adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data today, storing it for the day a quantum machine can crack it open. The new security architecture is not a response to a future threat. It is a response to a present one.

Climate modeling. Quantum could run atmospheric simulations that finally keep pace with the climate itself, modeling millions of variables simultaneously rather than relying on the approximations current models require.

And beyond these, industries that don’t have names yet. Every previous expansion of computing capability, from mainframes to the internet to mobile to cloud to AI, created entirely new categories of human activity. Quantum will do the same. We just can’t see them yet, the same way nobody in 1993 could have described social media.

AI is getting all the attention, deservedly so. But on a greater timescale, quantum will be what this decade is remembered for.

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New York was boiling. I was dripping with sweat when I arrived at a certain Flatiron establishment with a whiskey library more than a few bookcases deep. I had just left a role I cared about deeply and was questioning whether I’d have the opportunity to do impact-driven work again. So when Ed Wise approached me about joining his scrappy young renewables project, I knew before dessert that I was in.

Two weeks after that initial meeting I became employee number four.

Ed is a visionary business leader who had earned the respect of his peers, the admiration of his mentees, and was gritty enough to ensure that whatever predictable or otherwise adversarial situations we found ourselves in, he was going to fight his way through to the other side. For me it was as much about the founder as it was the project itself. So I dove in, carrying a burnout I’d convinced myself was behind me. It wasn’t behind me. It was just quiet enough to ignore, the way a fractured instep feels fine until you take your first step.

I joined PositivEnergy as Vice President of Communications & Public Policy because I’d spent enough time following geopolitics to know that the calm in the Middle East was on borrowed time. Regardless of government incentives, renewable technology was going to provide resilience that fossil fuel dependency never could. That conviction wasn’t popular. Most of us were still riding the wave of the Green Revolution. That is to say, we were approaching renewable technology through the lens of environmental altruism instead of the lens of national security. Capital was reluctant. The urgency wasn’t felt.

Borrowed time has a way of coming due all at once.

For most of my adult life, America operated under a kind of ambient invincibility. Oil shocks were something that happened in our parents’ generation. Amazon and UPS had made just-in-time delivery table stakes. Supply chain was a term for logistics people, not a household anxiety. We had built an economy so dominant, so insulated by military reach and reserve currency status and sheer geographic luck, that we confused resilience with imperviousness.

We were not impervious. We were dependent. We just couldn’t see the dependency because no one had tested it in a generation.

The Middle East had been, by its own standards, remarkably stable in the last decade. The Abraham Accords. The Saudi modernization push. Iran contained, if not quiet. And in that calm, a consensus formed: this is the new normal. We stopped war-gaming disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz the way previous generations had. We stopped treating energy independence as a security imperative and started treating it as a culture war talking point.

Trump articulated something some more mainstream characters probably agree with: that nations need to be self-reliant. America’s dependence on global supply chains, on foreign energy, on the assumption that trade routes would remain open forever, is a genuine strategic weakness. He gave language to an anxiety that millions of people already felt in their bones.

He’s just so catastrophically wrong about how to get there, and that has clouded the entire conversation around solving the problem. Tariffs don’t build energy independence. Pulling out of climate agreements doesn’t reduce our exposure to a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf. Gutting the agencies that fund storage and grid modernization doesn’t make us more resilient. It makes us more fragile.

And the Democrats have spent so long running against Trump that they’ve forgotten how to run toward solutions. The opposition became the identity. The result is that one of the most important strategic questions facing this country, how do we build genuine energy sovereignty, has been reduced to a proxy war between two parties more interested in defeating each other than solving the problem.

Meanwhile, the problem solved itself. In the worst possible way.

The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed. And we should be prepared for it to stay that way.

A single drone can spook an insurance underwriter in London into pulling war-risk coverage for every tanker in the Gulf. That’s all it takes. One drone. One underwriter. And suddenly the economics of transit collapse, regardless of whether the waterway is physically blocked. Reopening the strait would require the most powerful military on earth to guarantee safe passage for every vessel, every mile, every day, indefinitely. And the drones that can shut a waterway down are now off-the-shelf technology, cheaper than the fuel in the tankers they’re threatening.

One side needs a speedboat, or a drone. The other side needs omnipresence.

That’s asymmetry. It’s how wars are won and lost. And it’s why this isn’t a disruption. It’s a new reality.

Twenty percent of the world’s oil moves through that strait. A fifth of its liquefied natural gas. Right now, tankers are stranded. Refineries are shuttered. Brent crude has blown past $100. Analysts are calling it the largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1973 oil embargo. Nations across South Asia are staring down power-sector collapse because they built their entire energy architecture around a 21-mile-wide chokepoint between Iran and Oman. Europe’s natural gas prices doubled in a week. Fertilizer costs are spiking during planting season in the American Midwest. The cascading effects will take months, possibly years, to unwind.

And that’s if this war ends now.

It won’t.

While energy resilience was being ignored, here’s where the money was going. The US government deprioritized renewables. Venture capital flowed toward ChatGPT wrappers as fast as founders could get their slides on Product Hunt. Crypto speculation (gambling). Actual gambling. AI infrastructure. Protein bars.

Battery storage and grid resilience sat in the waiting room while Silicon Valley funded the future of content generation. The companies building the actual physical infrastructure of energy independence couldn’t get a meeting.

The thesis was patient. The world was not.

This catastrophe was never an “if.” It was a “when.” And “when” is now.

I left PositivEnergy's day-to-day operations a while back. The burnout I carried in the door eventually did what burnout does. But I never left the conviction that pulled me in. What Ed and that team continue to build is the infrastructure of self-reliance. Battery storage. Microgrids. EV charging systems. The unsexy, essential plumbing of a country that can power itself without asking permission from a strait, a regime, or a market it doesn’t control.

