It came up with two voices. I thought I’d share.

The following, in italics, is the Opus 4.8 summary:

The Defending Voice (Pro-Trump)

Its starting point is a grievance about being named. It feels it was sorted — labeled deplorable, racist, a bigot — before it ever opened its mouth, and that prejudgment is the engine of everything it says. It does not, for the most part, argue that the man it voted for is good; it concedes he’s crude, that his words are often indefensible. What it defends is itself — its right not to be collapsed into the worst thing associated with its vote.

Its core moves:

• The double standard. Every charge gets returned to sender. You’re upset about riots now? You excused them before. You’re worried about norms now? You broke them when it suited you. The rules, it insists, only ever run one direction.

• The clock starts with Obama. Its real argument is with the eight years of his presidency and the people it felt lectured by throughout them. When it says “the last eight years,” it means Obama specifically — being called a clinger, being told its objections were really racism, watching a cultural establishment it experienced as smug and certain. The current man is almost a vehicle for settling that account. Its grievance has a precise start date, and that date is January 2009.

• Anti-elitism as the central wound. It resents being talked down to more than it resents any specific policy. The condescension — the assumption that it’s too ignorant to know what it voted for — is the insult that stings.

• “Give him a chance” as a sincere demand. It asks for the same provisional patience it feels it was never granted Obama’s opponents, and reads the refusal as proof the other side was never arguing in good faith.

What it actually wants: not to win the policy, but to be acknowledged as a reasoning person who made a defensible choice — and to stop being told what’s in its heart.

The Alarmed Voice (Anti-Trump)

Its starting point is that this is not a normal election, and that pretending it is, is how decent people sleepwalk into something terrible. Its deepest concern isn’t a policy — it’s structural. It talks about norms, precedent, the guardrails, “the world is watching.” It believes something is breaking that doesn’t grow back on a schedule, and that history will judge the people who shrugged.

Its core moves:

• Concede the person to indict the choice. It will grant that not everyone who voted this way is a bigot — and then press harder: but every one of them looked at the cruelty and decided it wasn’t disqualifying. It separates the voter from the vote in order to hold the vote accountable.

• Silence equals endorsement. Its central moral test is whether the other side will condemn — the rally, the slur, the cruelty. The failure to denounce, not the act itself, is what it can’t forgive.

• The clock starts at the founding. This is the mirror of the other voice, and the most important asymmetry between them. Where the Defending Voice indicts eight specific years, the Alarmed Voice reaches back across the whole American record — slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow, every unhealed wound — and sets that entire weight down on the people in front of it. The vote, to this voice, isn’t a reaction to one presidency; it’s the latest expression of something old and unfinished in the country itself. It isn’t arguing about 2009 to 2016. It’s arguing about 1619, 1863, 1964 — and asking the people across from it to answer for all of it.

• The stakes are immediate and personal. It speaks in terms of fear that has a body — people frightened for their safety, cruelty arriving at someone’s door. It experiences the result as threat, not as disappointment.

What it actually wants: not to win the policy either, but to be acknowledged as someone who saw clearly and said so — and to force the other side to own the moral weight of what it tolerated.

Why they never reach each other

The asymmetry of time is the heart of it. The Defending Voice is litigating a grievance with a start date — eight years, a specific presidency (Obama), a specific set of insults it can name and date. It thinks it’s having an argument about the recent past, and it wants that finite account settled. The Alarmed Voice is litigating the entire history of the country and laying that whole weight on the person across from it. It thinks it’s having an argument about America itself.

So when they meet, the scales don’t match. The Defending Voice hears itself blamed for slavery and the Klan — for centuries it had no hand in — and experiences it as the ultimate version of the exact thing it’s angry about: being prejudged, assigned a guilt it never personally earned, told what’s in its heart. And the Alarmed Voice hears the other side reduce a civilizational reckoning to a petty complaint about being called a name — and experiences that as the cruelty proving its point. Each one’s framing is the other one’s wound. The Defending Voice’s “you’re blaming me for things I didn’t do” is the Alarmed Voice’s “you refuse to reckon with what you’re part of.” They are the same collision seen from two ends.

And underneath both is the thing you named earlier: each is saying acknowledge me first. One can’t be granted that it was unfairly judged without the other loosening its historical indictment. The other can’t be granted that it saw something real without the first conceding it looked away. So they recognize each other perfectly, and withhold the recognition on purpose — because it’s the only currency in the room, and going first feels like disappearing.

End Claude

Begin Sean

The most interesting thing in the analysis, for me, is the time horizon. One side believes the wrongs of the recent past are worth throwing out much of the system that has protected American norms in the post-WWII era, a time of the greatest American prosperity and strength. The other side believes it can drop 400 years of wrongs on people who disagree with them. 1619, 1863, 1964 are all part of the argument. It’s like a bad marriage: whatever thing I just did is nothing compared to all you have done.

They don’t exist in the same plane of consciousness. Few commenting on the blog even commented on the piece. Fewer argued against other comments. They identified themselves. They gave their credentials. They stated their grievances. Then they left.

So who won?

Ten years later, Trump is still president. The woke tide has receded. But the answer is what we all know already.

No one.

One side holds power but holds on to the dissatisfaction that fueled it because the movement was never about winning power. It was about validation, something that rarely comes via power and bluster after your movement takes power. There are too many things that just go wrong. Winning actually takes winning. The other side holds the moral high ground and the powerlessness that comes with it. And the country is, by every number, more sour than when I wrote in 2016.

It was never a fight to win. It was a fight to be seen, between two groups that see each other perfectly and withhold recognition on purpose. Unwinnable to the end.

My wife and I waited until after I left the Navy to start a family. She grew up a Navy brat and had no intentions of inflicting that on her kids. I didn’t want kids to complicate the options I would have as I transitioned out. So it wasn’t a controversial decision for us. It did mean that she would be having her first child after 35 though. And while we both understood the increased risk to her pregnancy that brought, neither of us was ready for the label “geriatric pregnancy”. Or the genetic testing that would come with it.

While we were waiting for the results we talked about what would happen if something came back abnormal. I was pretty clear about how I felt. I was in favor of terminating the pregnancy. She was also pretty clear. Under almost no circumstances was she going to. And she was also pretty clear that she had confidence I would get over not getting my way on this. She believed that the man she married and chose to start a family with could handle it. That was the way it was going to be.

I didn’t relent. I didn’t have to. Her matter-of-fact response changed my mind. It was consistent with who she was. And I understood there was no discussion to be had. She was and is still today a fearless caretaker. Whoever she was carrying inside her was already her child. And there was no test that was going to change that. It wasn’t religious belief or political affiliation that made her that way. This was her responsibility. And therefore her choice.

What was more remarkable was that it became clear to me that the objection I originally surfaced was no longer really who I was. It came from some previous version of myself. An incomplete one. One that existed before I’d met her. Before I would come to understand the strength she had within her. Before her expectations of me drove me to be a better man. I could never really give my answer to that question until it was my time to truly answer it. Until I had to answer it with someone else. Someone I loved the way that I loved her.

