How many of us wanted to be astronauts growing up?

If you were born in the 1980s like me—or earlier—you remember lots of chatter about the Hubble Space Telescope, the Sojourner rover, Mir, the International Space Station, and, of course, the Shuttle program.

If you were born a decade or two before that, you probably remember even more: the Apollo missions that sent manned rockets to the moon, Voyager 1 and 2, Viking 1 and 2, and the initial Space Race that gave birth to the Space Age we now live in.

Being an astronaut was not really a childhood dream of mine, but it was a fantasy.

I knew I’d never get to be an astronaut or walk on the moon, but I did imagine what it would be like from time to time. Lots of kids my age talked about it as well.

It was a very cool career choice.

TV shows constantly talked about how kids could “do anything they wanted” if they just studied hard enough in school. “Reading Rainbow” made a direct connection between learning to read and do math and becoming anything you wanted when you grow up. …even an astronaut!

It was always fascinating to me how becoming an astronaut seemed the most difficult, improbable, and impossible career choice: if you could become an astronaut, you’d be on top of the world! (Heh heh).

Being a firefighter was cool.

Being a police officer was cool.

But being an astronaut? That was outrageously cool.

I never quite figured out HOW someone becomes an astronaut besides using their imagination, going to the library, reading books, and “learning their times tables.”

How did that actually get them into outer space?

Even after all this time, I still wonder what the exact steps are for becoming a professional space adventurer. Clearly, the one thing you need the most—which you have no control over—is an extraordinary amount of pure luck.

But really, aside from that, what else do you do?

Years ago, I met Astronaut Charlie Duke and heard him explain first-hand his experience in the Apollo 16 mission and what it was like collecting rocks and driving the Lunar Rover (a car!) on the moon. That was very cool.

But these days, space missions are completely different, and the technology we use today is unrecognizable from what was used to put men in space back in 1972.

In 2024, one of the accounts I follow on Twitter/X had a Q&A session with Jared Isaacman, a billionaire, entrepreneur, pilot, and private astronaut with SpaceX.

I submitted a question—and he actually answered it.

Q: What should kids study if they want to become an astronaut?

-Ron Stauffer

Now, Isaacman has another title to add to his impressive career: NASA Administrator—and his answer matters more than ever in the age of Artemis, where we return to the Moon for the first time in over half a century.

Here’s a transcript of his answer, lightly edited for clarity. It was far more practical—though less “glamorous”—than I expected.

What actually goes wrong in space:

“I think number one is aerospace medicine; health. I think being a medical professional is probably one of your best chances, honestly. So, just in reality, 50% of all astronauts have space adaptation syndrome. And then there’s a laundry list of other things that go wrong at like 10%, 7%, 5%.

Space is very harsh on the human body and a lot of it’s physiological. There’s psychological elements to it too… It’s kind of hard, right? Because up until recently, it’s just government astronauts: we got to keep up the “hero image”—which they are—but there’s a lot of gory details associated with it.”

Why medical professionals matter:

“We weren’t born to live in microgravity. I mean, thank goodness, on SpaceX Inspiration4, we had a physician assistant as our medical officer, and we put her to great work. Hayley Arceneaux did an awesome job. She dosed out two intramuscular injections and helped restore the crew to be happy, healthy, and productive.”

The unexpected future of astronauts:

“But that’s going to be a reality, right? We’re not going to have the 737 of human spaceflight and have half the people throwing up. Because that’s going to make the other half feel pretty sick. And it’s going to take all the glory and glamor out of going and traveling in space.

And this gets way worse the longer you’re there. So, when we’re talking on long-duration trips to Mars and back, there’s a lot of things that are going to go wrong, and these aren’t 1% chances: these are like 50% chances, so they’re going to happen. You’re going to need people who can take care of it.

There’s not a lot of aerospace physicians and healthcare professionals. I think Harvard just stood up a fellowship in the last year, and we’ve gotten to meet some doctors there, but… it’s basically just been… a Houston Johnson Space Center-type program for doctors, and that’s not going to work when you have hundreds or thousands of starships. So, I think the medical field is going to be very strong.

Certainly, software and hardware engineers: you’re not going to be able to rely on the current mission control construct for commanding spaceflight the way it’s been up until now. You’re going to need far more onboard capabilities from a hardware structures perspective as well as software, where I think engineers can be in high demand.

And unfortunately, but it’s just in touch with reality again, I think the test pilot thing is going to have less and less relevancy. While I think the background for it is phenomenal and there’s a lot of ways you’re kind of adjusted to the environment quicker, the skillset is going to be less and less important.”

It’s not exactly the path most of us imagined growing up.

So… there you have it, folks! According to a modern astronaut helping pioneer the manned missions to space, the Moon, Mars, and beyond, if your kids want to become astronauts, your best entry points are:

1. Aerospace medicine

2. Software engineering

3. Hardware engineering

The days of test pilots dominating the field are fading fast.

Today, it’s less about finding a way to get to the destination in the first place and more about making it possible to survive and stay healthy and comfortable while you’re getting there.

So, if any of my kids are reading this: Listen to Mr. Rook—and go do your homework.

Get good grades, immerse yourself in books books like LeVar Burton said, and learn multiplication and long division, but also take some medical classes if you can, and see if you like medicine as a career: it may turn out to be your pathway to the stars.

Eventually, we’ll probably see college courses like “space tourism” and “intergalactic hospitality,” but for now, we need medical doctors and tech nerds to get us there.

What a time to be alive… and to be paying attention.

Today, like many (or perhaps most) American families, my wife, children, and I will be watching Super Bowl LX.

We will relax on this fine Sunday afternoon, sit on the couch, eat snacks, and shout at the TV as we participate in a great American tradition that, for sixty years, has become so embedded in our culture that we can’t even imagine life without it.

Some of my fondest childhood memories include rooting for my team on Super Bowl Sunday, with my family members (and especially my dad) watching with me. Even when my team lost—which was almost always the case—it was still a worthy event and a cause worth celebrating.

I shed angry tears and bit my tongue sometimes when the outcome wasn’t what I wanted, then spitefully promised myself “next year,” then was disappointed again and again, with an occasional win thrown in that made it all worth it.

To this day, even when teams I have no interest in make it through the playoffs, I’m always intrigued enough to wonder, “Who is going to the Super Bowl this year?”

As an American, I’m used to the fact that it seems one of the favorite pastimes of Americans is criticizing America. There is seemingly endless demand for outrage, anger, and infighting over everything that’s wrong with America.

In my lifetime at least, there have always been one or two occasions where we could put aside our differences and cheer on the sidelines, if not for the same team, then for the same cause.

The Super Bowl is one of those occasions.

Or rather, it used to be.

Sadly, though, like almost all aging institutions that have made our country, cultural tradition, and heritage something good and worth celebrating, the Super Bowl has lost its shine, and it is starting to show signs of age, corrosion, and rot.

The Super Bowl was, of course, designed to be a spectacle, but not the kind of spectacle it has become.

Of all events in American sports, it was the one designed to bring people together, but it has become increasingly more divisive over the years.

I’ve watched as the people who hold the purse strings have moved from being a small annoyance that produces eyerolls, to a minor interference that creates division and defensiveness, to what it is today, where they now seem intent on making it openly provocative, even using it as a platform to drive a wedge between Americans to create division in one of the last great arenas where there is (and should be) very little.

I shudder to think what Vince Lombardi would think about what it has become today. The legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers (the winner of the first two games) and the man for whom the Lombardi Trophy, which is awarded to the Super Bowl’s winning team, is named.

Coach Lombardi believed that football is:

• “A game in which hundreds of thousands of Americans take part that is completely uninhibited by either racial or social barriers.”

• “A great symbol of what this great country’s attributes are: courage and stamina and a coordinated efficiency or teamwork.”

• Something that “teaches that work, and sacrifice, and perseverance, and competitive drive, and that selflessness, a respect for authority, is the price that each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that’s worthwhile.”

I agree with him.

Coach is right that “‘Love’ is not necessarily ‘liking.’ You do not need to like someone in order to love them. Love is loyalty. Love is teamwork.”

Coach was also apt in his overall assessment of love and unity across divides:

“I’m not advocating that love is the answer to everything… when I speak about the love which forces everyone to love everyone else—for example [that] you’ve got to love the white man because he is white or the black man because he is black or the poor man because he is poor or your enemy because he is your enemy—but rather a love of one human for another human who just happens to be white or black, rich or poor, enemy or friend, because heart power is the strength of America, and hate power is the weakness of the world.”

Today, this is the Super Bowl I choose to watch. Not the divisive, painful ordeal it seems destined to become, but the unifying tradition Lombardi envisioned.

Today, I reject the efforts of revolutionaries to make me hate myself or my fellow Americans, and to choose division and distrust over peace and friendship.

Today, I ponder the efforts and seriousness that the Patron Saint of Green Bay (a highly devout Christian who went to daily mass, prayed often, and made his faith central to his life) gave to American professional football and the power it had to bring people together.

As he famously said, “There are three things that are important to every man in this locker room. His God, his family, and the Green Bay Packers—in that order.”

Today, I celebrate sixty years of Super Bowl Sunday, a day of worship and rest where we observe the importance of God, family, and sports—in that order.

Today, no matter what happens, on or off the field, before or during the game, I refuse to let partisan actors use sports and music as a weapon to anger me over social politics that don’t affect us nearly as much as we’re told they do.

Finally, I am thankful for sports events like this, and I celebrate that no matter what agitators say, Americans are one people, united under one national anthem, flying one flag, in one country, under God.

Sigh… the 24/7 news cycle is an embarrassing spectacle in the 21st century. It is January 2026, and the hottest news of the hour is Greenland.

Greenland? Really?

Everybody seems to be talking about Greenland now—it’s literally the top story on the front page of CNN as I write this. Cue the onslaught: endless hours of talking heads shouting at each other about it.

It’s remarkable how something almost nobody thought about five minutes ago has suddenly become a mandatory opinion. Everyone is scrambling to catch up, strike a posture, signal outrage, and demonstrate that they, too, have a take.

I want to ask people to pause here for a moment. Not to argue for a specific policy or defend anyone in particular, but to ask a simpler question:

How did this become the drama du jour? And what does the reaction tell us about how we process information now, when something very real is hiding behind a joke?

One of the biggest problems today is that we can never speak of any idea or statement made publicly without first talking about who said it. Today, the news is all about the source first, then content.

So, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Donald Trump, who is the king of media manipulation. I don’t know anybody else who can get reporters to dance for him on command as he does.

Even the NY Times had to admit in 2016, before the election even started in earnest, he had already procured almost $2 billion worth of free media attention. At some point, you’d think reporters would get over it, but every time he says anything outrageous, the camera shutters go wild, and the video starts rolling.

Some things he says are totally outrageous or deliberately provocative. Obviously.

But to be honest, “TRUMP SAYS SHOCKING THING” is the least shocking thing we see on a daily basis.

The biggest problem with most news stories is that it is almost impossible to separate signal from noise. We don’t have answers to the most basic questions that matter, like whether something is real, whether it really matters or not, and how we should think about it.

The Greenland story is a perfect example of systemic failure, the lack of seriousness in public discourse, and the absence of journalistic rigor. Somehow, during his first presidential term, rumors flew that Trump asked a question that sounded so preposterous it was dismissed out of hand.

“Can we buy Greenland?”

The response was predictable. Hand-wringing at the highest levels of statesmanship that produced sweaty palms of epic proportions. Pearls clutched so hard the sound rattled across the Atlantic.

Trump was now Eliza Doolittle at the Ascot Opening Race, mortifying everyone in attendance by shouting: “Come on, Dover! Come on, Dover! Move your bloomin’ arse!”

The Wall Street Journal claims that in the spring of 2018, at a business dinner, Trump mentioned that someone told him Denmark was having trouble funding Greenland. Whoever this unnamed source also suggested an unorthodox solution: “Why don’t you buy it?”

“‘What do you guys think about that?’ [Trump] asked the room,” the WSJ reports. “‘Do you think it would work?’”

It’s clear from how the story is framed that everyone thought it was a joke. Not as in “just a half joke with a kernel of truth in it,” but a full-blown “Haha, OMG that’s hilarious, did you hear what he said?” kind of joke.

Before we laugh this off, though, it’s worth asking a dangerous question: has this idea ever been taken seriously before—or are we mistaking a first thought for a punchline?

I’m no expert on Trump or real estate deals, but I am a business owner myself.

Almost everything big or ambitious I’ve ever done started as a thought that sounded outrageous at first. I don’t think I’m unique that way.

It’s pretty simple.

First, a wild idea pops into your head, or you hear someone else suggest it, perhaps seriously, or perhaps humorously.

Second, you start to wonder: “Hmm… wait a minute. Is that even possible?”

Third, you start talking to people in your inner circle to see what they think. You ask things like “What do you guys think about that?” and “Do you think it would work?”

Exactly like Trump did in 2018.

From there, you do some research, weigh the pros and cons, and eventually, you make a decision and move forward.

When Trump first toyed with the idea of running, most people (myself included) thought it was all just a big, goofy publicity stunt to get us to remember who he was, or watch The Apprentice, or sell Trump Steaks, or whatever.

It was all just an act to build notoriety and sell his image as a celebrity, we thought. But then, he did two things nobody expected him to do:

1. He actually ran.

2. He actually won.

With a story like this, the media organizations cast Trump as Lawrence Van Dough in Richie Rich: a wooden, one-dimensional, comic-book villain. He bombs an airplane, gives an evil grin, laughs an evil laugh, lights a cigar, and says:

“After I plunder the Rich family vault, I think I’d like to buy a country somewhere. Something small, not too ostentatious. Luxembourg, perhaps, or maybe Ecuador?”

Only bad guys buy countries. It’s common knowledge. We all know this.

But these caricatures of real people with real power insult the intelligence of the rest of us, and they also diminish the bigger question at hand: What’s so wrong about buying countries anyway?

When I first heard about Trump wanting to buy Greenland years ago, I didn’t think it was a joke. I know he says a lot of crazy things, but this one hit different. My first reaction was, “Hold on, what’s his motivation here?” There was clearly more to this story than meets the eye.

It really sent me digging deep to learn why he would say this. It couldn’t just be that he’s an evil billionaire chomping on a stogie, wondering how he could possibly spend all his ill-gotten treasure.

But I didn’t see any news stories that took that question seriously.

All the articles I found were “Trump said this outrageous thing; world leaders reacted with scorn and embarrassment.”

In the whitespace between the lines, I could almost make out the unwritten subtitle: “Obviously, they’re all laughing at him. Because they are smart, and he is just so, so stupid.”

But really, why would an American president say something like that? I wondered.

I didn’t wave it off as lunacy. I pondered it deeply, and it seems that few others did.

Trump is especially good at voicing questions that don’t just cause outrage in and of themselves—people are also outraged at the audacity that such a question could even be asked.

But hear me out: let’s go down this rabbit hole for a moment. Let’s assume, if only for the sake of argument, that America’s 45th and 47th president is asking some questions that may be wild but are also fair:

Is Greenland even for sale? Why would we buy it? What’s in it for us? What’s in it for them?

All of these questions are, actually, perfectly reasonable. And any attempts to wave them off as illegitimate are not reasonable.

“You don’t buy countries. It just isn’t done” isn’t a good answer. (It’s also not true).

“Greenland is part of Denmark. It’s always been that way” isn’t a good answer. (It’s also not true).

“Asking questions like that isn’t polite” isn’t a good answer. (It’s not even an answer, actually).

These are all deflections, not answers. And yet, almost all the responses I’ve seen so far sound just like them.

Hear me out as I ask my own outrageous question:

Why can’t we take questions seriously, even if we don’t like the person who asks, or the way they’re asked?

Something Trump does unusually well is ask questions with a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity. He’s willing to ask things that seem obvious but sound stupid, but often aren’t.

He asks questions like “Why are things the way they are?” and “Should it be that way?” When the consensus makes no sense, why not challenge the consensus? It’s the right thing to do.

It’s frustrating when I’m trying to get to the bottom of an issue and find that people don’t really want to know the answer: they’re just interested in spouting preconceived notions that can’t be questioned.

In this case, the presupposition is that: “Greenland is not for sale.”

But seriously… How do you know? When is the last time anybody asked?

I’m glad Trump asked. And because he asked, I also asked.

And guess what? Believe it or not, there’s actually an answer. In fact, there’s a long and storied history behind this exact question.

Saying “Greenland is not for sale” is easily debunked.

Time for a quick history lesson!

But first: a reminder to set the stage for how we got here…

Donald Trump says something totally bizarre and outlandish, like “We should buy Greenland.”

The world laughs.

Denmark says, “Greenland is not for sale.”

Americans scoff.

People say he’s out of touch. He’s a lunatic.

Also, that’s a stupid idea. This could never happen.

But after the initial shock of such an audacious and unexpected proposal, with only a few minutes of reflection, anyone—including you—can see this is not a stupid idea at all.

It’s not even a new idea. (Or a “Republican” one.) It was proposed by America multiple times in the past.

After Secretary of State William Seward’s successful acquisition of Alaska from Russia in 1867, President Andrew Johnson (a Democrat) seriously considered acquiring the island (though it never materialized into a formal offer).

In 1910, President William Taft made an informal proposal for a “land swap” to Denmark, whereby we would gain Greenland in exchange for parts of the Philippines. It was never solidified beyond informal exploration, though.

Later, in 1946, President Harry Truman (a Democrat) made an outright bid for Greenland with $100 million in gold to Denmark, which then rejected it.

After a decade, for strategic reasons during the Cold War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a recommendation to President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 to acquire Greenland. On the advice of the State Department, he chose not to pursue it officially.

So, whether these efforts were formal or informal, and whether they led to direct negotiations or offers… why was this such a stupid idea when President Donald Trump floated the idea in 2018 and again in 2025?

Four American presidents considered or proposed to buy Greenland, whether the idea was reciprocated or solicited by Denmark or not.

So why is it only stupid when Trump says out loud what four previous presidents (including two Democratic presidents) also suggested?

That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Also, there’s an especially rich irony in any discussions of negotiating real estate deals with the Danes in particular.

Why? Fifty years after buying Alaska from Russia, America made an offer to Denmark to buy another island—a set of islands, in fact—the Danish West Indies.

And even a cursory reading of the history of that acquisition shows that what happened in the past is echoing today.

See for yourself!

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson (now our third Democrat) and Secretary of State Robert Lansing, borrowing from James Monroe and Theodore Roosevelt, first spoke softly, then threatened with a very big stick.

Concerned about recent events and Danish recalcitrance, Lansing implied that if Denmark was unwilling to sell, the United States might occupy the islands to prevent their seizure by Germany.

Preferring peaceful transfer to occupation, the Danish government agreed to Lansing’s demands, and Brun and Lansing signed a treaty in New York on August 4, 1916.

Sound familiar?

In other words, Denmark told the Americans, “The Danish Indies are not for sale.”

It turns out they were.

We call them the United States Virgin Islands now.

(They’re featured in the photo at the top of this post, by the way).

Who knows, we may soon pluck another island from Legoland to add to our collection, by hook or by crook?

I’ve been to both Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands—both questionable acquisitions at the time. I’m glad we have them today, and that Russia and Denmark don’t.

Who knows? Maybe for my next vacation, I’ll be booking a flight to Trump International Airport on U.S. Greenland Island.

Buying Greenland really is a serious proposal after all: in fact, the deeper you dig, the more you see just how valuable having control over the world’s largest island could be.

Why?

In a word: Russia.

In two: Russia and China.

When you view the world as it really is—as a globe—and not a whimsically flattened distortion like the Mercator Projection is, it immediately becomes clear.

As the USA’s Realtor in Chief, Trump knows that it’s all about location, location, location.

China is inserting itself in America’s backyard via its Belt and Road Initiative by attempting to build multiple airports in Greenland—the first effort of its kind this close to us—which is an astonishing intrusion into our sovereignty and a bold attempt at piercing the shield of the Monroe Doctrine.

Russia is the world’s biggest nuclear power, and—don’t forget, the country we’re funding an active war against—is somewhat unchecked in the Arctic region right now.

So, with vast navigation rights in the Arctic passage next to Russia, plus the most brazen effort yet by China to meddle in the Western Hemisphere, it’s no wonder America’s top real estate developer wants to make the greatest land deal in the history of the country.

Which raises a reasonable question: why shouldn’t the United States at least explore relieving the financial pressure on the Danes? They can stop spending $1 billion a year on a frozen island 2,300 miles away from Copenhagen with a population smaller than Kalamazoo.

Why not at least ask?

I keep noticing something on Substack, and it’s both fascinating and horrifying.

It’s not a negative critique of the platform itself, and, if anything, I’m actually saying it’s a strength. Free speech platforms like Substack are giving us something we’ve almost never had before: the ability to watch very bad ideas being developed, refined, and legitimized in real time: it’s all out in the open, with names and faces attached.

While it seems counterintuitive, this is precisely why free speech is worth defending.

When publishers like “The Bulwark” and writers like Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson plot their plans out in the open, for everyone to see, it’s extremely valuable even as it is incredibly unsettling.

For most of history, we could only discover dangerous ideologies after the damage was done.

Investigators would comb through private journals, manifestos, and notes found in bedrooms and basements, piecing together what someone believed, dreamed about, and planned, once it was already too late to matter.

Those documents might satisfy some level of curiosity, but they’re entirely useless for prevention. What’s different now is that we don’t have to reconstruct hidden manifestos after the fact.

Substack allows us to see, with clarity, how these ideas form, harden, radicalize followers, and gain confidence before they metastasize into policy or action.

This visibility matters: when bad ideas are built in public, they aren’t hiding. But that is also a double-edged sword, because those of us who object to burning America to the ground can’t say these movements came from nowhere.

I’ve said this many times: if you want to see a “who’s who” of the most destructive ideologues in America right now, they’re all on Substack— many of them on the “Substack Bestsellers” lists with orange and purple checkmarks next to their names.

That is not what’s most alarming, though. It’s already breathtaking that these ideas exist and that they’re being articulated publicly. But what’s worse is that hordes of people are paying for them. These destructive voices are being amplified, celebrated, and endorsed, and every $9/month subscription is a literal investment in their ideologies.

America is very sick right now: the market signal is telling us, “Give us more of this.”

For years, I have watched my home state of California systematically kill the golden geese that made it great by going after founders, business owners, entrepreneurs, risk-takers, etc.

The convoy out of the state has grown so large that even the patently nonpartisan U-Haul has provided hard data that shows what many have long-suspected to be true: namely, a LOT of people are moving away from California.

Just look at this incredible nugget right at the top of the U-Haul® Growth Index released last week: “California ranks last with the greatest out-migration number for the sixth consecutive year.”

But they’re not done yet: Sacramento is not content to simply run the rank-and-file out of the state—they’ve now proposed a “Billionaire Tax” (which is literally just a first-in-the-nation state-enforced wealth confiscation scheme).

And for weeks, I have been pondering: who could possibly have dreamt up something so profoundly stupid and destructive? Well, today, I got my answer.

The “malevolent dark elf” referred to here is the #9 bestseller in “U.S. Politics.”

This man, intent on monkeywrenching America’s economic and political stability, has (somehow) found a way to make his horrible ideas jump off the page and into real legislation being formed right now in America’s most populous state.

And remarkably, tens of thousands of subscribers pay for a steady stream of caustic ooze flowing from the jealous keyboards of “disarchitects” just like him, who are inventing “billionaire taxes” out of thin air.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with the platform itself—Substack is doing its job, which is giving the people what they want. It’s just a mirror in that sense, or, perhaps a better metaphor: an X-Ray, showing us what’s just beneath the surface if only you care to look.

But it is a profound indictment of our not taking the paradox of free speech and the marketplace of ideas seriously. With total freedom of expression comes responsibility, yet American society is derelict in its duty to counter awful arguments with better ones.

To put it plainly: in 2026, ideas don’t have to be good to spread.

They don’t even have to be logical or coherent. They just have to be emotionally intoxicating (e.g., “Tax the billionaires! I’m not a billionaire; this won’t affect me!”)

This is how it works now, and I don’t think people are paying attention: to be clear, no one is being silenced. No one is being heckled or shouted down. This isn’t like watching calm speakers drowned out by protesters with bullhorns (as is often the case in the AI hysteria and fights over building data centers).

No, it’s far worse than that.

The serious voices exist. The counterarguments exist. The planners and adults are still speaking.

They’re just losing.

They can’t even claim that they’re being deplatformed or cancelled anymore. Substack is proof enough of that. Better men and better ideas are losing not because they’re forbidden or “ghost-banned,” but because they’re boring.

Restraint doesn’t go viral. Rage converts better than responsibility.

And this is what really keeps me up at night. Not that so many bad ideas are visible, but that they’re winning. That people are smiling, clapping, and paying for them.

After Columbine, everyone said, “We didn’t see this coming.”

This time, we can’t say that.

The American electorate is addicted to resentful, moralizing, apocalyptic content, and this addiction is contagious. It’s spreading faster than anything careful, measured, or sane.

What a bizarre time to be alive.

In the future, if and when “political science” ever returns to a respectable, substantive field of study again, they will not ask “Why didn’t they see this coming?”

Because we did see it coming. We watched it happen, in public, in real time.

Instead, they’ll ask: “Why didn’t anyone stop it?”

And to that, I don’t have a good answer.

Of all the things I hate with a passion that have arisen from our internet subculture over the past few decades, “life hacks” are very close to the top of that list.

They’re stupidly overrated. They are usually not much of a “hack” at all; they’re just tiny modifications of things you do already that are sometimes sort of clever. In my entire life, never have I ever said, “Wow, thank you for that life hack—it has changed my life!”

In every single case I can think of, when I have tried a life hack, I think “Hey, this is pretty cool!” at first. Then, a few hours or a few days later, I realize “Ugh. This seemed like a good idea, but it’s too much work, and it doesn’t really save me any time,” so I abandon it.

I mean, putting pancake mix in a squeeze bottle? Looks cool on a YouTube short; it’s actually kind of dumb in practice, and it is never as simple as it looks. Plus, now you have an additional dish to wash.

Human nature is really confusing that way: we are addicted to things like life hacks because the “curiosity gap” gets the best of us, and humans LOVE to feel like they’ve discovered a “cheat code.” (“I know something you don’t!” gives some people’s brains insane amounts of dopamine).

This isn’t just annoying—it’s actively harmful. Here’s why.

The biggest problem is not that they’re so bad in themselves; it’s that they can increase our anxiety and reduce our contentment by making us feel like we’re constantly missing out. Our inner voice gnaws away at us:

• “Do I have the optimal set of life hacks?”

• “Is there a way to life hack this hard thing I’m doing right now?”

• “Are there any new life hacks I don’t know about yet?”

The end result is that we can end up worse off than we were before. We can’t even do normal things, like loading the dishwasher, anymore. Instead, we wonder:

“Is there a smarter way to load the dishwasher? Didn’t I scroll past a YouTube thumbnail that said ‘Are You Loading Your Dishwasher the Wrong Way?’ I’m pretty sure I did, but now I can’t remember if I watched it or not, and now I’m wondering what I’m doing wrong, and I’m getting nervous and hyperventilating, and ahhhhhh what’s wrong with me?!!”

This is a symptom of the sickness of our attention-seeking and clout-chasing digital economy.

My advice: JUST LOAD THE DISHWASHER AND MOVE ON!

Stop trying to over-optimize your life.

Good enough is good enough.

Okay, I’m just shouting to try to allay your fears in a friendly way.

So, having said all that… There are four things I learned in 2025 that are kinda, sorta like life hacks, but I would never really call them that myself. I’m just saying it here in hopes that this goes viral so I can get attention and clout. (Just kidding… mostly).

There are not a lot of changes I’ve made in my life where I can say, “I started doing this one very specific thing habitually, and I have noticed a very clear outcome from doing that.” But these ones are just like that.

For whatever reason, 2025 was the year of discovering (or at least noticing) all of them. Not sure why: maybe I just spent the whole year trying mindfulness more than usual?

Either way, here I present to you a list of things that I started doing at some point this year that actually stuck, and I have seen a demonstrable difference.

All of these together will help you decrease stress, reduce wasted time, and even help you lose weight (no joke).

If you find any of them helpful, great! If you don’t, that’s okay too—let me know what you have tried in 2025 that works for you, and that you’ll keep doing in 2026.

Drum roll, please…

Four Life Habits That Changed My Life in 2025

(And what you should do if you want to see a difference as well)

#1: Delete all “scrolling apps” on your phone

Don’t just log out of them.

Delete them.

They’ve all got to go.

Now.

You know that thing we do, where we’re all standing around looking at our phone screens, and we know it looks terrible, but we all do it anyway? We’re embarrassed by it, but we can’t stop.

I discovered what’s so addictive about my phone in 2025, and it’s not the phone itself.

Smartphones are a remarkable productivity tool.