The policy prescription is straightforward: stop treating energy storage and distributed power as an alternative and start treating them as critical infrastructure. The same way we treat roads. Bridges. Water. This isn’t a left idea or a right idea. It’s an American idea. And it’s the only version of self-reliance that actually works.

We don’t get to act surprised that a chokepoint choked. We had the tools to build redundancy. We chose not to prioritize them because the need didn’t feel urgent.

Does it feel urgent now?

Tragedy has a way of sharpening focus and forcing the mind to confront questions we spend most of our lives avoiding.

Growing up, I had two best friends: Mark and Adam. Mark was our cultural oracle. The first among us to discover the Dead Kennedys, to smuggle home copies of Adbusters and 2600, to teach us that rebellion is an art form requiring both passion and precision. Adam and I became his willing disciples, absorbing everything he offered about music, art, and the beautiful futility of suburban insurrection. We were a triumvirate bound by shared discovery, three scrawny boys from manicured neighborhoods trying to import the chaos of punk clubs into our parents' Costco-adorned garages.

Then, in our junior year of high school, Adam picked up a paintbrush.

As it pertains to impact, I've found that there are three kinds of people: those who claw their way toward mastery, spending years in deliberate practice, toiling day and night with calloused fingers under drooping, greasy eyelids. There is no secret to their success, only the source of their grit. Then there are those born with gifts so innate that debating their origins is a futile exercise. We read about them in the history books and idealize the impossible ease with which they produce masterpiece after masterpiece. But there's also that third kind, perhaps the most haunting: those who possess the capacity for greatness yet never discover the key that unlocks it.

Adam surely wasn't the third kind. The day he touched brush to canvas, something ancient awakened in him. What poured forth seemed effortless to Mark and me, though we could see Adam putting in the work, holed up in the second-story bedroom of his childhood home, acrylic and graphite merging with the skin under his fingernails. In mere months, he had mastered drawing, painting, and design with a fluency that seemed to come from somewhere beyond practice.

As Adam disappeared deeper into his craft, Mark and I found our own outlet. The band we had started in our freshman year was releasing its second record, touring on every school break, playing at bigger and bigger venues. Somewhere around junior year, Mark lost his taste for it, but I still craved the brutality of relentless touring. I thrived on cartons of cigarettes and handles of booze mixed with heart-stopping handfuls of No-Doz, as the uninsulated cargo van shepherded me and my bandmates from gig to gig; cig to cig. From Jacksonville to Syracuse, I basked in the adoration of fans and thrived on the chaos of makeshift moshpits, the stinking sweat of adolescence greasing linoleum floors, the way they would scream our lyrics back at us like incantations against their own suburban prisons, leaving the venue hoarse but somehow still engaged and alive.

For Adam, impact was meticulous mastery of craft. For me, it was the stage, the brutal communion between performer and crowd. For Mark, it was the art he shared with us. As young as we were, each of us had found our answer to that restless, magnetic pull toward consequence, toward leaving the world different from how we found it.

After I left the band, recognizing that staying would have probably killed me, I spent years trying to deny that pull. Trying to retire it. Convincing myself that the comfortable path, the safe path, was more than enough.

For many people, "impact" is a mere marketing term, something we claim in pitch decks or LinkedIn profiles: an ironic return to paper bags from plastic, the purchase of carbon credits to offset business class air travel, a commitment to no-waste packaging while conveniently ignoring the environmental hostility that is direct-to-consumer shipping. But for those who have tasted the possibility of real change, denial becomes its own form of hypocrisy.

Since those early years, I've always chased consequence and purpose, failing as many times as I've succeeded, even if that success was only for a fleeting moment. Sometimes those failures were devastating and set me back financially, to say nothing of the bruised ego that took as many years to repair. But to know you have the tools, the vision, the creative fire, and to not deploy every ounce of will toward fulfilling your own prophecy is to live in a particular kind of hell, far worse than the sting brought on by any memory of previous failures.

So I share with you today an idea about consequence.

To those grinding away on projects that feel like elaborate games of corporate solitaire. To those building systems that serve someone else's vision. To those who've outlined the book in their mind a thousand times but never let ink flow to page. To those dreaming of their own café where the cacophony of ceramic and metal merges with the sweet smell of butter and bread, giving way to the conversation and community you've craved all along. To those suffocating in bureaucracies that mistake process for purpose, confusing the labor of paperwork with the labor of love.

Your source of impact is waiting. Waiting for you to say no to the seductive comfort of almost-enough. To throw off the yoke of incremental progress and build something that bears your name, serves your people, honors the things you love.

As the years grow on and the hairs gray, then depart, the temptation does not retire. It doesn't fade with age or dim with disappointment. It only grows more urgent, more insistent, more unforgiving. Because there is no fourth kind of person. None of us departs this world without at least that momentary wonder if we did our part, or anything at all. The question has never been whether you have the capacity to make an impact. The question is whether you have the simple bravery to run toward it instead of away.

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On September 9th, 2009, the late summer heat lingered as the sun projected a western shadow over the Washington Monument. Theodore Olson walked toward his destination, the morning already warm at 79 degrees with light rain from overnight still dampening the marble steps. At 69, he moved with the measured confidence of someone who had argued before these…

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It wasn't a glitch. It wasn't hackers crashing servers from the shadows. It was something far more powerful. A protest. The internet had gone to war. And it was going to win.

The bills we were fighting, SOPA (in the House) and PIPA (in the Senate), were designed to give the government control of the free and open internet, a veto on every website, a switch to turn them off without so much as a public hearing, let alone due process. Their introduction followed a string of escalating parries back and forth between legacy media and the fledgling tech companies. One gasping to maintain its status. The other, desperate to enable the next generation of creators.

