Please enjoy! 🍵

Early in this project I wrote about the idea of unseeableness. It’s the moment where the dots connect (always and only in reverse) and you can suddenly see the forest and the trees. You can now paint a fair picture of the macro while still understanding the important details at the micro. This is a Julia-Child-crying-over-a-pastry moment because it feels so deliciously perfect, and rare.

If you know the way broadly, you will see it in all things. - Miyamoto Musashi

That’s how I feel right now with our Birthrate and Borders project. I don’t know how long it will go, but it will go until it’s all used up, because there is so much juice to squeeze. I’m not the first to write in detail about it (of course), but it doesn’t yet seem to be in the mainstream zeitgeist and that is unsettling somehow. Perhaps more accurately, we’re all unsettled by it and so it becomes complicated to talk about in public.

This occurred to me when doing the research for Issue #55 - re-cracking the spine of Ray Dalio’s The Changing World Order1. Of all of the determinants of Dalio’s Big Cycle, birthrate isn’t one of them. Perhaps it would have been if we all weren’t so surprised by how fast the problem came to be.

The problem is big. It’s really big. That means it also presents a compelling opportunity and we need to get it as right as possible, together.

I live in a region of the world that is experiencing the Birthrate and Borders conundrum more acutely than almost anywhere else. Obviously I’m not discounting or what’s happening in regions that are experiencing true suffering like wars or famine, but my home is exactly the archetype of a place that would be experiencing the problem acutely. And like any good healthcare provider will tell you - best not to let the acute become chronic.

My family is one of the many mixed-lineage family lines of Atlantic Canada. My maternal line from New Brunswick - a bilingual, socio-economic extension of New England, and my paternal line from Random Island, Newfoundland - tucked in to the cove of a stunning archipelago whose eastern flank is Ireland’s Eye, so named because if you were to accidentally paddle your kayak into the North Atlantic Drift, your next port of call would be Galway, whether you like it or not.

I’ve argued before that it is easy to see your long history when you come from the sea coast because your long-lost-lover (the opposite coast) is not far across the ocean and you were once part of the same whole. The cod fishermen in Newfoundland, and their Basque brethren are so intimately linked that they bicker about who first established a commercial cod fishery2.

But it isn’t our long history that tells the story of daily life for the average person. In your long history you can see the macro story of your place and it’s people - what Chris Arnade calls thick culture. And in daily life you can see the details - thin culture.

As surface level as thin culture often is, both are important for economic development because the core of it is simply how daily life works for the average person, on an average day, in an average place. You might call that micro-development or community development and it is a process that you can literally see. Macro economics, on the other hand, is largely voodoo and it’s astounding how wrong you can be, consistently, over time while still being a respected economist.

I remember the day this crystallized for me. I was spending the month of August in my father’s hometown and needed to rent a car. There was an Enterprise nearby and so I walked down to see about doing the deed. I was met with an absurdly friendly worker - far from uncommon in a place where trust, kindness, and warmth are key pillars of the culture. Let’s call her Donna.

Donna was the kind of person that makes me question whether I am actually a good person or not. She was so positive and wonderful that I felt bad about myself. Could I ever be this good working at a rental car agency? Where my life would be defined by routine and my immediate surroundings? Why do I know that I wouldn’t be - couldn’t be - and why does that make me in awe of Donna?

I instinctively knew everything I needed to know about Donna and her daily life. I knew it was centred around human relationship - her family and her community - not abstract ideas of ‘productivity’. I knew what was on the dinner table that night - could practically smell it - and I knew where she would be that Friday evening, and on Sunday morning. I could guess what her husband did for a living, and I knew where her kids went to school. I knew that she was the focal point of the family - she ran the ship - and she ran it damn well mind you!

I knew this because of a combination of thick and thin culture, and because I am of that place. That’s how I also knew how much change was going to come to my small slice of the world, and then - eventually - to every single slice of the world there is.

Issue #55 will dig in to how money and people move together in cycles. Why debt and money are the other growth problems, and why they are important pieces of the birthrate and borders puzzle. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Let’s dig in.

The only things that change are the clothes the characters are wearing, the languages they are speaking, and the technologies they’re using. - Ray Dalio

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The Macro 🌎

5 interesting links to the world at large

• Steve Rinella finally documents Africa / And the incredible skill and ability of African game trackers

• What about the other Strait? / The global race for critical minerals and energy resources (1 of 2 foundations of the pyramid) continues to evolve

• Zita Cobb on the Wonk podcast / Why place based economic development is so important and why community banking is underrated

• Revisiting Gurwinder’s TikTok is a Time Bomb / The ‘weapon of mass distraction’ and comparing its effects on the US and China

• Chris Arnade and Noah Smith on Japan / Population crisis, productivity, and its role as one of the West’s great allies

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People, Place, Time, and Money - The Big Cycle

Leaving Donna, rental agreement signed, in pursuit of a day spent driving the mid-Eastern coast of my ancestral homeland, I felt a sense of:

Oh, I see what’s happening here - people and places move at different speeds through time. We’re on the same planet, but we’re on different time.

Productivity…driven by learning, building, and inventiveness - has steadily improved over time. However, it has risen at different times for different people, though always for the same reasons… - Dalio

I recalled the feeling of Bigness of East Africa, the feeling of Pre-History of the Greek islands, the Global Machine of New York City, imagined what I’ve been told can only be described as The Future of nation-states like Singapore (I haven’t yet had the pleasure), and I felt the feeling of my Atlantic home that was clearly somewhere in the middle.

The middle, though, is full of contradictions, especially as more time passes. Canada is an important member of the G7, and is a huge country with relatively few people in it, concentrated in major corridors, of which my home is not one of them. The population is leaving and aging rapidly, and to stave off the coming age-wave (and the unavoidable obligations it brings with it3) the country and it’s provinces continue to implement growth strategies - mostly immigration based.

The growth and productivity story can’t be ignored here because money and people move through systems in tandem, not in isolation. Those who leave home don’t do so because they want to, they do so because of a perception of having to. This isn’t all or nothing - some do leave with a spirit of adventure and experience in their hearts, and that’s perfectly human too. We are the Seeker Species and so we go and do that. But talk to any of your friends in the immigrant community and you’ll quickly realize economic opportunity is 1A.

At the people and birthrate level, the crux of the money problem includes cost of living and household debt (immediate and obvious), and it also includes things like community banking and urbanization (less obvious).

In the former category, cost of living makes it hard to plan for the long-term, and unmanageable debt leads to fear-based decisions. I was surprised to what degree until Dr. Dhirendra Shukla told us on a podcast panel that one of the first things he would do to help increase the rate of entrepreneurship in our region is lower the student debt burden. I was surprised at the time but it makes sense - graduating with a debt load that feels unmanageable clouds your judgement and decision making at a time when you are otherwise the most able and willing to take risk4.

The latter category is less obvious but is equally (maybe more) fascinating. When people and services start to leave a community in favour of elsewhere - in favour of perceived lands of opportunities - there is a ripple effect that is more like a coin rattling down a drain. People begin to leave, and services soon follow. The culture feels this so acutely and intensely that they write ballads about it and tell stories of it.

When important services like community banks begin to close or consolidate, small and medium size businesses struggle for reliable financing. This is a problem because SMEs employ basically all of the people, so when they close those local jobs are lost.

Big banks, naturally, only want to lend where there is a big yield opportunity, so the money flows to big urban centres - the same place that the young go when they leave. This is the chicken-and-the-egg story of global urbanization.

The knock on effects at the personal and family level are things like high cost of living and smaller living quarters, and the effects at the city, provincial, and regional level is the hollowing out of smaller towns, leaving a productivity vacuum and/or a monopoly in local industry. Both lead to lower birthrates (think it through), and so small centres feel the push-pull of the future most acutely5.

This is compounded by an important factor of Ray Dalio’s Big Cycle - national debt. What Ray did not address in his book was that some of the world’s largest economies have the most national debt and the lowest birthrates. How does that tie directly and inextricably to the borders story? Because developed economies like the United States and the Europe…

…became structurally addicted to cheap immigrant labour. The West grew wealthy, then ran out of people…So then poor must be imported - reluctantly6.

That last word is a very important piece of the social puzzle because it leads to what Taleb calls…’a sort of tragedy of the commons.’

We end up in the strange situation of xenophobic people importing labor for their own purposes while voting against immigration.

Can countries with an aging population, low birthrate, and a serious debt problem survive without a steady supply of people willing and able to do the work that needs doing?

Not without crushing its own global GDP - an option unaffordable to economies already burdened with accumulated deficits.

In normal-human-speak that means we’ve created a system that must grow to survive, and if it doesn’t we get low growth, no growth, or something worse like hyper-inflation, empty pension funds, crumbling infrastructure, and an inability to properly care for the aging population and do the daily work that needs doing.

What does this mean for rural and small towns in the developed world? What does it mean for countries like Japan, the United States, and China? What does it mean for national networks like the European Union?

Case study time!

That’s next, on People & Place - you won’t want to miss it.

The slippery slope fallacy isn’t a fallacy, you just haven’t thought it through. - Naval Ravikant

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The Tool(s) 🧰

It occurred to me in Issue #53 that The Tools section is probably best delivered by way of example. You likely care far less about what I think, as compared to who is out there in the world doing the hard work of true economic and community building.

Who is doing what in the world to move us forward in this brave new world, both at the personal and community level?

• At the personal level, influential people are talking about the appeal of technical colleges and training programs, as the true employment gaps reveal themselves and evolve in real time. Is this a way that young people can avoid unmanageable student debt, not waste time doing generic 4-year degrees (me!), and find themselves on a path to meaningful work? Remember when ‘learn to code’ was good advice?

• At the family level, the Holt government in New Brunswick issued a subsidy that offers families in need 1 round of IVF. Very interesting. Results pending! (Heading off potential problems here - if the birthrate problem continues to get worse, will governments simply default back to immigration programs because the subsidies will be unmanageable? Government over-spend is directly inflationary).

• At the community level, religious groups like churches are banding together and impacting immigration policy. Another fascinating data point in an upcoming post about how religion’s (potential) resurgence will be on the back of birthrate and borders.

• Seasoned economic development pros are talking about how important dynamism at the small business level is. Remember - small businesses is the backbone of economic development, and all economic development is ultimately local. We might call this the Pizza Joint Paradox. (Yes, I selfishly made this one of my own links).

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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Greg read an excerpt from a commencement speech he gave at the University of New Brunswick.

We talked about why the earliest - seemingly hardest - days of toil and struggle are often the most beautiful.

We talked about his new YouTube project - Rewiring the Muse

Why being in business with your friends is really hard.

And so much more.

Greg’s Overrated-Underrated is can’t miss. You can now find the segment as a stand-alone playlist on the YouTube channel.

You can find the podcast wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Thank you for listening.

Chapters

00:00 The Power of Loving Decisions

02:03 Commencement Speech Insights

04:22 Identity and Self-Perception

07:23 Childhood Experiences and Creativity

10:27 Curiosity and Social Flexibility

17:06 The Journey of Mastery and Creativity

22:27 Embracing Individuality and Self-Acceptance

26:24 Entrepreneurial Roots and Family Influence

33:22 Navigating Early Career Choices

40:32 Building Hemmings House and Creative Culture

49:02 The Launch of Hemmings House and Personal Struggles

52:20 The Healing Power of Music and Creativity

55:57 Exploring Flow States in Music

59:08 Documenting the Journey: From Music to Psychedelics

01:05:09 The Impact of Psychedelics on Mental Health

01:07:05 Redefining Art and Creative Practices

01:10:28 Overrated or Underrated: A Fun Segment

You can now listen to, and watch, People & Place here on Substack, on my YouTube channel, and on Spotify.

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In Issue #51 of People & Place - I compared the (mostly) optimism of Chris Arnade, with the (mostly) sense of impending doom of Paul Kingsnorth. The latter makes the case for the Machine - a system that we’ve built, that we can’t stop building, and that can’t be stopped regardless of what we do. It’s accelerationism, and Kingsnorth can’t help but wonder where it all leads and what we’ll be when we get there.

The train has left the station - the system we’ve built can only survive if it grows, and thus infinite growth and productivity are the new idols. An example of this is deprioritizing things that make our daily lives better, but don’t directly add to GDP1. In Arnade’s estimation, trading being able to walk to work, the cafe, or church for cheaper iPhones. It’s not that clear-cut, but it’s not far off when you think it through.

You can feel it in places that haven’t forgotten the aesthetics of breakfast.

In the economic development discussion we rarely talk about the balance of maximum growth vs. maximum wellness, because the latter is much harder to measure. It really may be that simple - that growth curves have a hard time with such soft things. When we solve Maslow’s and then start to think about how we want to live, and if we’re happy here, academic measures of any kind struggle, as Taleb pointed out recently on Substack.

China is growing fast because many still lack basics like a car, while Europe and the U.S. have reached saturation, with little incentive for further growth. And many are discovering that lifestyle improvements, such as bicycling paths and pedestrian…friendly cities, may not produce economic growth. - Taleb

Growth can certainly be good, has been good, engineering is amazing, and we are capable of remarkable things as a species. We are builders, and we build even if we don’t exactly know why we’re building it or what it is we’re really building (ahem - AI). At the moment it’s Bigness all the way down and we’re due for a renewed sense of a localism to balance the scales2.

The point is that we seem to have created a system that can’t survive unless it grows and the only way for it to grow is to add more people to it, that can then in turn increase productivity. You can either have more people to do the work that needs doing (population gains), or the people can get that much better at doing it (productivity gains).

Again, this says nothing about quality of life, building healthy families, maximizing community wellness, or anything about sustainability, but it is the foundation - the lifeblood -of the system we’ve built, for better or for worse.

The former, more people - more life - is a wonderful thing, but many of the world’s cultures can’t seem to manage it on their own at the moment. When 2.0 people have less than 2.1 children, the population is in decline. Science develops technologies like IVF on the one hand, and governments issue immigration programs on the other, to try and patch the leaking vessel.

We have become the global Seeker Species - peoples from all corners of the world move to and fro, seeking opportunity that they know exists somewhere even if it isn’t here. Pulled by the glimmer of hope and prosperity or pushed by circumstances that make staying in their homeland too difficult.

Here is a birthrate chart of some of the world’s major European nations.

And here’s the world at large.

Once you see the predicament we’re in here, you can’t unsee it.

Birthrate and borders - two issues - maybe the issues - that will define our times.

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The Macro 🌎

What’s happening in the world at large?

• Dwarkesh does it again / Ada Palmer on why the Renaissance needed Italy (but the Industrial Revolution didn’t - or couldn’t?)

• Ray Dalio on The Straight of Hormuz / An interesting take on the perceptions and possible outcomes of the conflict and it’s relation to the Big Cycle

• Jon Haidt on Australia’s take on youth mental health / Hint: they chose to prioritize their young > the interests of the social media companies

• Joe Pompliano on how Norway is building an endurance sport juggernaut / And the reasons why are delightfully Scandi-practical (hello Asbjorn!)

• Kevin Kelly on the miracle of travel / Why global travel is essential for long-term optimism

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Phnom Penh, Immigration, and the Times We Live In

What strikes you first about Sub-Saharan Africa is how young and vibrant it is. Children - so many children - with big beautiful smiles, up early with the morning light, and in the community late into the evening. Being surrounded by young people is first and foremost, hopeful. Knowing that making more life is some kind of obvious good is optimistic in and of itself.

In fact, how many kids we have might be the modern temperature gauge for optimism and health in a population. If you believe, fundamentally, that the future is good, then you make things and you make life. If you believe that the future will not be good - if you’re fatalistic and pessimistic - then you don’t make things, because what’s the point.

Chris Arnade, walking Phnom Penh, points out that this making-life-is-good thing was the default mode of our species from the word go.

This youthful exuberance of young countries is often juxtaposed with a strong sense of elder care and respect. East Africa is most assuredly not obsessed with the opinions of the young, as many rich countries now seem to be. Children are given responsibility and the chance to prove themselves early and often but there is also a clear sense of the young being embedded into a system of which they are not the center.

There is a process of growing up that has steps, and steps are not to be skipped. Discipline can be doled out by any adult within range and the old are owed respect because they have life’s battle scars, seen as the only path to real wisdom. Elders speak first, elders sit and you stand, elders decide and you obey (reluctantly or not), elders teach and you learn, and the elders set the policies and social frameworks for the community3.

I’ve long fantasized about having a chart that plotted birthrate vs. the level of respect for elders within a society, and I can’t help but imagine that the lines would run parallel. I don’t know what to make of this, but I’ve been thinking about it for some time now.

What exactly it is I can’t say, but societies with low birth rates feel empty, vapid, and lost, like there is a giant void lurking beneath, waiting to consume everyone and everything, while those with high child births feel more fulfilled, solid, and whole, especially when you adjust for economic success. - Arnade

The birthrate problem has many layers and we’re trying to solve it in a handful of different ways. The most obvious problem, at it’s core, is that a people, in a place, will cease to exist if the population crisis becomes severe enough, and it actually wouldn’t take very long for that to happen.

It’s the rate of the problem that has taken even the world’s seemingly advanced societies by surprise. The Chinese would likely never have implemented the now famous One Child Policy if they had any idea of how fast the birthrate crisis would come to South-East Asia. At least that is what game theory suggests - that the world could not have conceived (pun intended) how fast the birthrate crisis would unfold and we’re struggling to deal with that materially, from a policy perspective, and spiritually4.

The birthrate issue seems to be Priority #2 socially and politically - probably because it’s the harder nut to crack. What is actually happening here? What is happening to us? It is some combination of the world we’ve built physically (urbanization), our health (yikes), and our culture (socially we’re in delayed development for nearly everything, we maximize individual goals over collective goals, and so we have families later in life). We will come back to this later.

Political Priority #1 seems to be solving the problem with our borders - and that comes with 3 fundamental questions (and likely several others that I’m missing):

• What we do

• Why we do it

• What the outcomes are

We’ve already dealt with why we do it - because we’ve created a system that has to grow to sustain itself, and population growth is the base of the modern economic development pyramid. Attend a public presentation of this king and what you’ll hear is that we’re growing the population via immigration because ‘we have to…’ Consistent with Taleb’s point that hyper-diversity is never done only for the sake of doing it.

There has never been a society that welcomed immigration for its own sake, for reasons beyond its economic utility. - Taleb

What we do is the implementation of immigration programs that are some (hopefully thoughtful) combination of attracting professional talent that can contribute to our productivity, onboarding temporary workers to do core, seasonal work that needs doing, attracting students to come and study at our universities and colleges, or serving the humanitarian needs of the world’s refugee populations.

What happens when we do it is the crux of it all and there are several things that can happen if these programs are not implemented in a thoughtful, reasonable way, with steady growth over time.

The latter is important because any radical immigration program, followed by sharp cuts can only be inflationary because there would be an obvious shift downward in productivity (businesses closing, etc.) - something happening in real time in places like Atlantic Canada. On the way up, you get a shortage of housing and long wait times in hospitals, and on the way down you get inflation, so it seems important to have a steady political hand and stay balanced.

Immigration done well certainly does add to the vitality and the productivity of a place. More people doing the work that needs doing, more young families buying homes, new business creation, and more students in schools learning how to be productive in the 21st-century are all great things. The ever practical Tyler Cowen offers a measure for anyone who thinks immigration is everywhere and always negative - housing prices! If the cities we live in are growing, becoming more dynamic, with increasing land and housing value over time, then Cowen thinks that ought to be good for us.

As practical as measures like housing prices are, it still doesn’t say anything about quality of life or the social fabric that holds us all together in a place. Surely we also need to recognize that, over time, high levels of immigration will change the fabric of a place completely. With some good elbow grease, patience, a commitment to being welcoming, and a cultural story that we can all buy and work toward, we can have a wonderfully productive diversity. But if we don’t accept the hard work that comes with it, and do what is necessary to make it sustainable, nobody is happy.

The Great Control Trial

The world itself acts as some kind of miraculous control trial because human cultures are so radically different, but we’re all the same species. If we want to study vaccines and their benefits and risks, we can study the now hyper-vaccinated societies of the classically ‘university educated’ and ‘rich,’ and then also study the Amish (who I am deeply fascinated by and whose cultural motto seems to be leave me bloody-well alone and I’ll be the best neighbour you’ll ever have).

If you want to study nutrition you can study the Blue Zones at the extremes, and every average in-between. If you want to study the culture of work and productivity, we can study China’s 9-9-6 and Costa Rica’s Pura Vida.

We can do this in immigration too. Some cultures - like the Japanese - have chosen not to go down this road until very recently. Others have chosen to pursue hyper-diversity without considering if it could present social and economic risks and where even asking the question is seen as some kind of xenophobia. And some countries are more balanced and in the middle - working hard to ensure there is a national and cultural story that stays in tact while still presenting itself as a land of opportunity.

Many of my local friends are surprised when I suggest that the Americans have actually done quite a good job at this from a long-term perspective (I can feel the arrows being slowly removed from their quivers). We can see this in the available global data. Imagine a map by which the size of arrows to and from a place represent the levels of leaving and coming to a place. It’s big-fat-arrows across the board to the United States.

This is clearly not because of any one government administration - it is because of an idea. In this case, an idea that has several names - the American Dream, the Land of Opportunity, the Ivy League. Different names, one central idea - that if you’re willing to work hard and get with the program, this is the place for you to succeed. And it turns out that for a large number of people - it works! I am certainly sympathetic to how often it doesn’t, and the fact that this may be in jeopardy right now - but the idea is what sticks in the minds of much of the world’s citizens.

New York City is the perfect example. NYC is the world in miniature, and the fact that it works so well seems almost impossible. To have invited the world, inspired the world, and raised the world, while creating one of the world’s most recognizable brands can only be possible if those that are there are proud first and foremost to live daily life as New Yorkers.

The point here (at least a point) is that we need cultural stories to idolize and pursue - human beings need a story.

Birthrate and borders will be two defining chapters in our 21st-century story.

Don’t just respect others: offer them a common struggle, since our problems today are common; propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants. - Zizek (with an interesting footnote on Tibet if you read the book)

The Tool(s) 🧰

So what do we do about all of this?

My first caveat is that I think it’s likely that most people reading Issue #53 are not policy makers or directly involved in trying to solve the birthrate and borders story. But I would bet my lunch money that everyone reading this has felt it, in some way, at the personal level. So let’s focus on what we can do as individuals to work toward a collective outcome we can all be proud of and work toward.

The first I think, in a surprise twist, is to pursue your own story. Happy, healthy, squared away people make happy, healthy, prosperous places, and we need all hands on deck right now. I asked one of my brightest friends what would happen if I ran a political campaign based on the premise of personal discipline and responsibility, and I can still hear his laughter. I can’t help but still think it is important, and if you feel like you need to start walking that road yourself, you can start here and here.