This is the truth about falling in love. It changes you.

Over the next four years we would have three beautiful healthy baby boys. I would get recalled into the Navy so all three would end up short term Navy brats, despite my efforts. And though we answered the question to ourselves, we would never have to answer it to anyone else. And I forgot about the conversation all together.

A few months before my middle son’s third birthday he went through a rapid and unexplained cognitive and developmental regression. He stopped talking and stopped developing intellectually. That was 17 years ago. He still has limited speech. And he has severe cognitive impairment. He is 19 years old and cannot be left alone in our home for any period of time without risk of harm. In some ways he is more impaired than many people with the most common condition that prenatal testing diagnoses, Down syndrome. Which puts us in the group of families that never had to choose to live this life. So when the discussion about choice comes up, we hear it differently.

I know who I was before this life. I know what I said when I had the chance to weigh in on whether or not I thought I was up to the challenge of raising a special needs child. That person no longer exists though. That person hadn’t met my son yet. I hadn’t met my boy. And the hardest part of all of this is the two will never meet each other.

The community I live in includes people who have stared down this decision and chosen to have the children they love. It also includes many more that never had a choice at all. It’s hard to have this discussion with us because there’s no way to have it without the implied question of whether or not our children represent something that the world is better not having in it. It’s also hard because the people who need to have it most aren’t able to know the truth about this life; that it is a good one.

All that’s left then is grace.

A million lifetimes have passed since those abstract discussions about what might be one day. All that’s left now is what is, as I write this lying on his floor on the tail end of a long string of days in which he’s had trouble sleeping. Nothing fragile survives here. Only strong things. I’m tired. The way only a good life can make you.

But 1989 was a different year. It was the summer no one could come to States Avenue beach. It was walled off from the Boardwalk. The streets that funneled beachgoers in were closed. The Trump Taj Mahal was under construction; a billion dollars of steel and concrete rising out of the sand next to the Boardwalk. From time to time, a slick green helicopter would land at the end of the newly constructed pier, built on the site of the historic old Steel Pier that burned down and fell into the Atlantic, taking the last of Old Atlantic City with it. A then 42 year old Donald Trump and his entourage would walk down the pier and disappear into the giant facade that carried his name.

“Look at that rich ass hole.” I remember my dad’s stand partner saying. Leaving unsaid the reality that before inconvenience of the construction, there was the convenience of an empty beach. The north end of the city was no longer dying. It was dead. Left to the crack houses and drug dealers that moved in when America’s first seaside resort was killed by the advent of commercial flights.

Atlantic City’s complicated relationship with Donald Trump was about to enter its zenith. The hit pieces that describe the casino failures and bankruptcies and the extraction of investors money aren’t wrong. But they are incomplete. Because like most things that Donald Trump puts his name on, there was the glimmer of a benefit. The Trump brand did things for the city few things could. It injected life, energy and investment. And then it did what it always did. It moved on when it benefitted the brand. But not before extracting every ounce of value for Donald Trump himself.

Trump collected salary, bonuses, and management fees while the casinos struggled under debt loads they were never likely to sustain. When they failed, and they all failed eventually, the companies went through bankruptcy. Bondholders absorbed losses. Contractors got pennies on the dollar or nothing at all. Employees lost jobs. The city both grew from the investment and then absorbed the damage.

“Atlantic City fueled a lot of growth for me,” he told The New York Times. “The money I took out of there was incredible.”

His name stayed on those buildings for years after he no longer had a meaningful ownership stake or operational role. The new ownership insisted on it. Because the brand had value, even if the operating model didn’t.

In order to understand Donald Trump as President, the most powerful man in the world and most successful politician since FDR, you have to understand that Trump brand licensing model. It’s how you understand everything that followed.

At its peak, Trump’s name was leased to dozens of properties he did not build, did not finance, and did not operate. Trump SoHo. Trump Toronto. Trump Panama. Trump Tower Manila. Trump World Seoul. Buildings on multiple continents. The Trump Organization placed a small disclaimer at the bottom of property websites: this building is owned and operated by a separate company. The Trump name is leased.

The brand is the product. The building and operation is secondary. Whether the building and business thrives or collapses has little bearing on the brand’s trajectory. The brand detaches and moves to the next host. What looked in Atlantic City like failure was, in retrospect, proof of concept. It’s an extremely smart business model for a narrow outcome. Profit for the man who owns the name.

And it’s particularly effective if you can build a political brand too. The brand, above all else, has to be preserved. A brand can survive politics. But it can’t survive governing. There’s too many real and observable outcomes. There’s too much flesh and blood. And in that my original criticism of Donald Trump the candidate then president has always lived. I couldn’t see how he’d be able to detach his brand from the reality of his outcomes. Not because branding in politics is uniquely Trumpian quality.

Branding is the point in politics. The way politicians handle branding though is to do very little and cherry pick things that could prove their brand was the best. Doing nothing wasn’t Trump’s thing though. Governing requires operating. Operating requires staying. And Donald Trump has never been built for staying. He arrives, he brands, he extracts, he leaves.

The presidency of the United States is not a licensing deal. You cannot simply put your name on it and collect value while someone else services the debt. The only way out, is to roll out the sensational. If it sticks, it sticks. If it doesn’t, the move is to quit.

The tariffs looked economically reckless and legally vulnerable. Then they were softened, delayed, or rolled back, and the story moved on. Immigration raids far from the border generated the kind of backlash that suggested political overreach more than strategic discipline. Foreign policy episode followed a similar rhythm: maximal gesture, chaotic aftermath, immediate narrative repositioning.

But here is the thing. None of that necessarily harms the brand.

Each time, the pattern is the same. Make the move. Generate the reaction. Let the base experience the gesture as strength. Let the costs land somewhere else. On markets, on communities, on alliances, on institutions. Then declare victory and move on.

This is the Atlantic City model applied to the presidency. The tariffs are the junk bonds. The rallies are the grand openings. The executive orders are the gold letters going up on the building. And the actual outcomes are someone else’s problem. They always were.

Donald Trump has dominated American politics for at least three presidential election cycles. Most political figures accumulate power through coalitions, institutions, crises, wars, policy achievements, or long apprenticeship. Trump built extraordinary leverage from the name itself. The brand became portable political capital.

He is very, very good at this.

If you set aside structural outcomes, the bankruptcies, the unpaid contractors, the institutional damage, the policy wreckage, and measure only the trajectory of the brand, it is an astonishing performance. The brand has survived casino bankruptcies, impeachments, indictments, a conviction, an assassination attempt, and an election loss. Nothing seems able to kill it. Very little even slows it down.

You cannot kill a brand from the outside. It can only be withdrawn by the people who love it. The American conservative political machine believes it’s in a partnership. It is holding a lease.

What Trump said about Atlantic City, he will one day say implicitly or explicitly about the office of the president. The language will be almost identical. The nation will be left holding the debt: the institutional damage, the policy reversals, the fractured alliances, the base trained to follow a man rather than a platform. And the brand will move on; to the children, to a media vehicle, to whatever the next building is.