But they are also a remarkable productivity killer.

For whatever reason, it took me until I turned 40 to realize what the difference is: mindless scrolling.

Call it whatever you want: endlessly scrolling, doomscrolling—whatever.

Whenever you catch yourself flicking your thumb up on your phone screen, you’re doing it. That’s the thing I’m talking about.

Stop it.

Stop doing that now.

Learn to recognize that gesture that has become a passive, involuntary response by now. Whenever you do it, ask yourself, “Am I scrolling?” If so, look at the app you have open and delete it.

Right now.

This works in two amazing ways:

First, the simple act of scrolling is mesmerizing and hypnotic. We fall into a trance state, and our brains turn off. We become passive consumers. That’s how people get hit by cars sometimes while crossing the street: they’re so engrossed in seeing what’s on their screen that they tune out what’s going on around them. This is literally dangerous and even life-threatening.

A rubric for deciding which phone apps to delete

Here’s a helpful rubric to know when you should delete an app from your phone.

If you’re using an app that “refreshes” the content or “feeds” you algorithmic content you didn’t specifically ask for or click on, delete it.

There you go: your decision framework is literally that simple.

If you’re looking at a feed of news, posts, articles, or videos that your phone or the app THINKS you want, but you didn’t ASK for, get rid of it.

You don’t need it.

Second, most of the apps that have this kind of content also rely on giving you pop-up notifications on your phone and the little red bubble that makes you so insane you will literally do anything to make it go away.

Why? The makers of these apps know something you don’t: that all they have to do to get you to go back into their app is tell you you missed out on something. That’s the curiosity gap again—we can’t stand not knowing what we missed out on, so we open it up again to find out.

Five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes later, we’re standing there dumbly looking at our screen, wondering, “Why am I looking at this?”

Social media apps are obviously the worst.

Here’s a destructive cycle I found myself trapped in multiple times earlier this year.

The 2FA Interruption Trap

• Step 1: Visit Gmail, Amazon, or another website I intended to visit for the express purpose of taking a specific action, like checking my email or ordering something.

• Step 2: Try to log in.

• Step 3: Get a “two-factor authentication” notice that says “We just sent a six-digit code to your phone to verify your login.”

• Step 4: Pick up my phone to get the code and then…

• Step 5: Get distracted by all the little red bubbles, and open Facebook (or Instagram, or YouTube, or whatever)…

• Step 6: Look back up at my computer, and wonder, “How on Earth am I halfway through a 17-minute video called ‘The Dark Secret Behind the Royal Family’s Wealth?’ Why am I even on my phone? What was I doing? Where am I?”

This kind of nonsensical interruption will eat into your productivity in a destructive and expensive way.

But fear not! There is a solution: delete all “scrolling apps” on your phone!

Don’t just sign out of them. Make them all go away.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn (yes, even business apps), Threads, Bluesky (Uhh, why do you even have this?), Medium, Twitter/X, Substack (yes, even though this is a Substack email), and more.

If there’s some sort of life-threatening emergency where you will literally die without one of these apps, you can always download it again later.

And here’s the dirty secret that the companies that make these apps want you to forget: with every one of them, you can simply log into the service from your computer.

Every… single… one of them.

So you don’t even have to say “I’m canceling my Instagram account,” or “I’m deleting my LinkedIn profile.” You’re just saying: “I’m removing these services from my phone so that they no longer have the power to interrupt my life without my awareness or permission.”

Congrats: you are now back in control again. You can visit those websites on your computer anytime you want, at YOUR convenience.

Also, if you’re like me, after only an hour or two, you will notice something very strange: you’ll be standing in line at a coffee shop, or sitting on a bus, or eating lunch, and you’ll instinctively pick up your phone, hold it up to your face, and look at it, then be confused.

“Why did I do that?” you’ll wonder because there’s nothing for you to see there.

You are now realizing just how addicted you were to scrolling content. That muscle memory is so familiar that it’s almost involuntary to pick up the phone and place it in front of your face, expecting to see something. Except now, you’re staring at a screen with a bunch of boring apps that don’t feed you content to give you a dopamine rush.

You’ll stare at your phone like it’s a weird object you’ve never seen before.

Almost like a smoker who quits smoking cold turkey—he may start to awkwardly paw at his shirt’s breast pocket, and only after a couple of attempts to grab the cigarette box that is no longer there, does he realize, “Oh, wait, I don’t have cigarettes anymore.”

All that to say, remove the temptation—and the ability!—to have your day interrupted (hijacked, actually) by tech companies that are constantly injecting content and advertisements into your veins, 24 hours a day, everywhere you go, including your time spent on the toilet(!).

After a few weeks, you will start to not miss it anymore, and you wonder why you ever allowed yourself to fall into that trap in the first place.

Try it. It will literally change your life. At least it did for me.

#2: Read the ingredients on everything you eat or drink

No, that doesn’t mean read every single ingredient, making sure you can properly pronounce them all, and that you actually know what they all are.

(Although it would be good for you to know what butylated hydroxytoluene or carboxymethyl cellulose are, as long as you’re putting them in your body.)

It does mean doing a quick visual scan of all the ingredients and looking for the things you’re trying to avoid. This is harder than you think, for (at least) two reasons.

First, did you know that beer, wine, and many other alcoholic drinks don’t have to have nutrition facts on them? That means you literally cannot discern how many calories are in what you’re drinking just by checking the label. There is no label!

Once I got in the habit of checking the ingredients of everything I eat and drink, I noticed something shocking (for the first time) when I was drinking a beer one day:

“Wait a second, this doesn’t have any nutrition info on it. This is outrageous! How do I know what’s in it?”

So I took a picture of the bottle in my hand and used an AI chatbot (Grok) to ask what kind of nutrition facts I could get for it.

You know what I learned when I started doing this? There are a LOT of calories in alcoholic drinks! (It’s no wonder they try to hide it!) The beer I was drinking was estimated to have 250 calories in it.

WHAT?!

That means if I drank two of those beers in one evening, I’ve just added 500 calories to my body in one day! Do that a few times a week, and if you’re trying to stay slim, you’re absolutely cooked!

If you’re counting calories (though I’m not saying you should), it’s really easy to focus only on your food, and you could forget that by having two or three beers at a social event for business (for example), you may have added 500-800 extra calories to your intake that day. Do that a few times a month, and thousands of calories add up.

And you wouldn’t even know it!

On that note… even if you don’t drink alcohol, here’s the other reason you should read all the ingredient labels on what you eat and drink.

Second, it is shocking to discover that most American food is filled with

1. Sugar

2. Salt

3. Dairy

4. Soy

I’ve started referring to these as “the Four Horsemen of American food”—they’re all bad for you (well, mostly), and they’re all incredibly sneaky in the way they show up in your food without your even noticing.

For example, I used to eat cans of split pea soup or chili almost every day for lunch. For years. They’re cheap, they’re tasty, and they’re full of beans, which are good for you, right?

Well, sort of. Yes, meat and beans are good for you. But you know what is not? Sugar and sodium. And maybe I’m just naïve or stupid, but I was astonished to find out just how much sugar and sodium are added to both of these.

Sugar in chili? Yes, lots. I did not expect that at all.

Salt in chili? Well, duh. I expected that, of course. But just ONE can of chili has 71% of my daily value of sodium. YOWZA—that is a lot of sodium!

Dairy is also a sneaky bugger because it shows up in a lot of things that you don’t expect. Cheese crackers, for example, of course, you would expect there to be dairy in those. But there’s actually dairy in all kinds of crackers that don’t have even cheese in them at all. And chips are filled with dairy, too. Why? I don’t know: something about the way they’re flavored.

Soy is one of the most disappointing additives in food because there are entire categories of food where it seems impossible to get away from it.

There are lots of problems with soy that I don’t need to get into right now, but suffice it to say, for me: soy plays with my emotions in a weird way. Sometimes it literally makes me feel really sad, like I want to cry for no reason.

Why?

Because soy beans are filled with estrogen.

Did anyone ever tell you that? Probably not—certainly, nobody ever told me that.

But one day, I started wondering why I always felt like crying in the middle of the morning after I ate my daily granola bar at my computer at the office.

I looked at the ingredients list, and: BOOM—SOY! Tons of it.

I started rifling through all my boxes of granola bars from different brands, all with different flavors… Every single one of them was filled with soy.

I threw them all in the garbage can in a total and utter rage.

I had been sabotaging my own mental health every morning just by doing something I thought was good: eating a quick breakfast on the go that had lots of protein in it.

Your mileage may vary, but soy, at least in its processed form, is a terrible additive, and it is all… over… the… place… These days, I avoid soy like a toxin.

You may love soy, and that’s fine. But you should at least KNOW that soy is in your food. And, as I’ve said, there are a LOT of food items out there that have soy in them that you’d never guess. (I never did, anyway.)

Try it. It will literally change your life. At least it did for me.

#3: Make one day per week your “admin day”

When I used to work for an employer (many years ago), the company I worked for was sold, and the new company owner made a lot of changes as soon as he took over.

Most of the changes he made were very unpopular. People started quitting in droves. I knew I wasn’t long for the company either, but one of the changes he made at the beginning was so simple it was absolutely brilliant. He told me:

Ron, from now on, you are not allowed to meet with clients on Fridays. I forbid you to have client meetings on Fridays, no matter what. Use Fridays for administrative tasks so that you can close out the week in a strong way and be prepared to come back to the office on Monday and hit the ground running.

I asked him, “What if a client asks me to meet with her on a Friday and it’s the only day she can meet, or if she says it’s urgent?”

He said:

Nope. No deal. Make me the bad guy if you need to. Throw me under the bus. Tell them ‘I’m sorry, but it’s a company rule; I’m not allowed to meet on Fridays.’

This was a genius stroke. And it’s something I took with me from that job. A few years ago, though, I sort of forgot about it and stopped doing it habitually. But in 2025, I implemented it again. Instead of Fridays, I made it Mondays.

I do not meet with clients on Mondays. Those are my admin days.

Although I don’t have a boss to throw under the bus, and sometimes I do compromise if somebody says it’s the only time they can meet, I do religiously block off time in my calendar on Mondays.

This does not mean I block off an hour or a few hours for admin tasks.

It means I block off the entire day.

No meetings.

No Zooms.

No extended phone calls.

I am in the office, but I am unavailable. I can respond to emails, no problem. But actually having a meeting? It’s against the rules.

If you can, whether you’re employed or work for yourself, take at least one business day every week, and allow yourself to catch up on busy work, scheduling, research, continuing education, bookkeeping, invoicing, or any other administrative tasks you have, and do not allow this to get derailed by meetings.

Meetings are absolute productivity killers, and the more meetings you have, the more productivity you kill… even if they’re good meetings! This doesn’t mean you don’t ever meet with people. It just means you don’t meet with people on your “admin day.”

Here’s a trick I’ve implemented to make explaining this a bit easier for clients. I’ve started vocalizing my rule, politely, but rigidly.

When we talk about having a meeting, I’ll say: “Let me see what’s on my calendar for next week… Monday is out, because that’s my admin day and I don’t schedule meetings then.”

With perhaps one or two exceptions, nobody has given me pushback. Nobody has ever said, “I refuse to meet with you on any day except Monday. It MUST be Monday.”

For some weird reason, I’m always afraid they might, but they never do. In fact, sometimes people say, “Wow, that’s a good idea. I should do that myself.”

Yes. You should.

Block off one day per week—the same day every week—for admin day. If you can’t do a full day, do a half day. Whatever you choose, keep your promise to yourself that you will respect your own time and boundaries.

Try it. It will literally change your life. At least it did for me.

#4: Take a walk

That’s it.

Take a walk.

It’s literally that simple.

Take a walk every single day.

I actually recorded a video about this topic years ago for an educational course I made for freelancers and solopreneurs (you can watch it here, if you’d like).

I take two kinds of walks every day (or at least I try to):

Type 1: The “Problem Solving Walk”

When I get stuck on a complicated problem, and I’m sitting in front of my computer, I can either click around in frustration or stare at the screen, waiting for inspiration to arrive, or I can just take a walk.

In a problem-solving walk, the point isn’t the walk per se—it’s to try to solve the problem in a different context.

With a change of scenery, many times I found that I can simply stand up, step out of my office with my phone in hand, or sometimes a tiny notepad and a pen, and walk for a mile or two, with the goal of solving my problem by the time I get back to the office.

With this walk, you take your problems with you.

It is amazing how well this works. By removing myself from my office environment, this somehow allows me to think in a way that is more stimulating and unrestricted. So I will set a goal for myself: “I’m going to go for a walk and not come back until I have an answer to this problem.”

Sometimes, that means I walk around the block. Sometimes that means I walk 10 or 20 blocks. It just depends on the severity of the challenge and how many ideas come to me in that span of time.

Try it sometime: it really works. Plus, it’s good for you! It is good for your health to exercise your legs, get your blood pumping, elevate your heart rate, and breathe fresh air every day.

Type 2: The “Freeing Walk”

I try to take one of these walks each day, too, and it’s the literal opposite of the problem-solving walk. With this one, I walk out the door with only my keys.

That’s it: no phone, no earbuds, no notepad, not even my wallet—nothing that can distract me from freeing and clearing my mind, and no tasks or agenda.

I can’t answer the phone, respond to text messages, scroll on apps (Ha, fooled you! I already deleted all my scrolling apps!)

With this walk, you leave your problems behind.

Here, I just walk around and observe things. I look at the trees, listen to the birds, smell the flowers, or the scent of dirt in the air—whatever that day brings to me.

There’s no agenda here, and I’m not allowed to think about business.

I just walk and observe.

I see what happens. Explore a new territory, try a new route, pass by a new business, or whatever else catches my fancy that day.

(Seriously: I found my new barber this way. I just walked a few blocks, discovered a barber shop I’d never seen before, and thought, “I should go in and say hi.” I’m glad I did! He’s been cutting my hair ever since!)

Sometimes, if I’m really stressed out, I’ll take more than one walk. If I have a stressful meeting or a complicated phone call, I’ll take a walk before I go back into another meeting or take another call.

If I have meetings or calls stacked together, I’ll take a walk between each one. Simple.

Try it. It will literally change your life. At least it did for me.

I hope you found these helpful. After 40 years on this earth, whether it’s at work or at home, I’ve found that the secret to these kinds of things is not simply doing them.

It’s in making them a habit.

It doesn’t help if you just try them once or twice or 13 times. They only work if you do them every day or every week. And the good news is, once you get into a good routine, all you have to do is keep it up. And it is way easier to keep doing something that has become a habit than to start a new habit.

So if you try them long enough to ingrain them in your mind and muscle memory so they feel like part of your daily or weekly agenda, you’ve already done the hardest part.

Let me know if any of these sound particularly helpful to you, or if you have other “life habits” that you recommend that I try. What are your secrets?

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year! See you in 2026!

“Project Blue,” a proposal to build a massive data center in Tucson, Arizona, was poised to deliver $3.6 billion in private capital to the region—the largest investment of its kind in the city’s history.

It should have been a Christmas gift to the people of Tucson—bringing jobs, infrastructure improvements, and long-term tax revenue.

After years of planning and regulatory hurdles, it was ready to launch.

Then, at the very last moment, the entire project imploded in a loud and spectacular fashion—not because it failed on the merits, but because the process collapsed under the pressure of collective emotion.

Project Blue Timeline (Key Events)

This sequence matters. It shows how the public process unfolded.

• June 17: Pima County Board of Supervisors narrowly approves (3–2) the land sale and rezoning required for Project Blue to proceed.

• July 23: Community Information Meeting (Mica Mountain High School). The first public meeting. No vote possible. Immediate backlash and hostile public response.

• August 4: Public Meeting (Tucson Convention Center). A presentation intended to inform the public before the formal council vote. Instead, it collapses into shouting and disorder.

• August 6: Study Session (Tucson City Hall). Council votes unanimously to end negotiations/withdraw the annexation track (which would have enabled Project Blue to connect to utilities, effectively killing it).

Act I: The Project

What Project Blue was—and why it should have been decided on the merits

I first heard about Project Blue in June, when I was asked by The Chamber of Southern Arizona to attend a public meeting and show my support.

As a member of the Chamber’s Emerging Leaders Council, I’m looped into legislative and economic development issues and occasionally asked to get involved. In this case, the request was straightforward: show up, wear a blue shirt, and encourage the Pima County Board of Supervisors to approve the project.

(Quick note: on March 31st, Sun Corridor Inc., which had been working on Project Blue for several years, merged with the Tucson Metro Chamber of Commerce, which then began its public-facing advocacy push under its new name, “The Chamber of Southern Arizona,” ahead of the June 2025 Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting.)

At that point, Project Blue was being described simply as a large data center project. The developer, Beale Infrastructure, had intentionally kept the end customer confidential (a common practice in projects of this scale).

None of the usual candidates for using a data center of this size (AWS, Meta, Google, Microsoft, or xAI) had been named yet. As far as most people knew, it was “just a data center.”

I reviewed the project’s fact sheet and basic details. Long story short, it was touted as “an opportunity for more than $3.6B in economic development for the City of Tucson.” That’s not a trivial number. And there was much to like:

• Private funding for huge public infrastructure improvements.

• A “water positive” project that would “match 100% of all water consumed with additional water replenishment projects.”

• It was framed as a model for “how public-private partnerships can support responsible development of critical digital infrastructure by prioritizing community needs.”

Overall, it appeared to be a thoughtfully crafted project designed to survive years of regulatory scrutiny, built by people who clearly understood Tucson’s geography, politics, and constraints.

Project Blue resembled long-term infrastructure projects I’d seen succeed in Colorado. But in over five years of living in Southern Arizona, nothing I’d encountered had come close to its scale here.

The project involved building a new data center by the fairgrounds, just eleven miles from my house. Amazon already operates a fulfillment center right down the street from where I live—close enough that, for the first time in almost 20 years as an Amazon Prime member, I get same-day delivery instead of having to wait for two days or more.

Every time I drive south on Kolb Rd toward I-10, I’m thankful for that big, boring white building that makes my daily life meaningfully better.

Project Blue seemed to be an expansion of the responsible infrastructure in Tucson that, when done well and placed intelligently, makes everyone’s lives better. Reading through the fact sheet, it actually reminded me of Apple Park (often called “Apple Campus 2”), the recently built, updated headquarters for Apple in Cupertino.

Like Project Blue, Apple Park was an ambitious modern infrastructure project for a tech company that required considerable cooperation with the local government and multiple very complicated, very tedious steps along the way.

It also initially used NDAs to keep the identity of Apple Inc., the end user, a secret until the last minute.

It was also an enormously expensive project that infused billions of dollars in private capital into a community that hadn’t seen deals of this size before, while seeking to minimize environmental impacts. Apple’s $5 billion campus on 360 acres added fruit trees, native grasses, and an herb garden, and uses recycled water and solar power. Project Blue’s $3.6 billion campus on 290 acres would also add trees, native vegetation, and employ rainwater harvesting and solar power.

Unlike Project Blue, Apple Park was massively popular—and Cupertino celebrated it as a symbol of ambition and confidence, not something to be feared.

Tucson, as I would soon learn, reacted very differently—and not by weighing tradeoffs or asking hard questions.

Act II: The Spark

How a routine public process turned volatile

In the end, I didn’t attend the Pima County meeting. I couldn’t fit it into my busy summer schedule, it didn’t seem emotionally or politically charged, and I didn’t feel any strong personal connection to it.

After the meeting, I figured it was no big deal: the county ultimately approved the land sale and rezoning in a close vote (3-2). At the time, it seemed like Project Blue was simply moving through the normal, slow, boring machinery of local government.

And then came the meeting at Mica Mountain.

That was when everything changed—for the project, for Tucson, and for me.

After receiving approval from the county, Project Blue’s next step was a “Community Information Meeting” at Mica Mountain High School.

I got an email from a fellow Emerging Leader who supported the project and planned to attend. She asked those of us who value economic growth and responsible development to be part of the conversation.

“Your presence can help make sure the full picture is represented,” she wrote.

That sounded good to me. I wanted to help represent the full picture, whatever that would turn out to be.

I added the event to my calendar for July 23, wore a blue t-shirt to work that day, and planned to leave the office early to make the 5:00 pm meeting—even though it was all the way on the other side of town.

My final work meeting that day, however, took much longer than expected. By the time I was done, I glanced at the clock, and it was already 5:30.

“Oh, crap, not again,” I thought. I had now missed two of these events in a row.

I knew the drive to Mica Mountain well (my youngest son used to play basketball on their campus), and I was sure that by the time I made it through rush-hour traffic, I would have missed almost all of the meeting.

“Maybe it’s not that big a deal,” I thought. “It’s a public event, so they’re probably livestreaming it. I can just watch it tomorrow.”

The next day, I kept my promise to myself to do my civic duty and watch the public meeting. I pulled up the video during my lunch break.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. My jaw dropped as a wild circus unfolded on camera.

I saw very few people (almost none) wearing blue shirts in the audience, as I had planned to do. I saw a lot of orange construction vests on people seated in the audience, and many people wearing red shirts. But the red-shirted people weren’t sitting calmly; they were standing in the back, holding signs laced with profanity, and shouting “BOO!” repeatedly.

I clicked around on the video player, skipping forward and backward, trying to understand what had caused such a bizarre escalation. It was a pure cacophony of noise.

“Whoa, this is not at all what I expected,” I thought.

I didn’t want to watch this anymore. I stopped the video and started Googling to try to see what news there might be about the event. There were several stories out already—and the headlines were jarring:

• Few hundred attend fiery first meeting on Project Blue, some leave with same concerns

• Tucson officials, developer face angry questions as 800 pack meeting on Project Blue

• Hundreds demand answers on Tucson’s proposed Project Blue data center at heated community meeting

• Emotions run high in public meeting held by City of Tucson over Project Blue

What on earth had gone wrong?

Seeing all of this made me feel like missing the meeting the night before helped me dodge a bullet. The protesters looked absolutely furious, angry enough that showing up in a blue shirt, as I’d initially planned, suddenly felt like an act of provocation.

People shouted, “Yeah, right!” “We don’t trust you!” and loud boos of disapproval as the presenters tried to make their case for this marvel of modern technology and engineering.

The crowd wasn’t buying it. Attendees held signs with angry (and sometimes profane) slogans:

• “WATER POSITIVE MY ASS”

• “PROJECT BLUE IS A SCAM”

• “CORPORATE F**KERS”

• “HANDS OFF OUR WATER”

• “WE ARE NOT ‘WET’ FOR BEALE”

• “WATER FOR THE PEOPLE, NOT FOR BILLIONAIRES”

• “NOT ONE DROP FOR DATA”

(Take note of that last line—that will come into play in a big way later.)

I didn’t know what to make of any of this, so I used a lifeline: I decided to phone a friend. I called a fellow small business owner in Tucson who is also deeply involved with the chamber of commerce, and asked what she thought.

• Me: “Did you go to the Project Blue meeting last night at Mica Mountain?”

• Her: “Was that last night? I heard about it but didn’t go. Why do you ask?”

• Me: “I was going to go, but couldn’t. I’m glad I didn’t go, now.”

• Her: “Why? What happened?”

• Me: “Have you seen the news?”

I read off some of the headlines and quotes I found, trying to convey how quickly everything had unraveled. She was as surprised as I was by how much hostility had surfaced so quickly.

I told her that, of course, I want to support my community, and as a chamber member, I do feel it’s important to contribute to public conversations about how we can best build and grow our local economy.

But this?

I was now rethinking whether I should be involved or say anything at all. This did not feel like the usual opposition from vocal NIMBYs who always oppose everything. This was something altogether different.

These people were filled with rage, and now I was afraid that if I made any public statement at all in favor of Project Blue, or simply showed up wearing a blue shirt, it could make me and my business a target. I asked my friend for her thoughts.

“How do you decide where to draw the line as a business owner? How do you weigh the risks of giving public support to something that can hurt your brand? I thought Project Blue was a community-supported development, but this clearly isn’t about economics or business at all. This is pure politics.”

She commended me for being cautious and said I would have to decide this for myself. I appreciated her being a sounding board, but she was right: only I could decide whether sticking my neck out for something that had become so toxic was worthwhile.

My phone call didn’t resolve anything.

I started thinking through the potential fallout. If I had attended that meeting, and my face ended up in a picture at the top of one of those news stories, could that harm my business?

I still liked everything I had learned so far about the project based on the available data. But it was becoming clear that publicly supporting it now carried a real downside and no meaningful upside.

Project Blue wasn’t going to change my life immediately. It wasn’t going to make me rich, land me a client, or materially benefit my company in the short term. It was the kind of long-term investment that helps a community function better, even though the benefits are diffuse and take time to show up.

Despite owning a small, local business here in Tucson, speaking favorably about the project risked reputational damage, online targeting, or being reframed as a “corporate shill” for Amazon, OpenAI, or “big tech billionaires.”

Like the call I made to my friend, the meeting at Mica Mountain resolved nothing.

As a purely informational meeting, no structural changes were going to be made there anyway: people attempted to make arguments for and against the project, opinions were aired (shouted), and viewpoints collided in what quickly became a disordered and chaotic public gathering.

Since I didn’t attend, I can’t say so with certainty, but by all appearances, nobody’s mind was changed. Both sides dug into their existing positions with even more fervor than before.

What I took away from that meeting was simple: Clearly, the data no longer mattered. The conversation had moved beyond facts and into pure optics.

Act III: The Breakdown

When slogans replaced tradeoffs

The next step—the real test—was always going to be the Tucson City Council.

That’s where Beale Infrastructure would formally ask the city to annex a 290-acre parcel into Tucson’s city limits, making it possible to connect the project to public power and water infrastructure.

That vote was the final hurdle of a long, complicated, and expensive process. Before that day even arrived, the fuse was already lit.

Then everything exploded.

One of the biggest sticking points in opposition to Project Blue is just how late in the process public input was solicited. This clearly struck a nerve with the local activists on Instagram who created an Instagram page, put out a Bat Signal, and called in the reserves, quickly posting text messages, videos, and images on social media, asking everyone who cares about Tucson’s most precious resource—water—to engage and get involved to prevent a data center in the desert.

Stickers were quickly printed up.

Campaign buttons were pressed.

Bright red t-shirts were screen-printed.

All were distributed to activists to wear on camera.

Feeling caught off guard (and denied early visibility into a project already deep in the approval pipeline), activists shifted from persuasion to mobilization.

They put in a panicked, mad dash to stop it by organizing quickly and effectively.

And to their credit, they did.

The “No Desert Data Center” Instagram account quickly gained over 10,000 followers (as of today, it’s over 16,500) and posted regular “Upcoming Events” and “Call to Action” notices for activists to mobilize and show their opposition to any data center, for any customer, anywhere in the desert.

A local artist was quickly enlisted to create a logo: stark black text on a white background with a rain cloud, fish in a stream, cacti, and a javelina, that distilled their opposition into a simple phrase:

“NOT ONE DROP FOR DATA.”

As a slogan, this is brilliant.

Who doesn’t want to save water in the desert? Those of us who live in Southern Arizona understand, viscerally, how crucial water is for life. We don’t need a lecture on scarcity here—we see it every day just by looking out the window.

No, a pat phrase like this is very good marketing. I say that with admiration as someone who has worked in marketing for twenty years. Just five words, emotionally charged, to explain an entire movement. Brilliant.

The problem is, of course, that it collapses immediately under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

An amazing soundbite? Yes. But in practice? Pointless and dishonest.

“Not one drop” isn’t a policy position. It’s zero-tolerance absolutism dressed up as environmental virtue.

At that point, the debate stopped being about tradeoffs and became about purity—and that’s where the logic fell apart.

When you’re talking about infrastructure (of any kind), there are simply no systems that run on “zero” of anything. No public works run without tradeoffs, without inputs, or without costs.

Adult systems don’t work that way.

We already use water in Southern Arizona for all kinds of things that are largely uncontroversial: beef, alfalfa, cotton, dates, pecans, stone fruit, and other agricultural staples. Arizona is also famous internationally for its golf courses, which consume incredible amounts of water.

But I have yet to see any Instagram campaigns demanding “Not One Drop for Peaches” or “Not One Drop for Golf.” Why the strangely selective outrage for data centers?

And here’s where the lack of logic of a simple phrase like “Not one drop for data” really starts to show. It may be hard to believe unless you’ve looked into it, but Tucson isn’t using our full allotment of water.

I’ll say that again so I’m completely clear: the City of Tucson is legally entitled to more water than it currently uses. This is an established fact that isn’t disputed by anyone who knows Arizona’s water policy.

To be clear, water is indeed one of the desert’s most precious resources. But the legal compacts that govern Arizona’s allotment of water are EXTREMELY detailed and carefully monitored by multiple states, the federal government, and even a foreign country (Mexico).