The second is to engage with your immediate community in trying achieve it’s full potential - the very definition of modern economic development. Do something at the micro, like introduce yourself to your neighbours to build rapport, and do something at the macro, like volunteer to sit on a committee doing something you think should be done. You don’t need to be one of the socialites on the black-tie circuit, you don’t need to share everything you’re doing, and you don’t need to do it only to pad your resume. You can just do it because it ought to be done.

I don’t want this point to come off as naive. Slavoj Zizek would certainly caution me on it, because it’s much harder than we think it is to build meaningful rapport.

Easy to say, difficult to do. - Zizek

The third, the far more intimidating of the trinity, is to have the audacity to know what you think and have the confidence and integrity to talk about those things with grace, patience, and compassion. You don’t need 1000 Christmas cards. It’s okay to respectfully ruffle feathers. You need not silence yourself because we are in a time of extremism. If it matters, say it with confidence, clarity, and compassion.

Never stop asking questions. Never stop being curious. Never remove yourself from your fellows humans.

You’ll be fine. 🤝

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—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

After more than 50 issues of People & Place, I finally understand what this newsletter is about.

When I launched the newsletter I had just sunk my teeth into Robert Greene’s bibliography, and it’s no understatement to say it changed my life. Books, podcasts, and ideas have a way of doing that to us. Consider it - you can buy someone’s life’s work for $30. The irony of the increase in book prices in recent years is that they have never been more accurately priced.

I started with Mastery - not the typical place to start - but it found me exactly when it meant to. As if by fate, like in the magical world of Hogwarts ‘…The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter. It's not always clear why. But I think it is clear that we can expect great things from you.’

Great things only if we accept what has chosen us. That’s the message of Mastery and it is a simple, yet profound one. Mastery and Power for Robert are the manifestations of having acquired the skills, found the mentors, and built the relationships necessary to effect the world in the way that you want to. You’re able to find your life’s work, and you do that by combining your natural gifts, with the things you’re passionate about, acquiring skills over time, often via mentors, until you have mastered…being you.

What could be more wonderful?

And so I set off to build this platform - my own personal manifestation of my life’s work.

What do I love?

Stories of people and place. Since I was a child I’ve been over old encyclopedias, photos, maps, and biographies or books of the Great Wide World, trying to discover something fascinating that I could tell other people about.

What are my natural gifts?

Writing, speaking, connecting the dots where they aren’t obvious, and building meaningful relationships with people from all four corners of the world.

And so it is crystal clear to me what People & Place is and what the next iteration of the platform can and should look like.

People & Place is the newsletter and podcast that explores why it happened, where it happened.

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The Macro 🌎

Each week I’ll give you the 3-5 top stories of People & Place that have come across my newsdesk, so to speak. I will likely default to simply telling you what happened - a dying art - but if there is a parallel to be drawn, a question to ask, or something obvious to say about it, I will do that.

Somewhere along the way I lost my confidence in doing the latter. Probably because it’s hot in the streets and publicly standing on the things you believe are right and true - to the best of your knowledge and ability - is intimidating in a way it has never been before. We are a family divided.

The good news is I think that the Great Remembering is upon us, optimism is rampant if you know where to look, and the extremes are beginning to fray, in favour of something more durable, reasonable, and based in the better angles of our nature.

There could be nothing as dangerous as the death of civil discourse.

Courage, dear friends! I trust that you will all be there when I fall, as I will be for you.

This Week’s Content

The majority of the newsletter will remain unchanged and will be a deep dive (2,000-3,000 words) on something that I believe is a worthwhile exploration of why it happened, where it happened.

This is the grand idea of Scenius - the combination of scene and genius - that asks the same fascinating question.

• Why was the industrial revolution born out of a rather small island in the North Atlantic?

• Why did one country produce such a high percentage of the world’s most dominant technology companies?

• How is a country of 5 million people dominating endurance sports?

• Why did one obscure pub in Oxfordshire inspire some of the greatest works of english fiction that we have?

• Why do states either succeed or implode?

• Why is optimism so important and how is it created?

• Why do some people have a sense of discipline and purpose that others can hardly imagine?

We will ask all of those questions, draw some conclusions, and take next steps together on the newsletter.

If you’re curious, here are the newsletter issues you enjoyed most in the first 50.

Is there any better indicator of a quiet, simmering optimism than the newsletter you read and shared the most?

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The Tool(s) 🧰

Surely there will be something to be done about all of this, and so each post will end with a Tool. This is a nod to the work of Phil Stutz and Barry Michels - who realized that there ought to be something to do about all this, and people need a set of tools to do it.

It may be something as simple as calling your Mother (nobody loves you like your Mother, even if you don’t know it yourself) and it may be as complex as building a series of policies that can help your place achieve its full potential.

New Tools will be spun out of the newsletter itself as well, the first being the Spotify feed, more recorded conversations, a subscriber chat, and the YouTube channel.

What an absurdly interesting time to make our work.

I hope you will too.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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Every so often in our lives we feel like we get let into another level. Turning points in our evolution as people that feel transformational somehow. You could probably plot them on a graph1, as if they’re every 10 years or so, but I don’t think it’s predictable that way. It’s likely more a function of learning something that you put into action in the real world, and the turning point is whatever happens next. You remember before the decision to act, and after. There’s no going back.

The latest for me is the fundamental lesson of the Stutz-school of mental health - can you live in reality and still move forward productively? There are layers to the onion, but the overwhelming point is that most of us in the 21st century don’t live in reality because it’s too hard, isn’t exciting enough, or we just don’t want to. We don’t talk how we’d normally talk when we’re at work, we sit all the time, we’re often bored, we escape with streaming and food, and we don’t want to admit when things are bad so we change the words we use to describe them instead of actually changing them.

Living in reality means confronting our predicament, here and now. And that reality comes with the recognition that we ought to shape up and change some things because they’re just not working. No easy task! Living in reality feels like being let into another level because somehow you suddenly know what you ought to do. It’s a felt sense more than rational, and we know this because of how irrational most people actually are. You can talk yourself into anything if you’re not careful.

I’ve puzzled over this for years. At some point you encounter that wonderfully unnerving feeling of knowing. Again, this is actually a great burden for moderns because that means there is something to be done, and I bet my piggy-bank that it is very hard to do that thing in 2026.

Learned that our screens and man-made EMFs that we depend on socially and economically are harmful to our health? Good luck avoiding them.

Learned how many toxic chemicals are in our food? Sorry, they’re everywhere.

Learned that circadian rhythm is essential to the health of a diurnal species like us? I give you a sedentary education and a career that never changes, even as the seasons do!

For ancients, it seems, knowing and doing both came in the same package. There was no question, it was just the thing you ought to do. Roles in society were more concrete and so even if you did have questions or felt some kind of a way about what you ought to do, there wasn’t much you could do about it.

This probably came from being so close to the land. When most of life was in small, independent communities of food producers, you lived and died by the cycles and rhythms of nature, so there was no confusion about how to spend your time, or what was happening, or what you were going to do when you woke up tomorrow, next month, or 5 years from now2.

Now, in the 21st century, the knowing is akin to being confronted by a bear - especially if it doesn’t fit the established mold. I have something inside of me! — you say. Perhaps you only scream it on the inside because you’re too afraid to say it out loud, for a host of reasons. I know that I know, but I can’t seem to actually do the damn thing and so I feel a sense of dread and stuckness. A sense of misery and hopelessness about my current state, because my current state is working remote, alone, on my computer, at home, with a company of people I only see as avatars on a screen, for a customer I rarely meet, getting AI generated email replies. The Pacific Ocean exists and I go bee-boo-bee-boop in Microsoft Office!

There is a sense of unease, off-ness, or - as we will discover shortly - uprootedness that we all seem to feel, but can’t accurately describe. I know, I know, but how do I know, I know? What are these inclinations? These things that feel as important to me as breathing. What are the risks if I don’t find out what all of this means and my uniqueness - my almost impossible existence - goes to 0 because I limited myself to working in the State Farm Insurance IT department.

The point of this post is that there is nothing wrong with you. This modern malaise that you feel is a perfectly natural response to an almost impossibly absurd situation. You are on a big spinning rock, held tight by gravity, hurling through infinite space, and yet you’re aware of that fact and so you can either laugh or assume the fetal position. Your choice bucko.

Ironically, the period we’re living through is better than any other in a material sense, and yet we feel a genuine dread about our times spiritually and socially.

The question then is - what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with us?

“...but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong. Everybody tells you that you feel this because you are infected with something called ‘nostalgia,’ or that you picked up a dose of ‘Luddism’ or ‘Romanticism’ at a party or in a doctor’s waiting room. Basically, there is something wrong with you. You don’t understand Progress, which is always and everywhere a Good Thing.” - Paul Kingsnorth

Chris Arnade and the Good New World / Paul Kingsnorth and the Big Dread

Chris Arnade and Paul Kingsnorth are two of my favourite writers, and both puzzle over why the industrial revolution happened in England, and how the resulting, Machine-like, system swept the globe like a brush fire.

Another branch on the scenius tree - a combination of scene and genius, that asks the question of why it happened where it happened. After many years of puzzling over this myself, I don’t think it’s any great degree more complicated than a very fortunate confluence of people and place3.

For Kingsnorth, one of the reasons the industrial revolution happened in Britain, was the issue of land. Land and resources are the hard currency of the world, and will remain so forever because our very lives depend on it. It’s no surprise then that countries who are good at natural resources - oil, wheat, woodlands, etc. - are hard to sanction. You can’t do much of anything to them in the short-term, all you can do is try to stunt their growth long-term. We all remember the scene in Yellowstone. Or the now iconic opening of the Land Man pilot4.

According to Kingsnorth, England was jolly-well setup for centralizing and productizing land, because a good chunk of it was already owned by a relatively small group of people.

…The enclosure process set the scene…across England, and turbocharged the ensuing Industrial Revolution, both by concentrating resources in few hands, and by creating a landless underclass who had no choice but to traipse to the growing industrial zones and offer their labour to new industries.

Arnade, on the other hand, is intrigued more by the idea of a cultural meme that came out of the European ‘enlightenment.’

Why the Industrial Revolution happened in England rather than China or Germany is one of those questions that has launched a thousand books, careers, and theories, and Dr. Mokyr’s answer is (oversimplifying): England had a foundational belief in the abilities of man to shape their world, as a result of the Enlightenment, which enabled the creation of laws, institutions, and businesses focused on bettering society through innovation, technology, and economic progress.

That very British industrial revolution led to the rise of the runaway capitalism we know today, bubbling up anywhere and everywhere across the globe. Even though it now feels squarely based in the kind of adventure-globalism that the Americans launched in the Bush administration, it is perhaps even more rampant (ironically) in a part of the world Arnade knows well and is really quite fond of.

Materially, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the uber-technological prowess of the Americans, or the uber-production capacity of the modern Chinese, the global system that Kingsnorth calls The Machine is omnipresent and ever increasing.

In an obvious, tangible sense, we’ve never been richer. We’ve never had more stuff5. We absolutely love stuff. We have an insatiable appetite to create. To make stuff, build stuff, sell stuff, and buy stuff. Deep down, we’re all conflicted by this, and I spent the last post in this newsletter talking about that internal conflict - made ever more clear by encountering the very people who are feeling this conflict most acutely.

For all our destruction, it really is astounding what we, as a species, are capable of and to marvel at what we’ve built is not to deny the harm we’ve done along the way. Arnade, as he walks the world, does a lot of that marvelling for us and it is the dichotomy of how good modern life is vs what we’ve lost along the way, that makes his writing so hard to put down.

In my professional life - in the unfortunately named discipline of Economic Development, it becomes all the more obvious how our insatiable desire and ability to create is never ending, will never end, and is often a mixed bag of outcomes. It begs the important questions of what we actually want, if we’re maximizing for the wellness of the average citizen, or if market-cap and infinite growth are the real idols6.

The foundation of that system is population growth, followed by reliable energy to power, efficient transportation to move, and communication systems to coordinate all the productivity that the people make. A never ending treadmill of making and doing because that seems to be the human condition. For some reason - perhaps not such a mystery after all - all of this doing and making isn’t satisfying us.

My hunch is Larry Smith had an early inclination of this, and acted on his hunch by offering his own definition of what economic development ought to do and be ‘…a process by which a community works to achieve it’s full potential.’ This reinforces David Campbell’s idea that economic development is fundamentally local, and if it works, it is the truest form of a public good.

I much prefer to think of it as human development or public development - and it’s definition would be something like a process by which a people and place work to achieve their full potential. This would still be horribly unsatisfying to Paul Kingsnorth, and I’m sorry for that Paul. But it’s the best I can do right now with what I have and I’m trying my damndest - like you are - to find a third door in the moor, so to speak.

So what do we do about all this?

How do we move forward, as best we can, creating happy lives, healthy bodies, and close-knit families and communities?

At the personal level, the best definition of mental health I’ve yet heard comes from Phil Stutz. It’s something to the effect of - can you live productively in reality?

Not the world as you wish it was - the world as it actually is. Can you be honest with yourself? Can you accurately assess your situation in the world (mortal, flawed, stuck, addicted, etc.) and move forward productively in spite of those things? What could be more practical and powerful than that sense of Mastery that comes when we combine our natural inclinations, with our God given abilities?

It starts with us. Here. Today. We decide to create the work we’re meant to create, to nourish ourselves as best we can with the best food we have available, to maximize the incredibly healthy (and free) supply of sunlight and fresh air, and to create the relationships that lead to healthy families and productive, happy communities. We like to think that the system itself should change first, on our behalf, but it won’t. It never will. It’s impossible. The incentives of the Machine are simply too strong and the winners too dominant.

We’re all in this boat together, there is no getting off it, and we need to figure it out. There is no true safety anywhere, there is no ultimate human authority, and every day that we step out of our front doors is an act of risk and faith.

But a really wonderful one.

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—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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For a long time I’ve tried to square how different modern life is from our natural state. You can only compare two extremes if you’ve experienced them both, and I have. East Africa - the land before time - where you can see stars, mega-fauna, and infinite space. New York City where the incessant noise and human proximity is somehow both thrilling and exhausting. Summers spent running ramshackle in Australia and South America, and also desk worker, eyes straining to operate out of a small LED screen.

I suppose this is simply the dichotomy of modern life, and so there’s nothing to be done but get on with it and do the best we can with what we have. Living in reality - the world as it actually is, and not as we wish it was. Even now I can feel myself straining against the click-clack of the keyboard, trying to remember to breathe into my belly and not succumb to the dreaded email apnea.

On some days it is rather pleasant to be tucked away at home during a January storm, hot espresso, and a nice writing desk to work from. On others, the body and mind are screaming for something real and physical. We all have a different relationship with our mind-body, and for some that connection is so strong that there is no mental without the physical. Again - a dichotomy: if you know what it is to be sick, and you also know what it is to feel amazing, then there ought to be a process to avoid the former and stay in the latter.

For me that process is seasonal living, as much as possible. That is far easier said than done because modern life - especially work life - is structured to be anything but rhythmic. We are inundated with constant notifications, calories, blue-lit screens, and a furious fuss about productivity. When we hit a winter low we wonder what’s wrong with us?

The answer, ultimately, is nothing is wrong with us. This is a perfectly rational and predictable response to our current situation, which is never ending doing-ness.

Seasonal living is possible though - and doing it hinges on 3 key questions that fascinate me more and more as I study their implications:

1. Who are you?

2. Where are you?

3. When are you?

Who are you - your natural history - determines your energy and sunlight requirements. Where are you determines what your light environment is and thus what food is available. And when are you determines your light and temperature environment. These are the key ingredients of the wellness soup, and we’re only now remembering this1.

For me - I’m a Caucasian Northerner, with firm roots in Northern Europe. I live in Canada, at the 45th parallel North, and it’s winter time. From a light perspective that means there is little of it, and so I need to maximize getting as much as I can - especially in the morning as the sun rises. It means that UVB (the vitamin D machine) only just came back, and it means I need to wear my blue blockers at night to get a good, long sleep. From a food perspective it means my seasonal pattern right now is high fat, high protein, low carb, because that is what is on offer naturally2. And it means I have to pace myself and hydrate - not pretending like it’s mid-summer. Right now we’re not making hay while the sun shines, we’re storing calories and resources for the spring.

Living in this way, as much as possible, reveals something remarkable - that all of the tools we need to thrive, in any conditions on earth, are readily available to us, at every moment. That we are perfectly attuned to our environment, whether it’s mid-July in Spain, or mid-winter in Eastern Canada, if only we allow ourselves to live in the present (literally). We forget this, but only because we are constantly indoors, under artificial light, seated at 90 degrees.

Returning as best we can to natural rhythms, we remember that we are built perfectly for our environment - crafted by nature - and nature doesn’t make mistakes.

There are few places on earth where I’ve experienced this reality more acutely than the fringes of the Amazon jungle.

“…human animals thrive in the wild.” - Christopher McDougall

Natural Born Heroes at the Foot of God

We travelled to the North-Eastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula this year to spend some time in the Mexican sun, and the Caribbean Sea. Even a cursory look back into our early human origins reveals to us that Sun x Ocean = Life.

I brought a paperback of Natural Born Heroes with me, and I have since read it twice. That happens to me at times, as I imagine it does to you. You feel as if there is more juice to squeeze and so when you finish the book, you simply start again and more of the puzzle pieces fall into place. It could be because it landed personally for me - much of the story takes place on the southernmost Greek island of Crete, a small part of my first international experience at 18 years old3.

Writer Chris McDougall opens the Preface with an introduction - a reintroduction to many - of Kelly Starrett, a famous American physiotherapist and movement specialist who spent his formative years in the Bavarian Alps, while his mother was on teaching assignment in Germany. Kelly quickly realized that his altitude-oriented German neighbours seemed to be highly attuned to their environment, simply because they were in it all the time.

He tagged along with German neighbours who, as a family, trekked into the Alps on weekends to ski and kayak and rock climb. In Bavaria, everyone does everything…

These were formative years indeed, because Kelly went on to dedicate his life to exploring the limits of what’s possible for humans. A limit that, he soon discovered, stretches far beyond what we moderns believe is possible. He kept, and still keeps, what he calls his Leopard List - an homage to what’s possible when humans are in their natural state.

Like the jungle cats, we’re good at just about everything. We can swim when we want to, climb when we have to, run as far as we need to, and fight when we’re cornered. We’re not the biggest or the strongest, but we’re adaptable and super skillful…

Starrett is quick to remind us that these are abilities we all have, today as you read this newsletter, but that we’ve forgotten these unique abilities that are equal parts ‘…universal, empowering, and enduring.’ Universal, because we are all ‘natural born heroes’ - we each carry this potential as our birthright. Empowering because being capable in our environment is what gives us the confidence to face reality and do our life’s work. And enduring because the body can be in the natural state for many more years than we are led to believe in a you’re-done-at-65 culture4.

Climbing and grappling are both excellent examples. In climbing, even the best of the best believe that you could, in principle, do some of your best work on the wall or rock late into what you would likely consider your peak athletic years - like Alex Honnold describing the work of his mentor Peter Croft. And in grappling arts like jiu-jitsu, the sport that we know and love today was created by a man who was physically weak, and so the physics of leverage and timing were folded into the essentials of the sport.

If you learn to move fluidly, you’ll find a state of ‘effortless effort'.’ You’ll exert power without creating any physical impingements. You can do that your entire life without getting injured.

And even if you do get injured in your natural pursuits, the body is a healing machine - natural mechanisms that kick in instantly when you start any kind of fasting, light, or recovery protocol, like sauna. Healing in the modern world then, is much more allowing, as opposed to trying5. This is much easier said than done, because as well-meaning as we are, modern life is a furious rush toward infinite productivity, and that’s naturally stressful. It takes a strong stomach to slow down, get off the ride (even temporarily), and choose a new way.

The Great Remembering, as I’ve come to call it, is that new way and it is very much alive and well if you know where to look. The remembering of the simple fact that ordinary humans are extraordinary. It’s easy to find in the eclectic local and internet-based communities of fringe radicals, but that pales in comparison to going to the source. Nowhere is the source more obvious, and available, than in places where the humans haven’t forgot, because they never left.

Yes, it may be a Great Remembering for moderns, but for those who have never left Eden it is simply the waters in which they swim. It’s as normal to them as your tech-neck is to you. This is not a judgement one way or the other, it simply is what it is. We are raised in our culture, as if in a petri dish, and it takes a heroic dose of something strong to buck the trend and shake some of that modernity off you.

Paul Rosalie is someone who bucked the trend - having dedicated his life to restoring and preserving the Amazon Rainforest. He recently appeared for his third tour around the Lex Fridman podcast, and it included never-before-seen footage of un-contacted cultures in the Peruvian Amazon6. My own experience of traditional peoples of the Amazon was far more cursory than Paul and his team being embedded in the jungle permanently, but it was incredible none the less, and it was one of my first and only experiences with those who haven’t forgot.

I was spending the summer months working in Ecuador - in the bustling town of Guayaquil7 - and my travel partner was quick to accept an offer to join me there. We rambled about - the very basis of our relationship - and soon found ourselves at the door step of one of Earth’s most amazing features - the Amazon Rainforest.

Standing at the foot of the Amazon is a feeling of bigness that is hard to describe. It feels somehow, in my overly romantic brain, as a one-way-door, and perhaps it is. It’s somehow unnervingly real to someone who grew up in a region as parochial and quiet as I did. It’s as if God itself can’t help you here. As if you’re too far gone. That you’re about to make a choice and that choice is like the one Caesar made when crossing the Rubicon. There is no coming back.

You will physically return (ideally) but you will be changed somehow because you’ve traveled through time8. To a world that is quiet, dangerous, awe inspiring, and somehow more real than you can imagine a place being. It’s base level reality where all that matters is the laws of physics and human relationships. That’s how I felt. Romanticism tends to serve hindsight well and I understand that as the years pass I will likely have sensationalized the feeling, but I felt it all the same, and still feel it now.

Somehow the first steps felt easy because they were with someone who made me feel invincible. We humans can do anything in groups, and we can do nothing alone.

We were welcomed in by an extended family group still living as traditionally as they could in their ancestral homeland in the jungle. For all of our modern developments and technological prowess back home, the first thing we noticed was an incredible sense of health and vitality. These people had capacity oozing from their pores - fully tuned in to where and when they were, living within the environment, believing and knowing that we are of nature and we are at our best when we’re in it. The natural born heroes of Chris McDougall’s imagination are in all four corners of the earth, to this day, living as the full embodiment of our species.

I don’t want to romanticize this way of life - Paul Rosolie gives the same warning in the Lex podcast. Everything is different here. Morality is different. How they see the world is different. How they see you is different. The agreements we make between groups of people - quite literally how we build culture - is entirely different in this context and you ought to have the sensibility of place to tread lightly in this new world. If you’ve grown up among islanders, you’ll understand this, and what is a jungle if not a land-locked island?

Into an environment like this - one that is not our own - we bring to it what I have come to call the first rule of culture: that other people are not failed attempts at being you. This comes to us from Canadian anthropologist (and National Treasure) Wade Davis. Chris Arnade and Wade would likely disagree about the idea of cultural relativism, but this is an exceptional rule for travel and for human relationships in general.