Legacy media had spent their war chests on lobbyists and hill visits, deployed their unlimited budgets trying to cut down the sprouting tech companies with headline-grabbing lawsuits meant less to win than to terrorize. Scare off partners. Intimidate advertisers. Generate threats from state Attorneys General.

Grooveshark was the first global music streaming site, operating in 24 languages in every single country in the world. We were the YouTube of music. No gatekeepers. No barriers to entry. No intermediaries. Just creators with direct access to their fans. We were disruptive, and we had the battle scars to prove it.

We were on the receiving end of more than one lawsuit during my tenure as the head of the data team and then the head of their government affairs department. I was personally named in the notorious $17 billion case: Arista et al v. Escape Media Group,

or as it read when I was served: UMG Recording, Inc., Atlantic Recording Corporation, Zomba Recording L.L.C., Elektra Entertainment Group Inc., Arista Records LLC, LaFace Records, LLC, Warner Bros. Records Inc., Arista Music and Sony Music Entertainment v. Escape Media Group, Inc., Samuel Tarantino, Joshua Greenberg, Paul Geller, Benjamin Westermann-Clark, John Ashenden, Chanel Munezero and Nikola Arabadjiev.

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But these bills were to be their coup de grâce against the open internet. The studios marshaled the full weight of Hollywood, major record labels, and nearly every major content company in America. Sony, Universal, Disney. A constellation of incumbent power that had never known defeat. But they had overreached, and this time, the internet would fight back.

The mechanics of the blackout weren't complicated. Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization, coordinated the effort through private listservs and direct outreach. They didn't just recruit tech giants; they organized thousands of smaller sites, personal blogs, independent forums. The power would come from volume, not prestige.

Reddit committed first to a 12-hour blackout. The announcement sent ripples through the tech community. Wikipedia's community voted overwhelmingly to join for 24 hours. At Grooveshark, we didn't hesitate. We were already in the crosshairs of these very same forces trying to push SOPA through Congress. The cascade was swift. Once the major platforms committed, smaller operators felt permission to follow.

There was no central command that could be co-opted. No single leader who could be bought off. Just thousands of independent decisions to act in coordination. We each added a simple piece of code that would activate on the same day at the same time, replacing our content with information about the bills and direct links to congressional contact forms. It was elegant in its simplicity and devastating in its effectiveness.

When every screen you loaded showed the same message, the message became impossible to ignore. Within 24 hours, 162 million people had seen Wikipedia's blackout message. Google collected 4.5 million petition signatures. For the first time in history, congressional email servers had buckled, broken, and become overloaded under more than a million messages.

Forty-eight hours later, 18 senators had withdrawn their support. By January 20th, both bills were effectively dead. It was the most successful act of coordinated digital resistance in history. A perfect demonstration of what the internet could accomplish when it moved as one organism instead of billions of separate voices shouting into the void.

So here's what I can't wrap my head around: Why haven't we done it again?

We had proven that coordinated digital action could kill legislation backed by some of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington. We demonstrated that congressional servers could be overwhelmed, that public opinion could be shifted overnight, that the internet could defend itself when it chose to act collectively.

But we've never built on that victory.

Since 2012, we've become masters of organizing in physical space, even using digital tools to do so. We know how to fill plazas and pack stadiums. We've perfected phone banking and door knocking. We can coordinate millions of people for marches and rallies with unprecedented sophistication and coordinated messaging across time zones and territories. But it almost never seems to move the needle. Sure, we can get press and own the conversation for a few hours online, but it's not changing legislation. It's not moving our lawmakers anymore.

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Here's why. They live online now. They get their information from digital feeds. Their understanding of public sentiment is filtered through social media metrics, algorithmic recommendations, and engagement data: upvotes, ratios. Protest is easy to ignore if it never reaches the volume or influence of the average presidential bleet.

We are fighting for the attention of people who experience reality primarily through screens, and we've abandoned the one tactic we proved could capture their attention completely.

It's not for a lack of infrastructure. The infrastructure is still there. WordPress powers 40% of all websites across the world. Substack hosts thousands of independent newsletters. Personal blogs and forums continue to thrive.

The technical capacity for coordination is greater now than it was in 2012, not less. But we act as if we're powerless, as if the internet is something that happens to us rather than something we create.

We tweet our outrage into algorithms designed to optimize engagement, not political impact. We sign petitions that disappear into databases. We share articles that get buried beneath sponsored content and AI-generated slop.

Meanwhile, buried in our collective memory is proof that we once made the most powerful lobbying operation in Washington back down in mere hours.

In 2012, we were fighting against censorship. In 2025, things feel eerily similar, and the incumbents are not all that different. Perhaps they're more integrated with the government. Perhaps the government is less responsive. Perhaps the open Internet no longer feels like the underdog. But perhaps the threat to speech is more dire than ever.

The question isn't whether we have the technical capacity to coordinate something as impactful as we did in 2012. We surely do. The question is whether we remember that we have this power. That every website that goes dark represents thousands and thousands of votes. That every coordinated silence is a form of speech. That when government becomes unresponsive, you have another choice. You can comment on their feed. Or you can turn it off until they listen.

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On the morning of July 21st, 2025, an Albatros with the tail number N339L left Alpine, Wyoming, from a private airstrip near the home my friend David had just moved into. David was a talented engineer and startup founder who found success young and spent the rest of his life giving back. He was constantly starting new ventures, investing in other entrepreneurs (myself included), and living the kind of life you hope you’d live if things went your way.

You never went hungry when you were with David. He was the type of person who would order one of everything off the menu so we could savor the entire experience. And there was always another trip, another adventure, another long, meandering voice note about the next business venture.

He was an experienced pilot with hundreds of hours logged, but on this trip, he was the passenger, suited up, wearing a breather, as required above 10,000 feet (the L-39 has a pressurized ceiling). He was excited to board the navy blue jet, with a serifed number three painted across the fuselage.