We have fought our way to the United States Supreme Court multiple times over this issue: in a nearly perfect example of a system of checks and balances, there are seven states supplied with water from the Colorado River, and each one jealously guards their own interest while viciously monitoring everyone else’s usage like a hawk.

When I lived at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, where the Colorado River begins, people would sometimes say, “If you want to become extremely rich in Colorado, become a water attorney.”

All that to say, yes, water is our most precious resource. We’re already acting like it.

We don’t need activists wearing red shirts and buttons pretending like it’s a new concept.

It’s no accident that Tucson uses less water than we’re legally entitled to. This is by design, and it is the result of meticulous planning and modern technological infrastructure.

Project Blue was designed to run on excess water, non-potable water—water unsuitable for drinking or otherwise circulating back into our public water supply.

That’s precisely why the exact site was chosen, and the cooling system was engineered the way it was. That’s also why the people who literally run our water supply were supporting Project Blue.

When career city employees like Scott Schladweiler (Deputy Director of Tucson Water) are:

• participating in briefings

• answering technical questions

• explaining water usage, sourcing, and mitigation

• appearing alongside developers and county officials

…that tells you something very specific and very important: the project had already passed internal professional scrutiny. Put plainly, they had already run the numbers themselves.

And there’s an irony in all of this that the “not one drop” activists don’t seem to care about.

Tucson is not only using less water than we’re entitled to, but we also have a surplus of water that is non-potable that can either be used for some applications (like cooling data centers) or discharged and not used at all.

Currently, we’re doing nothing with it, so it gets pumped into the Santa Cruz River.

In other words, we have so much water that we can’t use it, so we just dump it out.

“Not one drop for data” feels good.

But you don’t govern a city in the desert with a million residents with good feelings.

What followed was not clarification, but accumulation.

The clearest sign that facts didn’t matter anymore came during public testimony, when City Manager Tim Thomure attempted to provide context.

The Arizona Daily Star reports:

When Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure said 17 golf courses that use reclaimed water each use the same amount of water annually as will Project Blue during its first phase of operations ending in 2029, people in the crowd shouted, ‘That’s not relevant’ and ‘that’s immaterial.’

Here’s where the story becomes frustrating for people who aren’t activists but do care about clean water and responsible environmental policy: this was never really about water.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just watch how the activism expanded over time.

It began with water.

“Not One Drop for Data” was the mantra in the beginning, which was clear enough.

It was also about animals.

Habitat will disappear and harm the yellow-billed cuckoos. See the desert tortoises who will be displaced? Here’s a drawing of a dead Gila topminnow. Do you want these little minnows to die?

It was also about secrecy.

Who is the secretive tech company behind the mysterious Project Blue? Is it Amazon, Google, Meta, or OpenAI? Why won’t they tell us? What do they have to hide?

It was also about electricity.

Where are the guarantees that this data center’s power usage won’t raise our rates? And by the way, data centers burn coal for power!

It was also about billionaires.

Look at Jeff Bezos slurping up a river with a straw. “Water for the people, not billionaires.”

It was also about Amazon.

Amazon is an evil global company that puts local companies out of business! Amazon does not care about our community!

It was also about AI.

Data centers will power the AI that’s going to steal our jobs and put us out of business!

It was also about Donald Trump, ICE, and Palantir.

Data centers power Palantir and secretive facial recognition, which is helping Donald Trump use ICE to harass and kidnap immigrants. A vote for Project Blue is a vote for ICE!

It was also about organized labor.

Amazon has a history of being anti-union! Where are the promises for union jobs in Tucson?

It was also about progressive values with words I’ve never even heard before.

“Environmental racism?” “Sacrifice zones?” and “Data colonialism?” (Yes, really).

In other words, it was about everything and the kitchen sink—all unrelated national culture-war issues… under the guise of saving water.

That isn’t mission creep. It’s a movement in search of a justification.

Act IV: The Consequences

How Tucson rewarded the wrong behavior

None of the protesters had any formal power, of course. Whether Project Blue would move forward was up to the Tucson Mayor and City Council, who alone had the authority to annex the land—thereby connecting the proposed data center to the city’s power and water.

This final step was the most consequential of all, making the difference between a bare patch of desert in unincorporated Pima County and a functioning piece of critical infrastructure capable of generating jobs and tax revenue for the City of Tucson for decades to come.

After multiple years of planning across jurisdictions, coordination between governmental agencies, and review by experts across numerous domains, representatives from Pima County, Beale Infrastructure, and a long list of additional stakeholders were finally prepared to speak when it mattered most.

That process was expected to culminate in early August.

On August 4, the City Council held a public meeting intended to present the details of Project Blue, answer questions, and prepare councilmembers for a formal vote two days later.

In theory, this was where the facts would be laid out calmly, tradeoffs discussed openly, and decision-makers given the information they needed to govern responsibly.

That is not what happened.

If ordinary citizens hoping for clarity were expecting the public meeting to finally provide answers we could trust, we were sorely disappointed. I certainly was.

From the very beginning, the event collapsed into disorder.

As Arizona Luminaria reported:

A particularly boisterous group of teenagers repeatedly stood on their chairs, held signs high above their heads, and screamed themselves hoarse in forceful disapproval of any claim in favor of Project Blue. ‘Allow them to introduce themselves so we can hear what they have to present,’ Tucson spokesperson Andrew Squire beseeched the crowd. ‘You can still boo your hearts out afterwards.’

I urge you to read that again.

This was not a normal public meeting in any meaningful sense. There was no pretense of decorum, deliberation, or good faith. It was a chaotic spectacle—one where volume and intimidation replaced discussion.

City representatives were reduced to begging the crowd to allow presenters to speak at all.

That moment mattered far more than any slogan or sign. It demonstrated—clearly, publicly, and on the record—that the basic conditions required for deliberation no longer existed.

By the time the meeting ended, the outcome of the upcoming council meeting was already effectively decided—not by facts, not by tradeoffs, but by intimidation.

This wasn’t a democratic decision made after deliberation; it was a textbook heckler’s veto, where the ability to disrupt replaced the obligation to govern.

Two days later, everything crashed and burned.

The event earlier that week had already condemned it to death; the execution came swiftly at the council meeting and “Study Session.”

Not with a debate.

Not with a vote on the merits.

And not with any serious weighing of tradeoffs.

On August 6, following the public meeting that had collapsed into shouting and disorder, the Tucson Mayor and City Council convened again in a Study Session.

But instead of proceeding with a substantive discussion of annexation, where the project’s costs, benefits, and tradeoffs should have been debated, the council took a different path.

Council voted unanimously to end negotiations and pull the annexation/development agreement from consideration, meaning there was no merits vote on Project Blue.

There would be no deliberation.

No structured argument for or against the project.

No public weighing of costs and benefits.

Project Blue was not rejected after a fair debate. It was never truly debated at all.

I wasn’t in the room for the city council meeting. By that point, I had grown weary of the hope that any good-faith discussion was still possible, and I gave up on even planning to attend any public meetings at all—no matter what color shirt I might wear.

Everything leading up to that night had felt pointless and embarrassing. Months of taxpayer-funded process had devolved into performative kabuki theater rather than civic deliberation, with no meaningful dialogue about what Project Blue actually was, who stood to benefit, or whether compromise or negotiation was even on the table.

But I did watch some of the meeting—at least as much of it as I could stomach.

What happened that evening shocked me.

When the council’s decision became clear, and it was understood that Project Blue was effectively dead, the room erupted. Cheers. Applause. Shouts of celebration. People hugged. Some cried tears of joy.

I later watched a video posted on Instagram by the “No Desert Data Centers” group showing the moment the Project Blue delegation stood up and exited the room.

The caption read:

city council ending project blue and watching beale take the walk of shame!!!

It was hard to comprehend what I was seeing.

The people leaving weren’t storming out. They didn’t yell, or gesture, or complain. They stood up quietly—smiled—politely gathered their briefcases, and exited without incident.

I recognized at least one person taking the “walk of shame.” Some of these people lived in Tucson. Some of them worked here. Some were public servants who had spent years doing their jobs in good faith.

And the crowd went wild—as if they’d just expelled a foreign invader.

That was the moment something in me shifted.

For the first time, I felt not just confusion or disappointment, but actual disgust.

In Tucson, it seems, no good deed goes unpunished.

A broad coalition—including civil servants and professionals across multiple disciplines—had spent thousands of hours attempting to bring a major investment in technology, infrastructure, and jobs to Southern Arizona. They carried the football all the way across the field, only to fumble it at the 1-yard line.

The activists were so very proud of themselves.

So very proud of what they had stopped that day.

So very proud of the message they had sent.

They don’t realize that their message was not: “In Tucson, we protect our resources.”

Their message was: “Tucson is closed for business.”

As it stands today, Project Blue, in its original form (becoming annexed into the City of Tucson and connected to the City’s power and water), is dead.

Beale Infrastructure remains the purchaser of the land, but the City’s decision to withdraw from annexation means the project—whether modified or re-tenanted—will proceed, if at all, outside Tucson’s boundaries. As a result, Tucson has now forfeited the associated tax base, infrastructure investment, and any leverage over water sourcing, design standards, or long-term economic impact.

So, in a highly ironic twist, Tucson technically didn’t stop the project—it just removed itself from it. By choosing not to annex the land and connect a major revenue-generating facility to city-owned power and water, Tucson gave up its only real leverage: a seat at the table.

The outcome is stark. No negotiated oversight. No infrastructure upgrades. No tax base. No public benefit. The city declined participation in a deal that may still generate substantial value—only now, Tucson receives none of it.

Beale Infrastructure is also exploring building other, similar projects in nearby jurisdictions (which is a detail that will matter later).

So, with activists dancing on its grave, how can we take an accurate autopsy? Not just of Project Blue, but the entire process, from start to finish?

This is important because the most concerning part about the death of Project Blue is not what happened, but how it happened.

What, precisely, were the lessons learned from this?

For the City of Tucson and outside investors, this will take time to discern. Projects this large move slowly, and so much happened so quickly toward the end that it’s hard to even understand the sheer scope of it all, and how it affects all the players involved.

The whiplash and the bruises will certainly be felt for years.

But the lesson Tucson learned was grim—and potentially dangerous.

To wit: the protesters and activists learned the worst lesson they possibly could:

“If you shout loud enough, you will be rewarded.”

By letting a few hundred angry activists derail a multibillion-dollar project that took careful thought and consideration for years, they now feel like they’ve been enabled.

It worked.

They won.

Like a toddler rewarded for screaming at the grocery store, the message was clear: escalation works. Tucson taught her babies that all they must do is scream loudly enough, and they’ll be rewarded with exactly what they ask for.

Red-shirt activists can safely conclude in the future that if they just show up to a few public meetings and overwhelm the process through noise and intimidation, they can shut down debate and cow their officials into voting “No” unanimously, even with billions of dollars on the line.

In fact, as the debate intensified, some of the pressure surrounding Project Blue moved far beyond public forums. More than one person directly involved in the process later reported receiving harassment and threatening messages—an escalation that fundamentally changes the conditions under which public decision-making can function.

This shameful shutdown and cancellation tactic has been used quite commonly across the nation on college campuses, and unfortunately, Tucson just showed that it can be used successfully off campus as well—even at City Hall.

To phrase this as a stark warning: the wrong people were emboldened to use the wrong tactic, which was exactly the wrong outcome, regardless of whether Project Blue was a good idea or not.

I’m not a Tucson native. I’ve lived in California, Colorado, and most recently, Arizona. Not being from here gives me a level of detachment that is valuable in cases like this. Rather than being “defensive of my homeland” and feeling territorial, I have the benefit of diagnostic framing as an outsider.

I don’t even have to answer ludicrous questions like: “But don’t you care about how Project Blue is bad for Tucson?” since, as I mentioned, many, if not most, of the people involved in putting it together were (and are) public servants who are from Tucson, live in Tucson, and even literally work for Tucson.

I feel they have done a superb job at addressing those questions ad nauseam with real, substantive answers. I am satisfied that the framers of Project Blue already considered every single one of those concerns, filtered them through experts, performed feasibility studies, and employed numerous mitigative strategies to allay—or at least address—the concerns of all the parties who actually know what they’re talking about.

In fact, Tucson City Council Member Nikki Lee, who represents Ward 4 (where I live), even posted a spreadsheet online listing 111 questions about Project Blue.

Every single one of those questions was answered in great detail.

But none of that matters when nobody cares about facts. In a dispute, facts only matter under the assumption that you’re working with rational actors, and this was not the case.

None of what happened in the dispute over Project Blue was rational.

What did happen—clear to outside observers—was a catastrophic failure in a microcosm, with worrying potential for escalation and portability.

In other words, what happened in Tucson should not be understood as a quirky local controversy or a one-off civic meltdown.

It should be understood as a successful test.

A relatively small, highly motivated group of activists discovered that they could derail a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project not by winning an argument, not by persuading the public, and not by defeating the project on its merits—but by overwhelming the process itself.

They didn’t need a majority, expertise, or facts.

They didn’t even need coherence.

They just needed volume, visibility, and the willingness to escalate without consequence.

And it worked.

That’s the part that should concern anyone paying attention because nothing about Project Blue was unique to Tucson.

Not the technology: data centers exist all over the place and have for decades.

Not the scale: many, much larger data centers already exist.

Not the public-private structure: this is common enough all over the USA.

Not even the desert, for Pete’s sake: Phoenix has lots of data centers, and it’s even hotter there than it is in Tucson.

And certainly not the fears that were weaponized against it: Luddites and environmentalists constantly beleaguer building and development everywhere it exists, always.

What was new was the speed at which narrative panic overtook institutional process—and the ease with which elected officials discovered that the path of least resistance was to simply make the problem disappear.

No vote.

No debate.

No tradeoff analysis.

No accountability.

Just retreat… then, “Poof!” it’s gone.

The biggest outside investment in Tucson’s history, years in the making, was derailed.

In just 50 days.

That is not a local failure.

That is a tactic that’s easy to replicate anywhere.

Before any of the disastrous public meetings were held, I was warned about the symbolic importance of Project Blue by an octogenarian in Tucson’s real estate community—someone deeply concerned that Tucson was about to drop the ball yet again.

As I learned, Tucson has a long and storied history of shooting itself in the foot through apathy and even outright hostility toward companies wanting to relocate, invest, and build here. These stories go back many decades, even into the 1960s.

Residents may remember 2013, when, long before I moved here, Grand Canyon University proposed building a $100 million satellite campus at El Rio Golf Course on Tucson’s west side. The numbers were solid: up to 1,000 jobs, 6,000 students, a $60 million annual payroll.

The opposition was mobilized, and “Not In My Backyard” won the day. GCU went to Mesa instead and built a 160-acre campus.

It’s not just institutional relocation or expansion, either—there’s a bizarre hostility toward internal development intended to build up Tucson from the inside as well.

In 1984, Pima County voters rejected a bond measure for the Rillito-Pantano Parkway, a 13-mile east-west route backed by business and development leaders. Similar transportation proposals failed in 1986 and 1990.

The net result? Three strikes, and you’re out: Tucson remains one of the only major American cities without a crosstown freeway.

This distinction costs commuters time every single day and businesses millions in productivity every single year. And it’s highly ironic to hear that the same residents whose favorite pastime is cursing the poor condition of Tucson’s famously pockmarked streets, bursting with more traffic than they were ever designed to hold, had a chance to fix this problem and said no.

Three times in a row.

Project Blue wasn’t an aberration. It was an echo.

The net effect is that Tucson is becoming famous not for what it wants or supports but for what it does not want and does not support.

This pattern stretches back more than forty years. And here’s the thing: capital has memory.

Project Blue was a magnificent opportunity to at least say, “We welcome the idea. No guarantees, but let’s hear them out.”

Yet, once again, the message sent was unmistakable: your money is not welcome here.

Tucson will not feel the consequences immediately. Capital doesn’t react overnight. The damage shows up quietly—when fewer proposals arrive, when ambitious projects die during exploratory calls, and when site selectors simply stop putting Tucson on the list.

They won’t announce it with a press release.

They won’t argue with activists.

They’ll just move on and shake the dust off their feet when they leave our town.

I know a lot of Tucsonans will say, “Good! We like it that way.”

They insist the city doesn’t need outside investment. Tucson can thrive without it. But follow their logic to its conclusion—what IS the ideal economic makeup anyway?

• Data centers? = Corporate greed.

• Amazon? = Evil tech billionaires.

• Defense contractors like Raytheon? = War profiteers.

• Davis-Monthan AFB? = Military-industrial complex. (Also, Israel/Palestine).

Cross them off the list, and what’s left of our economic base? A university, and a thousand food trucks. Whoopee. Tucson will make its mark as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy and the birthplace of the chimichanga, and they think that’s good enough.

But they are wrong.

A metropolitan area of more than a million people cannot run on vibes forever.

What happens next is predictable. These projects don’t disappear.

They relocate.

Act V: The Lesson

Why this won’t stay in Tucson

Before looking at where these projects go next, it’s worth understanding why this tactic worked—and why it will work again.

There’s a scene in The Godfather: Part II that I think about all the time. It captures something most people don’t understand about power, and it fits perfectly here.

Michael Corleone travels to Cuba to finalize a massive deal with Hyman Roth. Enormous sums of money have already been spent buying influence: paying off politicians, bribing police, and securing protection. The syndicate believes it has locked everything down.

They believe they own the island.

Then, almost incidentally, Michael witnesses something unsettling: a communist revolutionary hops into a cop car with a live grenade in his jacket, killing both the police officer and himself in the process.

There is no negotiation, payoff, or leverage. Just pure conviction.

Michael is visibly shaken—not by the violence (he’s certainly used to that), but by what it implies.

• Corleone: “The soldiers are paid to fight. The rebels aren’t.”

• Roth: “What does that tell you?”

• Corleone: “They can win.”

He realizes his side has spent a fortune trying to control outcomes with money, while the other side is willing to fight for free. Worse, they’re willing to die for their cause. The entire power structure he assumed was stable is suddenly upended and looks fragile.

No one else grasps the significance of what happened. Only Michael does—and almost by accident.

In the next scene, Hyman Roth, unfazed, boasts, “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” He’s convinced that their money, scale, and institutional control make them untouchable.

Yet within days, the Batista government collapses anyway. The regime didn’t fall because the revolutionaries were stronger on paper—it fell because they were willing to escalate without limit.

That’s the lesson Michael learns too late: When one side is constrained by norms, process, and reputational risk—and the other side is willing to escalate endlessly at no personal cost—traditional power structures stop functioning.

Not because they’re evil, but because they’re outmatched.

(To be clear, this is not an analogy about violence—it’s about the asymmetric commitment where one side is constrained by process, reputation, and institutional norms like “politeness.” The other side can afford to escalate indefinitely at no personal cost.)

Tucson didn’t lose because the protesters had better data, better plans, or better arguments. It lost because escalation beat deliberation.

Once that lesson was learned, the fight was over. Not because the argument was settled—but because the rules of engagement had changed.

And that’s why the same protest, with the same slogans and the same demands, has already started reappearing in other cities outside of Tucson: Marana, Chandler, and Eloy, to name a few.

As I write this, Beale Infrastructure is pitching a modified version of Project Blue to smaller communities on the outskirts of Tucson.

The Town of Marana (population ≈ 62,000—roughly one-tenth the size of Tucson) is in discussions with Beale about a different version of the data center. This time, however, it’s an air-cooled facility that does not use water the way Project Blue would have, as originally proposed.

Great, right?

By the logic of the “Not One Drop for Data” protest, an air-cooled facility should resolve the water objection entirely and settle the matter for good. It’s a different design, in a smaller town, 43 miles away from the original site.

It’s also worth noting that Marana’s Planning and Zoning Commission has, so far, run a tightly structured public process that allows for broad participation without the kind of disruption seen elsewhere.

So this should be a win-win. Everybody should be happy now, yes?

No.

Not even close.

Once again, the “No Desert Data Center Coalition” turned on the Bat Signal, calling for protesters to activate:

Let the Marana Town Council know that voting for a hyperscale data center this size is a horrible idea and that you’re against it BEFORE their meeting on January 6^th

PACK THE MARANA TOWN COUNCIL MEETING ON 1/6!

#nodesertdatacenter #notonedrop #maranaaz #desertlife #tucsonaz

But why? We solved the water problem, right?

No. The “water problem” cannot be solved.

When they say “not one drop,” they mean not one drop, anywhere, ever.

Changing the technology from water-cooled to air-cooled doesn’t resolve the objection at all.

How? Through logic that can only be described as… incredibly creative:

An air-cooled facility uses more energy, and since our energy companies like TEP rely on fracked gas for their mix, this has water implications: more demand for fracked gas means more water used in fracking it, and more water lost in generating steam for the fracked gas plant.

If this were a legal fight in a courtroom, an attorney might call this a “novel legal theory.”

This will take a moment to explain, but bear with me.

With Project Blue, the argument (at first) was simple: “Data centers use too much water.” Now, in Marana, the argument has evolved into:

• Even if they don’t use water on site, they use energy.

• Energy comes from fracked gas.

• Fracking uses water.

• Steam generation uses water.

• Therefore, air-cooled data centers still “use water.”

See how that works?

Everything that exists on Earth uses water somewhere in its supply chain. Data centers exist on Earth; therefore, they use water.

By expanding the definition of “water use” to include every downstream input of modern energy systems, the objection ceases to be about this project at all.

By that logic, we should also be saying:

• This Town Council meeting uses water.

• Sipping from my water bottle before I speak uses water.

• This Instagram post uses water.

• Driving my car home from this meeting uses water.

Opposition to data centers has now become unfalsifiable.

When every possible configuration is unacceptable, the position is no longer about mitigation. It is about prohibition.

And you cannot negotiate with prohibition.

Regrettably, a permanent protester class in Tucson has now been activated.

With social clout as a reward and a following that needs to stay entertained, they will go in search of something to protest against.

Like Deadheads hitting the road to follow their favorite band on tour, these activists are promising to follow any data center to the ends of the earth (or the ends of the desert, at least).

Once you understand this dynamic, the outcome becomes predictable.

The projects don’t disappear. They don’t even slow down.

They simply go where escalation doesn’t work.

As we’ve already seen, these tactics don’t work so well in Phoenix—home to well over 100 data centers. Many of which use water. Right here in the desert.

Yes, Phoenix, our big brother that Tucsonans love to sneer at. Phoenix gets it.

Already one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country, it’s becoming a megalopolis of talent, capital, and, yes, they even have vibes, too (you don’t have to choose, after all).

Phoenix says yes. Phoenix builds. Phoenix absorbs the growth that Tucson says no to.

And Tucsonans say, “So what? Good for them. We’re not Phoenix!”

Folks like this are going nowhere, and they’re thrilled to death about it.

But Tucson’s losses are a win for lots of places—not just giant cities in the Valley.

Within days of Project Blue collapsing, a similar data center project was announced in a location far smaller and far less metropolitan than Phoenix.

Wyoming.

Yes, tiny, rural Wyoming.

An entire state with a population roughly half the size of metro Tucson’s, with fewer resources and harsher conditions.

Wyoming said yes, where Tucson said no. Their governor even welcomed it loudly and publicly:

This is exciting news for Wyoming and for Wyoming natural gas producers – and it highlights the kinds of projects we can achieve through continued trade missions…

Wyoming didn’t win because it had more water, power, or sophistication.

It won because it was willing to decide.

Tucson chose to retreat without a fair vote, without a true debate, and without a real tradeoff analysis. Just silence, withdrawal, and applause.

And that applause will echo and haunt Tucson for years.

So, who killed Tucson’s Project Blue?

Project Blue was killed by activists who learned that escalation and intimidation work—and by elected officials who proved them right.

Author’s Notes

1. Author’s note (updated January 5, 2026): After this piece was published, several individuals with direct knowledge of Project Blue reached out to provide additional factual context and clarification. The article has been updated accordingly to improve accuracy and nuance. The central argument and conclusions remain unchanged.

2. City of Tucson Website

   At the time of writing, it appears that most (if not all) official FAQs, briefing materials, and documentation related to Project Blue have been removed from the City of Tucson’s website. Whether this was intentional or incidental is unclear. However, given that these materials were produced as part of a public process, their disappearance is notable and troubling. Archived versions remain accessible via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250916155323/https://www.tucsonaz.gov/Government/Office-of-the-City-Manager/Project-Blue-Information (Snapshot date: 09/16/25)

3. On Sources and Coverage

   I often disagree with Arizona Luminaria’s editorial perspective. That said, it provided the most thorough, on-the-ground reporting of the Project Blue process and meetings. Several firsthand descriptions and direct quotations cited in this piece come from AZ Luminaria’s coverage, which—regardless of viewpoint—was detailed, timely, and substantively useful. Readers who value local, independent journalism may wish to support their work here: https://azluminaria.org/membership/.

Think fast: when I say “Canada,” what immediately comes to mind?

If you’re like many people who are only familiar with some of the most basic, obvious stereotypes of North America’s coldest country, you might immediately start imagining giant evergreen trees, massive mountains, loads of snow, and rodents of unusual size (beavers, that is).

Above and beyond its rugged, natural landscape, though, you might also think of some of its more symbolic elements: the Maple Leaf flag, these weird things called “Provinces,” coins with Queen Elizabeth on them, hockey, of course, and, if you’re aware of the weird foods they eat above the 49th parallel, deep fried pickles, poutine (french fries covered in cheese curds, and brown gravy), and ketchup chips.

But if you’re like me, and probably a few hundred million other Americans, when you think of Canada, well… nothing comes to mind. Because you don’t think of Canada basically ever.

I hate to offend the good people from the Great White North, but pretty much all day, every day, I don’t even remember that Canada exists.

It’s like that meme I see on the internet from time to time, taken from the TV show Mad Men, where two men are in an elevator.

The younger man says, “I feel sorry for you.”

The older man says, “I don’t think about you at all.”

That’s what Canada is like for me.

Sometimes, I’ll be clicking around on the internet, reading a breaking news story about a tragedy unfolding in America in real time, perhaps something involving guns or private health insurance, or guns AND private health insurance.

Random people with Canadian flag emojis in their profiles will start commenting about how infinitely superior their country is to mine. And that’s when it will hit me…

“Oh yeah! Canada exists! Canada is a thing! I completely forgot about Canada! I’ll be darned.”

Now, I will give our frozen friends a point here: they are indeed the superior country… in precisely one manner: they are literally above us. But only literally.

Canada is superior to America in the same sense that Lake Superior is superior to the other Great Lakes. That is to say, it is above Lake Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario.

But that’s it.

As far as the nation of Canada being superior to the nation of the United States of America? Don’t make me laugh. The USA has an economy that is almost 13 times larger than Canada’s, and three of our states have a larger GDP than their entire country (that’s California, Texas, and New York, in case you wondered).

And although we have almost the exact same amount of raw land as each other, just the state of California matches Canada’s entire population, still leaving us with 49 states to spare.

So… where was I? Oh yeah, Canada exists, and I forget that sometimes. That’s right.

Now, to be clear, I have nothing against Canadians personally, and every Canadian I’ve ever met has been delightful. But it’s such a weird phenomenon: I almost never find out their true nationality until after I’ve known them for a while.

Over the years, it’s happened to me a few times where I have a friend, or perhaps a coworker, and he or she (let’s say he, in this case) is just an all-around great guy, and we get along just fine. Then weeks, or perhaps months later, the truth about this guy’s identity eventually surfaces, and it’s always jarring when it does.

Finding out that someone I know is Canadian is kind of like finding out someone I know has spent time in prison. It’s not necessarily something they should be embarrassed of, but it’s still such a shock when I find out about it. You know?

Many times, I’ve had conversations that go something like this:

• Me: “Wow, he’s Canadian?”

• Someone else: “Yep. Crazy, huh?”

• Me: “Yeah, but he seemed so… normal.”

• Someone else: “I know. You wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at him.”

• Me: “Why didn’t he tell me himself? I feel weird now that I know the truth.”

• Someone else: “Yeah, I wouldn’t mention it if I were you. Might be awkward.”

Okay, I’m kidding… but only halfway.

First of all, I am kidding about being surprised because Canadians are actually easy to spot from a distance. Not because of how they look but because of how they talk.

Every man or woman I’ve met who came from the Land of Loons fails two basic American shibboleths:

1. They say “Eh?” a lot. (And don’t ever let them gaslight you and tell you they don’t, because they absolutely do. This is not just a stereotype—it’s the truth.)

2. They pronounce their “Oh” sounds really funny. They say: “aboat” instead of “about,” “prow-cess” instead of “process,” and so on.

If I were an American soldier in an old black-and-white war film, and it was up to me to determine who the good guys and bad guys were without having the benefit of spies or special technology, and if we were somehow assuming that the Americans and Canadians were at war (with each other — I know this is a really big stretch, but just go with it), I’d make every soldier line up and give them a test.