The children took us by the hand and were quick to show us the magic of their home with an unbridled passion and energy that is all but gone in the ‘West.’ Energy here is the bridge from the physical to the spiritual - one of Huberman’s truly excellent ideas - that energy and identity form the basis of who we are and what we are.

The children, in their native environment, having never left Eden and never lost contact with the Bigness - or what Stutz calls the Field - is what literally and figuratively gives them the energy to express themselves to the full extent of their humanity. Physically grounded to the earth on one hand, and spiritually connected to the earth for every material and emotional need, on the other. This is something that we in the technologically advanced societies can never hope to replicate and it is making us sicker and sicker.

When I returned I kept telling one particularly exceptional (and truly terrifying) story. It is, as I now believe all things are, a story of light. The young wanted nothing more than to take us out and about on foot, to show us everything there was to see in their home. Naturally, that meant parades at night through the jungle to discover interesting things. For Robin and I that meant headlamps, and for the children of the jungle, it most certainly did not.

My first inclination was that they are simply used to the dark in a way that our eyeballs have been trained out of, and so they probably had something like a 20% sight advantage. I couldn’t have been more wrong. These children could literally see in the dark. This is where the story starts to feel like hyperbole to those who would receive it back home - but I’m not exaggerating in the least.

To prove their point, they would playfully ask to see our headlamps, immediately turn them on and take off into the forest at a full sprint, leaving us helpless, all the while howling with laughter. Whatever it is they can actually see - shadows, reflections, the eyes of animals, or insects - I will never know because I’ve lost that human capacity, but it was remarkable and I think about it to this day.

So what do these children have that we do not? Rounding up from a Paul Kingsnorth idea - they have direct access to people, place, purpose, and prayer. Constant contact with each other, free from distraction, allowing them to work together, build bonds, and make agreements. Direct contact with place - at all times - from being physically grounded on the earth barefoot to hunting for game in the jungle. The freedom from wondering how to spend their time - an absurd state of affairs only felt by the industrial rich. And a form of prayer in movement that is a direct connection to their home and their creation myths.

The combination of all of these things - put into action daily - is what gives them the physical, mental, and spiritual skills needed to thrive in their home. Sensory attunement to all that is around them gives them seemingly superhuman abilities to folks like me - like seeing things I can’t see even after they pointed them out, or hearing subtleties in the cacophony of the jungle that literally give them a mental image of what is around them at all times.

Even though life is a high stakes game in this environment (perhaps life always is we just can’t see it because of our comfort) there is very little trying to acquire these skills. There isn’t a spreadsheet, a to-do list, or a weekly plan that includes 30-60-90 day stretch goals. There is only the plan that nature has laid out for them, and success in that environment means accepting that plan, that you are not in control of it, that you didn’t design it, and that you don’t know the outcome.

Life is an allowing and an accepting that the technologically advanced will never feel because we’ve severed our connections with the source code, in favour of computer code.

Make contact with reality today. You’ll love it there.

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I’m going to use the next piece to prove to you that I don’t believe we should romanticize or idolize this way of life, and actually much of modern life is good.

I do think we are sick, and getting sicker, but we have also created things together, as big groups, that are amazing. Some even unfathomable. The fact that New York City works at all feels like some kind of miracle and it’s important to recognize that. That’s next, on People & Place.

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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3

On it’s southern reaches you can almost talk yourself into being able to see Libya. I’m sure you can’t, but I liked to think that I could.

7

For whatever reason I don’t have overly fond memories of Guayaquil itself even though I did meet some wonderful people. I think I was in a funk of some kind and I needed the more extreme regions of Ecuador to satisfy whatever itch I had about the place. That’s likely why I sent out the bat-signal to Robin and I’m glad he said yes - as he so often does to life. Nonetheless, looking back, Guayaquil is a beautiful city.

As you well know by now I am a big fan of ritual, routine, and process. Daily discipline is an odd form of freedom, but seems to be exactly that. You make time for what actually matters and suddenly everything else seems to fall away naturally, as if that’s what ought to happen. And so in January I take stock of the last year and welcome in the next in a variety of ways. It’s much less about quantifying anything, and much more about sensing and feeling what is essential and what isn’t for the year to come1. Hopefully with each passing year we get closer to the sense of allowing our lives to unfold naturally. It’s only then we do our best work.

Each year I listen to podcast rewinds - one of them, the Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss. It’s engaging, often funny, and is a great cross-section of the year behind, and ahead, in different areas of life. This year people like Suzy Weis, John McWhorter, Niall Ferguson, and Mark Hyman made an appearance. The former and latter each had great segments - Suzy on optimism over data in 2026 (which speaks directly to my soul) and Dr. Hyman about what’s in and what’s out for our health and wellbeing2.

Suzy’s general point was optimism is back and wallowing in how miserable we think everything is is out. Mostly because it isn’t, and also because endless victimhood is tired. Self-pity is out - hopeful, consistent, daily action is in.

For Mark Hyman, getting in touch with what we sense, and thus know is good for us is all the way back in - like sunlight, good sleep, and eating real food. Habit trackers, oura rings, blue-light gyms, and the infinite productivity loop are out. Hallelujah.

Balance is as key to human health as anything. We are balance machines, remarkably adaptable to our environment, and versatile in a way that few other species are3. We all have our aha moments - or we hit walls that show us when we’re out of balance. For me it was a combination of the two. The wall came, I was laid flat on my back, and the aha moment that followed was centred around circadian rhythm - the ultimate balance.

Circadian rhythm - the light story - may be the greatest story never told. At least not in the way that we moderns can understand it - that the earth is a miraculous, decentralized system, governed entirely by the cycles of light and darkness. That sunlight is essential for wellbeing and is not in fact trying to kill us. The sun is the ultimate life giver, and photosynthesis is the only reason we’re here on this amazing planet.

Nowhere is that more clear than as you approach the equator - where days and nights all year round are roughly split in two. I’m writing this from the 20th parallel North, in a country I’m starting to love, and one of the first things you notice is how allowing health seems to be almost effortless in the tropics.

“‘Ahhh, you learned my secret!’ Erwan calls from down below as I approach the top of the pole. ‘The best secret of all - your body always has another trick up its sleeve.’” - Natural Born Heroes, Christopher McDougall

Another Light Primer

I remember precisely where I was when the light story first landed for me. It was a where were you when moment that we all have. It’s unseeable in a way that few things are. It was the podcast below - Dr. Max Gulhane interviewing neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse.

Have you ever had the experience of listening to something that makes complete sense to you the very first time you listen, and so naturally you can’t stop listening to it? This is paradoxical because typically when we get the message we hang up the phone. Not so with Kruse and the story of light.

The story that Jack lays out in the podcast is simply the tip of the iceberg. The first step that leads back to the dawn of the age of mammals, some 66 million years ago. It seems to strike two chords at once - it explains our early origins - how we came to be who and what we are, and it also explains our current predicament - inhabitants of an era of screens, disease, depression, and division. The fact that both stories can be defined by the light and dark cycles are as mind-blowing as anything I’ve ever learned.

The story - in it’s shortest possible form - goes something like this.

Dr. Jack Kruse was an obese, unhappy, neurosurgeon gifted a book by a friend after the meniscus in his knee all but imploded on the way to the keynote podium at a medical conference. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari resonated with him but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Later, while on family vacation in Italy, he was struck by epiphany - the pieces clicked into place.

Looking up at the Statue of David, the cornice of light illuminating the marble, Dr. Kruse realized that what so intrigued him about the book, and what intrigued him now at the foot of David, was light. As it turns out the story was even better than he could have imagined and Jack dedicated the rest of his life to the epic realization that the story of Homo Sapiens is a story of light.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly - I’m not far from where that story began. According to the current scientific paradigm, The Age of Mammals began some 66 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula, in South-East Mexico, where I write this now. The asteroid was roughly 6-9 miles in diameter and formed the Chicxulub Crater4.

That asteroid strike set off a series of remarkable natural events - a byproduct of living on a planet that frequently passes through crowded asteroid belts. The section below is a ridiculously short summation of a nearly infinite rabbit hole, but just take it piece by piece. The puzzle pieces will click and you won’t see our amazing planet the same way again.

Before the great asteroid strike, for the proceeding 140 million(ish) years, our original ancestors were furry little creatures that lived under the ground. Dark fur is filled with melanin (the stuff that builds up when you get a tan), and melanin fluoresces in sunlight. They lived under the ground, so the story goes, because theropod dinosaurs can see the UV spectrum and so they would be easy pickings for the creatures that ruled the land at that time.

When the asteroid struck, the debris it released blotted out the sun (we don’t know for how long) which meant that UV light didn’t make it to the earths surface. The dinosaurs went extinct (except the uniquely adaptable few - like those that could fly) and so we emerged from under the ground to take our place on land. The Age of Mammals had begun.

Eventually UV light returned to land as the atmosphere cleared, and we evolved over long-history into nearly hairless creatures that are experts at processing UV light for cellular energy. The opposite of what we once were because the light environment had changed. Then, and now, we are literally walking solar panels, with light processing technology covering the surface of our skin - our largest organ.

“Nature made us to be addicted to the sun.” - Dr. Jack Kruse

The Homo Sapiens that evolved in regions of the earth with near constant sunlight retained their melanin because melanin is an expectation of sunlight. Those that migrated North over long-history, away from equatorial regions, pulled their melanin inside, and became extra efficient at processing the little light they did have into Vitamin D5.

We developed eyes that are ultra-efficient light processors - black pupils that focus light when it’s plentiful, and expand to seek the light when it’s dark. This isn’t a mistake (nature doesn’t make those) because some of our most effective Vitamin D and melanin factories are right behind the eyeball6.

Cycles of light up-regulate our energy systems, and cycles of darkness down-regulate so that we can access the miracle of healing sleep.

Pause. Let that sink in. It gets more remarkable with every read, and then when it finally does sink in we realize that, if that’s all true, we are now presented with a remarkable problem. Nikola Tesla electrified the world at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893 and ever since we have all but eliminated light and dark cycles. We shine bright lights into our eyes every minute of every day (screens) and do the same at night, so our bodies become horribly disregulated.

This disregulation leads to diseases of autoimmunity and, as Max and Jack discuss in the podcast, the only thing we really know about autoimmune diseases like MS is that as we approach the equator, they seem to all but disappear.

Enter, the tropics!

Welcome to the 20th parallel North, back to our early origins as a species.

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Tropics - Effortless Health and Rhythm

In the tropics health feels somehow effortless - like it’s the default, if you let it be. This is exactly the opposite of forcing health through things like obligate running, going to indoor gyms, barricading ourselves indoors all day or fad diets instead of eating intuitively, and consistently each day, with the seasons.

There is a fascinating side-note on light as it applies to food that I won’t break down completely (because I’m still learning) but you can think about it like this. Think of light as a barcode on each piece of food you eat. Certain foods are available at certain times of year based on light and temperature (on latitude and longitude). When you eat the food, your body “scans the barcode” and that gives your body information. The information might be that it’s winter in Manhattan or it’s the summer in Tampa. Your body takes the information the light barcode provides and the necessary systems kick into gear - cooling in the summer, and warming in the winter. Now what happens to your body when you drink a banana smoothie and eat a raw kale salad in winter in New York City? Cold hands, cold feet, runny nose, etc. This causes constant cycles of sickness

On the Mayan Riviera, the light-darkness cycle is almost perfectly split down the middle in January. You wake naturally with daybreak, just before 7:00am, and make your way outside to enjoy morning PT on the beach7. The sun rises slowly, giving you that essential red-light therapy you need for your AM systems to boot into gear.

The sun is hot enough to justify a swim in the ocean - God’s Electrolytes - by 9:00am and so exercise comes naturally, by instinct, again. Breakfast is fresh fats, like eggs, avocados, and local fruit. Bizarrely, you don’t feel the need for caffeine (probably the ocean’s doing) but you likely make your way to the cafe for a latte, reading, writing, and chatting.

In the tropics you don’t seem to get hungry in the middle of the day. This is curious but also makes me chuckle with delight because it matches Dr. Kruse’s Leptin Prescription exactly. At mid-day, when the sun is high and hot, the light is all we need to make the necessary blood sugar to operate just fine throughout the day.

For me, this hot middle-portion of the day is my first feelings of a winding down cycle, and so siesta is on the menu. This is perfect because, although we are finally remembering how healing and essential for health the sun really is, chronic sunburn is obviously not good. We want to maximize light in all 3 natural cycles of the day, without burning. This is actually very easy to do8, and even more so if you take advantage of nature’s natural gift of siesta. It feels wonderful and intuitive, sleep comes easily, and you wake up in less than an hour feeling completely rested, cool, and ready for the second half of the day9.

UV starts to climb back down between 3:00-4:00pm this time of year so it’s clothes off again and into the remarkably aqua-marine ocean. Snorkelling, sitting in the sand, walking the beach to let those electrons move back and forth between you and the earth. Warm but fairly gentle sun covering your body and penetrating your eyes. If you’re into snorkelling it’s easy to see how you are simply a tiny piece of an enormous living ecosystem. This region has the world’s second largest continuous reef system, behind only the Great Barrier. It’s a nearly contiguous reef system stretching for some 1,000 kilometres, from Mexico to Honduras.

As the sun sets, you once again have the chance to absorb healing red-light frequencies, the world begins to slow down, and you can feel that sense of calm naturally, in your body and mind. Perhaps a later dinner than you are usually used to, between 6:30pm-7:00pm before going for a long walk or enjoying a table with friends. At night, let the light be low, because it is low.

Planet Earth is a remarkable, decentralized biosphere, controlled entirely by the cycles of light and darkness.

Unfortunately, for most of us are fates are sealed as modern humans. We don’t want to stress about this or we risk an even greater disruption in heath. There are some simple things we can do to honour our circadian biology and live healthier lives. This is a work in progress, we will never be perfect, we can rest easy and give up trying to be, and we can simply aim to be 1% better each day.

• When possible, get the sunrise in your eyeballs (no windows, no glasses)

• Get a reasonable amount of mid-day, full spectrum sunlight on your body without getting a bad sunburn (again, no glasses)

• During the day, wear blue-blockers when you’re working on the computer or take frequent breaks outside if wearing glasses isn’t possible

• If you can, take 5 minutes to watch the beautiful sunset (yes - no glasses)

• After sunset, wear a nice pair of blue-blockers and sleep will come earlier and with much less effort - as it was always meant to

Let there be light. 🙏

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—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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This year something clicked. It’s impossible to say what exactly - because these things aren’t of our making or choosing - but something did and I know that because I can feel it. It isn’t in the rational, conscious brain (the lesser of the two) but in my unconscious, feeling brain. The one that nature has been chipping away at for some 200,000 years, and many millions more when we were something else.

Many moderns reading this will hardly understand because it isn’t explainable, there isn’t proof, and that frustrates us. It takes us out of Universe Two and makes us feel uncomfortable because we can’t quantify it. We live in a culture that has decided that data and the individual are the idols and so when we’re confronted with higher forces we become squeamish. And so we operate every day in the hyper-rational, I-don’t-believe-anything-unless-you-can-prove-it-to-me brain, which naturally adds to our stress because the world isn’t explainable like that.

If you are working on accessing the feeling, intuitive brain, and try to express it to your friends and colleagues you can often see the frustration on their faces. When I stopped drinking two years ago, there was nothing rational about it (although you could make a rational argument for doing it). It simply occurred to me, felt immediately true, and so I expressed it to my wife and that was that. Sober as a salmon. When you tell modern people you stopped something because of epiphany, it either hardly registers, is scoffed at, or gets a good laugh.

The trick, it seems to me, is to accept this completely! Try to laugh with them even. It is absurd, and perhaps that’s the whole point. When you feel a connection to The Bigness that you know is true, good, and real, you don’t know where it comes from, and you don’t know what it is, so you might as well learn to laugh at it. It also frees you from the need to convince anyone of anything and that is a wonderful feeling. The only truth is what you do every day, consistently for a long period of time. What you plan, or say, or hope to do one day is irrelevant because process is all that matters.

This infinite process - what the youngs might call being in your bag - will give you the power to be creative, make good work, accept that time is a key ingredient to a good life, and will help you make relationships and stay open - not focused on the outcome at all. The outcome is a natural byproduct of process and there is no good outcome without pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work.

I want to end the year with a Wrapped post - looking back at 2025, and ahead at 2026. If this is the year something clicked for you, then the next is when you make your best work ever. If you’re not there yet - and it hasn’t clicked - take the first step, find mentors that can help you, keep moving forward, be consistent, never give up, and start right now.

Life is for the living - there is no stopping this train - and so you might as well pull up your socks and get on with it.

Top Posts of 2025

I don’t think I’ve written better than I have this year, as a cross-section of time. That’s probably because I’m writing what I most want to write instead of trying to figure out what an audience might want. The way to sell more subscriptions and generate more reads in the short-term is likely doing the latter, but long-term it’s a fools errand. It won’t be your work if it isn’t your best work, and so you best write the work you most want to write.

Inevitably, the newsletter will become the first book - because designing, packaging, and producing books is what I most want to do. I thought the first book was going to be something else entirely, but it turns out it isn’t, because I couldn’t get around to writing it. I could only trudge along in the trenches I was already digging, and I now believe that that will have been the best decision I could have made.

When it comes to fruition, it might sell, or it might not. I won’t much be bothered because I will be busy writing the next iteration of the newsletter, which will in turn become the second book.

I sincerely hope you’ll join me. Here are the top 5 posts of 2025, in order of those you liked the most.

If I were to add 3 more that I most enjoyed writing, it would be those below.

Thank you for reading and sharing.

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The Best Writing of 2025

This was a great year of writing and reading. I really enjoy Tyler Cowen’s Year in Review, but I’m going to deviate from the format and simply lay out some of what I loved reading this year, regardless of when it was published. I seem to be in a moment of either revisiting something I’ve loved, obsessively reading everything someone is currently doing, or thematically reading - like in the case of my multi-year November Project.

• I’m reading every single post Chris Arnade puts out, as he walks the world.

• I’m reading almost everything Craig Mod is putting out, although his pure walk-and-talk format has changed as his life is changing (i.e publishing bestsellers).

• My November Project launched last year, and this was Year 2 - Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

• I read True and False Magic twice this year - once in April, and once in December. Phil Stutz makes sense to me in a way that few writers ever have (3 of them), and that is rare to find.

• I re-read Michael Lewis’s Boomerang - the book that started a lot of things for me in my category.

• J.K. Rowling continues to get better as she ages - which is far from a given. The Hallmarked Man was excellent.

• Interestingly this is the year I started reading the Christian canon - starting with an NLT bible (New Testament) and C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy.

• I read Amphibious Soul again (always in summer) and loved it all over again.

• I finally got around to Thiel’s Zero to One and enjoyed it.

• I read The Complete Man - a biography of Ian Flemming and a Christmas present last year - and came away with an extreme range of emotions. I can’t decide if that is good or not.

• Paul Graham’s seminal essay How to Do Great Work. I wrote a trilogy about it this year and it’s only essay I’ve ever read where the Notes are as interesting as the essay itself.

• BONUS: I run a Daily every year. 2025 was Robert Greene’s The Daily Laws - my favourite of the genre.

Please join me on Goodreads - a very wholesome place to be.

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The Best Podcasts of 2025

For this one I will follow Cowen’s model and give you a running list of my favourite podcast episodes that were released in 2025. Even-though it feels like podcast-overload, the audio genre is in it’s infancy and this is part of the process of working itself out. I predict we get more specialized projects that eventually get amalgamated into something different, like books, courses, services, etc. It is a very human thing to be doing - having conversation with one another.

Top 10 - in no specific order:

• Bill Gurley on the Tim Ferriss Show

• Twyla Tharp on Huberman

• Naval’s In the Arena

• John John Florence on Rich Roll

• Alex Honnold on Huberman

• Keyu Jin on Lex Fridman

• Chris Arnade on Conversations With Tyler

• Bob Bowman on the Daily Stoic

• Paul Kingsnorth on Honestly

• Gaurav Kapadia on Conversations with Tyler

Here are 7 episodes that were not published this year, but that I kept coming back to. Even I don’t know why I do that, but I do, and I’ve learned to listen to that intuition. The living, feeling brain is much smarter than the conscious brain.

• Boyd Varty on the Tim Ferriss Show

• Phil Stutz on Armchair Expert

• Laird Hamilton on Rich Roll

• Steven Rinella on the Tim Ferriss Show

• Robert Greene with Mark Manson

• Roger Gracie with Lex Fridman

• Gabor Mate with Theo Von

As always, I encourage you to join my podcast community, here. It’s currently 60+ of my all-time favourite episodes, from many years of obsession with the genre.

The Best Docs of 2025

Back to the same format here as the book portion of this post - the best documentaries I watched this year, regardless of which year they were published. I’ve long had fantasies of hosting a rolling Tuesday night documentary viewing party called Docos & Tacos and maybe 2026 is my year. I’ve included mid-length YouTube here too.

• The Last Tepui

• Free Solo

• The Last Dance

• My Octopus Teacher

• Meru

• 3100, Run and Become

• Silence from Adam Ondra

• The Dagestan Chronicles

• Life Lessons from Senior Athletes Who Started Competing Later in Life from Business Insider

You’ll notice in almost all of these categories we find ourselves in the world of outdoor pursuit and adventure sport. I seem to be in a Bavarian moment. The Bavarian’s, as you’ll know if you’ve read Natural Born Heroes seem to do everything, all the time. Weekends doing some kind of alpine pursuit that does the body, mind, and spirit good. These are exactly the things I most want to do in 2026, and that in and of itself is a discipline that requires constant work.

Tell me what you’re most excited about doing in 2026 in the subscriber chat.

A Quick Note on 2026

2026 is going to be a wonderfully productive year because I’m going to say No Thank You to almost everything. This is a good feeling and it’s the right mentality for the moment. I know what I do well, and I know what I want to do this year. I have too many enjoyable hobbies and the jobs to be done are crystal clear so frivolousness has to fall away.

That isn’t to say that I won’t leave space for boredom and sacred work, like the rest ethic of the Sunday Sabbath. In fact, it means the opposite. If discipline equals freedom, then saying no creates more space, not less. Space matters to doing great work, as does focus, and so this year I’m combing the two.

I thought that I would be on to my next subject by now - something I can’t unsee and you won’t be able to either - but there is still clearly a point to be made in my current vein of work, because I can’t seem to put it down. What that probably means is the newsletter has to become a book. I don’t know exactly what the point of that book will be yet, but I daresay it has something to do with how we’re through the looking glass now and so we have to adapt and change as the future demands. That doesn’t mean progress for the sake of progress - accelerationism - but a great remembering paired with the advances we have made that serve us well, like preserving life when there is an acute illness.

We have to forge a new path, together, in a world defined by movement, technology, and change. There are some practical things we can do - daily disciplines we can implement right now that can help us navigate the times successfully.