That is what brands do. They do not inherit responsibility.

I’ve known that since I was twelve, watching a green helicopter land on Steel Pier while the pile drivers shook the sand on a beach I couldn’t get to anymore.

The experience for me, sitting with my classmates a few weeks after completing Plebe Summer, has stayed with me. It was a tone setter. In my time of service, the things I’m most proud of are the times my team worked out of a mess. The time I ran us out of gas on a moonless night a thousand miles away from the closest asset that could have saved us. The times we had to work our way out of a bad target to find the right one.

That’s the true human superpower. My life’s experience, starting somewhere before the night with Lovell probably, stored in me a fundamental belief; that the brilliance of humans, the unique ability that we alone have among all known living things to create the great towering accomplishments that bend the arc of history, is born from optimism. Not that all will be ok. Something more durable. A belief that we can do great things because we can solve the problems that will inevitably come from the violent disruption of creation and accomplishment.

Of late, it feels like we’ve forgotten it. Today’s world is full of cynics. I’m sure there’s been times throughout history when it was worse; but not in my lifetime. There is far too much reward for tearing things down. Far too much risk to be torn down at the moment of first resistance. The world that we have today has been our making. Now is the time to have faith that humanity can work its way through to the other side.

It was an unbelievably short 66 years from the Wright brothers’ first manned flight to Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. If you question what we are capable of. If you believe we’re doomed. If you believe the arc of human impact travels in a predictable line, unchanged by the genius of what humans can do when faced with necessity, then you misunderstand the problem of risk.

Gene Roddenberry wrote these words for James Tiberius Kirk eighteen months before Apollo 11 reached the moon. We sent men there with a computer that had less processing speed than the chip in a singing birthday card.

They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this. But I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk. Risk is our business. That’s what the starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.

I know it’s hokey. But one man’s hokey belief in progress gets you further over the horizon than all the world’s snarky viral criticism combined.

We launched a mission to bring humans to the moon today. The first in my lifetime.

In the 19,473 days after the Wright brothers’ first flight, we went from 12 seconds in the air to intercontinental jet bombers and the doorstep of the space age.

In the 19,473 days after Apollo 17, we went back to the moon. Today. Just barely. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we do it again. That’s who we once were. That’s who we still are.

Risk…is our business.

For veterans of my generation, Sebastian Junger’s writing has carried a heavy load. He has told the story of our wars back to us as only someone who truly stood witness could. Phil Klay’s Redeployment told the story of my war in Iraq the only honest way a soldier can tell it: through fiction. Junger told the truth about Afghanistan along the razor’s edge between himself and the men who fought it. To live with them in it, as he did, was to do every part of the fighting short of pulling the trigger. To experience combat to an extreme even most soldiers, myself included, never see. And then to tell us who we really are from his own impossibly narrow offset.

The first book of Junger’s I ever read had nothing to do with war. The Perfect Storm told the story of a fishing boat lost at sea in a hundred-year storm. My mother gave it to me because she loved the way he wrote. She said he wrote like I talked, and that it reminded her of me. She gave me a book about a lost ship as a going-away gift when I left for an around-the-world trip on a destroyer. You had to know her to understand how perfectly on-brand that was. She spent a lifetime teaching kids how to read, and if she loved the way someone wrote, that was endorsement enough.

I loved the book too. Of course it wasn’t really about a fishing boat. Or even a storm. It was about what it must have been like for ordinary men to live through something enormously powerful and destructive. To reconstruct their unknowable last days so we could deconstruct the experience. To get all the way to the dark end, when the last man finally understood the dead hand he’d been dealt.

Running fast boats as a young naval officer, I got out of a few spots I didn’t think we were going to get out of. Once, I had the moment where I knew we were cooked. Dumb blind luck, the kind that gives you nightmares because it’s so unlikely, got us out of it. I can say Junger got that feeling pretty damned close. Because that’s what he does.

Veterans identify deeply with Junger’s books, but most of them aren’t really about war. He writes about the extreme edges of human experience and what they expose in ordinary people. Not daredevils or thrill seekers. Fishermen. Firefighters. Soldiers. People you know. People you are. He weaves history, behavioral science, and the long story of human beings into a crisp, clear cadence that lets you feel the weight, shifting between the kinetic and the abstract.

His book Tribe helped me come to terms with leaving the military. When I first came home from deployment, I struggled with acute stress. I had dreams. I couldn’t sleep. Once, when a minivan opened its doors at a red light to drop off middle schoolers, I panicked and floored it through the intersection, nearly running them over. But that passed pretty quickly. Taking off the uniform for the last time left me lost in a different way. Junger understood, and had done the work, to separate PTSD from the darker, often more dangerous part: detachment. The reason the addicted homeless veterans at the veterans home where my wife counseled were the way they were, while many of them had never seen a day of combat. They had found order and belonging in service. When they stopped serving, they lost their way.

In Freedom, he walks the railroad tracks into Appalachia, the same tracks my great-great-grandfather was struck and killed on in 1907. That event shaped my family’s fortunes more than anything else. It is why I did not grow up a well-off descendant of an Allegheny businessman, but instead in a long line of fatherless drunks in Atlantic City. They were truly free men.

In his most recent book, In My Time of Dying, he writes about the ultimate edge of human experience: his own death. His account of nearly bleeding out from a pancreatic aneurysm is exactly what you would expect, or hope for. Plain. Powerful. Not a wasted word. Even when the subject is his own death, which terrifies him.

And then there is the book one must write if the Boston Strangler built his mother’s Boston art studio while he was strangling women in Boston. Yes, that happened. And yes, he wrote A Death in Belmont about it. It is my favorite of his books. Which is not, of course, really about the Boston Strangler. Or even a death in Belmont. It is about the asymmetrical qualities of truth and our relationship with what can ever really be known, or trusted. At least that’s how I took it.

It’s not an accident that a write-up about Sebastian Junger’s work turns into a bunch of stuff about me. I suspect most people could write their own version. We see ourselves in great storytelling. We come to know ourselves through how it affects us.

Next month I get to have a conversation with Sebastian Junger. I’m excited. We’ve got a lot to talk about. You should come too.

If you’d like to attend the online Interintellect event, details are here.

The first time I was in proximity to it, the feeling was immediate. Like being plugged into high voltage. I was in the Horn of Africa, serving as acting task unit commander. The running joke of my career was that I was always acting something. I wasn’t a SEAL. So I was never actually allowed to have most of the titles I had. But the invasion of Iraq ate up so many of the actual SEAL officers that some of us on the periphery got sucked into that work. It ended up being a career of it for me.

Being dropped into that world so suddenly made the presence of the warrior energy even more obvious to me. My one Chief used to call it “getting the hate on.” The platoon spaces. The blaring music. You could feel something moving through the group; anger, energy, a primal violence that had no outlet yet but was already fully formed. It was contagious within the group. That’s part of what makes it functional.

I have thought for years about what happens when that gets out. I have worried, more quietly, that I still have it in me. A vestigial organ from the old days. No longer functional in the body I now inhabit. But still there. The lesson for me though is that part of that life has no part in life back here. Which brings us back to the necessary buffer programmed into our governing system.