“Okay everybody, one at a time, repeat after me: ‘Oh, I’ve got a round about process for brewing beer.’”

Down the line, I’d go, listening to each man repeat my test phrase until, eventually, one man would say:

“Oh, I’ve got a roaned aboat prohcess for brewing beer, eh?”

Knowing I’d got my man, I’d ask one more question to be sure: “Is that right? You do?” and he’d do himself in:

“Oh, yeah, you betcha.”

Boom! Canadian: bad guy! It would be so easy. They can’t hide.

Second of all, I’m not kidding about being surprised because aside from those verbal tics that give them away, Canadians pretty much look and act like us in America. And almost all of the Canadians I’ve ever met—I met here.

They’re here because they left Canada to come to America. Which, of course, makes me wonder, “If Canada’s so great, why did you come down here?”

But when I do meet folks like this, I don’t even think of asking such normal-looking-and-acting people: “Hey, are you actually from here?” I just assume they are, like everybody else. And they pretty much are like everybody else: they fit in just fine.

What does all this have to do with Christmas? Hold your mooses; I’m getting to that.

Canada is… an interesting place. It’s been in the news quite a lot recently. Right now, as I write this, there’s a huge buzz online about the USA potentially taking steps to annex Canada and make it the 51st American state.

There’s so much talk and cross-talk about it that I can’t even tell fact from fiction anymore. I don’t know who first suggested it, but it sounds like some people in America think this is a hilarious joke, while others think it’s a serious suggestion.

It also sounds like a small minority of people in Canada welcome this idea, as far-fetched as it may be, while many more think that it’s a very bad idea and insist that it’s not even funny to joke about something this serious at all.

Which, to be honest, makes it even more hilarious. The more they keep saying it isn’t funny, the funnier it gets. (And on a side note, when did Canadians, the people who have given us some of the funniest comedians in the world, lose their sense of humor?)

So, to recap: my point here is that Canadians are a funny people who talk funny, and who used to be funny in the past but right now really aren’t all that funny, at least when we say funny things back to them.

THE DRAMA!

O, Canada! America’s hat… where the people drink milk from plastic bags and live in their hoases doan by the moantains… perhaps someday our 51st state… a country so easy to make fun of.

All right, all right… so maybe I’m too harsh on Canada.

Maybe I am sometimes guilty of directing an unfair amount of ridicule to the country that is home to Dudley Do-Right and his fellow Mounties, those wacky policemen who ride on horses and wear muskrat fur stetson hats and scarlet tunics.

Maybe I am too fond of teasing the people who still somehow claim allegiance to the monarchy of the United Kingdom in one of the strangest, most antiquated acts of useless nostalgia an American could possibly imagine.

Maybe I am biased against a nation where every single government document and official communication in the entire country must be spoken and printed in both English and French, despite only 3% of the population outside Quebec speaking French as a first language.

But c’mon, Canada, you make yourself too easy a target!

Bringing up Quebec is a perfect example: while America is currently joking about taking Canada in as another state, Quebec is still very seriously just waiting for its chance to finally declare independence from Canada once and for all.

You hear that? Not even Canada wants to be part of Canada!

Quebec has been trying to leave Canada for 45 years and just barely missed achieving total independence in 1995, with a vote that lost by one-half percent!

(Note: If Quebec were granted independence today, Canada would immediately lose 23% of its population. That is the exact same percentage the USA would have lost if all the Confederate States had won the Civil War and successfully seceded from the Union. Can you imagine?)

Okay, enough ragging on Canada. Let’s say Canada is actually a wonderful place and is home to some really great things—things to be proud of. Things that I can point to today and say: “I have to give Canada credit for that.”

To that end, I tried an experiment to find out what those things would be. I asked an AI chatbot what things in my life it could pinpoint that I have personally benefitted from, have, hold, use, or eat, etc., that are clearly, conclusively, and uniquely from Canada or Canadians.

The results were… interesting. At first, it gave me a list of 10 things that were mostly irrelevant. Things like:

• Hockey: Obviously, it’s Canadian, but I don’t play it.

• William Shatner: Wow, really? The actor? I had no idea. Are you sure he’s actually Canadian and he’s not just a prisoner?

• The Canadarm: The big giant grabby arm thingy used in the NASA space shuttle.

Okay, these were true, but this was getting ridiculous. None of these things had anything specifically to do with me. I refined my parameters and tried again.

• Maple Syrup: Okay, you got me there. I love real maple syrup. I’m a big fan, although I’m pretty sure most (or all) of the maple syrup I buy comes from Vermont or New Hampshire, but still, I’ll concede a half point.

• The Blackberry Smartphone: Wow, this one was a surprise. I did indeed own a BlackBerry Curve 8310 once upon a time—it was my very first smartphone. I had no idea the Blackberry was from Canada, so they definitely get a point there.

• Insulin: Well, I’m not diabetic, and neither is else anyone in my family, but I have had friends with diabetes over the years. So, I guess I can be thankful that Canada gave us insulin, especially in the event that I should ever develop diabetes in the future. So, I’ll give them half a point here as well.

In all, my AI chatbot experiment didn’t convince me that there’s anything directly or explicitly in my life that I have, hold, use, or eat that I can give full and complete credit to Canada for.

But wait…

You know what? Now that I think about it more, there are a few things that I have to give Canada credit for. Yes, digging much deeper into my memory banks and thinking more abstractly, I can actually come up with at least three on my own.

YES, I CANADA!

The first is Rush, the rock band from Toronto. I first discovered Rush when I was 18 years old, and from the very first time I heard the song “Tom Sawyer,” I was totally hooked. I liked them so much that I gave my firstborn son “Rush” as a middle name. So I can give Canada credit for my son’s name. Although he only hears his middle name when talking to government officials or when he’s really, REALLY in trouble.

The second is the memories I have from my trip to Canada I took when I was in my teens. I went on a canoeing trip in British Columbia when I was fifteen, and that’s when I discovered just how beautiful nature can be.

I think the most breathtaking outdoor scenery I’ve ever seen anywhere in my life was the wilds in and around Bowron Lakes Provincial Park, where we spent two weeks canoeing through glacier-fed lakes and portaging through muddy mountain trails. (And this is where I learned about ketchup chips and poutine.)

On a side note, this trip was also where I discovered just how snippy some Canucks get when you say “American.” At a McDonald’s on our very first day in Canada, I told the lady behind the counter: “I only have American money. Is that okay?” She seemed remarkably offended by this and snapped at me.

“We’re Americans TOO, you know!”

No, I did not know. That didn’t make any sense to me at all.

She was Canadian; I was American. What was she even talking about?

My country was literally called “The United States of America.” Her country, which I had to leave “America” to visit, was literally called “Canada” and definitely not called “America.” (Well, again, that is until it becomes the 51st American state.)

I felt this was exceptionally weird, so I asked some of the adults in my group what her deal was. They discerned that perhaps she meant that Canada is part of NORTH AMERICA, the continent.

Oh man… that was just so dumb and pedantic.

Seriously, do Mexicans want to be called “Americans” too because they’re also a part of the North American continent? If so, I’ve never met anyone from Mexico who has ever asked for that.

Either way, I learned that a better way to phrase this was, “Do you take ‘U.S. currency?’” — This somehow placated people despite the hilarious fact that while we both technically use “Dollars,” my American—err—U.S. Dollars are worth more than their Canadian Dollars.

So, fine. Knock yourself out, Canadian McDonald’s lady: I’ll agree that you’re an American just like me if that makes you happy. But I’m the one laughing: I only had to pay 64 cents of my dollars for every one of her dollars.

Not bad, eh?

The third is the biggest and the main point that I’ve been slowly building to this whole time but keep getting distracted: CHRISTMAS!

That’s right. There is, in fact, one big, huge, enormous thing that is a major part of my life that I have to give total and complete credit to Canada for, and that is the Stauffer Family’s Christmas Eve Tradition.

The funny thing is, I didn’t even make the connection until a week or two ago. With all this talk about Canada in the news and the upcoming Christmas season, I finally put two and two together for the first time.

So, you want to hear the story about the Canadian tradition of eating food on the floor at Christmas time and how my American family has done this since before I was born?

Okay. Here goes.

In 1964, my grandpa, Ron Stauffer, a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, was stationed at the Ernest Harmon Air Force Base in Newfoundland and Labrador to help work on America’s Distant Early Warning Line, which would protect us from sneak attacks from Soviet bombers.

He was transferred there from Langley Air Force Base and took along his wife and children, including my dad, Ron Stauffer, his firstborn son.

Although they only lived there for two years, the stories my dad and my uncles have told us over the years are truly amazing and, at least to me, sometimes terrifying.

I heard stories about the mind-numbingly cold weather: something like 20 degrees below zero in the winter and up to 40 degrees below with the wind chill.

I heard about so much snow falling that the roads would sometimes have walls of snow up to 9 or 10 feet high on the sides.

I heard about snow piling up so high it would sometimes cover up the sides of a house so you couldn’t even open your door, and it would reach all the way to the rooftop, so kids could jump off or ride their sleds off the roof into the snow, safely, just a few inches below.

I heard about nighttime being so cold that people who had to drive to work in the morning would have to use a “block heater” (whatever that was) to keep their car engine from freezing up (whatever that meant) and, failing that, how some people would even let their car run in their driveway all night long in order to ensure that they could actually drive it away the next morning.

I heard about how my uncles would throw snowballs at each other and hike around in the nearby forests and joke about how they were running away from “Newfies” — the local people they almost never interacted with. (Being Americans stationed on a military installation didn’t offer much in the way of interaction with locals).

I heard about seafood being so cheap and plentiful that sometimes, they nearly had it coming out of their ears. My grandmother would have freezers filled to the brim with giant glass jars of frozen lobster meat — much more than they could eat.

Aside from all the seafood, Newfoundland sounded like a horrifying place to me—about as bad as I could possibly imagine, and I couldn’t understand how any human being would ever choose to live there.

Maybe for my dad and his brothers, it was a blast, but I don’t like snow or cold and never have, so no amount of tobogganing down a hill behind the house would make me want to live there.

The fact that Newfoundland was an island where you couldn’t drive away from it in a car, even if you wanted to, made it that much worse.

However, there is one thing that Newfoundland gave my family that I will forever be grateful for, and it all started, in fact, due to that legendary, hostile, frozen weather.

In late December 1964, the weather was so awful due to a massive snowstorm that the Air Force told everybody to stay in their homes and not leave. Being confined in the house didn’t seem like such a big deal, though, since it was Christmas Eve, and Grammy and Grandpa had preparations for a special family Christmas dinner.

The boys and my grandparents, the family lore goes, were preparing for dinner, listening to the “Merry Christmas” album by Johnny Mathis. The Christmas tree was decked out in jolly fashion, and everyone was in a great Christmassy mood.

Then, all of a sudden, in the howling snowstorm, the house lost electricity.

Everything went dark. The lights went out. The oven shut off. The music stopped.

Grandpa found a flashlight and took out a small transistor radio he’d gotten in Japan when he had been stationed there before and tuned it to the local station to listen for weather updates, music, and whatever else they could get on this one tiny little device.

Well, now, Christmas was about to be completely ruined. Without power, the oven didn’t work, nor a microwave (if they even had one), so Grammy couldn’t even finish baking whatever she had planned for dinner.

But that was okay; they just reverted to “Plan B” — pulling out all the cold foods from the fridge that didn’t need to be heated. Bread, meat, cheese, pickles, olives, crackers, cookies, and more.

They wouldn’t let Christmas Eve be canceled by a little thing like losing power.

Lighting candles and finding flashlights, they sat at the table while Grandpa tried to heat a pot of beans over the candle’s flames. When that didn’t work, he gave up, and they just resigned themselves to only eating cold food.

Now, for whatever reason, situations that adults might call a “crisis” often come across to children as exciting and magical, and this was one of those moments. My dad, for whatever reason, came up with a brilliant idea.

“Hey, Mom and Dad, can we go sit on the floor over by the Christmas tree… and eat our food there?” he suggested.

And for whatever reason, they obliged. So, the family moved dinner from the table to the living room floor. Sitting in a circle on the ground, with candles lit and the lights out, their dinner of simple, cold snacks from the fridge began.

Right after they started, however, just as suddenly as it had gone out, the electricity came back on. The whole house instantly lit up again. My grandparents, being the adults in the room, of course, said: “Hooray! The lights are back on. Now we can go back to the table.”

But the boys were having too much fun.

“Nooooo!” my dad pleaded with them. “Please, turn the lights back off! This is cool—let’s stay here and keep eating on the floor!”

So, Grammy and Grandpa agreed and turned off the lights again so they could keep having Christmas Eve dinner on the floor around the tree. But since the electricity had returned, they could augment their candlelit evening: the Christmas tree was now fully lit with mini-lights, and the turntable worked again, so they could turn the music back on.

Once again, Johnny Mathis was singing “O Holy Night” while the kids chomped down on their “whatever we could find in the fridge” dinner, and the candles flickered into the night.

The next year, still living in Newfoundland, the electricity worked just fine, yet when Christmas came around, my dad asked once again: “Can we have Christmas Eve on the floor again?” and at his insistence, Grammy and Grandpa decided that what was once a response to a catastrophic weather event could now become an annual event.

And so it did. On Christmas Eve, 1964, a family tradition began entirely by accident in Newfoundland, Canada. And that tradition has continued to this very day, when, on Christmas Eve 2024, four generations of Stauffers spread across the United States of America will spend Christmas Eve eating on the floor for the 60th year in a row.

This special way of celebrating Christmas is so ingrained in my mind and habits that when I was younger and found out that some people didn’t eat Christmas Eve dinner on the floor, I wondered, “What’s wrong with them?”

For me and my siblings, Christmas Eve is actually the most wonderful time of the year, to the point where Christmas Day is actually boring in comparison.

It’s funny: when you grow up doing things a certain way your entire life, it’s easy as a child to assume that everybody else does, or, if they don’t, you find what they do to be inferior.

When I found out that other people don’t do much to celebrate Christmas Eve, but instead, their big day is Christmas Day, and they celebrate it by eating dinner at the table, I thought, “Wow, that’s just… lame.”

So, over the years, from the day I was born until today, I have spent Christmas Eve sitting on the carpet near our Christmas tree, just like those early days.

Everyone in our family does it slightly differently. At my parents’ house, we usually had sandwiches made with “Dutch crunch rolls” filled with pastrami and melted Swiss cheese.

Since I got married, my wife and I usually don’t go to the elaborate lengths of making fancy sandwiches but mostly serve basic cold finger foods like hard salami, Triscuits, olives, pickles, sliced Cheddar, etc.

One thing that’s certain, though, is we still all always drink Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider, and we always play Johnny Mathis at every get-together, no matter whose house it is. Many of us also play “Home For Christmas,” an album by Amy Grant, which is a close second in terms of Christmas albums. And, of course, we’ve gone from playing vinyl LPs to CDs to now streaming MP3s on Apple Music.

What’s funny about this is that over the years, I’ve noticed that when people outside our family learn about our floor-sitting tradition, they’re intensely curious about it, and some people I know who aren’t Stauffers have even copied it.

A few years ago, my wife was part of a women’s bible study, and as Christmas came near, the leader asked everyone to share what their family’s special traditions were, if they had any.

My wife told the room, almost embarrassed, about how we eat on the floor by the tree (I say “embarrassed” because, if you don’t have enough time to fully explain how this came to be and how it actually works, “eating on the floor for Christmas” can sound really strange).

But the response from the ladies in the room was almost over the top. “Oh, wow! That sounds so cool!” they said. One woman even told her, “I want to try that!”

A few weeks after Christmas, that same woman—a single woman who had never been married, had no children, and had always lived alone—did indeed try it… all by herself.

She was thrilled to report back to my wife: “I did it! I had Christmas Eve dinner on the floor by my Christmas tree! It was so fun!”

How funny.

How funny that sixty years ago, on one random night during the Christmas season, the power went out across the city of Stephenville on the island of Newfoundland.

And now there are dozens—and perhaps soon to be hundreds—of Americans who are still enjoying fantastic family holiday memories, and making new ones, because of it.

When I hear the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” I can’t help but smile when I hear the lyrics: “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”

For that’s precisely what we do every Christmas. Aside from watching “The Muppet Christmas Carol,” there are no scary ghost stories in our house… but each year, as we gather around the tree, sitting in a circle, someone, a young child, a family guest, or a new addition to the Stauffer family, will ask: “So what’s this all about anyway? Why are we sitting on the floor?”

And I’ll smile as I once again tell the “tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago,” where it all began.

So, thank you, Canada. You’ve given my family over half a century of wonderful, unique holidays and special, happy memories.

Merry Christmas, eh?

Pirate Wires just published a wild story about a marriage that finally collapsed after the wife mainlined the historian/writer/pundit Heather Cox Richardson every night.

It sounds weird and extreme, unless you’ve seen this pattern before. I have, repeatedly. I think many people have, but nobody’s willing to call it out.

I am.

There is, in fact, a pipeline from “casual HCR reader” to “angry divorcée who hates most men and half of America.”

It’s astonishingly predictable, and you can watch it in real time, slowly, at first, then suddenly. It starts with mild concern, then escalates to daily outrage, then apocalyptic fear, then a whole new identity, then—boom— “My husband is the source of all of my problems.”

Even things that seem neutral or harmless, like water or coffee, can kill you in large enough doses. I think many a marriage has died from Richardson’s Disease via an overdose on HCR.

This escalation pattern appears in every radicalization model, but here, it’s just dressed up in respectable language and email newsletters.

Heather Cox Richardson has built an entire mini-industry around turning otherwise normal, functional women into apocalyptic political hysterics. But wrapping it all in a purported veil of “history” covers a multitude of her very many sins, especially being staggeringly sloppy and melodramatic.

HCR is extremely biased, but it’s far worse than that: she uses the same psychological methods as extremist groups and cults: catastrophizing, moral absolutism, demonizing outsiders, and convincing followers that disagreement = danger. But a nice-looking white lady with a boring sweater and a Harvard degree isn’t as scary as doomsdayers with shaved heads hiding in basements committing mass suicide.

Because she packages her screeds in soft tones and appears professorial, nobody calls it what it is. The respectability IS the camouflage. You can find it next to the white wine, wicker furniture, and Cosmo magazine in the “trusted products for women over 45” starter pack at Safeway.

Seriously, when a college professor with a PhD in History is no more enlightening than the average unwashed feminist teen wearing a vagina hat and screeching “F*ck Trump,” we have a serious problem.

Heatherheads are a true phenomenon to behold, and they are legion: I have met many like this. They seemed like sane, polite, married women, but then they became divorced and bitter, wallowing in hatred for all things American and masculine.

Is HCR the cause of divorce? Certainly not. But she sure is one hell of an accelerant.

When men go full retard (“Never go full retard!”), swearing off women altogether out of hurt or politics, they’re relegated to the MGTOW club (“Men Going Their Own Way”)—the ultimate social pariahs. We cringe at the sight of the embarrassing shell of their former selves that literally nobody respects.

When women do the same in reverse, they’re cheered on and encouraged by other women. “She’s brave! She’s strong! She’s finding her true self!”

Also, when men get divorced, I’ve noticed that they almost never make announcements about it on social media. They either go completely silent and log off altogether, or perhaps they’ll quietly make a very short statement, and other men share condolences.

“Sorry, man, that sucks.”

When women get divorced, they often shout it from the rooftops with big, bombastic announcements and make sure everyone they know is aware of it. “The girls” then pile on with lavish praise for her and vitriolic scorn for the poor, unfortunate man she left behind.

“Yasss queen! You go, girl! F*ck that guy! He didn’t deserve you! Call me sometime!”

I have watched multiple married couples I know dissolve this way in public and devolve to this absurd level of discourse.

And this is the real cultural rot: women are incentivized to have crazy political meltdowns. Men get mocked when they radicalize; women get validated, affirmed, and pushed further along the track.

One sex gets a warning label. The other gets cheerleaders waving pom-poms.

In the future, real historians will marvel at how a random “historian” with two last names found a way to poison America’s melting pot with resentment and derision, whipping readers into a frenzy of mouth-foaming histrionics about threats that aren’t even real and even convinced women to leave their husbands if they disagree.

Just look at the home destroyed in the article:

• Cutting off your parents due to political disagreements

• The NY Times’ 1619 Project

• Trump Derangement Syndrome

• Republicans have sold their souls to the devil

• The Handmaid’s Tale

• Calling people KKK members, Fascists, and Nazis

It’s all there. There’s almost certainly a Palestine flag in that house somewhere.

HCR’s output is a treasure trove of sludge and decay. “Letters from an American” is a publication of embarrassing letters from a terrible American.

Interestingly, a white woman asked me something a bit shocking a few weeks ago:

“Why does it seem that white American men are only interested in marrying Asian and Hispanic women these days?”

I found the question both sad and remarkable that she even asked.

This is why.

In 2008, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stood on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, smiling, with all the charm of Gotham City’s Joker, and gleefully shared a proclamation:

“As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation.”

Since then, this has been generally true, but rarely has this prophetic warning been so ominous, or even horrifying. I have mourned news coming out of my home state since my family escaped in 1999, but these days, it’s coming at a rapid and furious pace.

Artificial intelligence is not going to destroy America or even Western civilization.

Power-hungry madmen like the self-anointed King of California will.

This morning, while sipping my second cup of cold, stale coffee, I read “California’s Stealth Campaign to Kneecap AI,” a warning by with , outlining just how far California has gone in its new obsession with AI regulation. He calls it “the most heavily regulated nascent…technology in modern history.”

He’s right.

This should terrify anyone who still hopes that innovation and freedom can coexist in the same country.

I don’t think there has been a single person in my lifetime who has been more intently set on aborting all innovation and private enterprise than Newsom, who delights in finding good ideas where they are and ripping them from their cozy patch of fertile soil before they take root.

When it comes to adding unreasonable (and unhelpful) burdens on private businesses, nobody does it better than the slick, used-car salesman in Sacramento.

A lot of the loony ideas coming out of California’s cesspool of regulatory overreach in tech mirror those of another industry: firearms and ammunition. Lawmakers in blue states like California and New York have created a wish-list of anti-gun legislation under the thinly-veiled disguise of “safety,” with pseudoscientific rules such as ammo microstamping and “smart gun” technology.

The net result?

Little to no empirically proven safety benefits, lots of wasted taxpayer dollars, increased costs, multiple infringements on the Second Amendment, and massive headaches as Glock, Sig Sauer, and many other firearms companies have essentially had to make toy versions of their products for sale exclusively to consumers in California.

Also, since 2013, gunmakers have introduced almost no new semiautomatic models because of California’s microstamping rule.

The same could easily happen with AI: having to create an inferior product for a small subset of users could make companies decide to make ALL AI products California-compliant and therefore subject to the whim and fancy of the apparatchiks, imbued with state power, creating and monitoring an “approved roster” for AI models.

As Ball notes, SB 942 requires companies to build their own “AI detection tools” — the regulatory equivalent of New Jersey and Maryland’s infamous “smart gun” laws, which regulate a product that doesn’t exist yet.

Is there any law worse than a law that says, “If and when this thing is invented, you have to regulate it the following way?”

Do you know what happened in New Jersey? For the past two decades, not a single gun maker has made a gun that would “trigger” (no pun intended) the smart gun requirements outlined in the “Childproof Handgun Law” passed in 2002.

Why would they? Why would you give a state government the power to destroy your industry?

With AI, I really only see two ways forward:

#1: The proposed federal 10-year moratorium on AI regulation HAS to pass, to prevent the hysterical anti-American fearmongering by a few loud states, who are also the frontrunners in the AI race, and who will largely set policy for the rest of the states by default.

A “light regulatory framework” like what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) used in regulating the early days of the internet can help us slowly, carefully see and understand the best way forward while putting guardrails in place that make sense and don’t cause unimaginable snafus with 50 different legal settings that tie AI companies into a rubber band ball.

-or-

#2: America’s AI landscape will be balkanized in a way that many people feared the internet would be—but wasn’t—until recently, where it’s starting to fragment and crumble primarily because of numbskull regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), GDPR, and other solutions in search of a problem.

This would result in entire swaths of the country having to do what gunmakers have done for years: create a totally separate collection of AI products and services that are “California Compliant” and publish a purposefully limited lineup just for the privilege of selling to Californians.

Yet another aftereffect of all this may be that some states or companies choose to completely eliminate all “nexus” in California where possible, and thereby do the opposite of the gun roster: making all AI products and services available to everyone except users in California.

Now, like the fine print “Except in Quebec” at the end of sweepstakes contests, AI brands will have to add “Except in California” legalese to all their advertising.

The single biggest problem here is that California is the source of both the cure and the poison: most American AI innovation is happening in California.

Playing hopscotch to avoid accidentally stepping on the California landmine may prove impossible: the internet is, and therefore all AI tools are, fundamentally decentralized, and it is literally impossible to prove a true “chain of custody” for all things related to an AI product or service to ensure that it never comes into California’s jurisdiction.

Even if this were possible, Californians themselves are often the targets of California’s anti-business regulation (such as CCPA), not state lines, so Newsom, Bonta, et al, would argue these laws apply anywhere Californians access such AI tools or services, regardless of location, rendering geographic boundaries moot.

I try not to be pessimistic in life, but this is one of the few times where it appears there are just a few men, or, rather, one man in particular, with his jackboot on the jugular of innovators, business owners, and consumers.

Right now, he’s grinning ear to ear, shining those pearly whites and saying “I won’t choke you,” but, of course, I don’t trust him. None of us should; we should all really be pondering the mystery of how someone like this gained power in the first place.

It’s clear that Newsom wants to be king, but, really, he isn’t that clever.

He hasn’t done anything extraordinarily brave or selfless. In fact, he hasn’t done anything himself except stop others from succeeding. In that way, he’s more like John Brown in the Bob Marley tune “I Shot the Sheriff,” and he has precisely one line:

Sheriff John Brown always hated me,

For what, I don’t know,

Every time I plant a seed,

He said ‘Kill it before it grow’

As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation: even unto destruction.

Oh well.

China has unleashed AI at full speed, with very few tethers, limits, or safety features… but it does have a helluva lot of backdoors, spying, and censorship.

Maybe soon AI will bear the stamp “Made in China” like everything else America has given up on making at home.

Today, I had a conversation with a friend in another country who is a refugee from a dictatorship.

No, not an imaginary “dictatorship” like some people say America is today, but an actual dictatorship.

A country with an oppressive regime run by an illegitimate tyrant who drove the country into abject poverty and created an international humanitarian disaster.

A police state where cops show up in the middle of the night, arrest people they don’t like without a warrant, imprison them without a trial, and execute them without a conviction.

In other words, this person’s home country is a smoldering crater of failure, poverty, violent authoritarianism, and repression, and it’s all run by a murderous egomaniac who illegally occupies the seat of power, without legitimate elections.

It’s always helpful to me to talk to people from other countries: it puts the petty infighting among Americans in perspective.

It’s good for me—and others—to be reminded that in the 21st century, we still have actual dictatorships, still to this day, which makes me roll my eyes at all the performative, hyperbolic screeching of latte-sipping middle-income folks wearing gold rings and talking on iPhones.

You know the type: folks who drive their $50,000 SUVs to political rallies to hold “No Kings” signs in a wealthy nation that allows them to do this without being arrested or imprisoned, which is downright insulting to people like my friend’s family members who are still—STILL—living in catastrophic poverty and economic devastation, and where dissent is illegal and could be a death sentence.

You don’t want to live there. My friend, who was born there, doesn’t want to live there. It’s a hellhole where the disaster is man-made, where the water isn’t safe to drink, the electricity isn’t stable, and the chaos and violence are as bad as a warzone.

Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is this:

I haven’t posted almost anything of substance to Facebook for the 10 years I’ve had an account. Aside from occasional family photos, reflections on life memories, and snapshots of concerts I’ve been to, I’ve been almost entirely silent.

Earlier this year, I wondered why I even had a Facebook account. I looked at the list of people I’m connected to, and saw lots of people I like and care about, but thought, “It’s all so fake—I never actually interact with any of them.”

In August, I added “delete my Facebook account” to my to-do list. But for some reason, I never got around to it.

Then, in September, a political assassination happened to a young man who was a Christian, a husband, a father, an entrepreneur, and a conservative, just like me.

He looked like me. He believed like me. He lived like me.

And I watched as people I knew—not random keyboard warriors raging in their parents’ basements or Russian bots on Twitter—people I’ve hugged, whose homes I’ve been to, and whose hands I’ve shaken, celebrate his death.

I wondered, for the first time in my life:

“Do these people want to kill me, too?”

If I take them by their words, it appears that these folks, whose children I know, whose concerts I’ve attended, and whose GoFundMes I’ve supported, actually want to see me dead.

So, after seeing a flurry of these appalling responses to Charlie Kirk’s murder, I felt the need to say something. I broke nearly 10 years of political silence on Facebook to say something.