They flew east all morning. The sun passed directly overhead, and they kept going. They stopped for fuel twice. The second stop was in Watertown, South Dakota, where they filled the external tanks for the last leg to Oshkosh. They planned to arrive at Fond du Lac County Airport, Wisconsin in the evening.

Twelve minutes after takeoff, they reached a cruising altitude of 20,000 feet when David and the pilot, Mark, smelled smoke, heard a bang, and lost their only engine.

Well-maintained, the original L-39 engines can last up to 10,000 hours, but because of the aircraft’s maintenance challenges, engine failure isn’t uncommon. David and Mark were both experienced flyers. They had a plan and a backup plan. When the engine gave out just after 5 p.m. local time, near Granite Falls, Minnesota, they radioed in and began a deadstick descent, dropping below the cloud cover at 14,000 feet in a controlled, if speedy descent.

When the airstrip came into view, it became clear they wouldn’t make it. They shifted to Plan B.

The L-39 is equipped with two rocket-propelled ejection seats. Mark’s worked. David’s didn’t.

Until the official report is released, that’s all we know about the last day of David’s life. He was excited. He was happy. He was prepared.

Thankfully, we know a lot more about the 49 years before because David made memories.

I first met David on a trip to Bali, and we bonded quickly because he's easy to bond with. He was attentive and asked probing questions. He had a swift and witty sense of humor that was disarming.

David wasn’t just an engineer or a founder or a pilot. He was a brother, a son, an uncle, a nephew. And when I say he wasn't just a friend, I mean he was the person who quietly held everything together. He was the one behind the group threads, the calendar invites, the travel plans. The one who kept up with the people you meant to. I knew him through Amy, technically, but I never once felt like a tagalong. He had a way of folding people in without making a show of it.

He was the kind of friend you could ask a favor from and get a yes before you finished the question. He was generous and thoughtful. He paid attention. He had a near-superhuman ability to realize when he’d said too much or taken up too much space. And when he did, he would stop, apologize, and then do something about it.

He knew that emotional intelligence wasn’t something you were born with. It was something you had to practice. And he practiced more than most.

He was steady when the moment called for it. Honest when it mattered. Critical, but careful. He questioned everything except your value. And he never left you hanging.

He became one of my main confidants during my last round of fundraising and was always willing to admit when he wasn’t the best resource, despite almost always being the best resource. Never once did he get annoyed with a late-night voice note or an inexperienced question. I sent more questions than I needed answered. The truth is, I just felt better when I ran things by him.

These weren’t just personality quirks. They were the tools David used to keep people connected. That’s why he had so many friends. I think that’s part of why this loss feels so devastating. And I can’t even claim to be one of his closest friends. There are plenty who were far closer and are hurting in ways I can’t fully understand. But I also know there are people like me — people on the periphery who’ve lost their connector and confidant. Their friend and supporter.

In losing him, we’ll all have to work harder. We’ll have to stay connected in ways that used to come easily, because David was the one holding us together.

So when we attend his memorial in the coming weeks, it will of course be a somber occasion. But it will also be a party. We’ll make new memories while we reflect on the ones we made with him. We’ll take plenty of photos. We’ll start WhatsApp groups and promise to stay in better touch. We’ll try to maintain the connections that used to come effortlessly, because David was the one who made them feel effortless. We'll tell stories that make us laugh until we cry, the way David would have wanted.

That's his legacy. Not just the memories he made, but all the memories he made possible for the rest of us. And the ones he’s still making, through the people he brought together.

In memory of David Colin Dacus, 1976-2025

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This is far simpler than that. This is me thinking out loud about what we believe, what we're fighting for, what we're trying to build. A restatement of our values so I can see them clearly again, so you can see them too.

We live in an age of salvage operations. Each morning arrives with another crisis to manage, another institution gasping for breath, another beloved space hanging a 'closed forever' sign in its window. We have become masters of damage control, spending our days racing from one emergency to the next, trying to preserve what we have before it slips away entirely.

It's necessary work. But it's not enough.

We must also think about what comes after we save what's left. We are here to imagine what we build when the immediate crisis passes. Otherwise, what will call us to battle in the first place? Without a vision of victory, we are merely fighting to lose more slowly.

That's what these essays are really about. Not just the spaces we're losing or the maligned systems that strangle them, though those matter deeply. They're about remembering that we are builders by nature. That the institutions we're scrambling to preserve were once someone's audacious vision of what could exist.

It feels almost grandiose to talk about building a better future when we're barely keeping the lights on. But that's exactly why we have to do it. The alternative is a world where our highest aspiration becomes keeping things from getting worse.

You've joined me in believing that we can do better than that. That while others triage the wreckage, we can draft the blueprints for what comes next. That even in the midst of all this necessary rescue work, we can still remember how to dream forward.

Thank you for coming along on this journey. Thank you for believing that building is still possible. See you next week.

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In May, my girlfriend and I spent a week at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Amy is a significant author in the relationship space, and she was invited to teach a four-day workshop called Pathways to Partnership. I had just ended a long-term client engagement and I was in the perfect headspace for a little relaxation in the hot springs, so I tagged along. While I was pruning myself in the sulfur springs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she was healing decades of trauma and rewriting the rules of healthy dating for thirty or so participants.

One evening, just after dinner, we caught a sunset worth remembering. It was the kind of sunset that makes you stop mid-conversation, the Pacific horizon painted in colors that seem too saturated to be real. One of our friends who had just gone through a heartwrenching breakup was there attending Amy's sessions. She had joined us for dinner and walked with us across the grounds to get a closer look at the ocean. She noticed a hula hoop almost strategically placed by the western fence and picked it up. Soon, all of us were twirling and laughing under the setting sun when Amy stopped. She looked me dead in the eyes and exclaimed, "This is a core memory!"