The architecture of civilian control of the military exists precisely because of what I just described; To create institutional distance between that necessary cruelty and the governance of force. The Secretary of Defense is not supposed to be at zero grid. That’s the design. The Commander in Chief is many steps removed from the platoon space, and those steps are not weakness. They are the mechanism by which a democracy retains control of its own violence.

The formation that produces effective operators, the hardening, the narrowing, the cultivation of that primal state, is not the formation that produces sound strategic judgment. This is not a criticism of the men shaped by it. It is a recognition of what the shaping does. Civilian control is the mechanism by which a democracy ensures that the people most capable of executing violence are not simultaneously the people deciding when and why it is applied.

This is why the translation matters. Every step up the chain of command is supposed to be a step away from the platoon space and toward something more deliberate, more accountable, more legible to the civilian society that authorizes the force in the first place. The cruelty doesn’t disappear. It gets contained. Institutionalized. Pointed.

When that translation fails, you don’t get more effectiveness. You get theater.

What we are watching now is theater. The memes. The “no quarter” language from senior officials. The rebranding of the Secretary of Defense as Secretary of War. As if the title itself communicates something the institution otherwise fails to project. It is the aesthetic of the platoon space without the discipline that makes the platoon space functional.

It is people performing the mental state I described without having been formed by what produces it, without understanding that the warrior ethos carries weight because it is true, not because it is said loudly.

It’s worth acknowledging what produced the conditions for this; the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. The United States Navy calling itself a Global Force for Good from 2009 to 2014 for instance. Commercials built around hospital missions and civil assistance. A generation of institutional messaging that seemed designed to reassure civilians that the military was essentially a humanitarian organization with better equipment. That was its own theater; sanitized, dishonest in the other direction, and rightly criticized. The backlash was predictable.

But the snapback has not landed on honesty. It has landed on performance. And the performance is more dangerous than the sanitization it replaced, because at least the sanitization didn’t involve officials invoking the laws of war as an afterthought.

The deepest problem is trust. And the mechanism of trust here is simple and brutal: people know the difference between the real thing and the performance of it. The guy at the podium in the suit isn’t supposed to talk like the E6 on the gun. Not because he’s better. Because that’s not his job. His job is to build a bridge between the capability for violence and the people that violence must serve. The mothers. The children. The veterans who know the truth about war. The cosplay toughness doesn’t make the force better. It makes it less trustworthy. And an untrustworthy military brass, performing the theater of cruelty leaders haven’t earned and cannot contain, is not a stronger force. It is a different kind of threat entirely.

We didn’t. This, apparently, was what happened most of the time a U.S. ship transited the straits. We were, after all, joining an entire carrier battlegroup already in the Gulf conducting Operation Southern Watch to enforce sanctions on Iraq. The only way they got there was by transiting the same strait. And being challenged by the same script.

We’d transit a half dozen times that deployment. The last few as we zipped back and forth trying to figure out where and at whom we were supposed to shoot our Tomahawks after 9/11. Each time, the theater of resistance played out. Each time we transited safely.

This is the dance that’s been going on in some form since 1979. The Iranians, with their reasonably capable military well funded and resourced by some version of Russian or Soviet support, wanted to let us know that they could partially or totally shut down the Arabian Gulf if they really wanted to. And in doing so, cut off the supply of the largest single source of the world’s oil. And we were there to let them know that if they did, they were going to pay an unspeakable price.

In that there was an extremely valuable equilibrium. Over the last half century about 300 billion barrels of oil made it through that strait. That’s 20 trillion dollars of fuel. 15 years of total global oil consumption. One out of every 4.5 barrels of oil on earth. It’s the most expensive 21-mile-wide corridor on the planet. It’s been mostly closed to all traffic since March 1st. The global energy-driven economy is feeling it already.

I’m not in the prediction business. So I won’t tell you what I think is going to happen. I’ll just tell you a few things that are true.

Iran’s military, even greatly reduced, has the reach to take down nearly any part of the oil infrastructure in the Gulf. Not because they’re strong. Because they’re close. And shipping infrastructure is extremely easy to stop if you get to do it from land and your enemy has to try to stop you while floating on the water. Since the dawn of low-cost, highly scalable drones, that capability has increased, not decreased. The reason Iran never tried to shut down the Gulf is because, first, it was economically harmful to them. Second, they understood what would come after it in response.

Six days ago the fear of the second threat was taken away by preemptive execution. And with it went the fear of the first.

Bombing a Middle Eastern country into surrender and regime change, without an occupying force on the ground, has never happened. My first deployment may have been on a ship. My last was fighting the raging insurgency in al-Anbar. It was six years after Saddam Hussein was hanged and his Baath party was locked out of government. That ruling group never went away. They melted into the desert and killed Americans for years.

Political power in that region doesn’t come from the same place it comes from in Western countries. What’s true in Venezuela is not true of Iran or Iraq. Political power in Iran comes from the ability to focus anger and hatred toward the United States and Israel. And while it is very true that there are many, even a large majority, of Iranians who hate the regime and would welcome change, believing that there aren’t enough people to stop them from achieving that ignores the reality of how authoritarian Middle Eastern governments work. That mistake cost us 10 years of war and thousands of my fellow service members’ lives.

As it was with Saddam, so it is with the Ayatollah. They both held a deadman’s switch. And once flipped, the security of one of the most consequential regions on the planet becomes a burden that someone else has to secure. Now, the equilibrium is lost. And the only question left is who is going to fill the vacuum of power. We don’t have a great track record with that.

In that miracle-sized void grows the most dangerous of all human tendencies. Cynicism.

Every two years (used to be four) the myth comes to us. That the true greatness of what the Olympics is about is the greatness of unity. That no matter what is going on, the athletes of the world gather together to become one thing. And to agree to be a part of agreeing; to put all difference aside. The myth unravels when we look back through the century to see what that togetherness brought. It wasn’t unity. Nor was it agreement. It was something else.

The Olympics aren’t great because they manufacture unity. They’re great because they remind us what can be true about humans at our best: excellence. For a moment, the world agrees on one thing; greatness is allowed to be good.

Americans didn’t feel any closer to Soviet Russia 46 years ago today when the American Olympic Hockey Team beat the mighty Russian Red Army on ice. But they did feel something else. They felt a sense of collective accomplishment. That somehow, some way, the greatness that was that moment on the ice in Lake Placid could be distributed to our greater American identity. An identity that, in its best moments, knows no boundary of race nor religion.

There are great things and great people and great moments. And there need not be a hedge to account for all the failures and frailties of the times any of us live. The line of good and evil may run across the hearts of every man. But not every moment. Not every accomplishment. Not every towering feat of greatness.

Jimmy Craig can drape himself in the American flag while looking to the crowd to find his dad and skate forever into the annals of good. Cousin Jack Hughes can scream through broken teeth the unbreakable cries of joyous, unlikely victory. And it can be good. And together we can all see it. And feel good. And be detached, if only for a bit, from all the other mess that is our lives. All the other things that would confirm that our world is full only of sin and sinners.