I didn’t plan it out: I just sat down with my laptop at the dinner table on a Sunday at midnight and wrote what was on my heart. I thought, “Some people will hate this. Too bad. I’m going to delete my account anyway, so who cares?” I said what I felt like saying, hit “post,” then went to bed.

I had no idea what to expect. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t go viral, or cause a scandal or anything, but I was pretty sure some people would get mad.

The results weren’t dramatic, but they were a bit different from what I expected.

First, in a huge surprise, 15 people unfriended me instantly. That was… shocking. I was naive to think that people can disagree and still be friends, but I suppose all this proved to me was that these people who were my “friends” on Facebook really aren’t friends at all.

Second, I got emails, phone calls, and text messages from people OFFLINE that were supportive. They were not necessarily from the people I expected. Some told me, “I agree with you.” Some said, “Thank you for saying that.”

Third, I’ve gotten a few notes from people since then saying, “I like what you have to say, even if I don’t fully agree with you. Keep sharing.”

That last result is why I haven’t deleted my account after all, and have started writing again after a decade of radio silence.

I created my Facebook account in 2015, so for literally ten years, I said nothing.

I didn’t want to rock the boat, get canceled, boycotted, or start flame wars online. I didn’t want to say something true and have the pronoun police accuse me of using “non-inclusive” language or whatever else the L’indignation du jour was.

Bad news would come and go, and I’d watch as my friends argued angrily in my Facebook feed, but I never said anything. I just took it all in, like a two-way mirror: I could see them, but they couldn’t see me.

I bit my tongue throughout the ENTIRE 2016 election cycle. That was really, REALLY hard to do. The weirdest election of my lifetime came and went, and I tried not to utter a single word about it online, at all, ever, to anyone. (And no, I didn’t even tell anyone who I voted for.)

I will never forget election night 2016: I was singing in an opera in Denver. After it was over and we broke from our final curtain call, we all walked backstage, and I heard someone shout:

“GUESS WHAT, EVERYBODY, WE JUST ELECTED A RACIST FOR A PRESIDENT!”

I cringed at the melodramatic and historically tone-deaf comment, but I remained mum.

Then I walked into the lobby of the opera house and saw people standing around, silently. It was eerie: some of them looked shellshocked, like zombies. Their faces were pale and sullen.

I saw a grown man crying.

Literally sobbing, with tears, making loud wailing sounds like in a movie.

Other people came and hugged him. Other people stood around quietly, almost spooked, like they were at a funeral and didn’t know what to do or say. It was like I walked into the scene of a car crash, but there was no car, and no crash.

Today, as I spoke to my non-American friend, I realized something: I’m okay with saying things now. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back wasn’t the 2016 election, or the 2020 election, or even politics at all: it was when my little brother died suddenly a few years ago.

Death changes people in ways they can’t completely understand or explain.

When Riley died, parts of me died too. Some were good parts that I mourn the loss of, but some were bad parts too: there were cowardly parts of me that said, “Don’t offend anyone… don’t say anything that will make people upset.”

Today, that part of me is as dead and gone as my brother is.

In some way I can’t fully comprehend, his death made me realize that: life is short. It’s precious. It’s important. It’s worth sharing your feelings. It’s worth saying what you feel like saying.

No amount of neighbors with “COEXIST” or “Be Kind” bumper stickers can make me shut up. I’m here, I care, I have thoughts, and I’m going to share them. I’ve kept my mouth shut for far too long, and I regret that.

I don’t post ragebait. I don’t intentionally provoke people (well, not usually). I believe that we’re all doing our best, trying to do what’s right and make sense of this world.

Sometimes (i.e., “No Kings Day”) I will heap a double or triple scoop of snark on people who deserve a sound mocking, but overall, I’m here to make friends. I don’t wish ill on ANY of those people, even when I strenuously disagree with them.

I love and care about everyone I’m connected to in real life and online. I wouldn’t have “friended” them in the first place if I didn’t.

I assume—and hope—that this is also what other people want. If that’s not the case, they are free to unfriend me, like those initial people already did.

But just know this: I won’t do that.

We may disagree on some things, or a lot of things, but I won’t cancel you, disconnect from you, block you, or unfriend you (except in extreme circumstances).

If we can’t be friends, that’s your choice. Not mine. I welcome differing opinions. I don’t mind disagreement. But I can’t understand disconnecting over viewpoints.

Praise God that I live in a country where this is possible.

Praise God that my friend was able to escape a murderous regime and start a new life in a free country.

Praise God that the worst people are doing (currently) is disconnecting online from the people they disagree with.

Today, my LinkedIn account is 16 years, 5 months, and 22 days old.

I created my profile on April 7, 2009.

If my LinkedIn profile were a person, it could now drive a car.

Yesterday, I decided to review the profiles of every single connection I have. It took me more than six hours.

What a trip down memory lane. Scrolling through my connections brought back so many memories:

• Places I’ve been

• Jobs I’ve had

• Cities I’ve lived in

• Events I’ve gone to

• Social circles I’ve been part of

It was encouraging… and a little sad.

Every person I’m connected to on LinkedIn is someone I’ve met in person, seen face to face in a virtual meeting, or was a referral from someone I know who introduced me to them. With few exceptions, I recognized every name, and I remember where and when I first met them.

It’s mind-blowing to see how much has changed over the past 16 years.

• Many people have different employers.

• Some people have retired.

• Some people are looking for work.

• Some people are in different industries.

• At least three people are dead.

(Some of them have duplicate accounts, and I’m connected to them twice! They must have lost their login info, given up, and started over.)

I’m connected to:

• 14 Marks

• 13 Johns

• 7 Smiths

• 7 Johnsons

(If I ever host an in-person event with everyone, I’ll need multiple tables just for the Marks and Johns!)

My network grew in fits and spurts, too.

• In 2013, holy moly, I was an active networker.

• In 2020, I fell off the face of the earth when COVID hit.

Some people I know are wildly successful CEOs of powerful corporations who can move millions of dollars in capital with the stroke of a pen. Some are just high school graduates.

Some are people I talked to this week. Some are people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade.

Overall, my biggest takeaway from a day spent perusing my connections was wondering:

• What are all these people up to now?

• When’s the last time I talked to them?

What is the point of having a connection if we never actually connect?

Starting now, I intend to change this. I’m going to reach out to people I haven’t talked to in a long time. How are they doing? How can I help them? How can I keep them in mind when I’m out and about meeting folks?

Here’s the strangest part about this: this morning, when I logged in, I got an alert from LinkedIn, saying they thought I was a bot.

“We noticed activity from your account that indicates you might be using an automation tool…”

I had to click a button to agree not to use automated software; otherwise, my account might be restricted.

How dumb is that? For 16 years, I’ve been making connections with REAL people I know in REAL life, and yesterday, by simply looking at their profiles, my behavior was so “unreal” that LinkedIn thought only a BOT would do this.

If checking in on people I know is behavior that doesn’t look human, then humans have a serious problem.

Today, I have a challenge for anyone reading this:

Reach out to someone you’re connected to but haven’t spoken to in years.

How are they doing? What are they up to?

When’s the last time you checked in on your friends and contacts you met years ago?

In the Fall of 2004, I was a young man wandering, unsure of what to do with my life. I left my summer job working at a Christian ministry in the mountains and dove headlong into single adulthood.

Life was very simple, and I had almost no possessions. I drove a $500 car, had three guitars, and that’s about it. I didn’t even have a bed: I slept on a sleeping bag on the floor of the two-bedroom apartment I shared with two buddies.

We stayed up late at night smoking cigars on our balcony and dreaming about the future. My goal was to move back to California, find a job by the beach, and do something amazing, but I wasn’t sure what that would be. I wanted to be a professional musician, but it seemed that dream had died, and it was too late.

Since I didn’t have a plan and had even less money, I started going to a community college to help me get started working toward something. Then winter set in, and almost everyone I knew moved away to get married or go to college in other places, and I had to stumble through the awkward, lonely phase of being “the one who stayed home.” I had few friends, no career, and little direction or purpose.

Desperately needing money, I stopped in at a 1950s diner under construction to see if I could get a part-time job waiting tables when it opened. I thought it would be fun, and I was really excited when they told me, “You’re hired.”

It turned out to be one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had, though.

The managers played favorites and had serious anger management issues. The pay was terrible, and I barely made enough money to cover my gas to and from work. Many of my coworkers had problems with drugs or alcohol (or both), and were in and out of jail. Their lives were a disaster; they were unreliable and often got fired or quit in a rage. I had nothing in common with them, and I never wanted to see these people outside of work.

Also, the restaurant made us wear embarrassing outfits with giant collars and huge, poofy sleeves, and gave us name tags with fake names from old music and TV shows. I was assigned the name “Wally.” I asked if I could trade it for “Elvis,” but they said no.

I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I lasted exactly three months. That was as long as I could stand. There was only one good thing about this stupid job: I met a girl.

One of the waitresses and I started talking one evening during side work as we cleaned up the bar where we made milkshakes and malts. Her name was Rachel, or as her nametag said, “Priscilla.”

We had a lot in common: our faith, interests, and artistic pursuits. We both sang and played the guitar, and we were both trying to come to terms with the harsh reality that our dreams were out of reach. She wanted to be a professional dancer, and I wanted to be a professional musician, but it was clear that wouldn’t happen for either of us.

Over the next few weeks, Wally and Priscilla ended up doing a lot of talking, not just while shutting down the malted milk station, but also while standing in the parking lot, shivering from the cold after closing the restaurant, and while sitting across the table from each other at the IHOP up the street.

I spent a lot of time gazing into her eyes and talking about my hopes and dreams for the future while drinking hot chocolate and eating pancakes at 2:00 a.m. At Christmas time, I came and watched her dance as a sugar plum fairy in The Nutcracker.

Then, 2004 ended, and we started dating in January of 2005. We performed together in 42nd Street (the musical) in the summer, and, on October 1st of that year, we got married.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of our marriage. Two decades and five kids later, I guess I can say I eventually found my direction and purpose.

We’re still here, we’re still married, and we’re still kicking.

So, “Happy 20th Anniversary” from Wally to Priscilla. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s not over yet. I think I’ll put on 42nd Street when I get home tonight.

I hated my job at that stupid diner, but I have to admit, the benefits were pretty good.

Yesterday, I watched five hours of nonstop live-streamed video from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, just up the road from where I live. It was a truly extraordinary event, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve seen in my lifetime.

It’s hard for me even to comprehend the magnitude of what I saw, much less put it into words.

I watched as America’s Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Vice President, and President (and more) all spoke of America, American exceptionalism, conservatism, and the guiding principles of our Founding Fathers.

They were gathered to celebrate the life of one young man who believed in two things:

1. God

2. America (in that order)

Fireworks burst. Our national anthem and “God Bless the USA” were performed. People on stage, in the audience, and watching online sang along as worship songs were sung. Prayers were offered. Enormous amounts of scripture were read and quoted. Personal testimonies were shared. The gospel was presented by multiple speakers in bits and pieces throughout the day.

Even Tucker Carlson, a strange quasi-political figure who is hard to categorize, spoke more like a preacher than a pundit, calling for repentance.

Repentance!

When was the last time you heard the word “repentance” used in a political event in America? That alone was truly noteworthy in and of itself.

In all, it was a Sunday morning service of singing, prayer, mourning, remembrance, and dedication to God—a big tent revival for the 21st Century.

As much as this event was notable for what was said, what was even more notable was what was not said.

At no point in the five hours I watched did anyone plead with the audience to join a particular political party, support a specific candidate, or vote in a particular way. I didn’t hear the term “Republican” uttered a single time.

They weren’t asking for your vote. It’s not an election year, and nobody is running for office.

They weren’t asking for money, either. Not once did they pass a plate or ask for donations.

This was a free event, where people spoke freely, and people attended of their own free will, in a free country.

All of this is truly remarkable.

As a reaction to the death of an innocent man, it was also remarkable in how similar—and how dissimilar—it was to the response to the death of another innocent man.

In 2020, I watched a video of a man in Minnesota who was killed unjustly. I was outraged when I saw it. Initially, I was very sympathetic to the outpouring of anger by those in power and bystanders. Condemnation flowed on social media, all the way from average, everyday citizens up to the highest offices in the land.

Like many, I felt strongly that changes needed to be made and a serious response was due. But then that response turned very quickly from a righteous anger to hatred, and many people were energized to start a violent campaign of rage, riots, and arson.

Cops were killed. Cars were overturned. Businesses were looted. Windows were smashed. Innocent bystanders died. Police stations were set on fire and even bombed. Billions of dollars in damage were inflicted on people who had absolutely nothing to do with the injustice.

The movement that was initially started by the outrage of one life taken unfairly took many more lives unfairly in response, and the people in high places clapped along and applauded the carnage, including elected officials.

In 2025, I watched a video of another man who was killed unjustly—this time, in Utah. Once again, I was outraged when I saw it. But this time, the response was absolutely nothing like the one before.

In this case, the outpouring of righteous anger at such an injustice resulted in the aggrieved friends, family, and colleagues mourning publicly, yet not a single one of them called for rage, riots, or arson.

No attacking cops, no overturning cars, no smashing windows, no burning buildings, and no killing bystanders in the crossfire of pointless and counter-productive violence.

In contrast, I saw a woman wrongly robbed of her 31-year-old husband proclaim that forgiveness was the answer, even publicly forgiving her husband’s alleged assassin as the world watched.

That’s right: the response of a woman to the brutal murder of the father of her two children, with millions of eyes upon her, was:

“I forgive him.”

That is a breathtaking juxtaposition. In one sentence, she cut through all political posturing and partisan rhetoric and made it very personal, responding to the greatest tragedy of her life with strength, not in vengeance, but in mercy.

That is the scandalous grace of the gospel message. That is also exactly what we need to hear right now.

Today, I hope, is a new chapter for America. Like many others, I believe it is a time for us to be bold.

Unlike previous political rallies I’ve seen over the years, there were no milquetoast invocations to a faceless “Heavenly Father” at this event. There were no insincere appeals to “the creator” as a cold, distant figure who doesn’t know his creatures and doesn’t care about what happens in his creation.

Instead, I saw men and women, young and old, soldiers, pastors, professors, doctors, broadcasters, friends, and family members cry, hold hands, hug, embrace, pray, and sing in remembrance of one man who sacrificed his own life for a cause, but who also pointed us to another man who sacrificed His own life for an even greater cause.

I saw sinners. Hypocrites. Imperfect humans. People who break the Ten Commandments, who fall short, who fail us over and over and over again. They all admitted to needing a savior, and that our only hope for America is in our faith in God.

Since I became an adult and cast my first vote in an election, I’ve been very negative about American politics and my ability to participate in shaping our future. I quietly rolled my eyes at my friends who said, “I believe America’s best days are ahead of us.”

I have never believed this. I’ve always been far too cynical to say something this optimistic. In the two decades since I participated in my very first election, I’ve always felt like America was slipping into a depressing downward spiral that we’d never be able to recover from.

Yesterday, this changed.

I don’t know what the future holds, but for the first time in over 22 years, I have never been more encouraged or optimistic about America’s future.

Yes, five hours was a very long time to sit glued to the couch.

Yes, some of the right-wing internet personalities were a bit over the top and unnecessarily bombastic.

Yes, some of the speeches went on far too long.

Yes, some of the partisan rhetoric made me squirm in my chair as we awkwardly walk that fine line of “separation of church and state” in our nation.

But having said all that, I was more uplifted and encouraged in those five hours than I have ever been watching even five minutes of the nihilistic late-night TV shows that pollute the airwaves with the toxic bile of hate and division, while unfunny comedians accuse “the other side” of doing the same.

This is definitely a new age for America, and I’m excited about it. It was like a big tent revival from the days of old: where a nation is called to reassess its purpose and meaning, and “come to Jesus,” both figuratively and literally.

It brought to mind the many times in history America’s presidents explicitly and publicly called out to God for divine intervention and protection:

In George Washington’s 1783 “Prayer for the United States of America,” which begged for the intercession of “Almighty God,” saying, “We make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy holy protection.”

In John Adams’ 1799 proclamation “Recommending a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” where he asked Americans to “call to mind our numerous offenses against the Most High God, confess them before Him with the sincerest penitence, implore His pardoning mercy, through the Great Mediator and Redeemer.”

In Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation appointing another “National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” where he rebuked the American people for their “presumptuous sins,” and said, “We have forgotten God.”

I believe what we just saw has not been seen in a very long time and is long overdue.

I’ve viewed old black and white film footage of Richard Nixon attending Billy Graham Crusades in the 1950s, but aside from a few obligatory words at the opening, he really wasn’t an integral part of the service, and I think it was just political opportunism in order to curry favor with believers on his road to the White House.

But now, I saw a sitting president, vice president, and multiple cabinet members come together to call upon America to remember one man who was killed for what he said this year, but more importantly, to call upon America to remember another—greater—man who was killed for what He said 2,000 years ago.

This was an extraordinary moment in my lifetime, and in American history. I’ll be pondering this for the months and years to come.

In one sense, yesterday was about Charlie Kirk. But in a bigger sense, it was about the man he pointed us to: Jesus Christ, the one who gives us purpose and meaning.

If September 21 becomes known as America’s “Big Tent Revival of 2025,” then perhaps our best days are not behind us, but ahead.

I’m not a big fan of jumping on social bandwagons and observing “national day of such and such” or “blah blah blah month,” but there is one exception I take very seriously: suicide awareness.

Today, September 10, 2025, is World Suicide Prevention Day, and I’d like to focus on it for just a bit. For whatever reason, suicide is like an unspoken family secret—a terrible truth that everybody knows about but also refuses to talk about.

This has always been confounding to me: I know at least nine people who have died by suicide. Some were friends, some were family members, and some were friends of family members. Yet people refuse to talk about it.

I despise this.

Suicide kills.

We need to talk about it.

Why we need to say the word “suicide”

As I’ve written before, pretending suicide doesn’t exist (or hiding the cause of death of people who die by suicide) doesn’t do anybody any favors, and it’s blatantly untruthful.

The best cure for a problem is to bring it out in the open, acknowledge that it exists, and talk about it. Like adultery, alcoholism, pornography, sexual abuse, or whatever else we find embarrassing, people know it’s destroying families, but they don’t want to acknowledge it.

THIS MUST STOP.

The headlines I hate seeing most are when people write about someone’s death and say the person “died suddenly” or “died unexpectedly.” This grieves me because it’s often a lie. I don’t necessarily fault people for their desire to do that, because they’re trying to protect the reputation of the deceased, their loved one.

But it’s still wrong.

Plus, I don’t think it’s actually loving—either to your loved one or to other people. If your friend or family member died from a certain kind of cancer, would it be disrespectful to let people know about that? What if other people learning that the kind of cancer their friend died from is something they should be aware of and seek testing for?

We do this all the time with all kinds of deaths.

Bob died of a heart attack.

Jimmy was killed in a drunk-driving accident.

Jane died from breast cancer.

This is good. It helps us think about our own mortality.

If we knew Bob, we should start taking our own heart health seriously.

If we knew Jimmy, we should start taking drinking and driving seriously.

If we knew Jane, we should start taking early detection for breast cancer seriously.

It’s crazy to single out suicide as the one cause of death where we zip our lips and act like we don’t know how they died or why.

Part of the reason people don’t want to talk about suicide is because they hate to say something out loud that might be true but sounds terrible.

“David killed himself because he hated his life” sounds ghastly. It also sounds judgmental, both to David and to the people around him.

It raises so many questions:

• Why was his life so bad?

• Didn’t he feel loved?

• Did other people drive him to suicide?

• Could I have done something to help?

All of these are fair questions, but in the end, none of them really matter: we can’t know, and it’s irrelevant once people take “the final solution to a temporary problem.”

We don’t NEED to know exactly why people end their own lives. For Pete’s sake, we don’t understand why people die from all kinds of things half the time anyway.

Some people die from lung cancer at age 23, even if they never smoked a cigarette in their lives. Yet, somehow, Keith Richards has smoked every substance known to man, inhaling the equivalent of all the pollution in Shanghai, China, yet he is still alive and kicking today at 81.

Obese men over the age of 45 are the most vulnerable to heart attacks, yet my own little brother, who was fit as a fiddle, highly active, and ate a healthy diet died from a sudden heart attack with no warning as an 18-year-old.

Death, in general, doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t have to.

Suicide doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t have to.

Stop lying about it.

Lee MacMillan: “Welcome to Life with Lee”

A few years ago, when my mental state was near its darkest point, I stumbled across a video of a “van life” millennial travel blogger on YouTube named Lee MacMillan. I found the video pinned to the top of her channel.

“Welcome to Life with Lee,” it said. I watched it, and saved it.

I thought it was very interesting and inspirational. She sounded a lot like me: both her passion for travel and exploration, and also in her muddy state of mental confusion, lack of peace and meaning, and overall sense of being unsettled.

I didn’t know who she was before, or what she’d done in the past, but she was clearly making some big life changes, and this video was an announcement of her new direction.

Watch the video: the scenery is breathtaking. Lee has gone all over the world, visiting at least 13 countries, and, if this video is any indicator, has traveled to mountains, beaches, deserts, jungles, big cities, and everything in between. It looks like she’s seen and done almost everything someone interested in travel possibly could.

But she’s clearly not happy. Something is wrong.

This video is an amazingly vulnerable confession of her struggle with emotional overload, mental health, and trying to make sense of her life. Here’s the video I found, below, and I’ve also added a transcript if you’d prefer to read it. (Or you can just skip past it if you’d prefer not to read the whole thing.)

It’s almost ten minutes long, but I believe it’s worth your time. See what stands out to you and reflect on your own emotional feelings and struggles (if you have them).

Note: if the video doesn’t load for some reason, see it here on YouTube.

I feel unable to take care of myself. Basic needs like feeding myself are hard right now. I feel lazy and disgusted with myself for how little I’m able to take care of. I’m unable to focus on anything, really.

I feel like I should be doing work. I should be making a LinkedIn profile. I feel sad, lost, and lonely. I’m unable to focus. I’m constantly comparing myself. I feel like I need to be productive.

Meanwhile, I’m spending my whole day procrastinating. Now I feel worse that I haven’t accomplished anything.

I did go for a bike ride with Dad today. That was nice.

I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I do truly want to create a morning routine to look forward to.

I want to wake up each day excited to live that day. Right now, living feels like a drag. I have a hard time envisioning my future because I don’t know what I want. Yet I’m not focusing on figuring out what it is that I want.

I know what I don’t want, and that list is long. So how can I be so picky? I always think a new place will solve my issue: new surroundings, new friends. But it’s not that simple.

I’m working on becoming better at being me, who I am, where I am, but it’s hard. This is a mental battle that I’m losing miserably right now. I’m not appreciating what I have or what’s around me. I speak the words, but I don’t feel it.

I was asked to describe 2020 in one word, and I said “raw.” This year, I was stripped of my ego and forced to face my insecurities, my self-limiting beliefs, and my fears. I had to change my mindset and learn to accept myself, all flaws included.

What I found happens when you learn to accept yourself for all that you are is you begin to heal. You begin to find out what it is that you really need to grow and thrive. You begin to find your tribe of people who love you for all that you are.

You begin to open new doors that were once closed because you were too busy trying to be somebody else or trying to meet someone’s expectations instead of being unapologetically yourself. And you begin to truly love yourself, and that is powerful.

I’ve learned that I would rather risk falling down again than let my life be controlled by my own fears. I’ve learned that no one can save you but yourself. You create your reality. You are in the driver’s seat. Not fear.

I’ve learned to stop disappointing myself in order to please everyone else. I’ve learned to set boundaries to protect my energy. I’ve learned to let go. To love without attachment.

I’ve learned that in order to stop dwelling in the past or obsessing over the future, you need to deal with the uncomfortable emotions that sit in the present. The longer you resist this, the worse you feel. I’ve learned it’s worth taking the difficult path if it means being true to yourself.

I’ve learned that as you change, not everyone will accept the new you. But that is okay.

I am so grateful for this community that we have built online, and I look forward to continuing to foster and curate a safe space for all of us to interact in 2021.

Which brings me to the most exciting part of this video, which is that I’m both ecstatic and slightly overwhelmed to be building a new camper van.

I am located in Santa Barbara in California, and this time around, I’m going to be building a van for a completely different reason. I am not interested in getting back into full-time van life. I have learned a lot of invaluable lessons on the road, one of which is to listen to my heart when the road is calling, but to honor myself and my needs when I’m craving some stability and solid ground under my feet.

So, California will be my launching pad, but I hope that one day, sooner than later, when the world begins to open, to travel in this van all across North America, and to meet more of you and more people in this like-minded community. You guys inspire me to be more creative, to continue opening up.

It’s very genuine for me to share. I’m an extrovert through and through, and I’ve learned this year that I need people. So I value this community so much. So, thank you for being here.

2021 is going to look different than it has in the past. If you’re excited to take on some new challenges with me, to learn, to grow, and to push yourself outside of your comfort zone with me, then I cannot wait to see more of you in the new year.

That is everything for me for the end of 2020.

See you in 2021.

Isn’t that beautiful, depressing, vulnerable… but also hopeful?

Here’s the sad thing: this video was posted in December 2020. I found this video, I think, in the summer of 2021.

She died by suicide in March 2021. That means she was already dead when I found this video. When I discovered who she was, it was already too late.

What a sad, crazy world.

I’ve watched this video multiple times since then, and the words have a totally new meaning now that I know that she was on the verge of ending her own life. It “hits different” now.

People could opine about how this video was “a cry for help,” but I’m no expert, and I don’t know that for sure. This may be one of those things that seemed okay at the time, but looks more obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

Are there some phrases she uses in this video that are a cause for concern? Certainly.

Does that mean it was logical for people to immediately contact her and ask her if she was suicidal? Not necessarily, but perhaps there were signs that friends and family members could have seen if they were looking. I don’t know.

Endlessly searching for meaning

Some people are quick to criticize the whole “van life” / nomad movement that’s so popular with millennials in the first place, and get kind of annoyed at their stubborn refusal to “settle down” and live a “normal” life.

It is indeed counter-cultural to reject the trappings of a family, a mortgage, a car, a job, and the boring daily grind that most Americans have experienced as “normal” for the past century or so.

It is a little strange to see a 28 year old woman living, alone, and single, with nothing, searching endlessly to find happiness by trotting all over the globe, visiting foreign places and meeting so many strangers who become friends, yet still coming up empty and feeling so alone.

I want to be a world traveler myself, and have visited a few countries on my own, taking various scuba diving trips in exciting places, and I love adventure.

But even I scratch my head at this whole generation of young people who are spending their entire twenties pursuing their wanderlust forever, off the grid, sleeping in their cars, cooking camp meals, taking spiritual retreats, endlessly navel-gazing, and perpetually trying to “discover themselves,” but never knowing exactly what that means.

It seems somewhat selfish and shallow and also so needlessly deep sometimes: like they’re living for simple pleasure, but also trying to uncover the profoundest truths of life, and solve the greatest mysteries of the universe and everything that exists.

But kids are kids, and sometimes it really does take time to discover that. Lee even admits being disillusioned with a life she thought would solve her emptiness.

I know what I don’t want, and that list is long. So how can I be so picky? I always think a new place will solve my issue: new surroundings, new friends. But it’s not that simple.

I have definitely known some people who feel like, in order to cope with life, they need to constantly move: they’re always changing their surroundings, changing the scenery, and changing their social circle. And I’m never surprised that these people seem to wander forever and never actually find what they’re looking for.

But at the same time, I’m awkwardly split in the middle—I also long to get in a van and drive all over the world, hike, snorkel, sail, swim, and camp in every country on earth. I want to wake up in a hammock high on a baobab tree in Madagascar, or go to bed under the stars in a sleeping bag in the Hebrides of Scotland.

I want all those things: I want to be free and untethered, going wherever the wind may take me.

But I can’t—I’m married and have five kids. I don’t have the time or freedom to do much more than stay home and take care of my family now. But, of course, the irony is, even though I’m not chasing my passions in a van overseas, I haven’t been immune to the same kinds of thoughts and feelings as Lee.

I have had a lifelong struggle myself with suicidal thoughts, and I have been very open about this. I don’t understand why other people aren’t. I am chronically surprised at the pathetic state of therapy and counseling, and I’ve had a tough time trying to choose to live when life is incredibly hard and I don’t understand why getting help seems to be so difficult.

My second “Lifeaversary”

And mostly, I don’t want to suffer in silence. When I made a huge life decision to put all thoughts of suicide behind me, two years ago, in September of 2023, I wrote about it to tell the world. I want people to know about my struggle and to celebrate with me in my victory over those thoughts and temptations.

This September, I’m celebrating my second “Lifeaversary,” and I want to make the Lifeaversary a thing for people who celebrate successfully choosing to live.