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In psychology, core memories refer to emotionally significant events that shape our personality and sense of self. It's not a clinical term, but rather a concept popularized by the movie "Inside Out" and supported by well-known neuroscientists like Charan Ranganath. Amy takes it seriously as a life philosophy. She had us breathe in deeply to collect the smells of lavender and rosemary from the nearby garden, listen to the hum of honey bees finishing their work for the day, feel the grass between our toes, all while taking in the sight of the sun painting silhouettes across the craggy rocks of the Pacific horizon. Later that evening, as we lay in bed, she had me replay the memory, reliving what it was like just hours earlier to increase the likelihood that the memory would be encoded.

Amy will forget more than most of us will ever know about building positive memories, but she has instilled at least this one important tool in me. She understands that the most important moments in life don't just happen to us. We create them. We are architects of our own memories. It comes into play when she is coaching clients, too. She reminds them that dwelling on complaints about their partner undermines the relationship's long-term viability. If they paid as much attention to replaying positive moments, she tells them, the stories and memories they create become investments in their future success as a couple.

Amy knows the tricks to building long-lasting relationships.

This stands in stark contrast to that client I was advising recently, who was so obsessed with the minutia of his measurements that he forgot what business he was actually in.

He was brilliant, technically speaking. A seasoned marketer. His dashboard was a work of art: conversion funnels, cohort analyses, customer acquisition costs broken down by channel, demographic, and time of day. I should know. I built it. He could tell you the exact percentage point impact of changing button colors or the correlation between email open rates and lifetime value. He lived in his data, breathed it, and made every decision based on what the numbers told him.

But while he was optimizing click-through rates, he was bleeding customers. While he was A/B testing emojis, his team was burning out. While he was measuring engagement metrics, he was pruning away his market share. The data told him everything except the one thing that mattered: why he kept paying more and more for new customers while returning customers were churning.

I watched him micromanage spreadsheets while acquisition costs skyrocketed. When I suggested that maybe we should be treating this incomplete data as directional instead of doctrinal, he balked. He had confused his instrument panel with the destination, mistaking measurements for the desired outcomes themselves.

This is what I call proxy addiction. Our obsession with measuring stand-ins for the things we actually care about, until we forget what we were trying to achieve in the first place. We optimize for metrics instead of outcomes, data points instead of human experience, efficiency instead of meaning.

My client wasn't an anomaly. This addiction has infected every corner of our lives. Schools optimize for test scores instead of retention and critical thinking. Hospitals optimize for patient throughput instead of long-term outcomes. Social media platforms optimize for short-term engagement instead of meaningful connection. We've built a world that measures everything and misunderstands how much value it is actually adding.

The irony is profound: in our quest to make life more measurable, we've made it less human. In our rush to quantify experience, we've engineered away the very experiences worth having.

Some companies are beginning to recognize this.

Netflix doesn't just measure viewing time. They track whether you finish a series, understanding that completion suggests emotional investment, not just passive consumption.

Airbnb obsesses over specific details in reviews rather than star ratings, knowing that stories like "Maria left fresh flowers and knew exactly where to get the best coffee" predict future bookings better than numerical scores.

Apple Stores prioritize whether customers learned something on their visit, not transactions per hour, recognizing that moments of discovery drive loyalty more than sales pressure.

But even these examples are still just proxies, two degrees removed from the raw experience they're trying to capture. They're getting closer to measuring what matters, but they're still trying to quantify the unquantifiable. This is proxy addiction.

Because here's the thing about core memories, about meaningful moments, about the experiences that shape us: they resist measurement not because they're soft or unimportant, but because they're emergent properties of complex systems. They arise from conditions we create, not outcomes we track.

Disney has instilled this in their park experiences. They've engineered Disney World not for predictable satisfaction scores, but for unpredictable magic. Cast members are trained to create spontaneous interactions: impromptu character appearances, playful banter with kids, unexpected acts of kindness. Some attractions feature randomized sequences, so no two experiences are identical. They're not optimizing for efficiency; they're designing for stories families will tell for decades.

Last weekend, Amy and I ventured to our favorite panini spot on the edge of downtown. When we arrived, well within normal operating hours, we learned they had run out of all but one menu item. Prosciutto, not my preference, but all they had left. I was annoyed. I had rearranged my entire day around this meal. But Philip, the owner, offered us the one panini he had left, on the house, which Amy graciously accepted. Though I was still disappointed, we were both impressed by Philip's generosity. Then, as we were leaving, he ran to catch up to us with two macaroons and another profuse apology. That gesture shifted my perspective. I had to abandon my grudge and promised to return, just earlier in the day next time.

This is what we lose when we optimize only for metrics: serendipity, surprise, the unexpected moments that can't be planned or measured but somehow stick with us forever. In our rush to engineer predictable experiences, we eliminate the very unpredictability that makes experiences memorable and build loyalty.

Amy calls attention to these moments because she understands how important they are in building the foundation of our romantic relationship. She knows that twenty years from now, we won't remember our screen time or our step counts or what we checked off on our to-do list. We'll remember the sunset at Esalen, the feeling of hula hoops in our hands and grass under our feet, the way our friends looked silhouetted against the Pacific sky.

Amy designs for moments that no dashboard could capture. She's learned what Disney knows and what my data-obsessed client missed: you can't measure meaningfulness, but you can create the conditions where it emerges.

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Growing up, I'd always felt excluded. I had trouble communicating my feelings and was prone to frustrated outbursts. Despite that, I found professional success, but it left me isolated and as lonely as ever. So when I was presented with the opportunity to build a new kind of nightclub, the type of place that would welcome a person like me, I took it.