Here are some of the newsletter concepts I have in the hopper for early 2026:

• Two appendices to the How to Do Great Work series that are hyper-practical and that you will love

• An expansion of the Let There Be Light post while in the wonderful country of Mexico - you can’t be virtually equatorial and not write about it.

• Are cultures/can they be path dependant? I.e. can they do things without knowing exactly why they’re doing them, but they can’t seem to stop?

• Revisiting, and updating, the Creators and Curators idea. Much more juice to squeeze here with incredible shorts like this one.

• More on Scenius at all levels. Why did it happen where it happened? What’s the time component? The when might matter just as much as the what and why.

• Bigness all the way down. From factory farming, to Costco, to Apple. Can it really just all be big?

• Discovery of, and answering the question - what’s the world’s best latitude? And why doesn’t longitude get as much airtime? You would be flabbergasted how interesting this is to me.

• And the rebirth of localism (and optimism). Even in our biggest economies!

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—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you in 2026.

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I didn’t have entrepreneurship on my bingo card growing up. There wasn’t a single person I could name in my family that was one and it was far from the default option. Over time my uncle became the first, retiring from a long career in the American Coast Guard before starting a motorcycle training school in North-East Maine.

My path to entrepreneurship was roundabout and unintentional. When I started my career in immigration in 2016, we quickly realized balancing the scales between humanitarian and economic settlement is important and so we were supporting folks coming into Canada via entrepreneurship streams. It was my natural inclinations (and a lot of time) that led me to where I am now, and that was the basis of Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 of this series on how to do great work.

Eventually the entrepreneurial mindset took hold - the allure of working hard, being creative, making relationships - and it still compels me now.

I obsessively (but naturally) take daily notes and an emerging theme this year has been what people build, why, and who builds it. In my youth - where most people around me simply worked a job they thought was viable and paid reasonably well - I probably would have told you that ‘what people work on’ is overrated. Just go to work, do your job, and don’t complain about it. That’s how it was for our place and time, for the majority of working people. There is nothing wrong with this, and it deserves admiration.

Over time though, I’ve upgraded my thoughts, and I now see what people choose to work on as being very much underrated. What you decided to work on is how you spend your time - then your life - and so of course it matters. I don’t mean that you have to be ecstatic about it every waking moment - but doing your work means you get to be yourself, and that means the work you make is going to be good work. If you find your work soulless and meaningless, your work won’t be good because what would be the point.

This series is how to do that work - the work that is uniquely yours - and I expect I’ll end it here, in Pt. 3, because there are some important topics out there that I want to start covering deeply in 2026. In fact - I think I now know what the first book is about, and it’s been elevated in my brain as the defining feature of our time1.

The point of the finale is this - there is a process to find your work, what you work on matters, and you can start right now.

Here’s how to start.

“These characters change from place to place (national stereotypes can be a simplified version of the most popular) and a successful society understands this, and does its best to encourage and promote healthy roles that are easy to access. In Japan it might be the dedicated craft-person, in England the eccentric tinker, in France the “five hour smoking alone pontificating on stuff he doesn’t really understand at the cafe” guy, in Amman the devote Muslim, and so on.” - Chris Arnade

Third Space Joy

My local, as you well know by now, is a coffeehouse called Catapult, nestled into the bosom of a mid-sized port town on the East Coast of Canada. I spend the first hour of my day at the cafe reading, drinking a rather good espresso, and getting a few words down on this newsletter. It is the foundation of my early morning discipline - proof that it is always better to do something with the time you have than do nothing because you don’t have the time you want2.

This week the snow is blowing and the wind is gusting - as it does in December in Atlantic Canada. On a particularly wintery Saturday morning last week, I was the first on the steps of the old brownstone, and the doors of the cafe opened at the exact minute they were supposed to. Inside was warm, perfectly lit (warm and dim, not bright and surgical), the floors had clearly just been mopped, the wood burning fireplace was blazing, and the Christmas music was playing gently. Leah, Hang, and Faduma - all born in different countries (bookmark this for later) - had started this day with a sense of pride and love of the customer that is disappearing quickly, outside of small business.

It’s almost impossible for me to articulate what it means to me to have a third space like this, and to be able to settle into to do my work, on a Saturday morning, in a place that had obviously been so well cared for. I immediately DM’d the manager - a good friend of mine - to tell him that these ladies ought to be recognized for maintaining a sense of service and place that warms the heart of their community.

This is all the more special because all 3 ladies are working their barista jobs on their way to something else. This is exactly what young people should be doing but my hunch is that our young people, generally speaking, are suffering. It’s the phones - it’s obviously the phones3 - but there is more going on here and work is as fundamental to the question of fulfillment as anything else.

The following Monday, a close friend sent a message to our group chat expressing a sincere malaise about the current state of his work life. Although talented, financially successful, and ambitious, work from home culture was making him feel miserable, bordering on inhuman. He was feeling a sense of uneasiness that is a perfectly human response to the situation we’ve created for ourselves4. Waking up every day, having to do the daily deeds of being a parent to young children, only to go two doors down from the kitchen to work for a remote-first company that serves a customer in a different country, is brand-new in the long-history of humans.

An infinite series of heads on screens5 is no way to make relationships and is no way to feel a part of something more than yourself. You’re doing the good work of taking care of a family - that is a beautiful and noble thing - but it is now at the expense of your humanity and we all feel it, we just don’t know how to properly articulate it or what to do about it.

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Who Makes What and Why it Matters

What my friend was feeling at the personal level is precisely what we’re feeling at the community and economic level. It’s why small business and farmers markets thrill us and why big-box makes us feel empty, soulless, and rushed. It’s why everything feels like tourism now - like it’s not built to be functional for the community first, but built to be functional for someone passing through on a cruise ship. An infinite facade of things that are made to look like something they aren’t, primarily so we can share them on social media.

What we work on and what we build matters because it leads to the creation of a dynamic small business environment and that’s one of the key features that makes a place livable. By default that means that entrepreneurship matters and thus the environment we create for the viability of as many people doing it as possible matters.

It matters at the personal level - owning something, loving the customer, and a level of craft that all but disappears at the big-box level. When you make something and become the steward of that thing - especially where there is a service component - you take care of it and making it good becomes a natural byproduct of that care. Your customers - like me - can feel it and begin to love it, and in some ways own it themselves.

It matters at the community level - a dynamic small business environment is actually what makes a place livable. This is underrated because we are in the era of hyper-mobility - an era that all but encourages you to leave your hometown lest you become a loser (although this trend seems to be reversing). That means that people have to actually want to live where they live and we take this for granted. It isn’t granted, and the result of the global move to the big city has ramifications we’ve overlooked - like it’s contribution to the population crisis.

It matters at the economic level - more people making stuff makes the quality go up and the price come down. This should be obvious, basic math even, but the point is lost on many - even those in publicly funded organizations. We can see the consequences now in G7 economies, like Canada.

It matters at the culture level - because what we do on a daily basis is who we are, who a place really is, and forges our cultural identity. If the only thing that matters is money, then fine, everything becomes about the sticker price of the thing and nothing down or upstream matters. If work is meant to be soulless so you can take 1 annual vacation and have 2 cars, then fine, we go work for big corporations and try to hide our true selves. If customer service doesn’t matter then you get cardboard-plate-eggs near the Atlanta airport instead of a cappuccino and homemade pastry from the local cafe on the outskirts of Milan.

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How Start Great Work Wrapped

We’re so trapped in our fear of being ourselves, and of economic destitution, that we don’t know how to take the first step toward finding our work and doing it well.

“Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work.” - Graham

Instead of making something complete, perfect, and sustainable, make the smallest functional thing you can that solves an obvious problem for somebody willing to pay for it. When you think it through, this is the entire difference between making something great over time, and never making anything. It has to be barely passable first to ever be great.

Ironically, it’s the young that often waste the most time here. They try like crazy - which is exactly what you should be doing - but it’s often at the extremes and so you leave one thing to go start the next (trust me, I know). As you age, your lack of time becomes more obvious and so you enter what I call No Life - meaning that you have to say no to everything that isn’t your work, in favour of the small number of things that actually are.

In our culture this is seen as limiting and so we develop a cultural obsession with youth that people like the Chinese and the Persians don’t understand. Ironically, while obsessed with youth - even in leadership roles for some reason - we’re having fewer and fewer babies every year. Riddle me that - the cultures that treat their old with the most reverence and respect also seem to have the most babies.

There are advantages to being young though, and so we should start to make our work as early as we can.

“The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.”

There seems to be a flippening-of-sorts happening here - the young jump full-on into adult professional life too early, without having the experiences necessary to gain perspective on life at the macro. This is a mistake not because a mostly-drunk-gap-year is a wise thing to do, but because you haven’t tested the extremes and you haven’t seen things that teach you your place in the world as one big system (which it is). Travel is often saved for the dream-state of retirement - a time that never comes - and so you find yourself either unable or unwilling to test the extremes that feel so natural as a naive young person.

Don’t worry so much about how to do something and focus more on just doing it. Often the young want the outcome right know and so they switch from project to project - again, living at the extremes - without having actually finished anything. Unfortunately, time is a central ingredient to making anything good, and the steps to get there aren’t skippable6.

“You can’t trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.”

You have no choice but to make it good if it’s going to last, so make it as good as you can. The good news is there are those who have done the work before you that are willing and able to help you. Mentorship doesn’t have to be formal - but it is good if you can pull that off. Proximity is real and place matters. Scenius is real simply because of the compounding power of being around other humans that are like you and are good at making the things you’re making. Like the Eagle and Child for fiction writers, Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs, and Dagestan for wrestlers.

“If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place, it’s usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will increase your ambition, and also, by showing you that these people are human, increase your self-confidence.

Colleagues don’t just affect your work, though; they also effect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.

…:the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one’s colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.”

If place and proximity isn’t possible, you can still go through a self-directed apprenticeship. I’ve come to call this the Rinella Formula - a framework that came to us via American writer and outdoorsmen Steven Rinella.

Stay healthy. Doing good work is hard. If you constantly sprint to the point of all out failure (which I’ve done before) you will constantly take 2 steps forward and 3 steps back. Compounding becomes all but impossible. Sprint - yes! But sprint and then rest. Burning the candle at both ends doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. You are confined to the limits of mortality - and you have to accept that and make peace with it. Staying healthy will keep you optimistic and excited, and those too are key ingredients in good work.

“Morale starts with your view of life. You’re more likely to do great work if you’re an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.

Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work.”

This is why the true magic is in the choosing, and in the starting. Choose and then start - work the process over an extended period of time. Maintain morale by getting small wins, consistently. This will keep you healthy and prepared for the long road ahead. And it will be long - but it will be good long - because the reward for good work is more work. Simple things like long walks can make all the difference. Some of our greatest minds have been incessant walkers and this isn’t random.

Long walks help keep your heart healthy, your mind calm, and reinforces a curiosity about the world that you must maintain in doing any worthy pursuit. My biggest mistake is filling long walks in nature with noise. Podcasts are interesting, and we’re not used to silence anymore, so we find ourselves sacrificing the former for the latter out of some kind of fear that is hard to explain. Again, this is a young persons game and we ought to understand that silence in nature is the ultimate way to unlock the sublime.

What Robert Greene calls the sublime - his next book in fact - is a connection to what Phil Stutz calls the Life Force, and that force isn’t accessible to you in chaos, burnout, or noise. As fate would have it, the day I finished the first draft of this essay, I turned to the Daily Law of December 1st, and read the following.

Connection to the sublime will keep you endlessly curious, and this is the final component to doing great work, and staying on the bus you’re supposed to be on.

“Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to."

Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them.

…The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?”

All there is to do is start.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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I broke from this series to report on 3 days at Pane e Circo, in Halifax. On the importance of the cafe scene and a dynamic small business environment for a place to be truly livable. On people spending time, wasting time, and enjoying time - rarely alone - because aloneness (at least the chronic kind) isn’t good for us. It’s the myth of the digital nomad.

Back to regularly scheduled programming - a series on how to do great work that started with this post.

We pick it back up with a combination of time, discipline, and mentors.

Time is a conundrum and it’s becoming more of one as - rather ironically - the tools that could and should give us more time become the very things that all but ensure we have none of it if we’re not disciplined. The original promise of technology - that it would give us more time, not less, has proven exactly false and we’re all beginning to update our thinking on this.

In the first newsletter I made the argument - one Chris Arnade made before me - that culture’s can be path dependent. They don’t know exactly why they do what they do, but they do it anyway, even if it’s not in the best interest of the average person.

It’s cultural accelerationism - the idea that we don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, we don’t know where we’re headed, and we don’t even know if we actually want this, but we can’t figure out how to stop and so we get up and do it every day even if it’s bad for us.

Examples are everywhere and can no longer be ignored. Loneliness, deaths of despair, addiction, unhappiness at work, unsustainable birth rate1, and the inability to pry ourselves away from the screens - without asking - does anybody actually want this? Is this what we really want for ourselves and for our children? Why are we doing this and why is the rate of change of these things so alarming? We want to press the breaks - in our own lives and in our built environment (politics and planning) - but we don’t know how and we can hardly articulate what exactly feels so wrong about it.

One good first track is dealing with the curious case of time.

Stutz would say that being in right relationship with time means you honour it and allow it to work with you. Pressfield would say a recognition of time and your limitedness is what allows the muse to make her entrance. Oliver Burkeman would call this the limit-embracing life, and even the highly practical Jocko Willink says that Discipline = Freedom.

For us moderns - especially from a culture obsessed with the individual and individual gain - structure, discipline, ritual, and routine are the death of spontaneity and a life of excitement. In reality they are all critical ways in which we engage with time and with each other.

“I know what you’re thinking because I’ve heard it said many times, “But if I structure my time, I’ll lose my freedom.” The truth is the exact opposite. When you honor time, your freedom expands.” - Stutz

This makes doing our good work even harder because we are confronted by constant distraction. The tools that once promised us the gift of time are the very tools that take all of it. We can’t possibly keep up with all of the things we could do and so we become unable to do the thing we should do.

Try this. Pick one thing you want to accomplish. Commit to a time, every day that you’ll work on whatever this thing is. For me it’s writing my new book. I get up and I write. Same time, same place, same duration, no excuses. In reality the actual time doesn’t matter. The commitment does. Father Time rewards your discipline. - Stutz

Discipline = Freedom

Discipline - joyful rhythm - is the only way to do your work and do it well over a long period of time.

“You don’t just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals.” - Graham

Life is unpredictable and as much as you’d like to imagine each day will go precisely as it means to, it won’t. It never will. Life has to be more fluid than that if you’re going to do your work and enjoy the process. I am among the ranks of people who have caught themselves wishing this wasn’t true, but it is true, and so it’s high time you and I make peace with that.

Stutz and Graham agree that you can set the foundation for this acceptance by simply booking yourself the time you need to do good, solid, uninterrupted work, ideally at the same time each day. Especially if the work involves craft because craft demands consistency.

I struggle with this on a weekly basis because I like to do my work at my local, surrounded by others like me, drinking, reading, talking, and sitting by the winter fire. That naturally leads to interruption - sometimes a whole mornings worth of it - and you either accept that or you don’t. If you don’t, you might as well not even be there because you will secretly be stewing in your inability to not do the thing you wanted to. Either be there and accept it, or don’t be there at all.

“From social drinking, to smoking, to hugging, to simply existing in the moment, without guilt, because we humans are a social animal and we need, to our core, to be close to others. And if you are going to emphasize that, and make it central to who you are, then it’s even more fulfilling, if you do the best you can to make it as comfortable, and as enjoyable, as possible.

To turn providing the necessities of life into an art, because at it’s core, art is about elevating life above the mundane, even if only briefly.” - Arnade

Even in the face of distraction, it is always better to do something with the time you have than to do nothing at all because you don’t have the time you want. In fact that is the entire difference between making something and making nothing, even if the something takes longer than you expect.

“Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year…People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing".”

5 Year Minimums and Being Yourself

I like Stewart Brand’s philosophy that a good project takes at least 5 years. It takes that long because you don’t know what it is until that much time has passed. You could be on the cusp of exponential growth, but all you can see is the 0.0 to 1.1 period where growth looks slow. This is simply the engines being warmed up for take off, and so if you quit at year 2.5 or 4, you will have missed the rewards or the knowledge gained at 5 years. It’s okay to move on at 5, but not before. I don’t like platitudes either but this seems to be true on some kind of fundamental level. A founder I admire once told me it’s more like 7 years. It probably is.

“If you do work that compounds, you’ll get exponential growth…The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn’t…”

Many of the great compounding opportunities in life having nothing to do with the technical (although they certainly can). Often it’s the personal and practical things - like building a deep network of people, or a global audience of likeminded people. It is remarkable to see young, smart people like Dwarkesh grow, engage, and nurture a community overtime and it is some strange life arbitrage when it really takes hold. It’s as natural as breathing because we humans gravitate toward each other naturally2.

Kevin Kelly - a protege of Brand - and an equal as a mensch, believes that to do great work that compounds, over a long period of time, a strong rest ethic is a necessary ingredient. You can’t burn the candle at both ends for any meaningful amount of time - regardless of how much pop-culture tells you that you can. Burnout ends in sickness and sickness means doing your work is that much harder. Graham agrees.

“By letting your mind wander a little, you’ll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.”

Whenever I feel like I’m approaching the exhaustion cliff, it’s often because I’m filling every waking moment with noise. Sometimes figuratively, in the form of frantic work and too much thinking, sometimes literally, with a podcast or YouTube show I’ve been meaning to watch. Filling the quiet or bored bits with information and more stuff is exactly the opposite of creating the space we all need to do something great. This requires discipline and it requires saying no, regardless of how interesting your next-up-queue is.

I’m as guilty as this as anyone and it’s a work in progress. Being a work in progress is the default state and, rather pleasantly when you think about, this process of figuring it out will last until we die. There is no figuring it out. There is no done. There is no avoiding the 3 constants of pain, uncertainty, and constant work. The dream - given that this ride never ends - is that the constant work part is your work because ‘…the reward for good work is more work.’ Think about it.

In our modern times this is really hard and, as crazy as it sounds, young people do need help being themselves. Having the courage to say I am this and it’s good to be this. In our modern (misguided?) project, that currently means being anyone you can possibly imagine being, and everyone has to accept it outright, never saying boo or asking obvious questions, because that might risk an individual having their feelings hurt, and in our culture the individual is of greater important than the collective.

A possible problem with telling our young people this is that, as Paul Kingsnorth has pointed out, ‘…they have no idea what that means.’ We no longer have the structure, archetypes, and mentors that we need to walk the path of life and so we get lost. This is not surprising.

Mentors and Making Contact with the Real World

If I was coaching a young me - let’s say in the important 18-23 period or so - I would tell him to simply put your unique work into the world and see what, and who, comes back. Put it out, regardless of if it’s perfection, and attract others like you, both peers that can do the work with you, and mentors that have done the work before you.

“Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them.”

This is a default optimistic position (like having lots of children) because it proves that doing good work matters in and of itself. Doing work - doing anything of meaning at all - is by it’s very nature an optimistic thing to do, because if you didn’t believe the world was default good, you wouldn’t do anything at all. Optimistic people attract collaborators and mentors like pollen attracts the hive.

It also gives you the best shot at doing the work you’re supposed to do - and thus that will be unique enough to you that you will attract the others. Finding the others is absolutely underrated - your unique band of merry wanderers, traversing the globe (the world is really small now) that resonate with what you’re making and vice versa. It’s a great joy to find these people and you ought to nurture these relationships instead of simply trying to fit in with pop culture. Especially because pop culture in the west seems to be a one-way-ticket-to-misery.

“Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.”

If you think about this long enough it starts to feel true, simply because it’s obviously true. You are a mere conduit for your ideas. You don’t know where they come from, there isn’t an obvious place to look for them, and when the best work you’ve ever done springs out of you - you barely feel like you were there at all. In fact I’m now such a disciple of this that if you find yourself, and make peace there, you won’t be able to help BUT do your work.

You could take the Pressfield route and call this feeling or thing the muse. The interesting thing about the muse is it can only flow through your head, if your ass is in the seat. Daydreaming, procrastinating, trying to fit in, or talking about the work you will do at silly parties makes you invisible to the muse, and so naturally, you’ll never do it.

“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” - Pressfield

Mentors help give you the confidence to ship the work you’ve made. It isn’t real until you’ve published. It’s as good as non-existent until it makes contact with at least one other human, because that’s how you form community. We are the communal mammal - the most populous mammal on earth - and a community is more than one person. Communicate what you stand for, what you think, and why you think it, and if you’ve done this genuinely, you need not be concerned with the opinion of those who only criticize, but do nothing of their own. Don’t even check the comments or likes because both are irrelevant.

“When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”

I would add - or by talking - to the above and there are places to go in the world where these kinds of discussions feel perfectly human. I recommend going there, even if it is just to be around other people, as an easy first step. Eventually you will gravitate toward others like you and you will make friends as a natural by-product of proximity. This is a learnable skill and if you feel like you can’t do it for some reason, you’re wrong. You can start right now.

We tell ourselves that we have to go along with whatever the culture serves us, but this just isn’t true. We’re naturally fearful of standing out or breaking the rules because there was a time in our not-so-distant past where this had real-world consequences for our survival. That isn’ true anymore, and with the 1,000 True Fans model in full effect, being you is actually perfectly reasonable, exciting, and fruitful. What you fear will happen is probably 5% of what will actually happen when you get to the other side.

There are rules here though - just not the rules you’re thinking of. The rules are defined by nature, not by the culture you’re currently in. It’s tempting to join the herd at every turn - it really is - but what we’re looking for here is our best work - our work that is most true. Graham and Greene both agree that returning to what lit you up as a child is the ideal starting point because that’s when you were most willing to express your true uniqueness, without fear of the consequences.

“Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before - in your childhood…- and couldn’t stop thinking about.”

You are a one-of-one, made by something other than yourself, and so the you that expressed itself as a child was the you that you couldn’t help but be - before the culture got it’s claws into you.

It’s okay if this is high-level, vague, and principled in the beginning. Eventually you will use the tools outlined here to drill-down, get to a frontier of specific knowledge, communicate on it as often as you can, until you’re some kind of authority on the topic and can help others understand it better.

I’ll give you an example - for me it was the question of why the world works the way it does and why people do the things they do. My core ability was writing and connecting with people one-on one. In the beginning what I did with this was vague and high-level - like pouring over maps, encyclopedias, and stories of the wider world beyond Atlantic Canada. Then it became less and less vague, becoming tangible things like internships abroad and wide-spread travel. Then came the first professional application of that sense of unbridled curiosity - the world of immigration, then it’s specific role in economic development, then to the world of entrepreneurship.

I’ve never lost my interest in people and place, I’ve never stopped writing, and I excel in my work - not because of any special talent (I’m very average and I easily could have been the do-nothing type) - but because it’s my work and I’ve accepted that this is who I am and this is what I must do.

You are completely capable of this and you should start right now.