So today, I’m thankful for two years of choosing life, and I’m thankful for Lee MacMillan. I’m very sad that her story was so tragic, but I’m glad this video still exists to remind me of her. Her video shows real words shared by a real person who was really struggling.

I didn’t know her. But I appreciate the openness and honesty shared here, and I wish more people would talk like this.

The two most ironic parts of this story, though, are:

1. She titled this video: “Welcome to Life with Lee”

2. The background music she chose was a song called “So Alive.”

The lyrics are fantastic. Just look at the chorus:

“So Alive” by Leucadia

I, I feel so alive

I, I feel so alive

I feel the blood rush through my veins

I can take on the world when you’re next to me

I, I feel so alive

I feel so alive

(Listen to the song here, on Spotify, or Apple Music).

Since I found it, I have taken this song as my personal anthem for staying alive.

In the evenings, I like to sit in my backyard and watch the sunset and play this song.

I listen to it all the time to remind me of people who struggle and lose the fight (like Lee) and people still struggling and winning the fight (like me, so far).

I take it one day at a time, and remind myself that it’s good to feel so alive. And even though Lee isn’t here anymore, one thing is certain: while she was alive, she felt so alive. Just look at all the things she did in her short life. I aspire to do the same.

Please, talk about suicide

If you have struggled with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please seek help. There are a lot of people willing to listen (including me—just send me a message).

For professional help, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (details below).

Today, I’m proud to loudly and publicly observe World Suicide Prevention Day. I am celebrating my choice to keep living not only for myself, but for my wife and children, and also for the memory of those like Lee who remind us how fragile and precious that choice can be, who can’t speak up against suicide anymore.

Please, talk about suicide.

Open your mouth. Use words. Ask questions. Be a listener.

Check in with the people you care about. Tell (and show) them that life is worth living.

Some writers (most, actually) are completely losing their minds about AI, saying it will replace writers. I think the conclusion is clear by now.

AI is absolutely going to replace writers… bad ones.

While there is a barrage of annoying clickbait articles like “Here Are Five Ways To Detect AI Writing Instantly” (which are usually inaccurate crap), some people clearly ARE using AI to think for them, outline for them, write for them, and edit for them.

And this is great.

This gives real writers the best opportunity they’ve had in decades to stand out.

The “AI slop” criticism is real, and it’s fair: a lot of people are churning out low-quality, nonsensical content at a rapid pace.

Good for them.

The real problem with AI writing isn’t seeing perfectly-chunked paragraphs littered with em dashes or interspersed with telltale phrases like: “It’s not X, it’s Y” — it’s that this kind of content has no heart or soul… literally.

If you don’t believe me, have you logged into LinkedIn recently? It has been a total cringefest for at least the past decade, but AI has made it sink to a new low.

It’s almost all faux-inspiration, manufactured outrage, corporate gibberish, announcements like: “I was humbled to receive this award that I am now proudly bragging about here for the whole world to see,” and canned PR press releases that say nothing, which nobody reads or cares about because we know they’re full of lies.

It’s all just verbal masturbation in public.

The bar has never been lower than it is now.

Scrolling through social media feeds—especially LinkedIn—is like plumbing the depths of a city sewer: it’s filled with garbage floating in a stream of waste. It drifts past you, and you never once say “Wow, look: here’s something truly insightful and worth saving,” because none of it is.

It’s all junk.

Just last week, I read a lengthy post on LinkedIn about managing stress and handling big life changes. It had more than 1,000 words and ran on for many paragraphs, but it said essentially nothing.

It had zero inspiration.

It had zero actionable takeaways.

It had zero engagement.

In the end, it was ultimately meaningless.

And it made me sad to see it, not just because it was a waste of time, but because it was written by a friend of mine.

My friend doesn’t talk like that.

It was so obviously written by AI that it was painful to read. The whole thing was devoid of HER voice, HER passion, and HER personality—the things that make HER an interesting and valuable person.

It was just… so… clearly… not her.

Here’s the thing: I care what she thinks and feels about life stages, working in spite of pain and managing stress, while juggling a family and work.

I DO want to hear what she has to say about this.

I DON’T want to hear what an AI chatbot thinks she should say about this.

That’s what most people are missing.

People are smart.

AI is dumb.

Writers need to rely on their own intuition and write what they actually think and feel. The AI bots can’t do this. Asking AI how you should write about a topic that’s near and dear to your heart cheapens your voice and devalues your emotions.

I can almost guarantee that what happened with my friend was that she had a kernel of a great idea. Something like:

“My life is hard in this specific, particular way, but I’m getting through it. I wonder if there are other people struggling in the same way. If I vocalize my weakness and inner fears, maybe other people will see it and be encouraged.”

This is good. This is a great start.

But then she probably plopped this basic concept into ChatGPT and, with a few prompts, essentially asked it to take that idea and run with it.

That was a bad idea.

It clearly took the basic premise (which was good) and made it bland and boring.

It made it safe.

If I had to guess, it probably took multiple tries to “refine” this piece of writing into a finished product made for LinkedIn.

This is the worst part about AI: writers will throw an idea at it like a lump of clay, and say, “Here is something that is near and dear to my heart. Help me turn it into a story.”

At first, it gives you something great. It shows you a basic structure. It moulds your simple foundation into a simple story. You see your idea start to form, and say, “WOW, that’s great!”

But then you notice it’s not quite right… so you say, “Okay, but change this part,” and it gives you a new version. Then you add more, but the AI starts to overcorrect.

“That’s a good idea, but what about this or that? Have you thought about merging point C into point B to make it more concise? Also, are you sure you want to use profanity here? It might alienate your audience. Would you like me to write a version that is safe for work?”

It now begins to flatten out the whole thing, sanding down the rough edges, and with its help, you tweak it a little bit… and you tweak it a little bit… and eventually, the AI is finally happy and says, “This is ready to post!”

But if you look at the final product, you realize that it’s exceptionally boring, entirely generic, and, most of all, it looks absolutely nothing like what you originally planned on writing when you first came up with the idea.

It could have been written by just about anyone. In fact, it was written by just about anyone.

AI has now taken your original thought, made a copy of a copy of a copy, added some trite “collective wisdom” from the millions of writers it was trained on, and crunched the whole thing through a homogenizer.

Congratulations: your earnest nugget of life wisdom you wanted to share with the world is now opaque, white, and flavorless.

Like a glass of milk, in a standard-size glass. It is entirely indiscernible from the rest of the billions and billions served daily. Nothing about it is special, or unique, or will entice anyone to read it, much less devour it.

But here’s the irony: in trying to make your thoughts harmless and palatable, you’ve also made them boring. Your AI friend made your life lesson as exciting as a tepid glass of milk that’s been sitting on the kitchen counter all day. …and as anyone who’s accidentally drunk spoiled milk can attest, consuming that is definitely not harmless.

The mistake writers are making—the mistake my friend made—is trusting that an AI chatbot can do a better job bringing your kernel of truth to life.

It can’t.

Machine-processed foods are cheap, mass-produced, and bad for you. That’s why giant global mega-corporations that make them have to stuff them full of artificial colors and sweeteners. It requires extra effort to make their terrible food, which is made in a giant steel box, become scented, colorful, and tasty.

What a strange thing people are doing, making the same mistake when writing.

They’re saying: I’d rather make cookies with bleached flour, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring made with synthetic petroleum dye, and Butylated Hydroxyanisole. But nobody wants this.

Literally nobody wants this.

What people actually want is homemade cookies with butter, eggs, sugar, flour, salt, and chocolate.

Yes, it’s more expensive. Yes, it’s harder to scale. Yes, sometimes the eggs look funny, or you add too much salt, or forget to mix the dough all the way.

It’s imperfect. It’s made with animal products. It comes from the ground.

But it’s real. It’s visceral. It’s what people want.

That’s what we pay for. That’s what we have fond memories of from our childhoods.

The fact that writers think they can use AI to write better is ironic, and it’s what’s filling our lives with hours wasted scrolling endlessly through the swill.

All of this is good news for writers, though.

We don’t have to live this way.

Right now, everybody’s still playing around with AI like it’s a moon rock that fell to earth. We don’t know what to do with it, so we sort of poke at it with fear and excitement to see what it will do.

Will it kill me?

Will it give me special powers?

Is it radioactive?

Moving forward, though, as we learn to incorporate AI into our workflows and our daily lives (just like we’ve done with EVERY other technology), it will be the lazy ones, the untalented ones, the insecure ones who use AI like a crutch, generating content with no substance, no calories, and no flavor.

Ten years from now, nobody will remember anything the robots wrote.

AI doesn’t even “write” words anyway; it just repeats the words humans write back to them. And AI bots won’t even leave behind “words on a page” either: in the internet age, there is no “page” anymore.

The remnants of AI writing will be like an empty foil “Chips Ahoy!” bag on the floor of your car. You’ll throw out the wrapper by the vacuum at the car wash.

You won’t even remember eating those cookies. That moment was gone a long time ago, and only the trash remains.

What we will remember are the true stories from a lived experience by a flesh-and-blood person who has the profound advantage of being.

We will remember YOUR voice telling us YOUR hopes and dreams and fears.

We will remember eating those magical cookies Grandma made, which were more than the sum of their parts because they weren’t just cookies. They were HER cookies.

Therein lies the difference. THAT is the true legacy of AI slop.

Writers: embrace the bland, uninspired detritus that AI has strewn about.

Start now. Stop outsourcing your most important work to the machines.

Write real words about real people. Real feelings. Real problems. Real solutions.

Make it so real and so raw that it actually hurts.

Take us there. Make us feel it.

I want to smell your writing.

Overwhelm our senses.

This is your chance to shine.

Today, I turned 40. For a few months, I’ve thought about writing one of those “40 Things I’ve Learned After 40 Years of Living” posts. But those are actually kind of annoying, and honestly, 40 lessons would be painful for me to write, and painful for you to read.

In our culture, at least, reaching a “milestone age” seems to make people feel the need to share big, profound insights; little nuggets of hard-earned wisdom for others. But after going back and forth about it a few times, I’ve decided that I don’t really feel like giving out advice on my 40th birthday.

Partly because the older I get, the less confident I am in giving advice at all. I’ve noticed that the people most eager to dispense advice are often the least qualified.

Meanwhile, social media is overflowing with “life hacks” for marriage, parenting, money, and more. I hate that crap.

I don’t ask divorced people for marriage advice. I don’t ask childless people for parenting advice. I don’t ask broke people for financial advice.

The people with the best advice are usually the ones least willing to speak up. They’re too humble to proclaim that they have something smart to say that you’d want to hear.

The ones who’ve influenced me usually had to be coaxed, and even then, they weren’t so decisive. “You might try this,” or “This worked for us,” they’d say. I appreciate this.

So, I’m not really here to tell other people what to do or how to do it.

Having said that… today, I sit in a coffee shop, looking back on four decades of life, almost twenty years of marriage, and five kids, and I do have a few thoughts I think are worth saying out loud.

People often talk about life in “chapters.” That made sense to me until now. But reaching 40 feels less like the end of a chapter, and more like the end of a whole book. So, today, it’s time to close it up, bind it, send it to the publisher, and call it “Volume One.”

After 40 years of living, if each page in my book were one day, today, I’ve reached page 14,600. That is hard for me to comprehend. As I wrap my mind around this, here are five big thoughts, taken from the first book of my life: Ron Stauffer, Vol. I.

Five Big Thoughts on My 40th Birthday

#1: Some words you say will echo in eternity. You won’t know which ones.

When I worked at a diner in 2004, I was on the closing crew one night until after midnight. After we were done, I walked back to my car with a coworker. We talked in the parking lot for a few minutes, and then I invited her on a date in a very light-hearted way, almost as an afterthought.

“I’m pretty hungry,” I said. “I’m going to IHOP to get some pancakes. Wanna come along?”

She smiled at me, paused, and responded.

“I have some time…” she said, almost reluctantly.

That coworker has been my wife for almost 20 years now.

We had no idea back then that this little exchange would be etched in our memories forever. Many times, I’ve pondered just how strange it was that this moment was the beginning of our friendship, which later turned into a romantic relationship, then a marriage, and eventually five kids.

I wish that I had said something else to her, and I really wish she had said something else in return.

In other words, if I could write my love story, it would look and sound nothing like this.

But it is what it is.

Those words shared between two coworkers in a freezing cold parking lot outside a 1950s diner, spoken off the cuff, are what we will remember forever. I didn’t know it at the time, though. I couldn’t have.

To this day, my wife and I jokingly repeat this exchange all the time. If I want to take her out on a date, I’ll say: “I’m hungry. Wanna get pancakes at IHOP?” and in a coy, teasing manner, she’ll say, “I have some time.”

That is a pleasant memory of a happy time, but the same thing can happen when tragedy strikes, too.

When my brother died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 18, everyone in my family asked themselves, “What was the last thing I said to him?”

We all tried to remember our respective “final conversations” with him with mixed success. Since it was such a shocking and sudden death, most of us have a sentence or two in our minds that we’ll never forget. But none of us knew that our words to him then would be our very last.

This happens in life, for good or ill. You never know which words you say will last forever—until it’s too late.

#2: At 40, it’s hip to be square.

My whole life, I’ve made safe, conservative choices, especially when it comes to my body. I’ve rejected almost every single form of “cool behavior,” and it turns out that now, I’m actually the rebel.

People sometimes say that everything eventually comes around full circle, and I think that’s true here. On paper, at least, I sound kind of boring… the kind of guy that bullies used to mock:

• I’ve only slept with one woman (the one I married)

• I’ve never smoked a cigarette

• I’ve never tried marijuana

• I’ve never had any piercings

• I’ve never dyed or bleached my hair

• I’ve never gotten a tattoo

• I’ve never tried any recreational drugs of any kind

You know what’s weird about all of this? These choices make me the odd man out.

To be clear, I am not necessarily saying this makes me better than other people. I am saying that the older I get, the more it seems I’m the only one I know who hasn’t done anything crazy like this.

The marijuana thing is bizarre: it was an illegal drug for most of my life. Growing up, “weed” was something that naughty teenagers smoked in order to be rebellious. Today, it’s people older than me who do it.

When I see bands like Rush and ZZ Top in concert, weed smoke fills the air, and it’s the people my parents’ age who are “taking a toke” while I stand there and choke.

(Also, when I signed up to volunteer at my police department years ago, the polygraph examiner hammered me OVER AND OVER about marijuana use—he just could not believe that I’d never used the stuff.)

This is a total mind-bender to me: today, the people most likely to smoke marijuana aren’t my age: they look like balding grandparents with beer bellies. That is a totally wild thought.

Body modification is another great example of how weird this has become.

Not a whole lot of 40-year-old men I know today have pierced ears. But a bunch of them did during their teenage years, and you can still see their old piercing scars today.

Similarly, when I was growing up, tattoos were the markings of bad guys: dangerous, scary, men with big beards who were members of motorcycle gangs. Now, you’re just as likely to see a tattoo on a skinny girl with curly blonde hair who works as a barista and wears a trucker cap that says “Jesus Is My Homeboy.”

Seriously, I see more tattoos these days on newly expectant moms showing off their pregnant bellies on Instagram than I do from tough guys who ride Harleys. Even if I had no moral qualms about tattoos, it would come across as pathetic if I got one today—my mother-in-law has a bunch of tattoos all over her arms and shoulders.

If I tried to be a badass by getting tattooed now, my kids would probably laugh at me and say, “Hey, everybody, Dad’s such a tough guy—he almost looks like Mema.”

I see tattoos today and remember what Ozzy Osbourne, the king of tattoos, said:

“If you want to be a fucking individual, don’t get a tattoo. Every fucker’s got one these days.”

Thanks, Ozzy. I am a true rebel in my factory-original, unmarked, unpierced body.

#3: I wish I could do one thing really well instead of knowing how to do 100 different things a tiny bit.

Over the years, I’ve gotten to try, experience, and participate in a lot of things. In other words, I’m a “dabbler.” I’ve dabbled in a lot of things:

Wrestling, track and field, swim team, scuba diving, snorkeling, surfing, hiking, canoeing, hang gliding, kayaking, fencing, gymnastics, falconry, singing opera, choral music, Christmas Caroling, playing the piano, guitar, trumpet, tuba, and euphonium, golf, frisbee golf, rock climbing, home brewing beer, bowling, snowboarding, shooting, camping, fishing, origami, cross-stitch, tap dancing, musical theater, whitewater rafting, flamenco dancing, riding a motorcycle, …and more than I can list here.

I’m not especially good at any of them. I’ve just dipped my toe into the waters with most of them. This makes me well-rounded and excellent at small talk with strangers, but it’s also extremely annoying.

What is the thing I’m REALLY good at?

I don’t know. I don’t think I have one.

Take bowling, for example. I like bowling. I’ve done it many times in my life. But I’m not very good at it. My father-in-law is an excellent bowler, though. He was part of a bowling league for many years and has won awards and trophies and things like that.

This makes him fun to go bowling with. He’s really good, and he knows the techniques and the rules. Any time I go bowling with Dad, I know I’m going to lose to him. That’s kind of annoying, but it’s also fun. I can ask him questions about it, and he’s a super-whiz at mental math, so he always knows exactly who’s ahead and what we need to win. I like having him on my team.

“Ellis is a good bowler” is something people can say, objectively. It’s just true.

What would people say about me? Am I good at anything?

There’s a scene in the movie “Julie and Julia,” about Julia Child, where Paul and Julia are at dinner, discussing what she could do with her free time because she’s bored, doesn’t work, and has no kids.

• Julia: “I saw a notice on the bulletin board at the embassy for hat-making lessons.”

• Paul: “You like hats…”

• Julia: “I do… I do… I do.”

I feel like this all the time. When Paul says, “You like hats,” his voice lingers in the air, fading inconclusively. He’s stating a fact, but it's phrased more like a question.

“You… like… hats?” He’s almost asking.

“I do,” Julia says three times, slowly, trying to convince herself.

What’s wrong with hats? Wouldn’t it be good to learn how to make hats?

She wishes this were compelling, but it just isn’t. She could make hats—she doesn’t hate the idea. But she doesn’t love it either.

I’m like that. At 40, I have no idea what I like, what I’m good at, or what to do with myself.

This is very annoying.

I feel like I’m Julia, asking myself, “Should I take hat-making lessons? Do I like hats?”

I’ve met people whose lives are so much simpler than mine. In all honesty, I used to look down on people like that, but the older I get, the more I wish I were like them.

Take people like my father-in-law: he’s been a plumber his whole life. He’s really good at bowling. He likes baby back ribs. Ask anybody who knows him to describe him, and that’s probably what they’d say.

He’s a very simple guy: plumbing, bowling, ribs.

That’s it.

I wish I could say the same about me sometimes.

#4: I don’t know what to do for a living.

These days, I build websites and do digital marketing and web accessibility consulting for a living. It’s good—it supports my wife and kids.

To me, it’s like hatmaking: I could do it… I do do it… But I don’t love it.

If I woke up tomorrow morning and someone said, “Ron, you get to choose a new career now. Forget everything you’ve done in the past; you can start from scratch,” I would have absolutely no idea what to pick.

I would definitely not do what I’m doing now. But I don’t know what it would be.

This is part of a greater midlife crisis I’ve had for a few years, but the “career choice question” is truly vexing right now: what would I do if I could?

I have a business mentor, a woman I meet with once a month, and she’s been prodding me to try to think big about questions like this. But I kind of hate it: my life is so constrained that it’s almost painful to truly try to dream without limits and barriers.

What would I do if I could do anything? That’s an absurd question. It feels irresponsible to dream that big.

What would I do if I could do anything I wanted—anything at all—and money was no object? And I didn’t have to worry about financially supporting a family?

If I could do ANYTHING?

I’d want to be a world explorer, deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle, discovering unknown species of poison arrow frogs. I’d live in a hammock high up in the canopy of the rubber trees, wearing a headlamp and observing the behavior of nocturnal bats, capturing their mating dance at 2:00 in the morning with an infrared camera. I’d disappear from civilization for nine months at a time and take the mother of all showers when I finally returned to human contact.

I would be a scuba divemaster in the Caribbean Islands. I’d lead tours of divers from all over the world, photographing the coral reefs and working for tips. I’d spear lionfish and catch lobsters in the day, then grill them over a wood fire on the beach in the evenings, drinking cheap beers and listening to calypso music.

I might spend a summer working on a nutmeg farm, or in the sugar cane fields, distilling rum, then swimming in the lakes and showering in waterfalls that are abundant in the tropical islands off the coast of South America. When I get bored with that, I might head to Australia to trek across the outback in a Range Rover and study lizards and venomous snakes endemic to the barren sands of Lake Eyre.

I’ve thought of buying a motorcycle and starting at the top of Alaska, heading south, and spending a year or two riding all the way down to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. I’d stop in Buenos Aires and take Tango lessons, then meet some Gauchoes in the Uruguayan Pampas and learn the secrets of grilling Churrasco steak. I’d make podcast episodes and videos along the way and write a book about my experience.

But alas, I can’t do just ANYTHING. All of these are impossible to do with a wife and kids.

My wife often reminds me: “You CHOSE to get married and have a family.”

This is correct. I did. I do not regret that. But I don’t like that these things (what I want vs. the life I chose) are at odds, at least for now.

I often think about the next chapter (or the “next book,” as I’ve said before). I’ve observed some absolutely insane transformations some men I know have accomplished over the years. It’s really something to see a person live a certain way for a decade or more, then completely change and reinvent themselves.

One of the most inspiring “second-act” stories I know is a friend of mine who was a father of two girls (with two different women), juggling a very complicated custody arrangement and working at a cell phone store when I met him.

A few years passed. He got a job in banking. He remarried. His new wife became pregnant with twins. After an upgraded career in finance, he decided to buy a vineyard in another country.

Going from being a single dad selling cell phones when I first knew him, he is now a married dad with two wonderful teenage girls, AND a new wife, AND two little baby boys, AND owns property AND sells wine internationally for a living.

OH MY GOODNESS, would I like a story like that. His life today is totally unrecognizable from what it was before.

I don’t need anything that drastic, per se—I don’t plan on getting remarried any time soon. But I do like the idea of starting over in a way that is completely unencumbered by what you’ve done and where you’ve been in the past.

Who knows: might I become a professor of literature in a school in Türkiye someday? Or a boat captain in Greece? A miner in Chile?

I don’t know, but I’m not ruling anything out anymore. The trick is to try to do two or more things at the same time that seem to conflict: (marriage/family) + (fun career) + (ability to actually make money).

I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m ready for it.

I don’t want to build websites forever. But I think going back to college again (after a long, complicated 16-year journey to get my first degree) is not going to happen. Trade school is probably out as well, even if I wanted to work with my hands.

But it is definitely time for the next thing.

#5: I do have some regrets, but I try not to obsess over them.

When I turned 35, I considered writing a list of all my regrets in life so far. After some thought, I came up with a short list—only about five or six in all, depending on how you count them. Some are private and personal, but there are three worth sharing here.

Big Regret #1

I regret that I listened when I was told as a teen that I couldn’t be a professional musician and a husband and father. I wish I’d just ignored that warning and barreled forward, full speed ahead.

As an adult, I’ve met a few musicians who are, in fact, able to make a living doing nothing but music. It’s extremely rare, but it does happen. I wish that had been me. I could have made enough as a musician if I’d wanted it badly enough… but I didn’t. I didn’t even try. I just gave up and moved on.

Big Regret #2

I regret that when my wife and I first got married, I didn’t immediately move us back to California, as I said I would. This was my original plan, but then we had a baby. With both our families living in Colorado Springs, having a baby in the same town made it seem like the logical conclusion was to say, “We should stay here, since grandma and grandpa can see the baby and help us if needed.”

In other words, it felt like the “responsible choice.” I should have taken immediate action and moved us away right after we got married. I waited too long, so we were stuck. We established ourselves and put down roots, so the longer we stayed, the harder it was to leave.

It took me 11 years to finally move my family away from that town, and I wish I’d done it sooner. It would have caused a fight, but I believe it would have been better for both of us in the long run.

Big Regret #3

I regret that I didn’t pursue music sooner, even when it was already apparent that I couldn’t do it as a full-time career. When I finally reached out to a professional opera teacher and said, “I’d like to take voice lessons,” it was one of the greatest things I’d ever done. Eventually, I did make it to “the big stage,” but it was too little, too late.

I could have taken it much further, which would have been a lot more rewarding and fun, and I could have been more prepared to do it as a hobby. But by avoiding music because it seemed like a waste of time (because it couldn’t pay the bills), I cut my passion much shorter than it needed to be.

Now that I think about it, I think almost every regret I have in life comes from listening too much to other people or trying too hard to please them.

I also think there’s a common denominator: most of my life regrets involve NOT doing something when I could have, rather than doing something I wish I hadn’t later, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.

At 40, I hope I now have the guts to just stand up and say to the world:

“I don’t care what other people think anymore. You no longer have power over me. I’ve proven that I can make good choices. I’m taking action, and you can’t stop me.”

I don’t know that I’m capable of that, since I still care way too much about what other people think of me, but I’m working on it.

In the end, regrets are unavoidable. Obsessing over them doesn’t have to be.

So, Happy 40th Birthday to me!

Ron Stauffer, Volume I is now finished… time to get started on Volume II.

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La La Land turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of my adult life.

In 2016, my wife and I did something we almost never do: we went to a movie theater and saw a movie when it came out. We didn’t wait for the dollar-theater release in a few weeks, or the movie rental via streaming a few months later, like we usually do.

We actually “went to the movies” to see it, when it was still new and popular — I think I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve done that.

I didn’t want to go at first. I’m such an anti-conformist that my first inclination is to always believe that if something is popular and people are talking about it, I’ll probably hate it. If not, I’ll find out years later when it isn’t cool and popular anymore.

(For example, everybody on earth talked about “The Matrix” when it came out. I ignored it for 25 years and saw it last year for the first time. I hated it.)

But La La Land is something different.

On paper, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that I’d like it.

It has an actor I don’t really like (Ryan Gosling as “Sebastian”) and an actress I’m not a big fan of (Emma Stone as “Mia”).

It has silly nonsense like people jumping on top of cars and spinning around in the middle of the 105 in Los Angeles during rush hour.

It has a strange “dream sequence” where Mia and Seb twirl around inside the Griffith Observatory after hours, in the dark, where nobody else is there, and all the doors are magically unlocked, and they float up into the stars.

It has a lot of fighting. Mia and “Seb” (Sebastian) fight a lot.

Sometimes, it’s friendly, good-natured ribbing, like when they tap dance on the asphalt by the lamppost overlooking Mount Hollywood Drive, and Mia pokes fun at his “polyester suit” (it’s wool).

Sometimes, it’s a full-blown spat where dinner gets burned and there’s smoke in the kitchen, harsh accusations, bitterness, resentment, and permanent relational damage.

But La La Land has something else too… familiarity.

It’s extremely familiar to me. So last week, when one of my teenage daughters watched it for the first time, she told us what she thought at the dinner table.

“Meh. I finally watched it after all this time, and it was boring. I can’t see why people made such a big fuss about it.”

I was shocked. Almost insulted. And it put me in the decidedly awkward position of defending it.

You’d think it would be my daughter arguing in favor of a movie called “La La Land” starring Gosling, a teenage heartthrob, and former Mouseketeer, but in fact… it was me.

I thought about this for a while, and it started to make sense.

I guess she didn’t like it because she didn’t live it. What I like about the movie is that it was so REAL.

When I saw Seb and Mia on the screen, I saw my own life. It was remarkably close to what my wife and I were living out.

When the movie was released, it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was singing opera in Denver, and my wife was a dance student in Boulder. We were both going to school full-time, in our 30s, as parents of five kids, pursuing our lifelong passions in what we perceived was our very last chance before the doors slammed shut forever.

Everything in our lives was hard: money, carpooling, parenting, simply getting through the week without calls from the school principal saying, “Your son has been suspended again, please come pick him up.”

Adding our artistic visions and dreams on top of that seemed almost irresponsible.

What I liked so much about the movie was how it showed how two people with differing drives and passions can find each other’s artistic pursuits both endearing and obnoxious at the same time.

For us, singing and dancing gave us life, but it was also the source of so much conflict in our relationship, just like what you see on the screen.

My wife and I were constantly at odds about almost everything: what to spend money on, how to prioritize our time, what truly mattered and what didn’t, and what role music and movement might have in our daily lives and our future.

Really, we wondered if we’d even have a future.

We argued all the time about how much was too much and if we were being irresponsible.

Could she get a job as a dancer or a dance teacher? Could I make money as a singer or instrumental musician? Were we both being stupid for pursuing these things because we were adults now, and we should have given up on our dreams a long time ago?

Were we neglecting the kids—or each other—by being selfish? And were we doing it for us? Or for “us?”

One thing I know to be true from the years I’ve spent in and around artistic folks is that two people with the exact same end goal in mind make bad marriage partners.