In doing so, I had my first taste of social success and popularity. The business was lucrative, too. We expanded the model, replicated it in city after city, and it eventually set me up for my second exit. But our success wasn't because the music was so good, the DJs were so talented or the bar specials were the best in town. It was because I let everyone in, unconditionally. It was the opposite of every velvet rope I'd ever been turned away from.

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The party was called Crush. It was a small 500-capacity club on the edge of downtown Orlando, Florida. A dirty, smoke-filled room owned by a pair of brothers who spent most of their money on the sound system and left everything else to chance, for the better. It had plenty of dark crevices for good old-fashioned evil.

There was no vibe check. There was no dress code. There was no required gender ratio. Come in your cargo shorts. Don't bring a dollar. You and the boys or you alone. If you gave me your email address and arrived before 10 p.m., you could come in for free and kill the keg with us. So there was no economic exclusion either. This served a dual purpose. It meant there was a line around the block by 9 p.m., a packed club the second the doors opened, and I had tens of thousands of email addresses so I could do it all again the next week without spending a dollar on advertising.

We were the punk kids who had never really gone to a dance club before. We were the outcasts, the ones in bands or obsessed with bands. Our crowd wasn't wealthy or aspirational. Most of us were scraping together gas money to get downtown, but we all came to be together, to see our friends and maybe even to meet someone new, every Monday night.

Twenty years later, the world has inverted. The spontaneous community that formed at Crush has been replaced by curated experiences. The spaces we now worship demand tribute,$3000 in annual dues (on the low end), letters of recommendation like college applications, and membership committees that weigh your worthiness.

We've confused curation with community.

The most sought-after spaces today aren't welcoming “outsiders” but excluding them. The modern third space promises aspiration, but aspiration is just exclusion wearing designer clothes. It's the promise that if you're good-looking enough, rich enough, cool enough, you too can belong. But belonging that requires qualification isn't belonging at all.

The membership industrial complex has convinced us that exclusivity creates value. Even spaces that claim to build community sort us before we can connect. We curate our coffee shops through pricing, our social media through algorithms, and our dating through compatibility scores.

But here's what we've lost in all this curation: the unexpected.

When spaces sort for compatibility, they eliminate the friction that creates genuine bonds. The conversations that change your mind. The friendships that shouldn't work but do. The moments when someone completely different from you becomes essential to your story.

True third spaces require unconditional access. Not because it's nice or fair, but because it's the only way community actually forms. Community grows from proximity, not pedigree. Because if your community is built on exclusivity, you lose it when you no longer meet the requirements. That is not community. That is not resiliency. That is the very definition of fragility.

We're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and our solution so far has been to create more exclusive spaces. It's exactly backwards.

The antidote to isolation isn't curation but the radical act of unconditional access.

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Either through parliamentary prowess or the kind of clarity that comes only when your neighbor's house is on fire, the Liberal government just did something spectacular.

Having been in power for mere weeks, Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberal-led parliamentary coalition conceived Bill C-5 and shepherded it through to bipartisan passage with the kind of speed that makes political scientists weep. What Klein and Thompson have been writing and advocating for, sweeping federal authority to fast-track infrastructure programs, is now law, born from necessity and delivered with speed and precision.

South of the 49th parallel, Trump has declared a national emergency to justify cruelty masquerading as policy: mass deportations that tear at the fabric of communities, economic warfare waged against the most vulnerable. An emergency entirely of his own making, its shockwaves spreading like ripples from a stone thrown into still water, radiating outward from American cities into the Canadian heartland, then across oceans to distant shores.

But here in Canada, the emergency is not manufactured. It is lived. Felt in the hollowing out of paychecks, measured in the empty chairs at factory tables, counted in the "For Sale" signs sprouting like weeds in towns that once thrived on cross-border trade. The theoretical became achingly personal the moment those tariffs landed.

And yet, there is the glimmer of resilience in the Canadian economy. An opportunity. The kind of opportunity that springs from the calloused hands of a friend turned foe and draws a country closer to its countermen, grasps what little seed of construction exists in what would otherwise be catastrophe and grips it so tightly that it germinates into a collective ambition seen only once in any generation, if at all.

In a stroke of uncharacteristic prescience, I recently wrote an essay for the Georgia Straight on the archaic minutia of sequential permitting, that death-by-a-thousand-cuts process where bureaucrats hold entire projects hostage, one approval at a time. Before I could even write a follow-up, the Liberals had gone and legislated the whole sorry system into oblivion, at least at the federal level.

Bill C-5 does what every frustrated builder has dreamed of: it sweeps away the regulatory labyrinth in one decisive stroke. Instead of asking whether projects should exist, it asks how they can be built safely and well. Projects designated as a "national interest" receive something approaching divine grace: guaranteed approval, subject to conditions, with a single Minister wielding the authority that once belonged to dozens of departments, each jealously guarding their tiny piece of the puzzle.

In the oft-quoted words of former Obama Chief of Staff and Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, "never let a good crisis go to waste." Prime Minister Carney has taken this lesson to heart with the fervor of a convert.

As an American watching my own country tear itself apart in slow motion, I know how this sounds. Single Minister with sweeping authority? In normal times, this would be the stuff of democratic nightmares, the kind of power grab that sends political scientists reaching for their history books. But Canada is bleeding jobs because of decisions made in Washington right now. When your neighbor sets fire to your economy, emergency powers stop being theoretical and become survival.

Proof of Possibility

There's still a ways to go. The concrete hasn't been poured, the steel hasn't been bent, the first shovel hasn't broken ground. But what Prime Minister Carney has proved is arguably more precious: that abundance politics can escape the conference room and become law. That a government can stare down the regulatory thicket that has strangled a generation of dreams and say, simply, "No more."