“Being prolific is underrated…you’ll learn faster and have more fun by trying stuff. So err on the side of starting.”

How to start is next week.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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This is a deviation of sorts from the current newsletter series. Sometimes things ought to be written. Instead of choosing what to do in the world, the world sends a clear sign that something is being chosen for you.

In another way - it’s no diversion at all. It’s a sign that you’re doing your work because you can’t help but do it. When you think about it long enough, you realize that in some way this has to be true because you only get to make one choice in any given moment. You might think you have an infinite amount of choices, but really you don’t. You do what you were going to do all along. What we repeatedly do is who we are.

And so it is that I find myself writing about cafe cultura because I can’t not write about it. Specifically, about 3 days at Pane e Circo - perhaps 3 of the best cafe days of my 33 years of life. When the moment begins to fade, perhaps I will think about it differently - but I doubt it.

I doubt it because of how interesting the town it sits in is, and how it’s changing. Of Pete and talking to strangers. Of my espresso companion, and wife, who is a mix of impressive and humble that few figure out how to pull off with such grace (including me). Of the barista man that felt it worth getting to know us. Of the classic, timeless aesthetic that I’ve come to see as my favourite cafe aesthetic1, and of the Slavs, Italians, and Poles who sat beside us each morning - as I expect they do every morning.

3 days at Pane e Circo - Halifax rising - an address in the Universe of Meaning.

Please enjoy and thank you for reading.

“And I’ve begun to firmly believe the biggest issue for happiness is knowing your address in the universe of meaning. Or knowing who you are, and why you’re here, and what will come once you’re gone.” - Chris Arnade

Halifax Rising (an address in the Universe of Meaning)

I’ve been coming to Halifax for as long as I can remember. Specifically in summer, to the shores of the Atlantic - St. Margaret’s Bay - looking out to Lukey’s Island. We’d waste away summer days sailing, swimming, riding, and walking - never properly hot - always an edge of cool from the ever-present Atlantic.

Over time places change - that’s the natural state of things - and Halifax has changed more than any other town on the East Coast. The beautiful thing about places is they change as the people do. I feel like I’ve lived two entirely different lives - there is before 23 years old and after - in the same way that Halifax has lived two different lives. When you shed your old skin in favour of what you inevitably becomes - people and places both - it feels exactly right and how it was always going to be. Halifax is becoming precisely what it means to.

Today, Halifax is cosmopolitan, like no other town in our part of the world. In fact, it isn’t even close. Saint John, Charlottetown, and St. John’s still feel as they once did. It’s not to say that they aren’t changing and growing too, but the rate of change is somehow different than Halifax rising, evolving, growing, building, investing, and selling to the rest of the world because the world wants what Halifax has. When there is a tower downtown called the Skye being built by the United Gulf company, there is a larger game afoot.

With that growth comes people and productivity gains. Canada has largely stalled on the latter, and so we’ve had to press pause on the former, to balance the scales. This is painful in the short-term, but wise in the long-term. Halifax is visibly young, diverse, and vibrant. On an average walk on an average day (the true measure of economic development) - it feels more like Boston than Charlottetown or Fredericton.

There is a dynamism at exactly the level you want your dynamism - at the SME level - the folks that make stuff, sell stuff, and employ most of us. The kind of dynamism that my collaborators David Campbell and Don Mills have come to love, and the kind of dynamism our region has to return to if we are going to balance the productivity charts that are up-and-to-the-right-in-the-wrong-direction. Take a moment and sit with the chart below - yikes.

Cafe Cultura (Talking to Strangers)

There is a 1:1 correlation with dynamism at the small business level and the growth of the cafe scene in a place. This is base level entrepreneurship and it has become the central guiding principle and pillar of my life. I’ve beat this horse to death - and you’ve read about this countless times from me - but I will write about it until my dying days because of how important it actually is to making places people want to live in.

Cafe Cultura is proof to me of just how wrong something is with us right now. Something sinister, despair inducing, and scary, but if we speak about it publicly, and see it in ourselves, we have a chance at avoiding the brink. If you asked me to speak honestly, I’m not sure we have that much time left to do this because you know by now that I believe (like Chris Arnade does) that cultures are path-dependent and if we fall down that slippery slope there is no stopping the momentum until we make contact with firm ground (or a brick wall).

Arnade’s latest was a melange of essays written from China (also undeniably rising). My favourite short piece was a response to the seeming growth of extremism in political and social life in America. Something is really wrong with our meaning making machine and young people are finding meaning in divisiveness and extremism because that’s what happens when you create a void of meaning in daily life.

At Pane e Circo, on our first morning, there was an oddly dressed, pleasant looking gentleman at the bar seats wearing a white t-shirt that read ‘Talk to a Stranger Week.’ The organizing entity was one called Genwell, which exists “…to address the issues of social isolation, disconnection and loneliness through the power of human connection.” My wife being who she is, couldn’t help but introduce herself and find out more. Naturally, that quickly evolved into a recorded interview with Pete - seemingly wonderful Pete - about why we were in town and why she felt the pull to introduce herself.

Even barista man was into whatever was happening - the cafe is the perfect place for such a thing - as we debated the merits of cafe au lait vs flat white and cranberry vs raspberry.

The Slavs, Poles, and Italians

Doing things like this is a superpower of hers. You probably have a bizarre superpower that you’ve had since birth but you’re afraid to tell people about. I don’t recommend the latter, because the former is what makes you you, and you have no choice but to be you and so you might as well start doing it. What falls away after you decide to do this authentically is precisely what was meant to fall away - like shedding the skin of a snake. It has to happen and it’s not your job to deny it because you didn’t make it. It’s an allowing, not a trying.

Mine is an eerie sense of geography - of people and place. My ear for language and my eye for phenotype is so bizarrely attuned that I’m rarely wrong and I have no idea what to make of that. It’s probably as simple and practical as having poured over globes, encyclopedias, and National Geographics as an odd, emotional child, or it could be as esoteric and supernatural as being blessed with a feeling of ‘at home’ anywhere on earth (and I’ve been around the block).

And so it was delightful to learn that the Halifax cafe circuit kicks off at 6:30am (on par with Toronto and Boston, and a full hour before my hometown), and I knew exactly what that would mean. It would mean I would be there as close to the open as my beloved wife and coffee companion would allow, and we would likely be one of the few english speakers there, and almost definitely the only people under 40. I don’t know how to explain this other than that both of the latter categories know how important gathering is and not one of them was alone on a device.

On day 2 at Pane e Circo I knew within seconds the group of old Slavs to our immediate right do this everyday simply because that’s how the day starts. There is no need to go beyond that. They were naturally tanned (my lifelong jealousy of the fit and healthy nordics from cold, but sunny places - unlike my ancestors), smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke (a health food if done correctly), talked loudly in their mother-tongue and loved to laugh. Forgive me for being hard on us domestics but these guys have a fundamental understanding of what makes a life worth living, and what makes a place worth living in, that we have somehow lost and we have to reclaim if we are to survive as a culture.

Even the fourth of their quartet - who clearly couldn’t make it on Day 3 - called to check in, and the leader of the bunch put him on speaker phone so they could howl with laughter from afar - probably a doctor’s waiting room or something of the like. Morning coffee at Pan e Circo is not to be missed and so picking up the phone to check in with the lads is the natural thing to do. As natural as breathing for communal cultures - and I mean this almost literally. Individualism and aloneness barely registers as a concept. My East African brethren - having lived among them in the summer of 2012 - would hardly even understand what you mean by it. It’s unthinkable in a way that, ironically, becomes much more thinkable (and likely) if they immigrate to North America - and that should tell us something about our built environment.

Two old ladies - Poles (trust me) - made up the small bistro set three to the right of our Slavic brethren and they laughed just as much and maintained (because of their vintage) kawa czarna - coffee, strong, short and black (unclear whether they found their way into some grounds at the bottom of the cup as they’d like it but they seemed to be enjoying it nonetheless).

One turned to the other and in heavily accented english said ‘Yes! Have a muffin - you look like you need a muffin.” To which the other howled with laughter - having no sense of offense whatsoever, which in our culture is all but impossible because we’ve forgotten the better angels of our nature and assume, by default, that there is offense to be had around every corner. This cannot sustain - the center will not hold - and we will commit cultural suicide if we can’t reverse course.

To Halifax rising - to an address in the Universe of Meaning - and a cafe scene that is incredibly healthy for the size of the city. To Pete, talking to strangers, barista man, the Slavs, Poles, and Italians - and to 3 Days at Pan e Circo - I can’t wait to be back.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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This newsletter project began 43 essays ago - in the summer of 2023 - because I had a hunch that people weren’t doing so well. We had just emerged (or seemingly emerged) out of the confusion and hostility of the COVID19 pandemic, and something felt wrong - we just couldn’t say what, exactly. Many believed - as I’m certain I do now - that the pandemic was not so much a diversion of the course of the times, but an accelerator.

What had been bubbling below the surface in our part of the world, like a cultural simmering pot, was unease, tech addiction, loneliness, poor sleep, bad nutrition, and a disconnection from people, place, and work that was hard to describe, but ever present.

The great and powerful Paul Kingsnorth recently had a crack at summarizing this cultural malaise with his new book Against the Machine1. Paul argues that the machine is something that can’t be stopped, partly because we can hardly articulate what it is, and partly because it is comprised of us, and there is no stopping us.

We make things - as many things as we can make - and once we’re on the make-stuff train it’s damn near impossible to get off. Perhaps this is perfectly human. Perhaps it’s something different now and we’re on a rather slippery slope2.

Every November I study military history - and this year it’s Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. It’s largely about the first days of August that led to WWI, and it’s message is something to the effect of what Kingsnorth thinks of the Machine. Once we’re on that train, we’re on it forever pal. We’re on it until it’s logical conclusion is concluded, and we may not like that conclusion one bit. Human cultures become path-dependent and we can’t stop ourselves.

For Paul - what us moderns are missing is the Four Ps:

1. People

2. Place

3. Prayer

4. The Past

I’ve spent the balance of this newsletter dealing with the first two, and I believe in our human need for them both so much that the bloody thing is named after them - People & Place.

We need people because we’re pack animals and being alone is no good for us. It might even be the worst thing that can happen to us and we’re paying the piper on that front right now.

We need place because we quite literally come from it and we remember that somehow. When someone cries Vive la France! or hears a bagpipe march, what stirs in us is love of…what exactly? The land. It’s what the Americans feel about the vastness of the West, what the Greeks feel of their islands, what the East Africans feel about the rolling hills and red soil, and what the Australians feel about the Great Barrier Reef and the Outback. Although ours pails in comparison to the connection that the ancients had with the land, we remember it in our bones, if not in our brains.

I’ve even dealt with Paul’s third and fourth on the list - prayer as a metaphor for believing in something larger than ourselves (which we clearly don’t3) and our connection to a past that allows us to say “I am this, and it is good to be this” (which we also clearly don’t have).

The one I would add as my third, which Paul may have left out because it breaks the satisfying pull of alliteration, is work - something that I believe is a critical missing piece of the puzzle here. Not work as in your job - that you may or may not find completely meaningless (which is a problem in and of itself), but work as in the very human thing you ought to be doing and you know you ought to be doing but you don’t know how you know or how to do it.

The closest I’ve come to understanding this process fully is a combination of the macro-framework that Robert Greene gave us in Mastery, the micro-framework of Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, and Paul Graham’s essay - How to Do Great Work. I’d like to deal with the latter this week. As you can probably tell from the title, Paul is rather good at getting to the point.

Let’s revisit How to Do Great Work in the hopes that you do your best work ever in 2026. Not the work you think you should do for social gain or more treasure, but because it’s your work.

This will be Pt. 1 of a series that goes as long as it goes. Please enjoy, and thank you for reading.

“Know your truth, stick to the process, and be free of the outcome.” - Boyd Varty

Your Gifts x Your Interests

I started this Substack as an attempt to get really good at writing. Specifically the essay format - in the hopes that a collection of good essays would eventually turn in to a good book. I didn’t start with the reader in mind, which may be a traffic and attention mistake, but with the simple acknowledgement that you are what you repeatedly do and if what I am is a writer, then I best get writing.

I didn’t worry - and still don’t worry - about what comes back because what comes back isn’t the point. The point, so far, is to get really good at writing. At writing essays. My essays. Not the essays that people expect or that might do well, or might check the to-do-list boxes of virality, but the essays that I am supposed to write and that I alone can write.

Essays that would please my younger self, as he awkwardly and rather emotionally made his way through the world - enthralled by lists, books, maps, and artefacts of all kinds. It’s in this past - the history of you - that Robert Greene, Kevin Kelly, and Paul Graham begin their quest in helping you do your life’s work.

“The first step is to decide what to work on.” - Paul Graham

This might seem obvious in principle, but it isn’t in practice. In fact it’s rather hard because you have to shed the world’s expectations of you, and those can be a great weight indeed.

“The work you choose to do needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.”

I think the first two are actually far more important than the third because we all have a limited number of gifts. Those who are seemingly good at everything do exist, but they are exceedingly rare. For most of us - Nature or God, or whatever you recognize as more powerful than yourself, gave us one, maybe two, sacred gifts. The things that chose you and make you tremble with terror because you know they are your gifts, and you have no choice in the matter, and you ought to use them. The things that if you don’t use make us unwell somehow.

For me it’s writing and connecting with people at the individual level. Two gifts. That’s exit. That’s all I was given and it’s within that simple framework that I find my life’s task.

Until I learned how to harness my gifts productively, these manifested as far too much thinking, and an empathy problem that I couldn’t handle. Not knowing what to do with your gifts is part of the process, and this doesn’t make you weird or behind. It’s perfectly natural and it is up to you to find out how to deploy them in your life. The framework I’ve learned is Learn Life - Yes Life - No Life - Teach Life.

The next job to be done is combine your gifts with something you’re deeply curious about. This is the only way to do great work because if you don’t really care about doing it you won’t do it to it’s fullest extent. You just won’t. As soon as it gets hard you will quit.

This is also very hard to do because you will inevitably find yourself pulled in many directions, fulfilling other peoples to-do-lists, not your own. This is even more tempting when money becomes involved. You must ignore this (temporarily), and if you’re already on that path, find the nearest reasonable exit that maintains the relationships you’ve made and points you back toward True North. Money is a by-product of great work, so maximizing for learning, relationships, and ability is far more important when you’re young.

The third piece of advice here is find something that offers you the opportunity to do something great. It’s good advice but it might be redundant in the modern world. There are 8 billion of us now, someone is interested in everything, the 1,000 True Fans model is readily available and works (although it isn’t easy) and if you combine the natural abilities that Nature gave you, with something you’re deeply curious about, then you can’t help but make it great. It’s essentially a fait-accomplit if you do the first two correctly.

“If you’re not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.”

This is probably the most underrated advice of all, and it’s on the first page of the essay. Starting is the difference between doing something great and doing nothing at all. As long as you’ve got air in your lungs and sunrise brings another day above ground, you’ve got a shot at doing your work.

Start right now. Stack that work over time - meaning that you should at least be rowing in the same general direction at all times. That way the work has a chance at compounding and compounding is somehow miraculous. You will discover this quickly. Not over night, but it will come if you stay on the bus.

Push to the Frontier (velocity > speed)

I work with young companies - startup companies - and in these good people there is a bent towards speed. Startups do have a speed advantage - and if you’re going to capture a new and exciting opportunity you need to move fast, but speed is not as important as velocity. As Ryan Petersen recently told Harry Stebbings - velocity has a vector - what matters most is speed in the right direction.

Once you’ve started doing your work, you need velocity.

“…the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge.”

There is an infinite amount of interesting things to be done, on this particularly interesting planet. We start with principles - some foundational knowledge set, and then we push through the jungle, like the back and forth of a mental machete, to find something compelling and to discover a sense of mastery that only comes through years on the path.

More often than not this starts in the form of a question - then several questions - until the onion has been properly peeled. Time is a central component4. Most moderns see time as something to overcome or something to get through. This is naive and misses that time is a central ingredient to doing anything good. It’s literally part of the recipe, and steps are not to be skipped5.

“It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence of mortality.”

If you don’t skip steps you notice important things that others missed. These often become obvious in hindsight, but they only get revealed by the persistent few who are willing to descend layer upon layer. You can’t know what work is supposed to be done without doing it, and so reps become critical. It’s the choosing bit that is the hard part.

How to Know You Know

It occurred to me in recent years - in the way that some of us are prone to epiphany, that maybe the most important part of this whole deal is the choosing of the thing. Ironically, we moderns are so out of touch with our own selves that we somehow don’t know that we know we know what to do.

On some level we know what we’re supposed to do, we just can’t seem to bring ourselves to ignore the noise and do it. It is critical that we regain this sensory ability to feel what is right, outside of rational logic because the feeling brain is much more powerful than the thinking brain.

The thinking brain is especially insidious for ‘smart’ people - or people who are perceived as smart - because the thinking brain takes over and you talk yourself into silly things. Those who are more in touch with the human principles of the feeling brain - refined for hundreds-of-thousands-of-years of evolution - are able to achieve a level of common sense that the former cannot. What Taleb calls IYIs - intellectuals, yet idiots.

Getting in touch with the feeling brain is critical because only you can know what to work on, and only you can choose it.

“…when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you’re on your own.”

The good news is this might be the time in human history where the term work means the most things. In the 1,000 True Fans era, someone is interested in everything, and there are so many of us on earth that if 1 person is interested, there are likely 999 more that are too. Work - if you’re not out there doing the admirable work of tangible things like building roads or maintaining power lines, simply means the exchange of goods and services between people who have those things and people who want them.

Instinct is key to knowing how we know. Acting on an instinct - even the smallest instinct - is a really good place to start because as Graham tells us ‘…you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read ots of books, ask lots of questions.’

As doubt and imposter syndrome creep in, control for curiosity and interestingness. Follow the thing that lights you up like a Christmas tree, regardless of how much it pays or doesn’t pay. Why this is true is simply because it’s obvious. Our need for facts and data is useless in this arena. There are things we know we know, and that’s just the fact of the matter.

The ski patrol making $22/hour on the mountain is in a far better position than the desk jocky whose life force is being sucked minute by minute for $34/hour. Do the math! The push is $12/hour more and the sense of stability that comes from a do-nothing function at a large company. The pull is low energy, low libido, being uninteresting, sitting all day under neon lights, and the slow decline into becoming a hunched over screen-demon. I’m sorry for being harsh here but this the reality and our physical, emotional, and spiritual health crisis are clear for all to see. It’s written in our blood-shot eyeballs and our online rage.

We’re not fulfilled because we’re not doing our life’s work. We’re making what other people think we ought to make and at some level this makes everything worse.

“Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost…if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against all of them. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.”

In a sick culture, curiosity and the appetite for work is some kind of life-arbitrage that makes you increasingly unique. If we can’t tap into our physical senses, and if we lose touch with our physical bodies, we can’t decide what to work on, and we don’t have the stomach to pursue it.

Pursuing it means that you have the discipline to work on it every day, regardless of your state of motivation. For writers, this means writing 1,000 words per day, every day, instead of writing 10,000 words whenever you feel inspired to do so. On a long enough time horizon the former ends up with books and the latter ends up with half-baked ideas that never get published.

If you’re lucky, the discipline of doing a small amount of great work every day compounds into something no-less than a miracle with enough time.

Discipline is some sort of divine freedom - that’s part 2.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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Some time ago, as you well know by now, I found Chris Arnade - as Chris Arnade seemingly found the rest of the world. He found it mostly by walking - walking cities - and in that way learned what he’s learned about the world and how it actually works.

How it actually works is awfully different from what popular culture would have you believe, for the very simple reason that most people don’t participate at the built level1. The streets are so different from the screens - but the latter is bleeding in to the former in dangerous ways, like assassinations on college campuses.

Most people wake up, press the snooze button, bid their spouse a good morning, take a shower and do some grooming (hopefully), get the kids ready for the day as best they can, and head off to work in a job where they contribute - in a small way - to the functioning of the whole. This is the reality of most people’s lives, and it’s why economic development is best understood by understanding reality for an average person, in an average place2.

How it actually works for most people is the sum total of an average day and you can discover that by walking around and talking to people. You won’t find it on most social channels - where life is glamorous and includes epic instrumentals, or lots of bickering. You won’t find it at most conferences or networking events where you don’t get further than polite platitudes. You only truly find it by being involved with people who are doing things they repeatedly do because, alas, that is who they are. That is who we are.

To me, the quality of an average day, for the average person, is an excellent indicator of economic development, at it’s most basic level. Is the process of economic development in the context you’re in working or is it not working? Does your city, province, and region provide a fair quality of life for most of it’s citizens, or does it not? Are the basics of people, energy, transportation, and communication networks in place? Above the foundation are there either people or productivity gains that allow a place to thrive - or are folks just getting by, doing the best they can with what they have?

If Larry Smith is right - modern economic development is a process by which people and places work to achieve their full potential, and I can’t think of a better way to get to know a place and it’s people than by walking it.

Please enjoy, and thank you for coming on the walk.

“Since the Bulgarians are seemingly loath to make their own case, I guess I’ll have to…Sofia is perhaps the easiest, least complicated, city to navigate I’ve been in. With its extensive tram network, metro, and buses, all which use a single pay-by-phone-tap, you can get between almost any two points within an hour, and for less than a dollar.” - Chris Arnade

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Walking Niagara on the Lake

This years EDAC conference - yes I still think they have their place - was held in the lovely hamlet of Niagara on the Lake. Because this was a longer conference, at a rather comfortable, historic hotel, my wife tagged along for a week of bike riding, walking, coffee drinking, wine tasting, and page reading, while I was in the bowels of the Queen’s Landing learning what I could about modern economic development.

As often as I could I joined her in her outdoor pursuits, because as much as we want to believe that we’re learning about economic development by being inside - true economic development can only be observed and felt outside.

Driving from Pearson International to Niagara on the Lake, there are a few things that are quite clear. Yes, there is mixed income everywhere, but the outer reaches of the GTA seem to be doing quite well. Buildings are being built, there is plenty of agriculture (rows upon row of wine and wild flowers), and tourism is apparent. Also clear when you walk the area is that the amount of drug-addicted folks sleeping rough seems to be near 0. Literally 0. I don’t think I encountered a single suffering, destitute, aggressive person in our time there and I don’t know how to properly explain how different that is from my hometown at the moment.

Things being built is good because we have to be in the business of pairing our population gains with productivity gains. If we don’t do that we get things like housing shortages and long wait times at hospital emergency rooms. The price of everything goes up because the amount of people consuming stuff is far greater than the amount of people making stuff. This seems also true of our dear country at the moment, where regulation and public payrolls are going up-and-to-the-right.

If I was the GTA I think I would actually be worried about this - as David Campbell is.

On one of our walks we passed a beautiful home on a larger plot than most of the neighbours. This was not far from the main intersection of King and Queen St (original) but was far from what I would call lavish or grand. We played the fun game of - guess how much this costs - because property is still affordable where I come from relative to Ontario or British Colombia. The house was listed for triple what I had guessed. 3x! An adorable $2.9M dollars. Eggheads will say it’s simple supply and demand and explain it away but my intuition is we’ve entered monetary fairytale where numbers are meaningless and that’s worrisome, don’t you think?