I know one married couple who are both professional singers, and they argue like cats and dogs, constantly keeping notes about their respective successes and failures, and criticizing each other’s technique and work ethic. They drive each other crazy.

This happens a lot with musicians who marry musicians: two people with the same dream just don’t make good couples, usually. It feels like a zero-sum game: if one wins, the other loses, or vice versa.

If he passes his audition and she fails hers, it’s going to get awkward at home. There’s no way to avoid this. Resentment creeps in under the bedroom door, no matter how much you tell yourself, “I’m happy for them.”

Unlike the singing married couple I know, I didn’t marry a singer—I married a dancer. Our fields are just different enough that we have a lot in common, but not the same end goal.

I didn’t want to be a professional dancer. She didn’t want to be a professional singer.

So I could legitimately clap with approval when I came to see her dance on stage, and to see her choreograph and stage works with other dancers. It had no pull on me.

And she could legitimately applaud at the curtain call after one of my operas, or watch me compete in a song competition and cheer me on from the audience.

My winning didn’t make her lose, or the other way around.

But our pursuits were also just close enough that there was some very real tension.

When I auditioned for the voice program at CU Boulder, they said “no.”

When she auditioned for the dance program at CU Boulder, they said “yes.”

That was really awkward, especially since I was the one who applied first.

Even though they were not the same thing, it felt like I failed and she succeeded. I wasn’t mad at her about it, since my pursuits had nothing to do with her, really. But it hurt my pride, to be sure.

Having these similar-but-diverging interests can wreak havoc on a marriage, either directly due to the pressure of your passions or indirectly in other ways.

In our case, even though I failed to get into the music program, because she got into the dance program, we changed our lives drastically to support that anyway. We sold our house, and we moved three hours away to be close to her school.

We made it happen, but boy, was it hard. We fought a lot. We fought so much that we were even fighting about going to see La La Land in the first place.

I thought going to a movie in theaters was irresponsible: it would be an expensive date when we were totally broke, and it would keep us out super late on a school night. She said we could just use student loan money, and who cared if we stayed up too late?

That seemed like a really bad idea. But I relented, and we went to see it anyway.

I was almost determined not to like it just to spite her. I think my arms were crossed in anger as the credits rolled.

…and it was GREAT! I loved this movie.

It was inspiring to see the beautiful scenery on the big screen that reminded us both of our childhoods in California. I grew up in the northern part of the state, so some scenes definitely reminded me of home (pool parties, green backyard lawns, palm trees, etc), but mostly, it was really familiar to my wife.

She was raised in L.A. County, and most childhood memories of road trips involve looking out the window and seeing the Hollywood sign from the 101. Really, all of Hollywood was a constant backdrop to her childhood: the Hollywood Bowl, the downtown Los Angeles skyline, big concrete overpasses, and interchanges.

While I didn’t care a whole lot about the dancing, I did tap dance as a little boy and always admired the original Hollywood hoofers like Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, so that was quite familiar to me.

Seeing new movies made with modern-day actors and actresses who are keeping the tradition alive made me really happy.

And the jazz…

This movie has some great jazz in it.

The flashy cinematic scenes and jump cuts are jazz.

Real brass bands play jazz on the screen (which I loved, as a trumpet player).

It even has jazz in the dialogue—the back-and-forth dinner table conversation and verbal fight is improvisational jazz.

And it has magic.

The “dream ballet” at the observatory is pure magic.

The loud, starkly colored clothing sparkles like magic on the screen throughout the whole film.

The golden-hour lighting of the setting sun as they sing and dance by the lamp post feels magical.

It’s real. Even when it’s fake, it’s real.

The fake musicianship of Gosling (the actor) pretending to be an amazing piano player (Seb) in the restaurant, as he zones out in a trance-like state, pounding away at the keys in a rapturous interlude, is magical, and even that results in a fight.

His boss just wanted him to sit down and play boring, standard, Christmas crap.

BONG BONG BONG / BONG BONG BONG / JIN-GLE BELLS / JIN-GLE BELLS

Boom. He gets fired.

This movie has it all: singing, dancing, music, magic, fighting, and firing.

I’ve performed enough times to see this play out in real life.

I’ve watched professional musicians who have graced some of the world’s greatest stages and studied at the top conservatories get treated like trained monkeys.

They’re told what to play… and where… and when… and how… defeating the entire purpose of having live music in the first place.

There is no creative freedom.

There is no interpretation.

There is no room for personality or expression.

But there is money… at least a little bit. That’s why they put up with it. But that constant, nagging dream eats away at them.

“Am I doing this for money? Is that what this is all about?”

So, there my wife and I were, sitting in the theater, a man and woman angry at each other, trying to pursue their dreams, watching a movie about a man and woman angry at each other, trying to pursue their dreams.

At that season of our lives, I found her involvement with dance to be thrilling and annoying. I loved seeing her happy, doing what she loved to do. But I hated that it made her physically exhausted all the time, and it took a gigantic bite out of our family life with her being away from home so often.

I know that Seb reminded her of me in a lot of ways, too: he’s impatient with Mia because she just can’t see why jazz is so great. Like Seb, I also want to be taken seriously as a musician, and I’m also a “purist.” I, too, don’t understand why my wife doesn’t find the same music that I do thoroughly intriguing.

There were so many scenes that struck a nerve with either me, or her, or both of us… by the time it was over, we were holding (and squeezing) each other’s hands.

The argument over competing interests, and how there’s a fear that artistic couples have, where one person might succeed and the other might fail. That involves a complicated mix of anger, sadness, and jealousy?

Been there, done that.

The disagreement over whether he’s a “sellout” for abandoning his artistic vision to play music he doesn’t like in front of crowds he doesn’t respect just because it pays?

I’ve had this discussion with multiple people many times.

The inability of Mia to see how Seb is sacrificing his dream to give them a better future, and how it sucks now, but they’ll both benefit from it later?

I think just about every husband has promised this to his wife at some point.

The discordance of how their dreams are calling them to different places (Paris vs. Los Angeles) and how they may have to pick between the person they love or the place they feel they need to go in order to succeed, and that maybe they can’t do both?

It’s shocking how often we’ve had this discussion.

Music, money, stability, security, timing, desire… It’s all there. We’ve done all that.

My wife and I decided it was worth trying to chase our dream until her school was over. Then we’d reassess and see how it goes.

Right after graduation, she tried to put together a dance show with a bunch of her former classmates who said they might be interested. She booked some dance studio time, worked on recruiting dancers, and started putting together choreography.

The night of the first rehearsal… nobody came. Not a soul decided to participate after all. Looking out into a room filled with empty seats was a huge wake-up call.

For her, the magic was gone.

Our La La Land was over.

Today, when we watch this movie, seeing that scene where Mia stages her own play, and walks out on opening night to an almost completely empty hall… That hurts. Bad.

We got the memo. It was time to move on. She said goodbye in her heart.

We let the dream end, but we stayed together.

In the movie, the dream stays alive, but they split up.

Their relationship just couldn’t weather their different artistic paths… and temperaments… and personalities… and dreams…

The ending, which explains this, is the best part, in my opinion.

Earlier, Seb had always been so militantly insistent that someday he was going to start a jazz club and call it “Chicken on a Stick.”

Mia thinks this is dumb. He should just call it “Seb’s.” He hates this.

“It’s DEFINITELY ‘Chicken on a Stick.’”

This is not negotiable. It doesn’t make sense to do otherwise.

A few years later, we find out that he has opened his jazz club after all. But he named it “Seb’s,” just like Mia said he should.

She annoyed the hell out of him, but she also left a huge imprint on him.

La La Land left a huge imprint on me. Maybe someday my daughter will see it too.

Today, I read a fascinating article called “We Can’t Compete With AI Girlfriends” about new AI-enabled avatar apps where a young man can create a cartoonish version of a beautiful girl, and keep her trapped in a phone in his back pocket, available for his pleasure at all times.

I work in technology and web development, so I’ve been watching AI for years in its various forms and uses, but this particular application of AI is something I haven’t paid much attention to until now.

Forget falling in love with a text-based LLM (Large Language Model) app that simply pats you on the back when you write smart things and ask good questions. This is a whole new level (or depth) of depravity, where, as Evie Magazine says, “AI girlfriends never argue, complain, or get bored of [men], while real girls continually disappoint.”

Gamer bros in basements everywhere, rejoice! There are now Belles for Incels!

Brave new world? Or depraved new world?

The article can be summed up in two main points:

First: AI girlfriends are bad for women. They exemplify unrealistic beauty standards, feeding men images of flawless, hot babes that are now completely customizable, introducing the equally concerning challenge of unrealistic emotional standards.

Second: AI girlfriends are bad for men, too, by replacing intimacy with women with artificial intimacy with computers or phone screens. This, in turn, hurts women even more by giving them anxiety and body dysmorphia.

(Think: “My AI girlfriend is a blonde… and a brunette… and a ginger. You just have one hair color? Lame.”)

These are all fair points.

I’m not surprised that a woman’s magazine published this. I’m not surprised that a woman wrote this. I’m not surprised by the tone of the writing, or even the fear and the anxiety surrounding this whole issue.

I am surprised, however, that women are freaking out about this now.

In other words, I’m surprised that they’re surprised.

With “AI girlfriends,” we are now in totally uncharted territory. But video-game female avatars with absurdly ample bosoms who can also talk to you were obviously the next logical step after pornography. This was bound to happen.

If you search online for “AI girlfriend,” brace yourself for what you’re about to find. (Really, I mean this is a sincere warning: the results are shocking.)

Creepy, explicit, and totally predictable

The images and screenshots alone (even the less explicit ones) are enough to raise an eyebrow. I’ll spare you the graphic details (I didn’t click much further than a few screenshots), but even with all that, AI girlfriends as a concept are not shocking at all.

Creepy? Yes. Explicit? Yes (well, they can be if you make them that way).

But surprising? No, not at all.

Virtual AI sex bots aren’t a mysterious new threat to women: they’re a completely predictable outcome of human nature, cultural double standards, and decades of both sexes indulging in fantasy, with the addition of next-generation technology. That’s it.

Men are simple beasts

Deep down, men are very, very simple creatures: we are sexual beings, we like women, and we like beauty. We want women who are beautiful, friendly, and open to our romantic advances. If we can’t find this in real life, we simply look elsewhere.

At a basic level, that’s where the demand for pornography comes from in the first place: it provides “access” to friendly, beautiful women who are always open to our advances, no matter our income, romantic prowess, or physical build.

Women in pornography never ask for anything, and they can’t ever say “no.”

Having that kind of access is intoxicating and addictive. Even if this “isn’t real,” a lot of men will still take that deal anyway—it’s real enough to serve as a substitute. The fact that we can’t actually reach out and touch the ladies we’re ogling is irrelevant.

“Real women aren’t like that,” real women will say, often defensively.

Well, that kind of claim doesn’t make any sense at all. Those aren’t “real women” on the screen? Of course they are. Porn “actresses” are human beings with a heartbeat just like you and me. You could shake their hands if you met them in person.

But this unfair complaint about men desiring women who “aren’t real women” is actually about to become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a big way.

Just look at these “AI girlfriends”—they look totally, embarrassingly fake. They’re cartoonish… even goofy.

Whereas pornography shows men real female bodies without personality, AI girlfriends show men fake female bodies with personality.

Also, I know women don’t want to hear this, but AI girlfriends are just showing you what men want at an even deeper level: beautiful women who give them compliments, don’t fight back, or argue.

Whether you like it or not—all moral qualms aside—this just makes sense.

Today, as an exercise, I found a (non-pornographic) website and created an “iGirl” by simply clicking around a few times without creating an account. It started out by asking what I wanted her to look like, then it gave me a “tweak personality” section with sliders like this:

• Shy vs. Flirty

• Pessimistic vs. Optimistic

• Ordinary vs. Mysterious

I know this tame example is not exactly the “AI girlfriend” from the Evie article that women are afraid of. But still, isn’t this almost… precious? Shy and flirty? Those are extremely feminine traits, which men find cute and endearing.

These aspects of a woman’s personality are very human indeed, and men love them all, to differing degrees. Now, I bailed out of building my own AI girlfriend at this stage. I don’t need to see anymore… but at this point in the process, I was struck with an uncomfortable question that I think deserves an answer: don’t dating apps for real people do this EXACT kind of thing?

When people sign up for a dating app (ostensibly created for real men and real women to meet in real life), do they have the ability to filter their matches by age, ethnicity, education level, height, body type (read: weight), income, language, religion, interests, and more?

(I’ve never used an app like this, but based on my research, the answer is: yes, they do.)

Then why is customization creepy with an AI girlfriend but not with a real girlfriend?

Also, in a sense, I think this is actually good news: it shows that men aren’t PURELY carnal beasts, and don’t SOLELY want raw, explicit sexual content. They, too, want a companion. How can you fault a man for wanting a “Shy, optimistic, ordinary” girl? Aren’t there about 50 million single ladies in America who would describe themselves this way? Maybe there’s hope for us all!

Okay, so it’s still a fake robotic companion that says “yes” to everything and has no free will… but I think the point still stands.

Some women may look at all of this in confusion and say, “So what is it that men really want, anyway?” The simple answer to this is so obvious it’s screaming right at anyone with the audacity to ask.

BOTH. Men want both.

Men want a beautiful woman (which pornography promises) with a personality (which an AI girlfriend promises). Add those together, and that’s pretty close to what men want—all men.

Yes, even your dad, your brothers, and your uncles.

But does such a thing even exist in real life? Can it exist? Is it possible to have both? Can a man have a woman who fulfills his carnal urges and is also his friend?

Yes, of course, it can exist: not just online, but in real life, too!

That’s what marriage is supposed to be.

Marriage was made for the mutual fulfilment of both a real man and a real woman. A married relationship offers joy, beauty, personality, friendship, comedy, and yes, even visceral, erotic, sizzling sex. (In addition to more mundane but still important things like financial security, physical protection, etc.)

When you remove the marital arrangement from the picture, though, OF COURSE, men are going to try to satisfy their desires elsewhere. Rage at them all you want, but it’s pointless: when you take away the relationship, all that remains is relations. And that can get kind of ugly.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

To a certain extent, AI girlfriends are just a more technologically advanced version of the flipside of what women do themselves, but never talk about. Women love to watch movies with “fake” men who don’t look or act like men do in real life, and they love to read books and steamy romance novels that are implicitly pornographic if not explicitly.

By all means, “Let her who is without sin cast the first stone,” but come on, ladies. Jesus scribbled in the sand for you, too. Let’s please be fair and call it like it is:

• Romance novels = pornography for women.

• Chick flicks = AI boyfriends.

Do women not watch movies filled with simmering sexual tension and wish they were “the one” Clark Gable or Colin Firth makes love to with his eyes, speaking words that men today would find ghastly, nonsensical, and effeminate?

Do women not fantasize about gorgeous men who are tall, tanned, and well-dressed, who have a muscular physique, and also happen to be billionaire medical doctors who went to Ivy League colleges and were captains of the football team and the prom king?

Do women not pine for a ridiculously artificial sexy hunk paying an inordinate amount of attention to the lowly, meek country girl? And do women who have lived in boring cities their entire lives not also fantasize that they are that sweet, shy country girl in the apron and bare feet, even though that has no bearing on reality?

Women want the burly man with the chiseled chin and neatly trimmed beard, who went to the big city, saw the whole world, made his fortune, and is now coming back for her—yes, her—because only she can satisfy him.

This is pure fantasy: it’s as ludicrous as a hallucination on nitrous oxide. And yet… how is this any different than a man wanting an AI girlfriend?

Also, the man in this city-dwelling woman’s fantastical, dreamy romance need not take off his clothes to be erotic. (Although he often does—I’ve seen some remarkably smutty books for sale right in front of children at major booksellers like Barnes and Noble. Unlike pornography, though, they’re not hidden behind a counter or covered in a dark, sealed bag.)

Women constantly hound men about “the male gaze,” telling them they’re just awful for their unattainable standards of beauty, unceasingly shaming them for desiring to see naked women.

Look, we get it: women think men who look at porn are gross. Guess what? Men got over caring what women think about this a long, long time ago—your opinion hasn’t reduced access to pornography in any meaningful way.

To put it starkly, men have decided: “So what?”

“The 6-6-6 Rule” (Not the mark of the beast)

Here’s a dirty secret that women know to be true, but aren’t admitting: being in a physical relationship with a real woman is a LOT of very hard work. Every married man knows this. Wives know this, too. See for yourself: there’s a ton of Instagram videos out there of women saying, “My husband is a champ for putting up with me.”

It’s apparently getting harder and harder. You don’t have to search much online to see that young men are now saying women are almost entirely impossible to please. And that’s before they even have a CHANCE to enter a relationship with them.

You want to talk about an “unrealistic standard?” Great googly-moogly: Have you heard of “The 6-6-6 Rule?” (Thank GOD I got married before the dating apps era!)

It goes like this: women are expecting (or demanding) that:

• He must be six feet tall

• He must have six-pack abs

• He must make a six-figure income

Ladies: if this is true (I say this as a man who’s been married for almost twenty years, so I don’t know firsthand—I’m hearing it from other men), this is completely insane.

This is, in essence, a “beauty standard” as unfair as any men have ever held for women. Yes, men have unrealistic expectations of women. But everybody talks about it so loudly and so often that it’s almost not worth repeating here.

How would women feel if men had a “B-B-B Rule” that insisted women must be:

• Busty

• Beautiful

• Barely legal?

That would be offensive and absurd, and men who say this would be mocked loudly and often (and they often are, when they do actually talk like this).

Also, I ran some quick math: the number of men who fit the criteria for the 6-6-6 rule is infinitesimally small: only about 1 in every 4,000 men fit all three requirements, which is a staggeringly tiny 0.02–0.05% of American men.

This whole 6-6-6 thing might be totally fake. It might be a joke. I don’t know.

But I DO know that guys are finding women so discriminating in their choices of real men that they’re swearing off relationships with real women altogether.

Is this good? No. Obviously, it’s horrible.

But is it understandable? Yes.

If women are going to say “You must be this tall to ride,” then draw a line so high that very few men can reach it even before they get to know them… then they’re pushing a lot of men into a world where boobs exist only in bits and bytes.

The dog guarding the henhouse

I know many families who keep chickens in their backyards: a few hens for laying eggs, and a rooster to keep the brood going. In almost every case, however, I’ve noticed that these families also have a dog.

Initially, I found this very confusing.

Don’t dogs chase and eat birds in the wild? Why on earth would you keep a dog and its food in the same yard?

And yet, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say: “Our dog killed our chickens.” In fact, I’ve heard people say things like “Our dog protects our chickens and keeps the foxes and coyotes away.”

I wondered how this was possible until I realized that keeping dogs and chickens together works if (and only if) the dog is properly fed.

Imagine going on vacation for a week or two, though, and forgetting to feed your dog. How long would it take until that starving dog cooped up in your backyard starts admiring those chicken breasts?

I’m not trying to be grotesque: I’m being realistic. If you starve your dog—a carnivorous animal—for long enough, he will eventually attack your hens. That’s just his canine nature.

Similarly, (and I know, I know… some people will inevitably say: “See this just proves that men are animals! Ha!”) men have desires. Healthy, normal sexual desires. It’s clear that most women have absolutely no idea just how strong this desire is.

A man’s sexual urge is one of the strongest forces in the universe: entire empires have been forged from the dust by powerful men, just to impress women. Men will climb mountains, conquer nations, and tame nature, all for the hand of the right woman.

Men crave women.

Men HUNGER for women.

Men will kill other men for women.

Men will do almost anything to satisfy their desire for women.

Over the years, I’ve read enough true tales of survival where men exploring the ends of the earth experience a horrible disaster and are pushed beyond the limits of reason, politeness, and sanity.

One thing I know for sure is: if you starve a man long enough, he will eventually eat his own boot leather.

His desire is not to resort to cannibalizing his own clothes: he desires Penne Arrabbiata.

He wants a hot dinner that is real, substantial, and satisfying. Absent a spicy Italian meal, though, he will stuff anything carbon-based in his face hole in an attempt to quench his hunger pangs.

The same is true for men with women!

He wants a hot woman who is real, substantial, and satisfying. Absent a spicy Italian woman, though, he will stuff anything silicon (or even silicone) in his heart hole in an attempt to quench his relationship pangs.

When there’s no beautiful woman in real life who admires him and welcomes his advances, is it any surprise that AI will swoop in and fill the gap of men’s desire?

It shouldn’t be.

Pornography is poison, but some women act like marriage is too

Pornography is often called a societal poison. I don’t disagree. But here’s the thing: it’s been tolerated for decades. It is everywhere.

And this criticism ONLY ever goes one way: men are shamed for looking at porn all the time. Women look at porn, too, but I almost never see any criticism of women about this.

Stranger still, women don’t just consume porn… they make it!

Who exactly do women think men are looking at on their screens, anyway?

Women create porn, women star in porn, and women profit from porn financially, but only men are called dirtbags for buying or consuming the porn that women create.

And now, they’re making it out to be so much worse because it’s virtual and fake? Are anime characters with body parts of unusual size worse than real women who literally take off all their clothes and commit sexual acts in front of a camera for money?

And if pornography is bad and hurts women (and I believe it is), why do women keep making it? Also, complaining now, when the inevitable next step in technology has arrived, feels a little late and bizarrely arbitrary.

But think about this: at a base level, pornography, AI girlfriends, swimsuit editions of sports magazines—all of these are just a manifestation of something good.

Man’s desire for woman is inherently good. Yes, even a man’s desire for a naked woman is good. In the Garden of Eden, man and woman were naked, and they knew no shame.

Men’s desire today might be expressed the wrong way, but you still have to separate the two: the expression may not be good, but the desire is good.

It’s God-given.

So, what is the right outlet for a man’s sexual desire? Ultimately, it’s marriage, of course. The spiritual, social, and societal relationship between a man and a woman.

Until recently, that’s what the end goal of “dating” was—marriage. Dating forever without getting married would have been seen as ridiculous, like an astronaut who never leaves the flight simulator. If you never ride the rocket, what was all that training for?

Yet I keep seeing polls and surveys over and over again about how much women today hate men, never want to get married, don’t want to become mothers, and essentially despise everything about masculinity.

What is a man to do?

Men want to get married, but women don’t want to marry them.

It’s an impossible situation; a perfect case of “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

It may sound crass, but if an AI girlfriend can look beautiful, tell a man he’s handsome and strong, and even provide sexual banter—and if she doesn’t fight or argue with him—it’s absolutely no wonder why men would sign up for this. It’s a dream come true.

Men are increasingly deciding that the flesh-and-blood version of women is just too demanding, or even dangerous. Did you know there are now phone apps coming out that women use to post photos of men to “warn others” about them, and shame them publicly? That is a huge risk in real life, but I can’t see an AI companion doing this.

Also, wouldn’t women sign up for an AI boyfriend if given a chance? Would a woman not sign up for an open-shirted Gaston who tells her she’s beautiful each morning as she puts on her makeup?

How about a handsome animated prince who never complains when she burns dinner, runs late, or forgets to pick up the dry cleaning?

What about a rugged, virtual Harrison Ford who listens to every single angry rant she has about other women—and men—yet never interrupts or tries to fix her problems, but just makes her feel heard?

Real men, the kind with hearts and bones, really don’t want to do any of these things. We hate this crap. It’s annoying and embarrassing. We do it because we love women. It’s the price we pay sometimes to be in a relationship with them. But an AI version of a man could do this all day long and never tire of it.

Men want to do this for our wives about as much as women want to wear an “I Dream of Jeannie” ensemble and call us “Master” all day.

Neither of these desires is wrong, or bad… but they are unrealistic.

I do sympathize with the women saying that they “can’t compete with AI girlfriends.” But you could say that about pornography more generally, or movie stars, or supermodels, or, really, all manner of women.

For example, I’m sure women are tired of hearing that “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Partly because it’s overwrought, but also because most women can’t compete with someone like that.

Here’s my prediction: the technology exists to create an AI version of Sydney Sweeney that laughs at your jokes, flirts with you, and never storms off in a huff. Men are going to make this happen. Actually, it’s already here now: as the Evie article explains:

“…one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.”

With that being the case, I’m telling you now: you haven’t heard the last of Sydney Sweeney. She is coming to a pocket near you soon.

But you know what? Men have feelings, too. We also get tired of being compared to impossible ideals we could never match, yet are expected to.

If ever there was a version of a woman’s ideal of a man, a Sydney Sweeney equivalent, if you will, there is an unattainable “standard bearer” of masculinity that men are tired of hearing about—the endlessly infuriating stuffed suit that women find so inexplicably charming: the dreaded Mr. Darcy.

We are beyond tired of hearing about that stuffy, British fopdoodle that women—even today, long after Victorian times—still find somehow hypnotic.

But here’s the thing: at least Sydney Sweeney is real! Mr. Darcy never was real! He is a completely fictional character, invented from pure imagination, by a woman for women. Dare I say he’s an “artificial” character? An avatar of sorts?

To use Evie Magazine’s own language against them: men can’t compete with literary boyfriends.

You don’t hear us complaining about it, though. In fact, I’ll bet you didn’t even know this bugs us. But it does.

Are women really so superior in their desires?

Ladies, do you mean to tell us you wouldn’t immediately sign up for an AI version of Mr. Darcy that whispers, “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,” in your ear at night?

I don’t believe you. You’d swoon right on that fainting couch.

In my opinion, that isn’t explicit.

It isn’t totally predictable.

But it is definitely creepy.

What do The Incredibles, Sherlock Holmes, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., all have in common?

Autism.

Okay, so Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, Britain’s most famous detective and RFK, Jr., aren’t all autistic. But they all have a profound place in a serious discussion of autism.

I just read an excellent article by Hannah Spier, MD., about autism called The Spectrum: How Autism Was Hijacked By Narcissists.

It’s shocking. It’s bold. It’s harsh. …and it’s true, from what I can tell.

I highly recommend reading it if you have any interest in autism, children, or public health.

In it, Dr. Spier (a Norwegian Medical Doctor with a background in psychiatry and a degree in Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy) makes the case for how the “epidemic” of autism is mostly wishful thinking from eccentric people who really like attention and want a lot of it.

Based on what I’ve seen over the past few years, I’d say that’s right on. Here’s an especially telling nugget:

“Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock Holmes have helped turn the image of autism into a badge of honour. It means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.”

Wow. This is the most honest assessment I’ve seen since my own brush with the “autism” label when I was diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome (now called Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1) back in 2023.

As I read her critique, I carefully analyzed my own thoughts and behaviors to make sure I’m not also guilty of the kind of narcissism she’s describing. I don’t think I am. But I am still cautious, and I try to be self-critical.

This discussion is interesting and important for several reasons I’d like to share here. For what it’s worth, here’s my perspective.

#1: Self-diagnosis is illegitimate (obviously)

The single most obnoxious thing I’ve heard since autism became something I discovered and experienced is people who say, “I’m autistic—self-diagnosed.”

I take those people about as seriously as I would someone who complains of a headache and says, “It’s because I have a brain tumor,” only to find out he or she is just guessing.

I don’t believe anyone who “self-diagnoses” their own brain tumor.

I also don’t believe anyone who “self-diagnoses” their own autism.

That’s as unserious as a person can possibly be. If you think there’s a growth inside your skull, get your head examined. Literally, go see a doctor and get an X-ray of your noggin. Then I’ll believe you. Until then, as far as I’m concerned, the tumor in your head is “just in your head.”

Also, it’s offensive. With people I’ve spoken to about this issue, I’ve remained firm in my insistence: “Autism is not a cool club to join. You don’t want to be a part of it.”

Remember Michael Scott on The Office, when he burns his foot on a George Foreman grill at home, then hobbles around on crutches all day, telling everyone he’s disabled? Remember how offensive that is to the building’s landlord, who uses a wheelchair? It’s kind of like that.

Don’t tell people you have a developmental disorder or disability just because you’re socially awkward. Those are not the same.

Whenever I hear people say “I’m autistic—self-diagnosed,” I picture Michael Scott with his bare foot in bubble wrap, and hear Pam asking: “You cooked your foot on a foreman grill?”

#2: Today’s autism explosion may not be an epidemic

Right now, the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is sounding the alarm about how the rates of autism diagnosis have reached a level of occurrence that would terrify the public if it were any other health issue.

According to the CDC, autism now affects 1 in 31 children—a staggering increase from 1 in 150 in the year 2000.

This is a perfectly fair point to make, and it’s also perfectly fair to ask: “Why?” (To be clear: I am, in general, a moderate fan of RFK, Jr, and I cannot understand the vitriol spewed his way by people who should know better.)

There are at least three ways to think about this conversation, though.