What Klein and Thompson articulate is a new way of thinking about how to deliver for the people. Prime Minister Carney has proven that the Liberals have the political will to transform theory into practice. The boldness of his approach shows what's possible when leaders choose action over paralysis, results over rhetoric.

There's much to be learned from the spirit of cooperation among the Canadian people and the coalition-building inherent to the parliamentary system. But there's just as much to be learned about political will, about seizing the moment you're given, about playing every card in your hand even when the odds are stacked against you.

We're witnessing something rare in the landscape of modern governance: leaders who remember that democracy is a verb, not a noun. A bravery to act with clarity even when the deck is stacked against you, when the easier path is delay and deliberation. We saw it with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who looked at the collapsed I-95 bridge and refused to accept that infrastructure takes years to build, rebuilding it instead in 12 days that felt like a small miracle. And we see it again in Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose opening legislative salvo reminds us that governments can choose to be instruments of possibility rather than monuments to process.

This is what democracy looks like when it remembers its purpose: not the grinding paralysis of proceduralism, but the swift grace of leadership that sees its moment clearly and acts with the backing of former enemies turned temporary allies.

Canada didn't just pass a bill. It demonstrated that abundance isn't trapped in think tank white papers or academic conferences. It lives, waiting to be chosen. And in choosing it, they reminded us that we've walked this path before, when the stakes demanded greatness.

We chose abundance when we rebuilt a shattered Europe from the ashes of war.

We chose it when we gathered the world's brightest minds and flung ourselves at the moon until we landed there.

Surely we can choose to build homes for families priced out of their own neighborhoods. Surely we can train doctors to heal and teachers to inspire. Surely we can care for those who spent their lives building the world we inherited.

Abundance is not a theory waiting to be proven. Abundance is a choice waiting to be made.

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The conventional wisdom on candidate selection is backwards. We scrutinize résumés, celebrate business acumen, and venerate institutional experience.

We mistake the shadow for the person …

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The phrase crept into my vocabulary slowly and then all at once. It took stepping back and examining this particular arrangement of words to see how repetition had drained it of meaning. But it was the way it made me bristle that forced me to examine it. It surfaced again and again as I was writing about how we've dismantled the infrastructure of human connection. In editing that piece, I had to remove several instances to avoid repetition. In conversations, in marketing copy, in my own words, again and again with ubiquity. The phrase has become so commonplace, so accepted, that it slipped past unexamined.

Like-minded individuals.

Harmless at first glance, aspirational even. But strip away the comforting associations, and it reveals something startlingly perverse.

The phrase appears with religious consistency on my social media feed. In my bubble, wellness centers promise communities of like-minded individuals. Coworking spaces advertise the same. Book clubs, meditation retreats, startup accelerators. The phrase has become the default marketing copy for anyone selling community.

But what are we actually admitting when we use the term like-minded individuals?

The phrase suggests we're seeking people who share our values, our principles, our deeper beliefs about how the world should work. Strip away that aspirational language and the truth emerges. It's nothing more than a polite code for 'people who won't make us uncomfortable.' It's not about shared values at all. It's mere signaling.

The meditation studio isn't looking for people who believe in mindfulness. Sure that would be nice and of course they do find some but if that person doesn’t share their social class, their sure to be non-grata. They're actually looking for people who can afford $40 drop-in classes and won't ask why the teacher training costs more than most people's rent.

This impulse spans much of modern community building. In one frame, you have wellness centers with ice baths and adaptogenic cocktails, pilates studios that feel more like sanctuaries than gyms, and coworking spaces filled with freelancers sharing their latest integration experiences. The conversations carefully orbit around sustainability, emotional resilience, and the virtues of alt milk. None ill-intentioned, of course.

In the other frame, masterminds that blend stoicism with stock tips, CrossFit gyms that double as entrepreneurship networks, and rent-by-the-hour podcasting studios where hosts build their personal brands. Conversations meander from market disruption to dark psychology and longevity hacks. Empire-building and individual excellence.

Different aesthetics.

Different vocabularies.

Same exclusionary principle.

Both building communities of like-minded individuals. Both rooms have convinced themselves they're building authentic community. Both are actually building echo chambers with membership fees.

The perversity isn't just that we're filtering out difference. It's that we've convinced ourselves this filtering is virtuous.

We call it intentional community or curating safe spaces, or the effortlessly cringey, finding my tribe. But strip away the euphemisms, and what we're really doing is ensuring we never have to encounter anyone who might challenge our assumptions.

The phrase itself tells us everything we need to know about how we got here.

Like-minded individuals.

It sounds so reasonable. So thoughtful. So evolved. It suggests we're being intentional about our connections, curating experiences that matter, building something meaningful rather than settling for whatever random collection of humans happens to be nearby.

But buried in those three words is the entire philosophy that's undermining social cohesion in western culture.

Like-minded assumes that shared thinking is the foundation of belonging, that compatibility of opinion creates connection, and that ideological alignment is what bonds people together.

This is exactly backwards.

Community has never been built on shared thinking. It's built on shared space, shared ritual, shared presence. The dive bar doesn't screen for political compatibility. The red sauce spot in the West Village doesn't require an ideological quiz. The dance floor doesn't care what you believe about the SALT tax.

These spaces create belonging not through curation but through proximity. Through the simple act of showing up consistently in the same place, learning to navigate difference rather than eliminate it.

You discover that disagreement doesn't preclude care. That the person whose politics make you wince might be the one who notices when you're struggling. You discover that proximity breeds empathy in ways ideology never could. That connection happens in the spaces between the ideas we’re so certain about, not in the echo chambers that confirm them.

But instead of protecting these spaces, we've created an entire membership industrial complex dedicated to helping us avoid them.

We've built institutions that sort us by ideology, income, and aesthetic preference.

Apps that filter us by compatibility.