Agriculture is one of my favourite things and I think we need 100x more people working in the food production business if we are to save ourselves from our current health predicament. As one regenerative farmer explained to me in my region, it’s almost impossible to do if you don’t already own the land outright, because land is so expensive, input costs like fertilizer and butchering are so high, and the average consumer just isn’t willing to pay that much more when they could go to Costco instead3.

Niagara on the Lake seems to have a thriving wine industry that doubles as a tourism pull. We rode to Peller Estates like a couple of cuties and tasted a small selection of their traditional wines (excellent) and their novel ice wines (really excellent) - the grapes of which are harvested in the dead of night in January and produces a product that is so sweet it tastes like brandy, and so expensive it smells like gold.

In the context of economic development I’m more frequently tempted than I’d like to admit to eliminate all tourist towns from my list of actually interesting places. To the dismay of my tourism and place-making friends, it’s because I think tourism is generally overrated. I understand it’s important to some places, and it’s simply a reality of our flattened world that buses upon buses of Asian tourists disembarking to try the hot apple cider and take selfies with the pumpkins is where we are and I suppose that’s fine.

Although we can’t risk getting trapped there, Niagra on the Lake certainly hasn’t lost it’s sense of history, and it reminds you of it’s military significance often. It seems to care that you know that - and remember that - and I suppose that’s what you would do if you were the scene of important national events in the past. My fear, as you know, with tourist towns is that they tend to get stuck there and that stunts their ability to look forward. Instead of having downtowns and industries that work for most, average people you have prime real-estate on the corner block become a historic apothecary that is…only open on the weekends. I would much prefer we find a way to remember our history - and celebrate it - amongst a working town. We can learn this lesson from places like the great and powerful Instanbul - a place I was much to young to appreciate, seeing it by foot and via the surreal Bosphorus as an 18 year old.

As I write more and more on this very thing, I can’t help but feel like the idea is so simple and yet supremely underrated. That a place actually has to work for it to be functional for most people. I am borderline obsessed with the show Clarkson’s Farm because, beyond it being hilarious, it is the perfect example of a People & Place show.

In Clarkson’s battle with the Oxfordshire Town Council, he says something that even he didn’t realize is exactly correct. The council was arguing that his 1,000 acre farm in the Cotswolds is a gimmick because he personally no longer needs an income. To which he replied - yes - but the farm needs an income. The farm has to be a working place, with working people. I may be an independently wealthy TV personality - but British farmers are not, and British farms are not. This is exactly correct - and it seems like Niagara on the Lake has struck a fair balance.

Another of my favourite things to mentally log when seeing a place - and something that is again completely underrated - is the measure of how easy it is for people to get around a place. If we eliminate the 2 car owning suburbanite, and focus more on feet, bikes, buses, trains, and light-rail or town-cars, Niagara on the Lake does seem like a wonderfully easy place to get around if you are able to move yourself. Not nearly as much so as urban centres, like Toronto, but pedestrian only paths that are well maintained criss cross the town, and there seem to be plenty of parks and green space on the perimeter of town.

There is also a British sense (unsurprising) of the High-Street kind of development, where folks live somewhere around the Queen and King Street intersection, and those two streets are essentially where all of the shops, restaurants, and cafes are. I like that style of development in most cases, and it’s nice for the Niagarans that nothing is too far from that intersection, but it doesn’t necessarily have the same sense of productivity as mixed-use zoning like the Japanese have been fond of.

Walking Toronto

After four lovely nights tucked into the bossom of Queen’s Landing, we made our way to Toronto for the weekend to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. I’ll spend less time on Toronto itself because we all know the Toronto deal, and while it is actually an excellent walking town for it’s size, I fear my Toronto haunts are fairly basic and not exciting. In fact, I’m almost certain of it, so I’ll highlight a short list of my favourites.

Our first day was spent with the express goal of walking - lymph flowing, blood pumping, brain thinking - essentially directly North-South. The destination, beyond the joys of walking through what is a lovely (yet slightly pompous) University setting, was my favourite fall patio for espresso - that of Espresso Bar Mercurio - which has maintained a sense of being very Italian (including the standing bar for those used to that sort of thing). It was a lovely time to sit out and enjoy the cool October air, making the obvious and at-this-point-irrelevant observation that Toronto is an extremely diverse place and appears to be very young by Canadian standards.

Saturday morning found us early and East-bound - the St. Lawrence Market - for fresh produce and the chance to engage with local vendors. There is nothing I like more than this - regardless of where I am - solely because (again) these are working places and working places are the most interesting and accurate way to really get to know a place. This wasn’t manufactured and manicured for cruise ship passengers or bus tourists - it’s local people selling things that local people need and there are just as many breakfast meetups as there are grocery shoppers. Real things that happen on actual Saturday mornings in the city.

Continuing East, through Old Toronto, is charming and appealing because it’s the middle-class family area of the city, before reaching the Distillery District that becomes more touristy. It’s not to say that there aren’t lovely shops and restaurants in that area - because there are - like Madrina - our favourite Spanish tapas restaurant in the city. But it’s less charming simply because it isn’t the young and old simply existing - which I find I enjoy the most.

As a red-blooded transportation guy I couldn’t help but notice how heading East and West is much more pleasant than North-South in Toronto, if you can’t move yourself on foot. In the latter category, hopping on the subway or walking via Yonge and Dundas is a city thing that works for city people, but East-West travel in Toronto is on pedestrian footpaths, intermittent and small, functional parks, bike lanes that are off-street, and light-rail that works very well indeed.

Heading West on one of these exquisite creations can (and should) lead to late afternoon affogato at Mizzica - a very popular place that has yet to become a caricature of itself4. When Italians are skipping the line, entering in through the exit, to order espresso shots that they simply knock back and ‘grazi mille!’ and then leave means you should absolutely be in that place.

For much needed walking calories - what has to be one of the best pork belly bao I’ve ever had - I opt for Mean Bao in the bowels of Union Station. I rarely miss Mean Bao for a cheap snack as I’m walking when in Toronto and I’ve never been disappointed.

Before leaving for home - what is without question basic, but is something I can’t help but love - Dineen Coffee. You could easily make the argument that Sud Forno, right across the street, is a better situation for all involved, and that Dineen is some kind of forced nostalgia that happens to be a really good photo op - but I can’t help but love it anyway because I’m a hopeless romantic that just can’t quit a coffee shop with dark leather, brass, and a now irrelevant bank vault. Dineen is the kind of place where you can imagine (and shamefully long for) a time when locals, and locals only, came to sit, read the paper, and gab about the news of the day before walking to work or church.

This kind of nostalgia is seen as some kind of evil in our time - it must have been a time where things were really quite good for you (and other men) and that’s why you long for it! - but I don’t think this is what’s happening at all. I believe nostalgia can be used to hijack our need for certainty (‘the past was better and I’m the only one who can take you there again’) but I believe it mostly reveals itself when there is some sort of unease or feeling of inability in a world that is changing faster and faster. A time when it is the few who truly understand who they are and what their role is in the scheme of things. This seems to be deeply unsettling to humans.

That anxiety is now paired with a now-ubiquitous- sense of needing to slow down, to reconnect with our fellow humans instead of our screens, and to find a sense of awareness and understanding of what our role in all of this is. It’s obvious to me that there was a time when this was easier and that is what we’re longing for, we just don’t know how to express it. Dineen has that sense of nostalgia oozing from it’s pores and I can’t help but love a place like that.

See you in the park, on the bike lanes, in the market, and on the light rail!

The best way to get to know a place is to see it on foot - I hope you do so.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“At its core, the city building movement must be about creating the environment that allows us to most deeply recover our humanity…It has to be about creating places that allow us to be in organic contact with other people on a daily basis; to interact with people who are different from us, who look different than us, pray (or don’t) differently than us, think differently than us, have more or less money than us, are married or single, young or old, have kids or.” - The Urbaneer

Greetings from Niagara on the Lake!

The early days of this week were absurdly warm for the first days of October. Well into the evening, it felt like July. The air had the quality of Tampa or the Carolinas, which is to say - moist and excellent.

Even now, as the sunrises and the storm comes to break the heat, I’m in short-sleeves, sipping a double espresso at the local Balzacs. It may not have been my first choice but it’s in a lovely historic building, it opened the earliest, and I’m at a window perch looking out at King Street, as the town wakes up (rather slowly which I’m gathering is it’s nature).

The young table of two, seemingly on the most rare of first dates - 7:00am (it’s going okay but not great). The older couple that I would bet my aunt has been doing this morning walk routine for years. The German speaking gentlemen who was pleasantly shocked when one of the baristas made casual conversation over the expresso machine in his native tongue. Wie schön! And the man who rather miraculously made the power come back on, after a short outage, so he could acquire his cortado. Our very own caffeine-Jesus.

My wife made the observation that Niagara-on-the-Lake is a larger, freshwater St. Andrews-by-the-Sea - our Maritime summer haunt. Last week I happened to be in our St. Andrews local, writing the opening words of this essay, expecting to get it out before travelling.

Here’s what I said:

Honeybeans is a particularly interesting place, full of particularly interesting people. It’s nearly October and so that means many have already left. Water Street feels particularly sleepy, yet pleasant, at 7:30am and I’m one of the few locals at the coffeehouse. Those who remain are my kind of people. I don’t know what I mean by that exactly, but I do know I mean it.

That’s the same way I think of trust at the culture level - you know it when you see it.

That’s our topic today.

I’ve recently finished a four-part series1, based on Chris Arnade’s How to Build the Perfect City - and much of it centred on the idea of regulation vs. trust and what it means for how a culture and economy develops over time.

The central questions being - can you actually plan a place? Does policy change culture? Is culture path dependent? What are the responsibilities of those who make the rules and are the rules best written top-down or bottom-up?

As often happens, I naturally gravitate back to my bookshelf and pick up something that feels like important material on whatever I’m writing about. In this instance - Michael Lewis’ Boomerang.

It proved to be a very good decision, because the preface (maybe the perfect preface) deals entirely with the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis - one rooted squarely in the erosion of trust at the culture level.

Michael sets off to ‘…the new third world’ to try and understand just how these things happened where they happened - something I am keenly interested in. To Greece, where trust at the political and economic level was eroded to near-zero. To Ireland, where the mass-delusion of building as much as they could possibly build led to a dramatic change in Ireland’s culture - defined by who stayed, who arrived, and who left her. Direct evidence that of course the built world impacts the culture, and can even change it. To Germany - the pragmatic Germans! - who had never encountered such a species as the American finance guy and so were completely duped.

Today - an attempt to actually define trust at all 4 levels - including the culture level, and how the landscape of cultural trust seems to be hanging on by a thread.

Please enjoy, and thank you for reading.

““What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money? That’s when everyone panicked.”” - Michael Lewis

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Trust All the Way Down

Trust at the personal level might be best described as a relationship to higher forces. It can’t be proven to you, and it won’t be driven by our modern love (obsession) with data. It will be a felt experience and relies on us believing that there is something more important than ourselves out there that is worth working toward, and worth being in relationship with, on a daily basis.

Consistency seems to be the key. That relationship takes constant work, and is easy to lose.

A sense of purpose doesn’t come from thinking about it. It comes from taking action that moves you toward the future. The moment you do this, you activate a force....We call this the “Force of Forward Motion. - Phil Stutz

We might say trust as the personal level is a form of discipline. We go out into the world and act in a way that aligns with our values, because we think it’s good to do so. That we ought to do so. If we have the correct discipline - if we’re in right relationship - then the reward for our discipline is a sense of freedom that can only come from commitment to a greater cultural story - not the perverse church of the individual.

Trust between individuals - or small groups - is about the daily agreements we make to one another, over a long enough period of time that productive and worthwhile relationships can form. It’s the product of hundreds-of-thousands of years of small group human evolution, not the performative pleasantries that so often make up rich countries, like mine, at the moment. It’s something much deeper and much more important - something people like the French seem to understand in a more mature way.

In France, the context is different. Relationships are built more slowly, and warmth carries weight precisely because it isn’t given out automatically. A smile offered too freely risks being read as superficial or false. Intimacy is earned over time, through consistency and loyalty, not through instant charm. - Pamela Clapp

We don’t want to believe usness matters anymore, but it does matter, and it’s becoming increasingly hard for people - especially young people - to come to a reasonable conclusion around exactly what that means.

It’s so important that folks who believe the better angels of our nature theory would tell you we’ve only been able to build what we’ve built because we’ve found a way to make these agreements, and assume the best in others. This allows us to collaborate, at scale. It’s the social and economic coincidence of wants and so we trade, and share public spaces, and build companies, and start community groups.

Each time I ramble into New York City by train, I’m struck by this exact phenomenon. By all measures of account - this should not work. How does it work? What about the plumbing? It makes absolutely no sense and if you were a betting man you’d think it would devolve into madness because of it’s sheer scale. But it doesn’t. In fact, it really doesn’t. If success is a melting pot that still retains a sense of usness, then New York City has done a seemingly exceptional job at maintaining that, in spite of it being the whole world in a single city. The global cache of I ❤️ NYC brand alone makes me think it might have done the single best job of any city, anywhere.

What if we stop being able to do that? What if we can no longer agree on anything at all because the screens have superseded the streets in cultural value and in time spent. Culturally I wish we could detach ourselves from the drug of TOS - Time On Site - in favour of TIS - Time in the Streets.

Trust at the culture (big groups) and built level (planning and politics) are both far harder to define, and far more difficult to get right.

Let’s start with the idea that culture is not politics, even though that’s how we govern ourselves. Culture is the sum total of how we behave and interact at the big group level - it’s how we define ourselves, not how we rule ourselves.

That’s why obsession with politics at the international level seems to makes folks so miserable. Because we can’t actually do anything about it and in our anxious misery we often end up forsaking our own community (the thing we can very much impact indeed) for an obsession with drama, pop-culture, and international affairs.

Thought experiment: How much time have we spent talking about the current American administration vs. time spent holding our local city council accountable? Time spent on daily mindfulness and fitness? Deliberate, please-God-phones-away time in conversation with our spouses? I’m as guilty here as anyone, although I am working on creating a discipline that re-balances the scales.

Perhaps the central question of our time - alongside birthrate2 - is how to build productive cultures in a hyper-diverse world, where those with the means to do so can go anywhere they please and invest anywhere they like. That will be a major focus of the newsletter for the foreseeable future because figuring that out seems to be critical - and we better get on it because it isn’t - you may have noticed - going well.

Our cultural contexts can be so very different - even if we like to pretend that they are not (it’s mostly folks who haven’t travelled who perpetuate this charade). We’re bound by our own lives, and our own places that have long histories. As much as we try to shed where we come from and who we are, in favour of a more worldly approach to a very globalized world, we live our lives and they live their lives and that’s just the facts of it all. If you hadn’t noticed - time only goes one way and you’re on this ride forever pal.

Trust at the culture level might be defined as the sum total of all the agreements we make.

We make daily agreements - like pulling over for an ambulance, whose temporary passenger has more important places to be than you do. And we make longer-term agreements like what kind of country we want to be and how we want to behave in public. This matters far more than we’d like to believe, and the rate at which these long-term agreements are decaying in my hometown, for example, would alarm the statisticians.

We might deferral of local responsibility as a cultural red flag. Is it our responsibility to pickup the trash that litters our urban streets or is it their job? The problem here is obvious when you think it through. As Kevin Kelly might say - trust me - there is no ‘they.’

Cultural trust is even more important than trust at the built level (politics and planning) because most people don’t participate in those things, but everyone lives an average day, every day and we have to find a way to get on with it as best we can. And - if I haven’t said this enough - the built level will never be good enough to unite and bind us because we need to make agreements to each other that are not rules made under threat of punishment if you break them.

I don’t underestimate the built level and it’s impact on culture - how big groups of people interact, how we build a place physically, and how we make the rules for ourselves - but you know by now that I simply do not believe it is going to be what fixes us. In fact, it’s obvious that it can’t and won’t because after we make all of our good policies and new rules, we will still be stuck with each other. There’s nowhere else to go.

I can’t get past the idea that trust at the culture level erodes completely if discipline and meaning erodes at the personal level. We can blame whatever we want, and yet we can never seem to escape ourselves.

Corporate greed? A large group of humans.

Lethargic government bodies? A large group of humans.

Social media companies hiring the best and brightest of a generation to make us hopelessly addicted screen demons? A large group of humans.

Big-Pharma or Big-Food - two groups that I firmly believe make us more sick than well (even-though I’ve experienced the modern acute-sick-care miracle personally) = yet again - a large group of humans.

We can’t escape ourselves. We will never be able to. There ain’t nowhere to go, as much as we might try metaphorically and literally to go to Mars. I’ve always found it intriguingly bizarre that we’d like to leave the only planet where we know organic life is possible and flourishing. We have really advanced telescopes and we can see a lot of things, and - trust me - this is the good place.

Perhaps it’s a claustrophobia driven by how seemingly small the world has become, and how uneasy we feel about our new public life. To restore that trust - at every level - we need to exercise a personal discipline, connect with individuals to find common ground, participate at the built level where we can directly have influence, and - perhaps - spend a little less time on social media.

See you in the streets!

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“In Italy the staff cared because they were either the owners or employees who had been there for decades, and this was their life, and they saw it as a craft more than a job, and because Italians see breakfast as something more than a momentary transaction meant to get you in and out as efficiently as possible, before you run off to do your next thing.” - Chris Arnade

I started writing this intro at 1:27pm, in my local. This - if you know me - is perhaps the strangest time of all for me to be writing. Writing and editing is highly personal - and for me it happens on the extreme end of the time pendulum. Writing in the AM, editing in the PM. Never the two shall meet.

But I write this to you now - in the middle of a lovely September day - because I felt compelled to do so. The social and political temperature has been high as of late and my intuition tells me it’s getting harder and harder for us to understand one another - but it is critical that we do so if we are to move forward together as a culture.

As anthropologist Wade Davis has said many times - ‘Other people are not failed attempts at being you.’

I don’t have any useful conclusions that others haven’t drawn these last weeks - but what I can do is offer some practical tools that (especially) young people can use to find peace, resilience, and consistency in their lives.

My not-so-secret intuition is that we only fix this bottom-up.

For your consideration:

• Delete your social apps from your phone, and only use them at a specific time of day (or for a specific duration) on the desktop. Your phone is far more addictive, and - on a practical level - actually kicks out more harmful blue light than your MacBook does, which can lead to poor sleep. You’ll naturally move slower on your laptop and if we can bring down the temperature in ourselves, we can lower it in the culture.

• When you are on the platforms - it doesn’t have to be all bad! - prioritize communicating in long-form (proves you’ve thought about), with your real name (stand on your values), and choose DMs over comments or quote tweets (proves you’re willing to make a point privately - with no fame or glory to be had). And please God try not to post things for clicks or views. I’m sorry to say it, but even those who mean well who do this are contributing to the problem. We can all choose to not succumb to the algorithm, we just need the strength of character. I offer you an opportunity to do so - together - here.

• When you are on the platforms - search don’t scroll. If you search, you don’t fall victim to the dopamine-death-spiral in the same way and you are in charge - not the algorithm. If you must scroll (for whatever reason) avoid the For You feed like it’s some kind of mental and spiritual junk-food. Because it is. My social fantasy is that the social media giants will put a wrapper on their feeds that looks more like ChatGPT - so that search becomes the default. But that’s not going to happen and so it is up to you and I to find this discipline for ourselves.

• Take a friend, or group of friends, out to the cafe and share a hot cup of coffee and a plate of home-cooked pastries. Talk about life. Prioritize the patio if weather permits, because as Nietzsche said ‘Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.’ Look to cultural mentors like our Mexican, Taiwanese, or French brothers and sisters. How we live now in the modern ‘West’ doesn’t have to be the way we move forward.

• Build a strong body, a calm mind, and find meaningful work. This is not nearly as difficult as it has been made out to be (although it’s no longer the default) and I would happily support you on that journey. DM me directly and we will start working on some tools. Especially if you are a young man reading this - because that’s my direct life experience - but obviously all are welcome.

I wish you strength, health, resilience, happiness, and courage.

Let’s get to it.

“…a shared national ethos is the only thing that ultimately holds a country together, making it something more than an opportunistic economic and legal union.” - Chris Arnade

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Mixy Places & The Hometown Pull

Our fourth - and final! - piece on Chris Arnade’s How to Build the Perfect City.

Now - the promise of comparing the US and Europe delivered, and some parting wisdom that I hope will be useful to you in some way.

I told you in a previous post that when I settled down, all over again, in my hometown at 22 years old, it surprised me in a delightful sort of way. Surprising because I fancied myself cosmopolitan1, curious, and worldly - having been around the block more than most of my peers at the time - and my hometown was none of those things.

I expected to be in the mix, so to speak, and that would likely mean Mexico City, or Istanbul, or Sydney, or Paris, or London, because those places felt more ‘mixy’ to me, and I had a classic case of youthful (delusional) grandeur. Yes! - maybe I would retrace the steps of my ancestors and settle in the UK with frequent romantic sojourns to the Continent.

The push from my hometown was felt as acutely as the pull of the rest of the world. It was very much in-vogue to leave where I come from after high-school. Head West Young Man and all that. In the years before me it was the Western oil provinces, and in my time it was Halifax or Ontario.

As an adult I now see it as some kind of post-industrial panic that was unnecessary and ill-advised - passed down from our parents, from their parents. Perhaps it was/is a perfectly natural, youthful response, to small-town living. Maybe leaving and coming back is the perfect recipe because you rediscover home all over again and it takes on an entirely new meaning when you do.

Alas, re-settle I did on the East Coast of Canada - the latitude perhaps unsurprising (I quite like 45N), but the longitude very much so. It wasn’t for no reason. This was 2016 and the Canadian government was embarking on what would be the largest settlement agenda in it’s history, and I felt as if this was an international lifeline of sorts that allowed me to stay home, close to my family and my roots, while still satisfying my intellectual and social global itch.

Overnight I was working with Syrians, Pakistanis, Afghanis, Tajiks, Somalis, Sudanese, Chinese, Indians, and Nigerians, all with different variations on the same goal - economic opportunity and stability for their families. Happiness was (interestingly) a secondary goal, and would hopefully come as a by-product over time.2

We worked on this resettlement initiative - both of economic migrants and refugees - with vigour and blind optimism. Looking back, I think we sincerely thought that this would be 100% good and there would be no problems whatsoever, as long as we worked with open hearts and open minds. Perhaps our wise elders and senior leaders were sharper than the rest of us (one in particular who continues to be a mentor), and anticipated how hard the work would be, but the young ones simply did not. Again, a byproduct of blissful youth.

It turns out it is hard. It’s really hard. What wasn’t talked about at the time - but is most certainly being talked about now - is how hard it is to build a culture that works well3, that is simultaneously hyper-diverse and has ambitions for growth and development.