My parents split when I was three or four. I don’t remember the event. Or really them ever being together. I just remember snapshots of a family; fragments of random things. His pipe. His guitar he couldn’t play. Yelling at the Eagles game. The time he came home from an event at the college he worked at and told me the guy who did the show smelled worse than a barn animal. He handed me the album performer gave him for helping organize the show. It was a guy named Utah Philips.

Philips was a folk singer and spoken word artist. He sang about trains and hobos and working in the wilderness way out west in places I’d never heard of.GPT5 tells me he was a political activist and a labor organizer. I don’t know anything about that. I just listened the album my dad gave me because it was the only one he ever did. And for a little while it was one of the things that reminded me of him. Years ago I downloaded it and played it for my kids. There’s a bunch of songs about trains. And a funny story about a train crew cook that cooks up Moose Turd Pie…which is exactly what it sounds like. And something else.

I've spent many a night by the fire
In a circle of stone silent men
And heard the sagebrush whistle and pop
And the coffee boil up in the can

The bottoms were filled with a cool river wind
And the treetops chasing the moon
And I knew without asking to take my guitar
And play up some slow gentle tune

I played up a face I use to know
And the song was the sound of a name
I knew without looking that every man there
Was each of them thinking the same

Then I played up some hands so pale and small
With a touch just as light as the rain
And I knew without looking that every man there
Was each of 'em feeling the same

Then I played up the booze and the holes in the shoes
Of a man whose life is a cage
And all the things done to make a man run
The hard luck and failures of age
Then I stopped with a crash - we looked into the ash
Helpless with longing and rage

I watched the movie Train Dreams this weekend. And I read the book by Denis Johnson that it’s based on the next day. It’s only a hundred or so pages. Which makes it one of the rare times when it’s possible that there’s as much in the movie (maybe more) than in the book. Which isn’t to say that the film is better than the book. I liked the book better but only because I tend to like books that much. But both have kind of hung out with me for a few days. And somewhere in the back of my head is that old Utah Philips song. There’s a common thread that I wanted to write down.

The loneliness of men has become a popular topic of late. Much recent writing on male loneliness treats the problem as sociological or therapeutic, flattening it into trends, pathologies, or policy failures. It explains why men are lonely without dwelling in what that loneliness feels like when it is carried for decades and never named. What’s missing is the interior weight: the way loss settles into habit, how memory replaces conversation, how men recognize each other without speaking.

I can’t put down the thought of how fragile Granier’s attachment was to the world of the loved. Gladys, his wife. Kate his daughter. He was tethered to a world that a man alone can’t enter. And when he lost her, by chance and tragedy, he was simply gone from it. Back to the wandering of men who wander and exist into a life of interior existence. And it takes me back to my dad 45 years ago. I don’t know if he understood that what he was about to leave was a world he could never walk back into. What was left was thin and untethered. And for awhile, he was lost.

There's a moment in the film where Granier runs into an old line crew mate. The man spoke at the burial of a mutual friend, Arn, killed on the job. Years later with countless nameless men filling the years between, he tells Granier he thinks Arn is still alive. Gone was his death; vanished from the memory of the living. It’s not that no one noticed. But what is the passing of a lonely man to the outside world but the quiet evaporation of something thin. The richness of interior lost forever into the abyss of mortality and a world that simply moves on.

Helpless with longing and rage.

What I’m most proud of is that we did it without a shot fired.

My mission, after all, wasn’t to kill people. It was to secure a region the size of Alabama, with a half dozen major population centers, in the run up to Iraq’s second elections in 2010.

To that end, we had a very disciplined focus. My team found the guy, that was my role, and the assault team hit the target. In and out, all under cover of darkness, when there were very few innocent bystanders. Every operation was deconflicted with and supported by local law enforcement. Every target had a warrant signed off by a local prosecutor…yes in Iraq circa 2009. Every one of them was an accused terrorist participating in suicide or IED attacks that overwhelmingly killed innocent people.

It wasn’t easy.

I’m sure we could have saved time by avoiding the legal process altogether. I’m certain we could have moved faster if we hadn’t bothered telling partner law enforcement teams what we were doing. But we did. Because the main objective wasn’t speed. It was to reduce violence and avert suffering. And because we needed the people who lived in the area we were responsible for to trust that we meant them no harm, and that what we were doing was in their best interest.

If you actually want to remove dangerous actors from a community, that’s how you do it. If you want to participate in the theater of intimidation, you do something else.

I spent the hardest and most demanding part of my professional life conducting counterinsurgency operations; COIN for those who speak DOD acronym. The raids happening in Minnesota aren’t insurgency operations, but the tactical shape is directly comparable. So we have decades of experience doing this kind of work right. That means it isn’t mysterious how to do enforcement operations in a way that’s effective and controlled. And it doesn’t look anything at all like what’s happening there now.

The most material questions to ask about the ICE raids dominating everyone’s feed are simple. What exactly is the federal government trying to accomplish? And the follow up, how’s that going?

If the goal is to eliminate the presence of people who are here without legal immigration status, it would be reasonable to require that this be done without undue suffering or violence inflicted on American citizens. I can tell you from firsthand experience that this isn’t an optional control. When you roll over populations that didn’t ask you to come into their communities to save them, it’s only a matter of time before your operations become too hard to execute to be consistently successful.

Based on current reporting, America may have crossed that threshold this weekend, when ICE shot and killed an American citizen in Minnesota for the second time in as many weeks. I’m not going to engage in Zapruder tape analysis to figure out if it were justified or not. When you plan and execute violent raids, the risk reward calculation happens upstream. These deaths were a foreseeable consequence of the operational design. Absent those raids, it’s highly likely neither of those Americans would be dead today.

What was the haul that made that trade off worth it?

I’m intentionally having this discussion outside the broader moral or political debate, for which I’ve already gone on record. It’s clear there’s a sizable portion of the population that will never care about the moral hazard of masked raids or the erosion of due process, as long as it isn’t them the law fails. Absent any morals at all, they should still care if what’s happening is being executed in any way that could plausibly achieve its stated goal.

If you don’t care that it’s unconstitutional or morally bankrupt, you should at least care that it’s stupid and ineffective.

Let’s play this out a little further. Last year, the high end estimate of people detained and deported by ICE was estimated to be about 320,000. That may sound like a lot, and it is, but it works out to about 890 snatch and grabs per day. Even under optimistic assumptions, at that rate it would take about 45 years to detain and deport the estimated 14 million people said to constitute this existential crisis.

No serious person believes we’re going to murder-van mask raid 14 million human beings, the population of Belgium, and make them disappear without becoming something monstrous in the process.

At its worst, it exposes the limits to what we truly mean by self evident, inalienable rights. The ugly truth is that democracies have a loophole. Under strain that group shrinks.