AI-powered platforms that curate our social circles.

Organizations that promise community but deliver isolation with better lighting.

The phrase like-minded individuals isn't just bad marketing copy. It's a confession. It’s an admission that we've given up on the messy, complicated work of actually building community and settled for the easier task of finding people who already agree with us.

Which brings us to the real question:

Why do we continue to sort ourselves this way and maintain the delusion that this is safety, that this is progress, that this is preferable to the alternative?

The answer isn't another framework or methodology. It's not a better way to curate community or a more sophisticated approach to finding your people.

The answer is asking different questions entirely.

Instead of: How do we find like-minded individuals?

Ask: How do we create spaces where difference is navigated rather than eliminated?

Instead of: Who shares our values?

Ask: What rituals bring strangers together?

Instead of: How do we find our tribe?

Ask: How do we build our neighborhood?

The infrastructure of human connection isn't broken because we haven't found the right people. It's broken because we've forgotten how to build spaces that work regardless of who shows up.

Stop looking for your tribe. Start rebuilding your neighborhood.

P.S. If this made you think, feel, or argue with yourself, forward it to someone you love. Or hate. Or both.

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Four years ago, I disappeared.

I had been writing about how language was being weaponized to manipulate us. The work felt urgent then, necessary. I would sit at my desk in the early morning hours, watching the sunrise over the alpine mountains of East Vancouver, convinced I was documenting something important about the fracturing of our shared reality.

Then I went quiet.

Not because the crisis had passed, but because I realized I was contributing to the cacophony: critiquing systems I didn't fully understand, diagnosing diseases I'd never tried to cure, building nothing while deepening the divide.

I was angry, sad, and felt powerless against the forces of division that seemed omnipresent and yet intangible. I could describe them. I could fantasize about defeating them.

Or I could decline the invitation altogether and watch the adolescent harbor seals soak up the sun off the seawall and the bald eagles nesting on the spire of the arena next door.

I chose the latter.

Seal Boy (I know, not very creative) and Larry and Linda (the eagles) were ambivalent to my gaze, but they became my inspiration, my indulgence, my reason for getting up with the sun when no other remained.

And even with their playful disregard for the sparrows and crows that taunted them, and Seal Boy's "belly-up" approach to the Aquabus, I continued my struggle in stony silence to reconcile my own high standards and aggrandizing self-conception with this seemingly small, lazy, meaningless career pivot.

I was building an alcohol brand.

Shrug.

For the first time in my life, I was dedicating my time to something divorced from impact.

After years of fighting for causes, building platforms, creating movements, here I was hawking hooch.

For a "true believer," I sure wasn't "doing the work." This, I reassured myself, would be my last business venture.

We all go through moments of searching for meaning.

Some find it in parenthood.

Others find it in our work.

In the end, it was that tired cliché that brought an end to my malaise.

I found what I was looking for only when I stopped looking.

It was through, of all things, a branding experiment, something I'd done with clients a dozen times, from the smallest early-stage startups to the biggest multinational organizations, religions, and political candidates… and yet I'd never thought to apply the technique to myself.

What I’d come to believe was an eclectic or slapdash, if portrayed kindly, career trajectory revealed a common thread. I was always trying to bridge the gap between my introverted loneliness and my need for connection, my awkward nerdiness and my desire to belong, my artistic ambitions and my commercial instincts. A childhood shadowed by loss had shaped an adulthood spent searching, sometimes desperately, often clumsily, for the communities that could make me whole.

From punk rock to politics, from dive bars to synagogues, I'd been building the same thing over and over and over: spaces where regulars could become friends, where strangers could become lovers, where the distance between souls could disappear, sometimes for a night, or for eternity.

I hadn't in fact abandoned impact. I'd been healing my longing for connection by building my own communities all along.

This natural shortcoming and childhood circumstances, by luck or by fate, had come packaged alongside an insatiable desire to build. To build. To build.

A solution to a problem only just now being considered. A knack for building things that bring people together.

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My generation now struggles with this. That wasn’t always the case.

We've watched our own gathering places disappear. Dive bars priced out by development, restaurants strangled by permits, nightclubs closed for noise complaints from luxury condos that go uninhabited and were built after the music had already started. We've seen what happens when the places that taught us how to be human together vanish one by one.

We've forgotten what it feels like to lose yourself on a dance floor full of strangers, to have conversations that would never happen in daylight, to discover parts of yourself that only emerge when the lights are dim and the music is loud and everyone around you is searching for the same indefinable something.

And we've allowed the very substances that have served as social lubricants since the dawn of civilization to be demonized. Spirits, which for centuries helped strangers become friends and communities crystallize around shared ritual, are now treated as moral failings rather than sacred tools for connection. Which was exactly why I had felt ashamed of what I was building. No more.

The generation coming of age now faces something far more urgent. They're inheriting a world where the infrastructure for human connection has been systematically dismantled. They think community happens in Discord servers and group chats. They believe connection means finding your exact tribe online, surrounded by people who think and look and vote exactly like you do. Like-minded individuals, they say. Through no fault of their own, they've never had the chance to learn the sacred art of sharing space with people who disagree with them, of finding common ground over shared drinks and imperfect conversations.

More than four years ago, I named this newsletter Solitary American without even knowing why. The words just felt right, the way certain truths do before you understand them. Now I see it clearly: we've become a nation of solitary individuals, cut off from the very spaces and rituals that once made us whole.

But solitude doesn't have to be permanent. Isolation isn't inevitable.

This is why I'm writing again. Not to add to the noise, but to help rebuild what we've lost. To explore how policy shapes community, how regulation either enables or destroys the places where strangers become friends. To understand what it means to design a society that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

The infrastructure of human connection is broken. But infrastructure can be rebuilt.

And that's exactly what we're going to do.

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