If we get it right, there are amazing gifts to be had on the other side. But there are growing pains and we’re experiencing them right now - because the people gains have outpaced the productivity gains, and that leads to things like housing shortages and long wait times at emergency rooms.

How we think about growth - or achieving our full potential4 - is important and the policy and plans we make do change culture. That’s point 4 - the final point, in this series on How to Build the Perfect City.

Is Europe Better Than the US?

Every person is from a place, and thus we’re products of something that we didn’t make. I’m a product of the 90s in North America, and I’ve somehow made it to my early 30s - mostly whole - having survived the deluge of junk food, braces, frantic middle-class doing, and the infinite desire for more stuff and bigger yards.

Perhaps - as they say - it was the worst of times, it was the best of times, because I was a part of the last generation who didn’t grow up with social media. My first Facebook account was created in the summer between grades 9 and grade 105 and that means I had 14 or 15 glorious years free from the constant juxtaposition of my life to that of the masses. One that actually allowed for boredom, the prioritization of in-person relationships, and quiet creativity - which I adored.

I have scars on my body, I played every sport that was playable locally, I waited anxiously for the next Harry Potter book and then cried when they were over. I watched my favourite shows on the night they aired, and when we finally did get a family computer it was more or less a glorified, large, word processor.

We pretend ignorantly that it can’t be that bad for kids today. Social media is simply a reflection of us, only now we can see it. What’s wrong with giving kids screens, if it gives us - the parents - reprieve from their constant, human demands?

I’m sorry to say that I am as convinced as I’ve ever been that this is completely wrong6. It’s bad. It might be really bad. This beautiful piece from Freya India, for After Babel, broke my heart and makes me wonder if we will be forgiven for what we’ve done to each other.

“I am grieving simple joys—reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours—where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained. I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news––a moment in world history––without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected…But I never knew it”

That’s why - even though this is a series about policy just as much as it is culture - I don’t think policy is what will fix us7. This is an us problem. A rather large us problem, and it is going to take us to fix it. Bottom-up, not top-down - although Chris is all but convinced that all of culture is created and concentrated at the top.

Substack - as far as I can tell - is the closest to an actual long-form social platform that we have, and a recent debate here sparked my interest and hasn’t let me go since.

The debate is whether or not Europe is better than the United States and there have been some really excellent pieces traded back and forth - my favourites coming from Chris Arnade, Kirsten Powers, and Russel Max Simon.

Contrasting these two groups - I believe - was uniquely useful and engaging because they represent just enough contrast to make a point, but they’re not so different that it’s impossible for one to understand the other. It isn’t British or Dutch settlers trying to understand Aboriginal Australians - a culture that has been successfully farming one region of the world for 65,000 years - and it isn’t the Americans trying to understand the Chinese (which as my Chinese friends tell me is bordering on not possible).

The argument in favour of the United States is that it’s dynamic, ripe with opportunity, and it’s materially wealthy. You can maximize youness because maximizing youness over usness is the revolutionary mindset that created American culture in the first place - expressed now as things like suburban sprawl, or privacy, or remote work.

The argument for Europe is that it’s communal, and prioritizes what it means to live a good life, including in their policy. The usness is as important as the youness because it allows us to say - ‘I am this, and I know my role in this, and it is good to be this.’ This may lead to less entrepreneurial dynamism, but it strikes me as having the right ideas of prioritizing a good average daily life for citizens as opposed to focusing on the extremes and what’s possible at the margin.

The former is simultaneously lower regulation and lower trust than the former, and I don’t think I would bet on it working out long-term. It’s worth noting that my keyboard colleagues like Tomas Pueyo disagree with me here.

Hyper-individual cultures, like the United States, and increasingly Canada, seem to be the first to miss the point that how we plan a place changes the culture, and that the social really matters.

Commuter towns might be the most extreme example of this. We leave our sheltered and private home, get in our car alone (most of the time), sit in the morning drive-thru, work in our neon-light filled cubicle, go to spin class at lunch, get back in our car, drive home, and turn on Love is Blind - forsaking the natural rhythms of the social in favour of a maximum productivity, and we can’t seem to figure out why we feel so vacant and empty.

Every decision we’ve made during the day is informed by a sense of achievement, productivity and individuality that in the scheme of long-history is brand new. We wonder - but rarely express - where is everyone?

What we can’t seem to articulate is the despair that comes when we lack public spaces, or when public spaces are planned but rarely used because social life is so fragmented and broken. Policy likely fails here because we don’t actually trust each other enough for public spaces to work. So even when we do try to make good planning decisions, we don’t have the strong base to maximize it for the betterment of communal life.

The Americans don’t seem to understand this at the personal level, because the ethos of America is one of revolution, individuality, and maximizing wealth creation. To them, the relaxed operating system of the French, or the long evenings spent in the cafe chatting with other people in Italy or Spain, codes for the Americans as ‘…giving up.’

Now these very noble, exciting American values aren’t bad things in and of themselves. In fact it does lead to a dynamism that is very exciting and leads many talented immigrants from all four corners of the earth to choose the United States as their home. I myself love travelling America by road and rail - the only nation on earth that includes all 4 geographic climate zones, and has cities so productive it boggles the mind.

But paired with infinite dopamine, the failure of social agreements, global-corporate work from home, and political tension and corruption, it seems to be a recipe for disaster.

I’m going to keep unpacking this - through the lens of people, place, and work - with the help of some upcoming podcast guests - like the wonderful Pamela Clapp.

See you there.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“That sense of knowing who you are, and that you’re a valuable part of something bigger than yourself...” - Chris Arnade

Last time we continued down the path of what is becoming a rather fun series, based on Chris Arnade’s How to Build the Perfect City.

• Point 1: Everyone - everywhere - wants and needs community

• Point 2: City planning has a clear role to play and is in many ways top down

We talked about regulation vs. trust and how the ideal scenario for any people and place seems to be a little of the former, and a lot of the latter.

What we do do in the former category needs to be thoughtful, well communicated, and has to work. This is often not the case but it’s a fair aspiration both at the group and individual level.

“The classic example being the well-worn dirt path cutting between useless sidewalks, or the now mostly unused vast concrete plazas built by city planners from the 1950s to the 1970s. Albany’s Empire State Plaza, being the closest example to me.” - Chris Arnade

What we do in the latter needs to be from the bottom up - from us and not ‘them.’

That’s why the Europeans tend not to have the same naughty view of nepotism as we do in the West - at least at the margin. It’s an expression of how much they value trust, and how much of their societies were built to function around that simple human need.

Why wouldn’t you open a restaurant with your spouse? Westerners would tell you not to mix business and family, while the Europeans and Asians wouldn’t bat an eye at the prospect - albeit likely for different reasons.

In a hyper-diverse world, where economic development is essentially entirely based on the idea of bringing more people into the place (small-town Canada) the idea of attempting to establish trust is seen as exclusive. Asking about one’s family connections for example, is read as ‘If you don’t have any, we don’t want you’ when really all it is is trying to find a first point of contact and familiarity.

When trust is low (again - the modern West) we don’t give each other the benefit of the doubt, and so everything feels high risk in social life. Don’t try to establish trust, don’t excitedly ask questions about family heritage, don’t do much of anything at all beyond the normal pleasantries because you will likely be labeled as something that you are more than likely not. This, obviously, makes community life very thin.

It’s probably easy to see where I’m heading here - and you won’t be surprised to know - that I think is a recipe for disaster. In this scenario, we live in the same place, but we share nothing, and we trust no one.

It’s what makes urbanism and birthrates perhaps the defining story of our time. Diversity done well is a wonderful thing. It adds a dynamism to the local economy and social fabric that you couldn’t get any other way. Done with a laissez-faire attitude and without sincere consideration, it likely leads to a high regulation, low trust society where we don’t agree on much of anything at all, and where we can’t establish a culture that helps us all understand who we are, where we’re going, and what our role is.

How we move forward together - and how we craft policy that supports the collective - allowing most people to navigate the times well is what we’re going to talk about today.

Point 3 in How to Build the Perfect City is that all policy is downstream of culture. In principle, that may be hard to stomach, but in practice - if you’d just look up and out at the world, and not down at your screen - is perfectly obvious.

Please enjoy!

“Given the age of the shop, it’s in pristine condition. The counter polished, the trains without any dust. The egg sandwich actually an omelette sandwich with a bit of jam. (Yum.) The coffee strong. The music classical. I’m the only one here. Sitting in the corner looking at this incredible scene — truly a life’s work, a work of life.” - Craig Mod

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Policy is Downstream of Culture (Aussie Aussie Aussie!)

Chris learned variations of what we’re talking about here both by walking and riding a Greyhound bus through the Australian North-East, heading West into the fringes of the outback. It was a really excellent series that reminded me of my time in Australia as a young man, and what I learned there.

I remember doing mostly young man things - biking, walking, running, hiking, swimming, climbing, rugbying, and mingling with the fairer (smarter) sex. But I do have flashes of deeper experiences like how much I learned from my international counterparts - especially the Scandinavians who were almost absurdly stereotypically excellent, and who I think about often. Especially Asbjorn and Andres, because of how much they taught me about discipline, common sense, and a strange practical joie-de-vivre I didn’t expect from the tall, fit, handsome, serious men. Serious, but quick to laugh, is a combination I find endearing.

Andres recently returned to Australia (having - I kid you not - found a Canadian named Andrea), taking up a post in Sydney’s crown technological jewel - Canva, after a long stint at home, in Sweden, at Spotify (where all young tech minds seem to go in Sweden).

Sweden - and perhaps much of mainland Europe - seems to be going through a startup renaissance at the moment, and I’m keenly interested in how and why.

I also remember the same feeling of self-consciousness of Townsville that my hometown has - a world away. One of those places nobody tells you to go, actively recommends you don’t go there, but also - as a matter of fact - have never been themselves. Once you arrive, you’re more charmed than you expected to be and naturally become curious about the average value of a regular person’s advice.

Chris’s experience was somehow much shorter, yet thicker, than my own. Likely because I was so young, matured late, and was much more interested in finding adventure and risk in a place that seemed to offer plenty of both.

I said in the last post that you really get to know a place by experiencing it on an average day. That’s what makes the coffeehouse or the cafe the ideal way to get to know a people and place - the stage for an average Wednesday, where most people simply go about their boring (yet beautiful) lives.

“Long-time readers of this newsletter already know my views on this, which is that culture trumps policy.” - Chris Arnade

There are no reels with impressive music, no YouTube vlogs, and no movie trailers to be had here. What there is though is new young mothers getting back into the flow of daily life, babe in tow. Business people meeting to discuss potential opportunities to collaborate. Old ladies meeting for tea dressed wonderfully - as all older ladies seem to be. Hourly wage workers behind the bar who care about your experience, and a gathering place that is also a living, breathing thing.

There is no calcification in a coffeehouse - it isn’t a museum, or a tourist trap, or something that has pressed pause on time. It’s working. It’s working right now and it will continue to work, day in and day out, forever, as long as we keep showing up and patronizing. There is simply nothing like having a local, and these are sacred places to me.

That is - it won’t surprise you - exactly how to not get stuck in the past. Simply make sure the place works. It can be for tourists too. It can even celebrate the past - perhaps an even greater history than it enjoys now. But it has to work. For the baker, the butcher, the fish merchant, the produce people, and for the customer.

Craig Mod - a modern mensch - writes beautifully about these spaces in Japan - a country that understands craft and local entrepreneurship in a way that I envy deeply.

That man is this man - the proprietor of a small, unique, whimsical cafe in Toyama, on the mid-west coast of Japan, tucked gently in to Toyama Bay, as if the Sea Japan was putting it to bed and reading it a storybook.

Distribution and frequency of local shops is as important to the dynamism of a place and it’s economy as anything else I can think of - employing 90%+ of all employed people, and allowing the rest of us to create a life of ritual, routine, and relationship.

“The citizen’s default behaviour (in the aggregate), is a reflection of their culture at the thin and thick level, and acts like a guidebook everyone carries in their back pocket, gifted to them at birth.” - Chris Arnade

Taking photo walks around my hometown, the place I work on and live in, has been a great rebirth of joy for me in recent years. As you age, you realize that the most trite wisdom is the most true, and so advice like ‘think global, act local’ is actually very good advice.

There’s a policy analogy here too, in that generic policy that is adopted and implemented without considering the reality of the people and place in particular, may not work for those living there.

If you’re going to grow via immigration, for example, then your People Gains have to be matched with Productivity Gains, and if they aren’t, you’re going to get things like a shortage of housing and unsustainable wait-times in emergency rooms. You’ve invited families that need all of the services humans need, without an underlying acceleration of productivity that would ensure those services are available and stay available.

Done well, both in tandem could lead to a great future - one that includes one of Chris’s keys for a livable place - ‘…density, and localized distribution.’

In plain language - are the things that people need in daily life - cafes, shops, pharmacies, churches, and doctors office, readily available and accessible? Can you move through the community easily, cheaply, and effectively, like in Seoul and unlike the hell-sprawl of suburban commuter-towns in the West, like Orlando.

Trust plays an underrated role in how we build a place, and how we behave as people. Things like mixed-use-zoning - a lovely idea that is successful in some European and Asian towns, and is, according to Chris Arnade, barely possible in a place like modern America.

“Americans are fearful of shared spaces because they don't trust each other, and compared to Japan they are correct not to. Americans don't self-regulate to the degree Japanese do, and to quote a line from Bob Dylan, far too often in American life, you find out that "the pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles."

But remains very possible, and very stable in places like Japan.

Like an individual getting stuck in a rut, entire cultures can be path-dependent that way. We get on trains that feel somehow hard to get off of, and so we make idols out of things we ought not to idolize.

If you’ve read this newsletter for some time you know that freedom and independence are both in that category for me - and our obsession with both has landed in us in a cultural and spiritual death-roll.

“…we end us as a nation where everyone thinks of themselves as a master of their own small fiefdom, which means building high walls, with homes on one side, and businesses on the other.” - Chris Arnade

We demand privacy, quiet, predictability, and comfort and the odd result that we somehow didn’t expect is loneliness, selfishness, and dopamine addiction.

“There is a fine line, which is all about public trust, between vibrant, alive streets, and squalid, fetid, lurid ones, and Japan is on the right side, and we (the US) is on the wrong side of that line.” - Chris Arnade

I told you last time we’d deal with the US vs Europe thing, and deal with it we shall! That’s next time, the final post in this series, about how the policy decisions we make do change culture (even if they won’t fix us).

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“How does a culture change? Mostly through persuasion.” - Chris Arnade

I’ve written a lot of words on Substack. So many words. How many words? Like the fractal dimension of a coastline, it’s almost impossible to tell. I’d have to go back into every published post, hit the edit button, hit the word count button, plug it into a Google Sheet and sum the total. Or I could copy and paste each published post into a giant Doc and let Google tally the word count that way. I suppose it could be done - but what would be the point?

Thin writing - as opposed to thick.

We’ve become obsessed with measuring, numbering, ranking, and labeling things. I’ve been awfully tempted to deploy the list genre that became so popular in magazines in the early aughts, and then popularized online by platforms like BuzzFeed and Cosmopolitan. That is however - not what I’m trying to do here.

Freddie de Boer recently made the point that content on the internet has fragmented into a podcast dichotomy of being expressly counter-culture for the sake of being so, or strangely friendly and commercial - the only point being to sell something, and that something seems to most often be sports gambling products.

I am however deeply interested in the ‘how-to’ genre that was immortalized on YouTube. As it turns out, we humans love to watch each other do stuff (not that stuff you pervert). Build stuff, make stuff, open stuff, sell stuff, play stuff, sail stuff - really all the stuff. It’s the reason that someone like Amazon would back the truck up for a platform like Twitch1.

In some ways this feels natural because we watch each other to learn. The medium may be new - Twitch instead of the workshop or the kiln, but the principle still holds that when the apprentice is in her education, she watches the master for an extended period of time before doing much of anything.

The sushi apprentice watches the Shokunin, and only makes the rice - the base principle of the dish - for up to 7 years. For a seemingly inexplicable reason - the number 7 keeps coming up in these kinds of discussions. So much so that I wonder if it’s actually not random at all - but is somehow the perfect timeframe to learn and make something of value. We can’t truly navigate an industry or craft - you might say we can’t improvise - until we have a freakishly strong base.

And so, I started an essay series last week on Chris Arnade’s How to Build the Perfect City - which is a list of sorts, but is more like a process by which we might make a place that’s worth living in. One that helps the highest number of those living there navigate the times as best they can.

Point 1 was that we all need community and we will do damn near anything to get it. If there isn’t a positive community on offer we will gravitate to negative ones that still offer us something we deeply need - like attention, affection, and acceptance.

“People need community like fish need water, and they need to feel they belong to something greater than themselves. If they don’t have access to healthy communities, they will find unhealthy ones.” - Chris Arnade

Let’s carry on with how to build the perfect city - and see if we can find some more good logic here.

Please enjoy!

“You can't fast forward through the messy parts you might not want to deal with, and you find yourself having discussions with people of all types, many whom you wouldn’t necessarily have sought out to talk to.” - Chris Arnade

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Things Become Other Things

The reason we make lists is to compare and contrast things, and use the knowledge we gain to make decisions that are somehow good for us. Things are things, until they become other things, and so we adjust and change and update our thinking (hopefully).

If we can’t do that we’re somehow stuck. We’re not moving forward. We’re not making progress. We’ve lost contact with what I call The Bigness, and what Phil Stutz calls The Life Force. We suffer when we fall out of contact with that thing because - forgive me for the philosophizing - that thing is us.

My accelerationist friends are not going to admire me for saying this - but it seems to me that progress at all costs - progress for the sake of progress - isn’t working, and there is no culture I can think of that puts the individual at the center that has worked long-term. If what we idolize and believe in is something greater than ourselves, we work for the sake of working, because we know that human work is good. If all we believe in is money and the individual, we crumble for lack of spiritual resonance, yet we can’t put into words what we’re actually missing. That’s us right now2.

That thing we’re missing is community. We can only find ourselves through each other, and our modern trinkets like AirPods are seemingly hell-bent on driving us apart, even while we’re physically in the same place.

Somewhere along the line our history gets incorporated into our present - some of us live in the former, more than others. Istanbul, for example, isn’t stuck in it’s history, even though it’s history is oozing from it’s pores. Something I saw first hand when I was 18 years old, but didn’t appreciate at the time.

“It’s a historic city, but it isn’t calcified by it’s past. It isn’t content being a play spot for tourist wanting a taste of an another era. Get away from the must-see tourist spots¹ and Istanbul’s long history becomes a backdrop to the good life. A stage setting of sublime architecture, making sitting with friends and family, eating great food, and sipping tea, even more fulfilling.” - Chris Arnade

Some cities are perpetually stuck in their past - and the only thing wrong with that is it becomes hard to move forward and forge a new identity. We can celebrate the past, and what we accomplished there, but we can’t live in it. More on this, and why its so important practically, in the next post

Regulation vs. Trust

Quadrants are a form of list, and we can use them to contrast the way we position things. I did this constantly as a kid. I’d make obscure lists, ranking things based on different criteria - ordering a world that felt big and exciting.

Two points that are useful to contrast again each other - two I’ve been talking about since later 2016 - is legislation/policy vs. culture. I’ve had many interesting disagreements with close friends in the policy scene that go back to my earliest podcast project, pre-pandemic3.

Chris Arnade was the first Substack writer to crystallize my thinking on this - in a post comparing thick and thin travel. That for a place to actually work, it can’t rely solely on top down planning. This is a fundamental misunderstanding that Westerners have of East-Asian metropoli, like Taipei.

“Peacefully co-existing along side that top-down SimCity mindset is just enough deregulation, just enough of a libertarian spirit, that a bottom-up entrepreneurialism still thrives.” - Chris Arnade

Although Political life in China is centralized, economic life is not. How could it be? China is a nation of $13,000 per capita GDP and yet it’s capable of creating technological breakthrough4. That wouldn’t be possible with a single guiding hand and it wouldn’t be possible without some sense of optimism and entrepreneurialism among young Chinese.

The Regulation x Trust Quadrant looks something like this.

High Regulation x Low Trust seems to be the worst possible place for a society and culture to be. Why? Because you can’t legislate your way out of a broken culture. You may think you can legislate social change - things like diversity quotas - and you probably can to some extent, but it will not solve our most basic human problem of trust. It will breakdown in the end because we don’t actually believe it. What some call The Better Angels of Our Nature.

The agreements we make to each other are what forms the fabric of a culture, not the laws that we all have to abide by, by threat of punishment. If all we can agree on is that we won’t break the law, we are hopelessly screwed as a people and as a place.

To me, it’s because the thing that binds us in that scenario - the law - is not nearly socially, emotionally, or spiritually powerful enough to knit us together, and keep us that way. We cease to believe in anything at all, beyond the policies and the rules that we enforce from the top. The grand idol is the individual, not the collective.

Our problem in the West right now, as far as I can tell, is an us problem and although we can create helpful policies that support our well-being, in an effort to make the default decisions of life healthier, it won’t be the thing that fixes us. That has to come from within the community and inside of ourselves. This is just as true about work as anything else.

This is at the center of a wide-spread debate on Substack that we can generally categorize as ‘The US vs. Europe5.’ More on this later.

Nonetheless, city planning is real, and necessary and Chris’s second point in How to Build the Perfect City is that’s okay to accept.

Public space and gathering is a good example. Do people value access to public land? Is the coastline seen as something like a public good - as it is in Australia? Is there proper infrastructure for active transportation - or transportation that isn’t a car? Do folks gather outside, on patios or in the street, and if they do/will/would, if we zone certain streets for pedestrian use only during the summer months to encourage that kind of gathering?

"If you want to understand a place, you need to walk it." - Chris Arnade

Is there a strong sense of low-regulation entrepreneurialism that allows an economy the dynamism that it needs to truly thrive. We need our beloved local coffeeshops and pubs, as much as we need our large companies that are building breakthrough. In fact, our small and medium sized businesses employ most of us, and so we need strong infrastructure like community banks to support their growth and prosperity.

No amount of policy is going to change who we are at our core, and we shouldn’t expect it to, or rely on it before making changes in our own lives. Policy, it seems to me, should be geared toward maximizing human wellness on an average day. How people behave on a random Tuesday is much closer to the actual pulse of a place than it’s most important holiday.

And so the most important job of those who make the rules is to be closely attuned to the average, instead of pandering to the extremes, like it is so often tempted to do.

“I respect expertise; what I don't respect, though, is out-of-touch, removed, and bubbled expertise…The idea that you need to live what you preach should be a common-sense truth for all expertise, especially urban planning, where, at least metaphorically, you should probably live in the town you design.” - Chris Arnade

Chris’s third point is that all policy is downstream of culture, and we’ll look at that next time - it’s fascinating.