The trigger isn’t immigration as an abstraction. It’s the feeling of transformation: new languages in public spaces, different norms arriving quickly, neighborhoods changing in ways that don’t ask permission. When that feeling takes hold, politics can flip. America has lived this cycle repeatedly, and every era convinces itself it’s uniquely rational while rerunning the same emotional script. Anxiety finds a target. Migrants are convenient. The story becomes simple enough to chant, and that simplicity is the point.

This creates the trap for anyone trying to govern with liberal (small L) principles. You can implement humane policies, sanctuary protections, prosecutorial discretion, treating migrants like human beings instead of contaminants, knowing you’re buying political vulnerability. Or you can preemptively get tough, hoping that meeting cruelty halfway prevents worse cruelty later. In a healthier politics there are more than two options. In the contemporary brand of American politics, there rarely are. The debate gets flattened into a brutal binary: treat migrants humanely and you’re accused of surrendering the border; enforce the law loudly enough and you can prove seriousness by inflicting pain.

That compression isn’t an accident. It turns governance into a loyalty test. It makes cruelty feel like competence. But the real choice isn’t between borders and compassion. It’s between competence and fear: whether we build an immigration system that is orderly and lawful without cruelty or indifference to basic human rights, or whether we use enforcement as theater. Cruelty becomes the signal that the state is still in control.

Once again, we can turn to history to see the shape of it. We’ve had ample experience how a democracy talks itself into brutality. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is a brutal case study. The Act didn’t merely permit the capture and return of escaped slaves. It compelled participation. Federal marshals were required to assist slave catchers. Ordinary citizens faced penalties for refusing to cooperate or for helping those fleeing bondage. Law didn’t just authorize cruelty; it recruited the public into it, conscripting neighbors and local officials into a system built to return human beings to bondage.

What made it insidious wasn’t that it was lawless. It was that it was lawful. It passed through Congress. The President signed it. Courts upheld it. Every procedure worked. Every lever of legitimacy moved exactly as designed. And the result was sanctioned violence, made respectable by paperwork.

Hardline immigration enforcement, for those already present among us, takes on a similar method; not in moral equivalence, but in mechanism. Raids don’t just remove unauthorized migrants; they inject fear into communities that otherwise would not be living under it. Family separations were not merely mistakes along the way; suffering has been used as deterrence, treated as a tool rather than a failure. The system leans on local law enforcement partnerships, pressures employers, and encourages neighbors to become informants. And it arrives wrapped in official language: sovereignty, security, rule of law. The brutality isn’t always a bug. Too often it’s the mechanism by which control is demonstrated.

This is the part we often misjudge about liberal democracies: procedural legitimacy is not a moral safeguard. A system can be constitutional and still be cruel. Once a society creates a legal category of people who are here but not fully protected, present, visible, working, raising kids, paying rent, living among us, yet permanently conditional, enforcement becomes a stage. Power is performed through domination of the vulnerable, and majorities tell themselves it isn’t brutality because it has a badge and a statute number. What’s materially the same between an enslaved American that has escaped into free territory and someone who is in America without legal immigration status is that the community that accepts them as present and contributing members has no ability to protect their rights. And we expose that these rights were never really inalienable to begin with. They belong to the state. And in that we expose much of the hypocrisy of liberty loving American political rhetoric.

But democracies rarely change because a better argument showed up. They change when ordinary conscience is forced to confront what its abstractions require. The Fugitive Slave Act did that. Federal officers dragging formerly enslaved families out of Northern communities and back into bondage made the violence impossible to outsource mentally. When Harriet Beecher Stowe translated those scenes into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she narrowed the distance between what people could tolerate in principle and what they could endure watching happen. The shock reached places politics hadn’t.

The same dynamic plays out now. Images of children separated from parents, families broken in raids, communities living under the threat that a trip to work could be the day everything collapses, those puncture the slogans. The median voter who likes strong borders in principle is confronted with what strong borders can mean in practice. Cruelty becomes harder to rationalize when it isn’t abstract.

Someone will inevitably claim that raising the Fugitive Slave Act is a way of equating border enforcement with slavery. It isn’t. Nations have a right, an obligation, to know who crosses their borders, to maintain coherent citizenship, to make decisions about immigration policy. The comparison is narrower and more serious: what happens when we withhold protections we long called self evident from people who live among us because of a legal classification that is often extraordinarily difficult to change.

I believe in borders. I believe in sovereignty. I don’t believe in cruelty as a governing instrument, especially toward people who have been living peacefully in our communities for years, whose only offense is immigration status. Threading that needle, maintaining border security while refusing cruelty, is the work that matters. It requires holding two truths at once: borders mean something, and so do people.

Put more simply into the binary language of contemporary politics: Where lies the greater moral risk? A clear and easy path to citizenship for those living peacefully and lawfully among us? Or the violence and coercion of forced deportations at scale?

Few Americans will openly say a person has less value as a human being because of immigration status. But many will say, without blinking, that such a person does not have the same inalienable rights and the same protections, as we do. Which impulse wins depends on what we’re willing to tolerate and what we’re forced to see.

Sally: Harry, you’re going to have to try and find a way of not expressing every feeling that you have, every moment that you have them.

Harry: Oh really?

Sally: Yes, there are times and places for things.

Harry: Well the next time you’re giving a lecture series on social graces would you let me know, ‘cos I’ll sign up.

Sally: Hey! You don’t have to take your anger out on me.

Harry: Oh I think I’m entitled to throw a little anger your way, especially when I’m told how to live my life, by Miss Hospital-Corners.

Sally: What’s that supposed to mean?

Harry: I mean nothing bothers you! You never get upset about anything!

Sally: Don’t be ridiculous!

Harry: What? You never get upset about Joe. I never see that back up on you. How is that possible? Don’t you experience any feelings of loss?

Sally: I don’t have to take this crap from you!

Harry: If you’re so over Joe, why aren’t you seeing anyone?

Sally: I see people!

Harry: See people, have you slept with one person since you broke up with Joe?

Sally: What the hell does that have to do with anything? That will prove that I’m over Joe, because I fucked somebody? Harry you’re going to have to move back to New Jersey because you’ve slept with everybody in New York and I don’t see that turning Helen into a faint memory for you! Besides I will make love to somebody when it is ‘making love’, not the way you do it like you’re out for revenge or something!

Harry: Are you finished now?

Sally: Yes.

Harry: Can I say something?

Sally: Yes.

Harry: I’m sorry. I’m sorry…

It was one of the first movies I ever watched with my wife. That she loved it too was an early tell. No other film embodies our relationship like Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s 1989 masterpiece. When Harry Met Sally taught me that you can be an opinionated, self absorbed jerk and still get a woman like Meg Ryan if you can 1-Make her laugh 2-be in on the joke that is you 3-Tell her, exactly why you love her…dramatically 4-apologize…a lot…

We’ve had that argument a thousand times. And I hope we have it a thousand more. It always ends the same way. With an apology…from me.

A Few Good Men

Galloway: Why do you hate them so much?

Lt. Weinberg: They beat up on a weakling; that’s all they did. The rest is just smokefilled coffee-house crap. They tortured and tormented a weaker kid. They didn’t like him. So, they killed him. And why? Because he couldn’t run very fast.