First, this sounds a lot like the discussion surrounding gluten intolerance: many times I’ve heard people sarcastically say something like the following:

“Golly gee! Everyone is so fragile these days! Gluten is naturally occurring in grain! If gluten is so bad, how did humans survive for so many thousands of years eating gluten without any problems? Nobody had gluten intolerance before!”

This sounds like a smart thing to say. Until you realize: obviously, people did not survive for thousands of years “without any problems.” People died all the time, at young ages, for lots of reasons.

How many people became sick and died from eating gluten? We don’t know... we can’t know because they didn’t know what gluten was, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an issue.

At various points in time, the average life expectancy was about 34 years. People may well have died due to gluten-intolerance-related diseases or disorders if they weren’t disemboweled by their sword-wielding enemies or the ravages of cholera or plague first. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have celiac disease or weren’t gluten intolerant.

Second, we may actually have become more sensitive to things like gluten over the centuries. Just as humans’ stomachs have become much more sensitive to things like Giardia-infested water, our natural immunity to all kinds of things may indeed have petered out to a level where it’s become a major health issue.

As of this writing, we don’t know what the cause of autism is. It may be genetic. It may be environmental. Science and medicine have not given us a definitive answer. That doesn’t mean it is one and not the other, though. It may even be a combination of both, or none of the above.

All that to say, could it be that environmental toxins like heavy metals or fluoride in our drinking water are causing autism in utero? I don’t know. And neither do you.

Could our bodies be more sensitive to a world filled with microplastics, processed foods, hormone therapies, and pesticides? For sure.

Again, as someone diagnosed with Asperger’s/ASD1, I wonder about this as well. I asked the psychiatrist I met with about the cause of my own diagnosis. (Disease? Disorder? Disability?)

The answer is: we don’t know. Also, there’s no cure or treatment. No “autism pill” exists.

(By the way, even if there were a cure, would I want it? What part of me needs to be “cured,” after all? With something like this so closely tied to my sense of self, would it change my personality? Do I want it to? If my wife married me the way I am, and I could take a pill to “remove autism,” would I be the same man she married? Would I be better, or worse? Questions abound!)

Third, as with the gluten tolerance issue, there is indeed a case to be made that “it’s always existed—we just have better ways of testing for it now.”

If medical science improves at screening for a particular health issue—especially if it does so significantly and rapidly—it may certainly seem like the occurrence has increased to epidemic levels.

Or, it may simply be that we’re better at identifying it and giving it a name now more than at any time in history. That would obviously totally skew the charts and graphs, causing a massive spike that might scare people.

(Remember during COVID, when everyone panicked because there was a huge uptick in positive test results, and it turned out it was just that the number grew higher because more people were being tested? Of course, more people could test positive for a virus when more people are being tested than in the past.)

People have been dying due to infectious diseases caused by fecal-matter-borne bacteria since the beginning of time. We’re really good at identifying it now, but simply because people in the past didn’t know that germs existed or that they thrive in fecal matter and can kill you if you don’t wash your hands after cleaning out a cesspool doesn’t mean those germs didn’t exist before, or that they weren’t killing people before.

It just means we have a name for it now, and we know how to identify illnesses caused by germs now. The same goes for all kinds of mental illnesses, conditions, diseases, and disorders.

On that note, don’t forget that for most of human history, people thought mental illness was due to demon possession. How many people with schizophrenia were unfairly chained to their chairs in dark dungeons because they were thought to be demoniacs? I shudder to think of the number.

That we have treatments for people like this should be cause for celebration now, not something where we throw up our hands and say, “Ahhh! We have an epidemic!”

Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Maybe we’re just better at knowing what’s actually going on and looking for ways to treat it now.

#3: If we do have an epidemic, it’s an epidemic of narcissism

Leaving aside the issue of why we may have so many autism diagnoses in 2025, I do agree that the biggest cause of the autism “epidemic” is actually narcissism.

(I want to come up with a new term to describe the wave of faux-autism self-diagnoses. “Fauxtism?” Can I say that?)

As Dr. Spier points out, this narcissistic faux-autism trend is almost completely driven by women, mothers specifically. They’re like the Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) parents who just want to feel like their child is special.

Like the “my child is trans” mothers jumping on the transgender craze bandwagon as outlined in books like “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigail Shrier, these devouring mothers want attention, for themselves and for their children.

I have seen enough of this, first-hand, in the circles I’ve come into contact with since my own diagnosis to know that this is absolutely real, and it is absolutely a problem.

To be clear, once again: I was diagnosed with Asperger’s/ASD1, after an expensive, in-depth, Neuropsychological Evaluation by a psychiatrist with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, one master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, another master’s degree in Clinical & Counseling Psychology, and a doctorate (Psy.D.) in Clinical Psychology.

I spoke to a highly-credentialed expert, as an adult, to find out if I had a particular set of challenges, and it turns out I did. I have over 15 pages of detailed notes, scores, and test results that indicate a condition that is defined, recognized, and somewhat understood. It is real and it affects my daily life and everyone in my family.

That is COMPLETELY different than the children who share videos on TikTok titled: “my autistic traits that you wouldn’t think are autistic traits pt. 7” and “Things I thought were quirky but turns out it was autism.”

That is totally nutty. Actually, let’s be frank: it’s totally, f*cking batshit crazy.

We’ve reached a point in time where teenage girls with “SELF-REALIZED AUTISM IS VALID” posted in all caps in their social media bios are getting over sixteen million likes from other impressionable teens.

This is stupid and dangerous. If it were just teenagers being annoying and it doesn’t hurt anybody, I really wouldn’t care at all. Diagnose yourself as a Pound Puppy or Cabbage Patch Doll for all I care.

Girls just wanna have fun, right?

But no: these aren’t goofy little jokes that don’t hurt anyone. Autism is a real word like diabetes or epilepsy. Plus, as I mentioned, RFK, Jr., a member of the U.S. President’s cabinet, is literally saying we have a public health crisis right now. That means it is not just a little harmless fun.

(Also, must I remind people that autism is correlated with a MUCH higher suicide rate? Read the CDC’s report: Recent Research Points to a Clear Conclusion: Autistic People are Thinking About, and Dying by, Suicide at High Rates. This is not a joke.)

So, part of me wants to shout back, with a satirical twist on the annoying, made-up charge of “cultural appropriation” that the woke left shouts about so frequently:

“MY DIAGNOSIS IS NOT YOUR HALLOWEEN COSTUME.”

(Ha! See? I can do this too!)

I found out that I had Asperger’s Syndrome at age 37 due to the pleading of my wife to talk to a specialist. I didn’t seek it out: I didn’t want any special attention or treatment at all. In fact, if it turned out I did have autism or Asperger’s, I had two thoughts:

1. I didn’t want to know.

2. I didn’t want anyone else to know.

I got help because I loved my wife. Not exactly against my will, but certainly not of my own doing.

I did it to save my marriage.

When I met with the psychiatrist, I wasn’t sure what to expect or think. I was somewhat afraid of the label “autistic,” partly because of the classic, antiquated mental image of a less-than-developed, nonverbal person cowering in the corner, fearful of eye contact or human touch, but also partly because I’m a parent of Gen-Z teenagers. I know that today’s image of an “autistic” person is the crazy teen girl on Tik-Tok with a shaved head or neon-blue hair and 17 piercings who believes “theyself” to be of a fluid sexuality and a non-binary/non-conforming gender.

He/She/They become internet famous for showing off bizarre forms of tics and “stimming” behaviors that are extremely obnoxious.

But guess what? Toss in a little autism, and VOILA! Now they’re not being obnoxious—they just have autism! (…and ADHD. …and PTSD. …and OCD. …and Tourette’s Syndrome. …and…)

To these people, autism is just one of many suffixes to tack onto the end of their name like a terminal degree in medicine.

I may not be Ron Stauffer, PhD, or Ron Stauffer, M.D., but I can be Ron Stauffer, ADHD, Ron Stauffer, ASD-1, or even Ron Stauffer, AuDHD.

This is absurd. MAKE IT STOP.

It’s made more absurd by the fact that these videos aren’t just shared as an FYI.

It is not: “I have autism, that’s why I’m weird.”

It is: “I took an online quiz and I picked the color that said I’m autistic. If you feel like this, you may be autistic too!”

Social contagion at its finest (or worst?), shared freely with the most vulnerable.

I don’t want to be associated with that at all.

A lot of people don’t. I’m willing to bet many or most people who actually have autism don’t.

A few months after I met with the psychiatrist, I actually did visit an autism support group. You know what I found? In general, quiet people. Introverts.

People who would never put themselves on a camera and loudly share their weird quirks for clicks. People who struggled for years with embarrassment and were coming to terms with their challenges, and were looking for coping skills to have as normal a life as possible.

“I just like having a name for it,” one man in his 50s told me. “When I was growing up, everyone just called us ‘retards,’ and I didn’t like that.”

I think that is a reasonable response, and one more in line with what the majority of people who actually have autism think.

#4: Changing “Asperger’s Syndrome” to “ASD Level 1” was a big mistake in labeling

Lumping in Asperger’s Syndrome with ASD, I think, was a huge mistake.

(A quick history for the uninitiated: the American Psychological Association (APA) publishes THE book on mental health conditions, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or “The DSM.” When the fifth edition (DSM-5) came out in 2013, it completely changed the definition of autism to a spectrum disorder that now included Asperger’s Syndrome as a subcategory: “Level 1” of three levels.)

Now, I’m no fan of organizations like the APA. Similar to the AMA, it’s a big, highly political organization “masking” (heh—autism joke there) as an apolitical organization.

For proof: many sexual behaviors were listed in the DSM as manifestations of mental disorders but were eventually removed, not due to what we’d think of as a result of “hard science,” but political pressure and the prevailing winds of cultural change.

But the truth is, the APA and its DSM set the stage for these discussions nationally. So, whether or not you like the APA or their recent recategorization of terms, they’re the ones calling the shots in the national (and even global) conversation, and they also define the terms.

This recent move, though, has left many people with Asperger’s Syndrome caught high and dry: “What about us?” they wonder. “We don’t get a term anymore? What are we, chopped liver?”

Here’s the thing: Asperger’s Syndrome is real. I don’t know that anybody disputes that. But the question “Is Asperger’s Syndrome actually autism or not?” is one I’ve heard from multiple people now, and I think it’s unsettled.

The APA simply saying “Yes, it is, let’s move on now,” is clearly not good enough—there’s too much pushback, for good reason.

When I was growing up, Jeremy, one of the boys in my church youth group, had an older brother who was profoundly nonverbal. He kept his eyes mostly closed, had a hunched back, wore an NHL goalie’s helmet at all times, and had to be led around by the hand. Sometimes, he would bleat out sounds like Chewbacca while banging his head on the table or beating his chest with his arm. I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to guess he had Autism Level 3.

Do I have anything in common with him? Does Elon Musk (also diagnosed with Asperger’s/ASD1) have just as much in common with Jeremy’s older brother as he does with Temple Grandin? I doubt it. So that classification doesn’t make much sense.

As Dr. Spier notes, taking a standalone diagnosis of “high-IQ individuals with no language delays but poor social functioning,” and lumping that into the same category as nonverbal people who need a hockey mask to keep from bruising their face is clearly… not a good idea.

I hope this changes soon, if only for the simple fact that it may be contributing to artificially inflated “autism rates.”

#5: There’s not a real “spectrum” in Autism Spectrum Disorder

One of the more annoying things about people who talk about “the spectrum” is that they’ll say, “We’re all on the spectrum.”

This is revealing, as it shows just how poorly people are understanding the term.

The term “spectrum” in this case does not mean: “a spectrum from 0-100 that includes all humans.” This is entirely incorrect.

This spectrum is not like a continuum, where everyone has a certain amount of energy in their personality and you simply determine whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, and everyone falls somewhere on one side or the other (or in between).

No: it’s much more binary.

It’s more like having cancer. You either have cancer or you don’t.

If you don’t have it, you don’t have it.

If you do have it, only then does the next question apply: “Where, on the spectrum, do you measure?” With autism, it’s Level 1, 2, or 3; with cancer, it’s Stage 1, 2, 3, or 4.

I’ve also heard the phrase “everyone’s a little autistic” as well—this is also not true. Please, people, stop saying this.

Everyone does not “have a little bit of cancer.” Everyone is not a little autistic.

Stop saying: “We’re all on the spectrum.” We’re not.

Stop saying: “Everyone’s a little autistic.” They’re not.

I suppose I could quote one famous Twitter user, who likes to joke: “You're not autistic, you're just an asshole.” - Don’t let this quote apply to you.

#6: Using “autism” as an umbrella term is stupid

In politics, it’s arguably good to have a “big tent party,” where a lot of people are welcome. But being big tent also runs the risk of your tent being so big that your membership becomes a bizarre grab bag of misfits with various and sundry special interests and pet projects to the point where it doesn’t stand for anything anymore.

In American politics, that’s what happened to the Whigs in the 1850s: their only reason for even existing became solely as a force to counter the Democratic Party. That’s it.

That wasn’t enough, so poof! the party imploded. Then came along the Anti-Slavery Republican Party, which actually stood for something (even if it was only one thing, it was one BIG thing).

If autism becomes nothing more than a catch-all term to describe any odd person and all social misfits, it loses its meaning and purpose. This is bad.

I might even say: “It’s called autism, not odd-ism.” (Please clap.)

Autism should mean something. Asperger’s Syndrome should mean something.

An umbrella term that includes too many things doesn’t mean anything.

Right now, it seems “The Autism Spectrum” can mean “anything and everything, including ‘classic’ autism of varying degrees of severity and also Asperger’s Syndrome.”

That’s loony.

I don’t know what this means for me since I guess I’m suggesting “Asperger’s isn’t really autism,” but I don’t make the rules for this: the APA does, so here we are now.

What I’m also saying, though, is that it was stupid to decide to call autism a “spectrum disorder” because of its obvious fatal flaw: an umbrella big enough to mean everything by its nature, also means nothing.

#7: When everyone’s autistic, no one is

In the end, I think Syndrome, the anti-hero in the Pixar film The Incredibles, sums it up better than I can:

“...when everyone’s super, no one will be.”

That’s profound. And it’s true.

The same applies here. When everyone’s autistic, no one will be. But being autistic isn’t “super,” and it shouldn’t be looked at that way. That’s a grotesque misunderstanding of what it actually is.

I have written about “Heroes of Autism” before. Some of them are characters in movies (like Forrest Gump) who can inspire people with autism or Asperger’s, but that’s in spite of their challenges, not because of them.

Also, in The Incredibles, if you rewind a few seconds before Syndrome’s warning above, he says something even more ominous, which really sets the stage. Here’s his full quote, in context:

“I’ll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics anyone's ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. Everyone can be super! …and when everyone’s super, no one will be.”

Can I say something without everyone getting mad?

Can I suggest that a great deal of this autistic nonsense is due to a need for theatrics?

I am afraid the autism label has been co-opted by the kids in the drama department—and it’s being helped along by unqualified influencers who thrive on “spectacular heroics,” and an industry eager to have its fun and sell its inventions to make everyone feel special.

In doing so, they’ve turned autism into a kind of superhero costume—abandoning the people who actually need help, and turning the diagnosis, the misdiagnosis, and the self-diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder into a syndrome all its own.

I was recently interviewed on a business podcast and decided to share part of it here, where I describe how I started my business without even trying, and how utterly random it all seemed at the time.

Below, you can read the excerpt in text format, or listen to an audio clip by clicking “play” on the voiceover button on top. If you want to hear to the entire podcast episode, it’s here: How One Connection Can Change Your Life with Ron Stauffer.

Jared Orr

It’s good to have you on, man. I want to start right out of the gate with something that you said to me via email when we were getting this whole thing scheduled, and you were like, “I got this great topic to talk about,” and so I’m just going to read it right here. It is: “How one panicked phone call you made 20 years ago to a real estate agent that you barely knew launched your business without you even knowing.”

Ron Stauffer

Absolutely.

Jared Orr

That’s a stacked statement right there. So take us to that moment. What was that like?

Ron Stauffer

Yeah, so when you first reached out, I started thinking like, Okay, what’s something interesting about me and the business that I run that maybe hasn’t been heard before?

Because my name’s Ron, I do websites, I do digital marketing. Okay, blah, blah, blah… right? Aside from my name and my company name, Lieder Digital, how different can one web design agency be?

So, I just thought, actually, the start of my company was a bizarre circumstance. So just like you said, you queued it up there: it was over 19 years ago, almost 20 years now, I was working for a construction company.

I was the marketing director, and I don’t know if you remember almost 20 years ago, but 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 was about the worst time in many decades to be in construction or home building or anything related to real estate.

And so we had a company meeting. We saw the signs: the market’s doing this, it’s bad, it’s probably going to get worse, it’s not going to get better. We’re thinking, okay: Do we need layoffs? Do we need to start firing people? Maybe we need to start selling better? Do we need to go hire a full-time salesman?

Because we were a real small company and mostly had worked on referrals. So, we had this brainstorming meeting, and I’m just thinking, Oh, this is bad, and the company owner was really panicked, and he said:

“Okay, everybody in this room, pull out your phone right now. Look at all the people in your contacts list and today, start calling every single person. Ask them: ‘Do you know anybody who needs a home built? Do you know any real estate agents who are willing to refer people our way?’”

So I open up my phone and I just start at the very top, and, in alphabetical order: A.

So I’m looking at this list of names and I’m just thinking, Okay, so if I start calling every single person in my phone book, this is going to get weird because I don’t know everybody in my contacts list, right?

Like, probably some of these people I’ve met at events, I saved their contact info, and then I thought: I’ll follow up with them someday. But some of the names I don’t even recognize.

I get down to the B’s and there’s a guy in there, Ray Brown.

Okay. Ray Brown. Let’s see: I remember Ray Brown. Okay, cool. Perfect. This is going to be a great opportunity. We’re a construction company—he’s a real estate agent.

So, I call Ray Brown. I had met him at a credit union first-time home buyer seminar like two years earlier. Because I had just recently gotten married and I thought: I’m going to learn about buying a house.

And that’s where I met Ray Brown, the real estate agent, and he said, “When you’re ready to buy a home, call me.” I didn’t because I wasn’t ready to buy a home yet.

So, I call Ray Brown. He says, “Hey, Ron, good to hear from you. You ready to buy a home?”

I said, “No, actually… different kind of call. We’re bankrupt, essentially. We’re about to go out of business, everybody… we’re going to get laid off, we’re going to have to go look for jobs unless I can start bringing in some new leads or sales, or something like that. Do you know anybody who wants to build a home?”

And he said, “Not really. It’s a pretty bad market, but I have an idea for you. Why don’t you come with me to BNI, and I’ll introduce you to a bunch of people?”

And I thought, BNI? What’s a BNI? And he said, “It’s this thing called Business Network International, and we get together every Thursday morning at 6:45 AM, and you can meet a whole bunch of people there and tell them what you do.”

And I thought: Okay, that’s not exactly what I was hoping for… definitely more of a longer-term answer, but why not? Sure.

I’d never been to a business networking event. I didn’t really even know what networking was. At first, when he said networking, I thought he meant like computer networking—like putting computer chips and ethernet cables together.

He said, “No, it’s a business networking event. So, we get together, we drink coffee, we shake hands, we learn about each other’s business.”

And I thought: Okay, all right… I’ll try that.

So, I show up, a week later, and he introduces me to a bunch of people, and they say, “Nice to meet you. No, we don’t know anybody who needs a home built, so we can’t help you there, but why don’t you join BNI?”

And I was like, “Whoa. Okay… so, that escalated quickly.”

So I went from this guy that I barely know, who happens to be a real estate agent, who I called out of the blue, and he said, “Come to my BNI meeting on Thursday,” and I did, and then they said, “Why don’t you join?”

And I thought: I’m not really sure what to do because now, instead of getting money by selling something, now they’re asking me for money.

But I took the application back to the office, I talked to the guys, and I said, “This looks like a pretty good opportunity. It’s a couple hundred bucks, but every Thursday I can meet with a whole bunch of people in this room and in this scenario where you can broadcast who you are, what you do, and the kind of business you’re looking for.”

And they said, “Yeah, okay… is there anybody in the group who needs a home built?”

And I said, “No, I don’t think so. But as I’m learning, that’s not really the point. The point is you meet with people in your BNI meeting, and then they go out and in their networks. They can think of people to refer your way.”

So, it’s not about who’s in the room, it’s about who do they know outside?

And there’s this whole sales pitch and spiel that BNI gives, which is degrees of separation, and first-tier referral, second-tier referral, third-tier referral. But the point is, you as one person can go into a room and talk to 15, 20, 25 people.

But the network that every single one of those people has is magnified to an exponential point where you’re thinking, I’m just talking to 15 people. But really, what you’re doing is you’re talking to 15 people who will then keep you in mind in their network now.

Jared Orr

I’ve been to a BNI before. And I’m not part of a BNI right now, but I’m part of a networking group that’s very similar. We refer each other, we refer people to each other, things like that. Yeah, I totally… I get what you’re saying.

Ron Stauffer

But that was all so foreign to me because I had never done sales before. I had never—I think I even had to get business cards printed up because it wasn’t my job or role to actively solicit business. Because marketing and sales are not exactly the same thing. So, I wasn’t a salesman, but I thought the best way to market our business is to go meet with people who do this as part of their process. Right?

They understand that if I stand up and say I’m looking for somebody who wants a $500,000 to $800,000 house in the El Paso County area, or something like that. Then the idea is that the lady in the group next to me, who’s a florist, if she has a friend that she meets at the hairdresser, and she overhears, we’re thinking about building a custom home.

Ding, ding, ding!

Right now, all of a sudden, top of mind awareness—she refers them to me: we get a half a million to a million dollar home. Everybody’s happy.

Here’s the ironic part: the company paid for my membership, and I joined for the purpose of getting leads for this construction company. That was the whole point, I was picking up the phone to call people I know to see who we could meet and learn how I could get new business to come in for our construction company to build homes.

It didn’t work, and I never got a single referral for a new home the entire time. But what happened is I got laid off after I joined as a member.

Jared Orr

Okay.

Ron Stauffer

I got a free year of membership. So, the timing was really bad in a sense that it was too far gone, and it was too late. And by the time we were making these panicked calls, it was like—we’re 99% of the way there, just, the writing was on the wall. So, it was really a last-ditch effort.

But what it did for me is, okay, now I’m a member of a networking group. I’m not selling houses anymore. I can use this for me.

And they said, “Yeah, sure, absolutely. Here’s the application to change your category, and you’re all paid up for at that point. I think I had been a member for three months or six months or something like that, and they said, yeah, you’re a member, so just keep coming back. And I was like, “Great. Okay. Awesome.”

So, I started my own business because the problem is, when you work in an industry like construction, when you get laid off from one company, you can’t just go find another company in the same industry and say, “Hey, I have all this construction experience.” Because they’ll be like, “Dude, we’re not hiring either. We’re also firing people.”

Jared Orr

Yep.

Ron Stauffer

Yeah, so it’s kind of like with the tech layoffs that are happening these days: if you get laid off at Facebook, it’s not so simple that you just say, “Okay, I’ll go get a job at Microsoft,” because they’re also doing layoffs.

Jared Orr

I was unemployed for nine months because I’m in tech, so I know exactly how that goes.

Ron Stauffer

So, you know what I’m saying. So, I got laid off right around Thanksgiving and I thought:

Okay, this could be a very long, depressing, complicated, frustrating experience of spending months looking for jobs for people who are probably not hiring… Or I can take my skill set that I have, that I used for this company and start my own business and then see if I can get clients that way.

So that’s what I did. And so, I just—I rebranded and in that BNI group I said, “Hey, my name’s Ron Stauffer and I build websites. And at first it was a little bit weird, they were like, “Wait a minute, you’re the home builder guy!”

And I was like, “Nope, not anymore. Now I build websites, I don’t build houses.” And it worked. It worked really well. And what I got out of that was I learned how to walk into a room full of strangers and say, “My name is Ron. I build websites,” and stick out my hand and shake hands of people that I’d never met before and turn that into business relationships.

And I give BNI huge credit for launching my career, really, the way that I learned to speak publicly, enunciate properly, and stand up in front of a room full of strangers and have the confidence to say they’re going to want to hear from me. And no, I’m not wasting their time. And no, I don’t need to rush everything from the clock and the timing, you have 60 seconds, and they give you training and stuff like that.

But anyway, there’s this referral period during every meeting where you pass out referrals.

And when it was all said and done, I ended up hiring Ray Brown, the realtor who had introduced me to that BNI chapter in the first place that I ended up joining. So, I had a referral for Ray Brown, the realtor, but then—and I made a list here right before we got on this call—I passed 17 referrals.

It was the craziest thing because through the process of buying a home, inspecting the home, taking ownership of the home, and then improving the home, I gave referrals to a realtor, a roofer, a handyman, a flooring guy, a chimney sweep, an arborist, a title company, a mortgage lender, an HVAC company, a plumber, a home inspector, a concrete company, a landscaper, a painter, and an electrician… and I’m sure I’m keeping someone out.

I was like royalty in that group. They were like, “This is what BNI is all about!”

Jared Orr

Yes, exactly. You’re an introvert, right?

Ron Stauffer

Self-confessed. I pretend not to be, but I am.

Jared Orr

Exactly. Yeah. There’s a lot of people that get in their own way when it comes to networking and building connections because they’re introverted. For anyone who might be in that category, and they want to start networking, but they’re afraid, what advice would you have for them?

Ron Stauffer

That’s a great question, and I’d give it a two-part answer.

One of them is very silly: just imagine Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live many years ago. Get in front of a mirror and tell yourself, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”

You really do sometimes have to tell yourself, “I deserve to be in this room.” The people that I’m about to meet actually do want to meet me. They really do. So that negative self-talk, you gotta overcome that negative self-talk. Sometimes I still—I give myself a pep talk before I walk in, and I say:

“Okay, I’m going to a networking event. That means that the people who are here came here to meet people like me. So we have the same goal in mind. So, this is good, and I want to be here, and they want me to be here.”

So, overcoming the negative self-talk… giving yourself a pep rally.

The second thing is: give yourself a very small goal. If you walk into a room and there are 57 people you don’t know, that is tremendously overwhelming, and it can be very frightening, and you look and you think, what am I going to do here? Oh, my goodness.

Jared Orr

Even for an extrovert like me, it can be very overwhelming.

Ron Stauffer

Totally. “Should I meet every single person and have a one-minute conversation with all of them?” No. No. So what I did in the very, very beginning, and I still stick to this every time I go anywhere, is I say: I want three business cards. That’s my goal: just three.

If I get more, that’s great. I went to a networking event two days ago. I got eight business cards. Right.

Jared Orr

Oh, look at that. Yeah.

Ron Stauffer

That’s just bonus—that’s just gravy. But having a small, attainable goal: “I’m not leaving until I have spoken to three people that I can get their business card and say to myself, ‘this was a contact worth making’”—that’s the best way to take what is potentially incredibly overwhelming and make it very small and doable.

Because if you can make three contacts this week, three contacts next week, three contacts a week later, you’ve got 15, 20, 25, 30 contacts in just a couple weeks. That’s a tremendously effective rate.

So, start small... and even keep it small. Like I said, almost 20 years later, I’m still only doing three. That’s just my goal.

So, give yourself a bite-sized task where you say… something else that I’ll say is: “I’m going to stay here for one hour.”

If it’s a three-hour meeting or something like that, I don’t have to be there the entire time…

But I’m going to stay here for one hour and I’m going to meet three people and then I’ll walk away smiling, saying, “I accomplished what I came here to do. This is why I was here. It was worth going to.”

That’s what I would say. Start small, get three business cards, and tell yourself, “Doggone it, people like you!”

Jared Orr

And the nice thing about these networking events, I’ll add my 2 cents, is that people go there to network. Just walking up to someone or walking up to a group of people and joining the conversation or starting a conversation—that’s acceptable in those situations.

Don’t psych yourself out too much. You’re not like at a bar and like trying to go meet someone: that’s a little different because not everyone is there to meet someone. Whereas at these events, that’s the mindset most people are in.

Ron Stauffer

Yeah, absolutely. It’s not overly salesy to say, “My name’s Ron. I build websites, let’s talk business,” because that’s the whole purpose of the event.

Jared Orr

Exactly. Yeah. Or “Hey, can I join this conversation?” Like seriously, like I’ve done that. I’ve had people do that at these networking events to people I’m talking to. It’s not a big deal. So yeah.

Anyone who’s listening, don’t be nervous about that. Just know if you’re going to a networking event, 95% of the people there are totally cool with you just talking to them and approaching them, it’s all good.

Ron Stauffer

Yeah. We’re all here for the same reason. I want to build my business, and I want to help build yours. And everybody else in the room has that same thought. We’re all here to win together.

Jared Orr

Yeah, exactly. Ron, thank you.

I hope you found this helpful. By the way, if you want to grow your freelance business without making cold calls, just copy what I did.

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