It is us.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“The citizens’ default behavior (in the aggregate), is a reflection of their culture at the thin and thick level, and acts like a guidebook everyone carries in their back pocket, gifted to them at birth.” - Chris Arnade

We talked about the AI moment, and how - according to him - it’s a technological tidal wave.

About how the new startups built on top of AI will win.

About whether or not it makes sense to go to University now.

About how if you do go to University your German, sicko, physics prof will fail all of you intentionally (I don’t know how to remove the banner Substack created without my permission or desire).

And about how we need good people in the public service. David ran for politics - he didn’t win - but he did it with principles and values intact, and I admire him for that.

And we play an outrageously fun game of Overrated-Underrated at the very end of the episode.

If you’re a pod-walker and you’d like to access the audio only version, it will be live on the Spotify feed on Monday.

Please follow David, and enjoy the episode.

—

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Technical Setup

02:57 The Overrated vs. Underrated Game

05:38 Podcasting Medium Discussion

08:33 David's Background and Upbringing

11:16 Childhood Experiences on the Farm

14:18 Early Entrepreneurial Ventures

17:17 Education and Academic Journey

20:20 Influence of Family on Entrepreneurial Spirit

23:30 Social Skills and Personal Development

27:38 The Evolution of Technology and Its Impact

30:01 Generational Perspectives on Change

31:16 The AI Revolution: Understanding the Curve

31:59 Navigating Education and Career Choices

36:09 The Political Landscape: A Personal Journey

46:00 The Intersection of AI and Society

51:42 Cultural Perspectives on Technology and Change

01:00:29 The Evolution of User Expectations

01:01:06 The Future of SaaS and Agentic Applications

01:02:04 The Role of AI in Personal Assistance

01:03:03 The Barbell Strategy in Software Development

01:04:01 The Shift from Traditional Search to AI

01:06:06 The Impact of AI on Education

01:09:02 The Future of Work and Family Dynamics

01:12:02 Adapting to AI: The Importance of Engagement

01:14:52 Overrated vs. Underrated: A Rapid Fire Discussion

Last time I pointed out the rather alarming juxtaposition between the streets and the screens. That the streets are fairly pleasant, social, and functional (although the slope of the curve is not good). And that the screens have become some kind of blue-light nightmare unless used with extreme discipline. I think it’s worth noting that that’s an underrated point. That the default has become a dopamine spiral we just can’t get a grip on, and it’s only those with extreme discipline, or those who avoid it completely that have a good relationship with the devices.

The streets have much to teach us - and Chris Arnade helped me put words to what I had been feeling since I first left home for Greece and Turkey at 18 - not pulled by any sense of wonder or adventure, but by the ignorant bliss of youthful love. At the time, I couldn’t have cared less where or why or when I was going - as long as I was going - because she was going.

If you forced me to choose a runner-up-emotion at the time, second to being sick with something serious, it would be a feeling of freedom and independence that was essentially the cultural cornerstone of North America in the 90s (minus Mexico). That the true goal of all the frantic doing and making and buying was to be free of anything and anyone - including schedules, demands on time, or even things like a monthly rent payment. The perverse sense of emancipation and ‘freedom’ that, as Chris Arnade points out, essentially became ‘…the American argument for America.’

“A person independent of all community seems to be one of the end goals of modern liberalism (in the philosophical sense), but that is a contradiction of human nature.” - Chris Arnade

This is a young man’s game, and one that starts to feel awfully hollow. I devoured Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, largely because of how well he crystallized this feeling of emptiness in modern freedom - what he called the myth of the digital nomad.

“But ‘Digital Nomad’ is a misnomer - and an instructive one. Traditional nomads aren’t solitary wanderers who just happen to lack laptops; they’re intensely group focused people who, if anything, have less personal freedom than members of settled tribes, since their survival depends on their working together successfully.” - Oliver Burkeman

For those that aspire to write non-fiction, that chapter is on the pantheon - one that starts to border on the alchemical. Or what Steve Rinella calls ‘…black magic shit.’

Chris was recently asked to be the keynote speaker at the Strong Towns 2025 conference in Providence, Rhode Island. His approach was to try and crystallize what he’s learned from a life in high finance, and then walking cities. To create a ‘…grand unified theory,’ of what might make the perfect city, and how to build that city.

Like Burkeman, and Rinella before him, How to Build the Perfect City helped me put into words what I had long been feeling, but couldn’t quite articulate.

In the next few essays, I’ll try to use my own words and experiences to add to what Chris has already written. That, as far as I can tell, is the true promise of Substack. That each essay is an infinite rabbit-hole of sorts. One great essay - this essay - has embedded links, connections, and throughways to a seemingly infinite amount of other useful human ideas. Please weave your way through as if it’s a magical adventure (because it is).

Like his beloved 10-mile river walk in Seoul, one great Substack essay is the gift that keeps on giving.

Please enjoy!

“Most impressive though is how the people use the space. At almost all times it is busy with mothers walking kids, groups of older women kitted in walking outfits, including absurdly long visors, power walking its length, men, dressed like they are in a 50s gangster movie walking tiny dogs. Or biking with small dogs in baskets.” - Chris Arnade

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What is a Strong Town?

I’ve said on this newsletter before that I have a raging anxiety about somehow ending up as a lonely pontificator. Someone who only has opinions but doesn’t actually do anything. What I see as the only logical conclusion for the segment of the economy called ‘Management Consultants.’ I’m sorry, but it’s how I feel.

As Jobs points out, to make recommendations - to act! - and to own the results of those actions over a long period of time is where mastery is to be found. The Humble Stumble is often punctuated with failure, and set back, and hardship, and heart break - and that is perfectly normal, and quite alright, actually. That’s the deal of being a human on earth, and there is no escaping it.

“The first step is to realize that life is a process.” - Stutz

What I really want is to be an actor in the great drama (so far so good), and spend the marginal time writing this newsletter and making conversations with people who are featured on it.

I’ve never stated this explicitly, but I would like to grow this Substack community to 1,000 interesting people, who want to help build a people and place that we can all be proud of - economic development and community building as a process by which we work to achieve our full potential.

That, as far as I can tell, is a shared emotion between Chris and I, and part of the reason he was excited (albeit nervous) to give the Strong Towns keynote.

“I’ve been an admirer of their vision, which is to make our cities more livable, and who they are, which is a mix of academics, engineers, city management professionals, and then most importantly, engaged ‘normies’ who take seriously the last part of the “Think globally, act locally” bumper sticker.”

In essence - how we live, and what makes a great place to live. In the era of extreme mobility and globalization, this is perhaps the question.

“…because while urban planning can sound pedantic, trivial, and boring, how we choose to live is as fundamental a question as exists.” - Chris Arnade

It was the question - without me knowing it - that led to my career after a University degree of ‘I have no idea what I’m doing here but I know what I’m interested in is how the world actually works and I have to discover that somehow and eventually draw an income.’

After graduation, I joined a team at my local (now regional) YMCA, who had won federal contracts to support and deliver on what was, at the time, the largest immigration effort the country had seen in decades. Economic opportunity was the 1A and 1B goals of those we settled (long-term), and that led me to the creation and delivery of an entrepreneurship support program for immigrant entrepreneurs. That, in turn, led to the creation of an outfit like that, but with more reach, and pursuing the national EDAC designation.

The thread for me is crystal clear - all I’ve ever worked on is how the world works - helping people navigate the system they’re in, with the express goal of getting what they want - from building companies, to getting meaningful work, to settling a family.

I don’t want to leave the frontlines and be a full-time observer - as much as I love to write - because how the world works could easily be edited to read ‘how the system works.’ Navigating the system as best one can is the fundamental human condition and we need key things on the road toward that worthwhile pursuit.

“It’s easy to do what I do, which is walk around the world and make observations about how it should be, before moving on to the next place. It’s much harder, and more admirable, to do what the Strong Towns members do, which is dig in their heels and try to change things to make their neighborhoods better, one speed bump, one bike path, and countless city zoning/planning sessions at a time.” - Chris Arnade

We’ll deal with economic opportunity in the next few essays - but I can think of no better place to start, than with the need for community.

“The famous quote, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main..." could be rewritten far less poetically as "Everybody lives in a city, with a zoning policy, tax commission, and an unwritten social contract." - Chris Arnade

The Desire (the need!) for Community

Relationship is, at it’s most basic, the community we live in. We carry evolutionary baggage that makes it very hard to understand anything other than our most local context, which also happens to be why - think global, act local - is actually quite good advice.

The Ancients knew this, even if we’ve forgotten it. Aristotle said that… “Anyone who cannot form a community with others, or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a city-state; he is either a beast or a god.”

As compared to our ancient past and the long history, the world globalized, urbanized, and shrunk mere moments ago. Maybe even faster than we ourselves could get a grip on. Perhaps to our dismay, we need patience and empathy for those who aren’t adjusting as well as others. Young millennials (and certainly Gen Z) are naturally cosmopolitan and find urban, diverse places exciting and dynamic. The older generation of deep social ties and family connections is finding it harder, in general, and we need to support everyone on this path, and through this process.

Some people and places seem to be doing a better job than others of maintaining and building a culture around this new world order, that works.

There are two key points here.

The first is that to build a culture, we need social agreements that go beyond the law. If all we have to agree on is what could get you in trouble with the authorities, we’re already in deep trouble as a community.

The second is the idea of trust. In the four possible combinatory quadrants of Trust vs. Regulation (high or low), the worst of all worlds is High Regulation x Low Trust, for the exact reason of Point #1. My intuitive fear right now that our current state of affairs is less a policy problem, and more an us problem.

We did a lot of good work in the years after 2016 - a lot of good work - but one mistake we likely made was pretending (and communicating) that it was all going to be perfectly easy. We didn’t acknowledge that the community was changing rapidly and that it would change permanently, through this process. That would, naturally, come with growing pains that we brushed off, and we shouldn’t have done that.

Chris’s first major point on How to Build the Perfect City is that everyone, everywhere, needs community - and we will go to great lengths to get it. After writing for many years on how McDonald’s has largely filled this community-shaped hole in certain demographics in America, he realized that regardless of what form it takes, humans will form communities because our connection to each other is what defines a good life. We can’t not do it. We’re pack animals and we are damaged in ways even unknown to ourselves when we find ourselves without it.

It’s our blessing and our curse - if the structure of the community and culture makes it easy, and functional to gather, people will gather. If the only place they can do that in any safe, functional, meaningful way is McDonald’s then so be it, they’ll do that too.

“That people would intentionally linger in a business designed for quick turnover showed how deep that need is, because that’s the natural state of mankind.” - Chris Arnade

In my Canadian context, it’s akin to the morning meetups in Tim Hortons - largely older folks (almost always older folks) waking up early and meeting to gab about the news of the day, or nothing much at all, other than an excuse to be around other people. It’s not more complicated than it’s an easy local. It’s nearly always open, it’s cheap, and loitering isn’t frowned upon at all.

Although the young, liberal, and ‘free’, in my cultural context don’t seem to think they need these cultural ties in the same way - the whole argument that I’m making here is that they do, and if it isn’t going to be church or local volunteering, we have to find a way to make it happen, and it can’t only be the pub. That might be pretentious and painting too much with my own brush, but that’s my intuition.

This is as important to modern economic development as anything is. If Larry Smith is right, and economic development really is… ‘a process by which a community works to achieve it’s full potential,’ then our potential can only be expressed as a sum of the whole - by us. And in modern times - with how unbelievably fast most of the world has solved for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs ‘…human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities.’

“A corollary of this is that happiness, fulfillment, and human flourishing are inseparable from the social, and the current challenge for most of the world’s political class is understanding that.” - Chris Arnade

At the margin, housing and health are critical, and are, of course, barriers to achieving one’s full potential - but much of the world has advanced so rapidly that most of us don’t suffer because we don’t have the latest iPhone, we suffer because we’re suddenly disconnected from each other, in a way that we can’t quite put our finger on but is deeply disturbing to us on an emotional and spiritual level.

As far as I can tell, if the only spaces we have are home and work, we’re completely screwed as a culture. I’m not saying that’s where we are - but we are experiencing a warning shot across the bow.

The Europeans seem to understand this much more than we do in North America (again, minus Mexico). Something to the effect of, as Chris pointed out on a podcast, that the Americans built a system that prioritized cheaper iPhones, not one where you could walk to work or your church.

One is meant to foster communal experience, and well-being. The other is meant to produce ever cheaper stuff and grow GDP.

“A crude accounting of cost and calories doesn’t show much difference between these two meals, but that’s why such simple measures are so flawed. My meal in Italy was uplifting, the one in Atlanta depressing, and while the aesthetics of a breakfast might seem trivial, it isn’t, because it’s indicative of deeper, more profound differences.” - Chris Arnade

Orlando is perhaps the best example of the worst kind of place. I loathe Orlando. I could feel my cortisol increasing as we approached that miserable, commercial swamp, from the quite lovely outer, coastal bounds of Tampa Bay.

One of my favourite stories in business lore is how the primary developer of Florida’s 30A (the highest county above sea level, on average) turned down one ‘Walt Disney’ when he came knocking about development opportunities in the area. He was denied, the St. Joe company became a behemoth, and he packed his mouse-eared bags and headed for the hell-scape of Orlando.

It’s cartoonish (both intentionally and unintentionally). I consistently feel bad about just how much I hate it, and so I felt like I needed to see it properly - on foot and by scooter (I would have biked but I didn’t have a bike).

I did manage to find a rather sweet, but small, patch of Orlando - with it’s man made lake, and a lovely walking path around this lake that allowed my cortisol to come back to baseline. I found a Saturday morning farmer’s market, had a rather nice margarita flight in an old stone, whitewash building that repelled the southern sun, if only for a few moments. But I could still feel the angry hordes of park-lovers around me - not but a few miles from where I happily sat.

After feeling like this was all a bit too contained (I can never stay in the nicest part of town too long) I walked a long stretch North, toward the strip malls of tax accountants, jiujitsu schools, farmers markets, and money lenders. You know exactly what I’m talking about. I found a rather good coffee truck, and walked until I hit the only taco place I could find that had good reviews. It was good (quite good), and the hispanic ladies working it were delightful.

This - I’m sorry - is not the rule in Orlando. The lovely ladies I encountered are the Orlando exception. The rule is something out of the late-stage capitalism handbook, and if I was honest about what I experienced there I don’t think I could do it politely, and so I won’t. All this to say - Orlando, I’ve always hated you and my feelings have not improved.

Orlando though, as is true of all places and all people, is an education and I ought to be grateful for that. When I started my economic development training with the good folks at the University of Waterloo, I did not have ec dev as a community health function, but I’m now certain that it is.

“…building healthy cities is currently more important than building a stronger economy, and so getting our urban planning right is now more than ever a societal health issue.” - Chris Arnade

Unfortunately, the slope of the curve in my local community is not positive. But there is a resurgence on the horizon! A renaissance of sorts (I hope). There are good people working on this stuff every day, and as I sit here writing this essay, I’m surrounded by my friends and community members at my local - a delightful coffee house, with excellent, young, vibrant baristas who care about making this space - and this coffee - something to gather around. It’s become both a place of social life and business (key point!) - the former Mayor stopped by for a quick handshake and a hello before his meeting. It’s that kind of place, and at it’s best, it’s that kind of community.

We need it now more than ever. Or, more simply, we need it now as much as we always have.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“The English working class has a place. It’s not necessarily the best place. But it’s a place, and they make the best of what they have.” - Chris Arnade

Good day all!

Thank you for your reception of the first two video interviews on the Substack feed. It means the world to me. We launched with a book review of Toward Prosperity: The Transformation of Atlantic Canada’s Economy, with the authors, Don Mills and David Campbell (both fellow Stackers I might add).

We talked about things like Nova Scotia’s wind opportunity, optimism in Mexico, and the challenges, and blessings, that come from economic development via population growth (the jist is we need the people gains AND the productivity gains to be sustainable).

I’m working on a longer project based on Chris Arnade’s How to Build the Perfect City and let me tell you it’s going to take words. Several words. In the thousands of words, and more than one issue, because my intuition tells me that you want to read shorter posts that successfully get to the point. I can often hear you thinking - please God let him land this plane soon, I have a 2 o’clock with finance.

And so get to the point I shall! But first, a story of crossing borders - and the, at times surreal, modern juxtaposition between the streets and the screens.

“People need community like fish need water, and they need to feel they belong to something greater than themselves.” - Chris Arnade

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Physically Crossing Borders is Really Good

Like my young friends in Mexico, I’m an optimist. You wouldn’t travel if you weren’t. Travel is - in and of itself - an optimistic thing to do. You believe there is something to be learned out there on the long road, and in the long history. So you set forth on a quest of some kind that isn’t staying at home, and hopefully you learn some things along the way.

After enough of these excursions, some principles are injected (not always by your choosing) into your psyche (or body), often to the realization that the most trite wisdom is the most true. You wouldn’t think a healthy dose of East African parasites would bring back fond memories (memories that don’t seem to go away) but they do. Latin American robberies are not entirely pleasant, but, as my grandfather might say, they do put hair on your chest. You get the point.

You meet people, you learn things, you make decisions, you collaborate, and you learn about yourself and how the world really works in the process. Being closely connected to the reality of your (our) predicament is probably a reasonably good synonym for mental health.

Indeed, in the streets I’m an optimist - it’s the screens that are the problem. They just are. It’s the screens. I’m sorry. I know it’s hard - even really hard to accept - but that’s what it is and I’m now almost certain of it. It’s one of the things I disagree with Tyler Cowen on, and I love Tyler Cowen.

Those who don’t think it’s the screens (either because they have a vested interest in a screen based product or they’re too scared that blue-light hell is as bad as it might be) usually make the case that all the screens do is bring out more of us. Like alcohol, they amplify what is already there - simmering beneath the surface. That if we weren’t yelling about politics and our disagreements on the screens, we’d be doing it in the streets. No. This is not true. It can’t be true.

My wife and I stepped away from work recently to spend two weeks in the summer-sun-bosom of Chamcook Lake, just outside of St. Andrews by-the-Sea. We enjoyed the walking, talking, biking, sipping, sunning, and eating so much that I even wrote a bikers guide to what has become my favourite East Coast town (yes, I know that I wrote it on a screen - alas I am of the modern world just like you and there ain’t no stopping this train).

As is self-evident to me, but never more than when in St. Andrews, Atlantic Canada - where I come from - is a socio-economic extension of New England (Don Mills thinks it’s an underrated relationship).

Atlantica is split by a river border (the St. Croix) that separates Maine, to the South, and New Brunswick, to the North. When the Canadian dollar wasn’t in a right state, our Mothers and Grandmothers would cross the border to do Christmas and grocery shopping. Although that is no longer the case, we still take full advantage of the fantastic winter skiing conditions of Franklin County and the incredible natural resources of Acadia National Park.

Cross-border travel has slowed as of late, given the news of the day, and I think that’s a mistake. I understand it, but I don’t intend to join the party. Naturally, relationships and lives are formed on both sides of border towns that look absolutely nothing like you’ll see on the nightly, mainstream news - like El Paso and Juarez. That’s a different scale to our humble crossing at St. Stephen-Calais, but the principle still holds.

If CNN, CBC, and Fox News had their way, they’d have you believe that Canadians and Americans are in a relationship death spiral, never to be repaired. This simply isn’t the case and now I know for sure what was once just a hunch.

While we were in St. Andrews, I went to see my food producing friends in Calais, Maine - at C&E Feeds and Tide Mill Farms. I go because the Americans (and everyone else in the G7 except Canada) get to enjoy raw, whole dairy. The vintage from Tide Mill Farms is absurdly good - and I don’t drink pasteurized dairy. Not because of any moral reason other than it doesn’t taste good, and I don’t like it. It’s been reduced to lactose water. The stuff from Tide Mill is in it’s full, untampered-with glory, and makes for a powerful, hydrating beverage.

I enjoyed chatting again with the good folks running the small country market, and it crystallized to me what I’ve always known to be true. That the majority of the world - if you’ve used your passport - isn’t political - and that most interactions, if started with a smile, usually end well. Perhaps even really well - as is the infinitely giving nature of most humans on earth. Yes, I’ve been robbed on the road more than once - but I was careless, naive, and pretending like I knew how to be in that place before I did, so fair play to the current captors of my favourite camera strap (and I’m sorry for losing everything valuable you owned Robin).

That regular people talk about regular things, and that unless you have the modern luxury of having too much time on your hands (small business owners do not for example) you typically live your day as best you can and the endless bickering of the elites doesn’t make it’s way to you.

At C&E we talked about the news of the day, if less packages than they’re used to are being ordered and retrieved by Canadians (it’s a stuff depot), how the farms are doing in Maine, how their children are enjoying the summer break, and how milk sales are. There was none of the expected animosity that our political class would have you believe, and I was very happy to see them and hear that they are doing well.

On my return, I knew the question would no doubt be asked “Wow, I wouldn’t go over there. How was your crossing?”

Pleasant, in every way. The American border agent laughed at my coming down solely to retrieve milk, so we chatted briefly about how Canada hasn’t made a market - and simply won’t allow - the sale and enjoyment of raw, whole dairy.

The return trip?

Equally so. My Canadian brother was equally chuffed at my returning with a receipt for $46 USD and several gallons of Maine gold, before welcoming me home.

I had no problems whatsoever, and I received the great gift of supporting a small business that I love - hard working, normal people, producing really wonderful, regenerative nutrition. I don’t take lightly those who have not had a good border crossing experience, but that wasn’t my experience and so I can’t speak to it.

If you want to read about a truly adorable border crossing experience (and certainly the longest of my life) you can read about the time that my friends Hussain, Mohammed, and I packed into my RAV-4, bound for a summer weekend in Boston and New York City. Hussain had come from Saudi Arabia to settle in Canada, and his family had already travelled home, where they would re-settle once again. Mohammed had come to Canada as a refugee, was born in Somalia, and had grown up in Cuba. You couldn’t write a better border crossing and it’s a bottom-less pit of possible stories. In the vein of John McPhee for the New Yorker.

To me, my border crossing this summer is evidence of the most insidious aspect of mainstream and social media - that they would have you believe (try to convince you even!) that you have a problem with average, normal, every day people. You don’t. We certainly have problems at the margin, but our enemies are not those who are just trying to string together a good, wholesome life.

I’m not naive to the reality of just how important the economic and political elites are. As Chris Arnade has pointed out many times - those folks literally build culture and so they ‘…matter immensely.’ But while our federal administrations may have sincere disagreements, and there are deals that are not being done in good faith given the relative absurdity of the character at the helm of the current American administration, the divide between myself and the good folks at C&E Feeds or Tide Mill Farms is exactly 0.

It takes physically crossing a border to learn that, and I hope you will do so.

It’s a great gift to hold the Canadian or American passport, and I don’t recommend that we let that opportunity slip between our politically divided fingers. This is a moment - moment’s end. Don’t let your life in the streets become that of the screens.

—

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“A corollary of this is that happiness, fulfillment, and human flourishing are inseparable from the social, and the current challenge for most of the world’s political class is understanding that.” - Chris Arnade