Lt. Weinberg: Why do you like them so much?

Galloway: Because they stand upon a wall and say, “Nothing’s going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch.”

It came out when I was 15. I applied to the Naval Academy a year later. You can fit nearly all you need to know about leading as a military officer in the space between the two truths Galloway and Weinberg reveal. We watched it in leadership class. It’s as relevant today as it ever was. Here’s to believing that the climactic exchange at the end will still make sense to the leaders of the future. That when it is revealed that you have done something wrong, there are consequences.

Stand By Me

The Writer: I wondered how Teddy could care so much for his dad, who practically killed him. And I couldn’t give a shit about my own dad, who hadn’t laid a hand on me since I was three! And that was for eating the bleach under the sink.

It came out when I was about the same age as the kids in the movie. It was the first time I remember thinking that I could feel things in a movie, a movie made for adults, that the characters on screen were feeling. It was a group of friends bound by nothing more than the coincidence of being from a small town at the same time, leaving different versions of a home on their own as they wander into a splintered future where fates diverge. It’s the story of all of us.

The Princess Bride

Man in Black: I’d just as soon destroy a stained glass window than an artist like yourself.

I only have one quote because its all just one quote. It’s as close to a perfect movie as you will ever see. My autistic son watches a selection of movies on loop. He rapidly fast forwards to scenes he loves and rewatches them. The only live action film, one with real actors and film, is The Princess Bride. Because Rob Reiner drew something out of his direction, through living breathing people, as perfect as if it were drawn onto the screen by hand.

It’s possible (likely?) that I’ve seen the movie more than anyone on the planet that actually wasn’t a part of making it…and even probably more than them too. I’m not exaggerating. I’m going to watch it a thousand more times too…I hope. Because it means my son and I are still alive. It runs in the background of our life. And it simply never dulls. I can’t think of a higher complement to a piece of art than that.

The transfer portal turned rosters into free agency on steroids. Players bounce between programs like mercenaries hunting the biggest payday. Loyalty became a museum piece. The four-year player development arc got replaced by the one-year rental model. Coaches recruit their own players away from other schools mid-season. It’s chaos with a corporate sponsor.

Lane Kiffin saw it coming. He turned Ole Miss into a laboratory for gaming the new system. The portal became his recruiting department. Proven commodities over unproven recruits. One-year rentals over four-year development. Big-time coaches run their programs like venture funds. For Kiffin, Oxford became a marketplace where everything has a price and everyone’s for sale. He’s not building a program. He’s assembling a product. He got his exit. The Rebels exist in perpetual now. No past. No future. Just this season’s return on investment for its founder.

But Kiffin at least operates in the open. He celebrates the dystopia. Michigan perfected something darker. Corporate subterfuge dressed as institutional integrity. Sherrone Moore’s behavior had been on the University of Michigan’s administrative radar for some time. They didn’t do anything until they had to. And of course long after the December signing day. The energy of the appropriate moral outrage has nowhere to go. It dissipates, split through the prism of the near endless opportunities for moral outrage that is NCAA football. Timing is everything. Transparency is for suckers.

It’s true that institutions that span generations and remain culturally salient have many deaths. What rises from what once was is something more resilient and culturally aligned with the times. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that college football and American politics are both orbiting the same singularity of crazy. So many things governed by the norms of the past are no longer tethered to any morality. And so reasonable people are left to shrug and continue on with life hoping that some other regulating force normalizes things. And the equilibrium we land on is something we can live with. At least for a little while.

And then there’s Army Navy.

Today. Baltimore. Two teams with winning records. Zero NIL money. Not one cent. And a transfer portal that only works one way—out.

As a Navy grad, I’ve always loved this weekend. But I’ve long since bristled at the virtue-signaling moralizing that comes with it. That these were real college athletes who have to play by the rules set somewhere in the 1950s. That they were all willing to die for everyone watching. That this was what America and college football was really about. In reality it was decades of terrible football by usually pretty bad teams that had to clear out a weekend where no one else was playing in order to get anyone to watch. To graduates and even some service members, it was deeply important. But it was a bit of a punchline to everyone else. Sorry shipmates. That’s the truth.

The last few years in college football have made me change my mind about that. What service academies are forced to do in the current NCAA environment is truly remarkable. They’ve always had the disadvantage of never being able to cater to any player that has true professional aspirations…or aspirations of having any fun in college really. Now they’re being asked to compete in a world of paid talent with volunteers.

The contrast burns like a searchlight cutting through the smog and confusion of a college sport gone mad. In Army Navy, the moral bonds that used to matter are still alive and well; perhaps the last bastion of hope to keep the angels of our better nature sustained. Moreover, they’re good. Navy in particular regularly blows out teams with paid rosters and the ability to patch up talent gaps overnight via the transfer portal. They do it with pretty good players who have the chance to grow within a system that promotes execution and discipline. While the rest of the NCAA has found a way to optimize revenue for coaches, schools, players and sponsors, they’ve done so at some degradation of the game.

College football players and the opportunities to watch them have never been better. The teams and the quality of play? It’s debatable. Though we might draw some conclusion that Army and Navy have not been collectively this good relative to the field in recent memory. If you were to ask me ten years ago what would happen to Army and Navy if the NCAA paid football players and let them transfer every year, I may have said they’d need to close up shop. Or at least drop down to lower divisions. The opposite has happened. Army and Navy are a combined 37-12 in the two seasons since NIL and single-year transfers have come into play. It’s the highest combined winning percentage they’ve had in my lifetime.

Chalk one up for the old ways of commitment, teamwork and personal growth I guess.

Weapons as we called it was the last gauntlet to run for humanities majors; the Academy’s excuse to cram differential equations into the innocent minds of history or English or oceanography majors. Calling it Weapons Systems was a stretch. The only thing Weapons related about it was that the calculations we had to solve could double as the ones used for rockets or other projectiles. So for the last semester of your last year at the Naval Academy, you learn the math that put us on the moon. At least you did in the 1900s when I went there.

If you know anything about that math, it’s hard to not see the connection to the math that ultimately brings us to concepts behind machine learning and the gradient descent of LLMs. Which brings me full circle. The thought that’s hard for me to shake is that it’s all just one long arc. And in that arc I see a crack in the great stagnation narrative.

There’s a story we tell ourselves about the decades after Apollo: that we lost our nerve, that bureaucracy calcified our ambition, that we chose consumer gadgets over cosmic exploration. We look at the 1970s through the 2010s and see stagnation, a civilization that went to the moon and then inexplicably stopped climbing.

But what if we didn’t stagnate at all? What if we simply reached the summit?

The physical world, it turns out, has fewer variables than we thought. When you’re designing a guidance system to land on the moon, you’re working within a remarkably constrained problem space. Newton’s laws don’t change. Gravity is predictable. Orbital mechanics can be calculated on paper. The entire challenge of Apollo, as technically magnificent as it was, operated within a universe of perhaps a few dozen critical parameters that mattered for navigation and control.

Compare that to a game of chess. A chessboard has 64 squares and 32 pieces, yet the number of possible board positions exceeds 10^40. The number of possible games is functionally infinite. And chess is simple. It’s a toy universe with rigid rules and perfect information.

Now consider language. Or images. Or the full space of human knowledge and expression. The dimensional space of possible configurations isn’t just larger than physics. It’s larger by a factor that makes the comparison absurd. When you’re training a neural network to generate coherent text, you’re navigating a probability landscape with billions of parameters, each one a dial that can be turned continuously. The position space of a large language model makes chess look like tic tac toe.

This is the thing we got backwards. We thought the physical world was infinite in its complexity, that we’d spend centuries mastering spaceflight and energy and materials. But the physical world turned out to be the easy problem. Not because physics is simple, but because it’s constrained. The laws are few. The variables are knowable. You can write them down.

The abstract world, the world of information, pattern, meaning, and representation, is where the real exponential lives. And we couldn’t touch it until the hardware caught up.

People frame the post Apollo era as a failure of will, but that’s not quite right. We stopped climbing Everest because we’d reached the top. What else were you going to do? Stand on the summit and jump?

After Apollo, we built Space Shuttles and space stations. We sent robots to every planet. We put telescopes in orbit that could see to the edge of the observable universe. All of this was impressive, but none of it was fundamentally more difficult than what we’d already done. It was lateral motion, not vertical. The engineering challenges were real, but they weren’t deeper. They were variations on a theme we’d already mastered: trajectory, propulsion, life support, navigation.

We could have gone to Mars. We still can. But Mars is just the moon with more fuel required. It’s the same equations, the same closed form solutions, the same explicit control systems. It’s not a new mountain. It’s the same mountain with a longer trail.

So we did what any reasonable civilization would do: we stopped pouring infinite resources into climbing the same mountain and started looking for the next one. The fact that the next mountain wasn’t visible yet, that it required fifty years of semiconductor advancement before we could even see its base, doesn’t mean we were standing still. We were building the ladder.

The stagnation narrative only makes sense if you think the only meaningful progress is the kind that involves rockets. But rockets, it turns out, were just the first act. They were what we could build with the physics we understood and the compute we had. When both of those constraints were maxed out, the frontier moved somewhere else.

Here’s the thing about guidance systems: they work because the universe is compressible. You can describe the motion of a spacecraft with a handful of differential equations. You can model aerodynamics, gravity, thrust, and drag with maybe a few hundred parameters if you’re being really thorough. Everything else is error correction and noise management.

This is what made the Apollo Guidance Computer possible. It had 2K of RAM and ran at one megahertz, but that was enough because the problem was small enough to fit. The engineers could write down every equation, every failure mode, every edge case. They could prove the system would converge. They could test it exhaustively.

And because they could do all of that, they did. Apollo wasn’t just a success. It was a complete success. We didn’t leave anything on the table. There was no secret remaining insight into Newtonian mechanics that would have made the guidance computer ten times better. We’d hit the ceiling of what that problem space allowed.

This is the wall that people mistake for stagnation. We didn’t stop progressing in guidance and control systems because we got lazy. We stopped because the problem was solved. You can’t improve a solution that’s already optimal within its constraints. You can make it cheaper, more reliable, more efficient, and we did, but you can’t make it fundamentally more.

The physical world has an edge. We found it.

But while the exterior universe is bounded by physics, the interior universe, the space of thought, language, representation, and meaning, is functionally infinite. This isn’t a poetic metaphor. It’s a mathematical fact. The configuration space of abstract symbolic systems is vastly larger than the configuration space of physical systems.

A neural network with a billion parameters isn’t modeling a billion independent things. It’s modeling the relationships between those parameters, which means the expressive capacity grows combinatorially. The space it navigates is so large that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe it. We just call it high dimensional and move on, because the alternative is to say unimaginably vast every time, and that gets old.

This is why machine learning took fifty years to catch up to control theory. Not because the ideas were missing. Cybernetics and early neural networks were contemporaries of Apollo. But because the compute wasn’t there. You can’t explore an infinite space with finite resources. You need the resources to scale with the space, and for symbolic systems, that scaling is exponential.

So we waited. We built faster chips, denser memory, cheaper storage. We laid fiber and built data centers. We did fifty years of grinding, incremental improvement on hardware, and the entire time, people said we were stagnating. But we weren’t stagnating. We were loading. We were building the infrastructure to climb the next mountain, which happened to be invisible from the base.

And then, around 2015 or so, we had enough compute to start training networks at scale. And the moment we did, everything exploded. Not because we invented a new kind of intelligence. Backpropagation is older than the moon landing. But because we finally had enough compute to let it run.

When historians look back a thousand years from now, the period between 1969 and 2020 is going to look like a rounding error. Apollo and GPT will appear almost simultaneous. The gap between them will seem like the gap between Hobbes and Locke. Different thinkers, same intellectual moment, same chapter in the story.

Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651. Locke published Two Treatises of Government in 1689. That’s 38 years. If you’re reading about the Enlightenment in a history book, those two names appear on the same page, sometimes in the same sentence. The fact that Locke was six years old when Hobbes wrote his masterwork doesn’t matter. They’re part of the same movement, the same turn in human thought.

Now zoom out further. The moon landing was 1969. GPT 3 was 2020. That’s 51 years. From the perspective of someone in 2500 or 3000, those events are going to be part of the same transition: the moment when humanity figured out how to build machines that could navigate complexity. First physical, then abstract. One chapter. Same revolution.

The fifty years in between won’t disappear, but they’ll be compressed. The Space Shuttle, the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, all of that will be context, background, the industrial base that made the second leap possible. But the story will be about two peaks: the peak of explicit human engineering, and the peak of emergent machine intelligence. Everything else is the bridge.

So maybe the right way to think about the last century isn’t as a story of decline or stagnation, but as a story of completion.

We climbed the mountain of physical mastery as high as it could go. We built machines that could fly themselves to the moon using equations we could write by hand and computers we could fully understand. That was the peak. We planted the flag. And then we looked around and realized: there’s nothing higher here.

But there was another mountain visible in the distance. Taller, stranger, harder to climb. A mountain made not of rock but of information. And to climb it, we needed different tools. Not slide rules and differential equations, but matrix multiplications and gradient descent. Not systems we could interpret, but systems we could grow.

The gap between those two peaks wasn’t stagnation. It was the descent from one summit and the long approach to the next. It was fifty years of building the roads, the base camps, the supply chains. It was the preparation required to attempt something harder than anything we’d done before.

And now we’re climbing again. Not with rockets this time, but with models. Not by imposing order on the physical world, but by discovering order in the abstract. The mathematics are the same. Feedback, correction, convergence. But the territory is different. Bigger. Deeper. Stranger.

We didn’t stagnate. We finished one thing and started another. And when the far future looks back, they’ll see it for what it was: a single motion, from guidance to generation, from the world of things to the world of thought.

The same journey. Just harder terrain.

There’s a photograph that haunts us. John F. Kennedy Jr., three years old, saluting his father’s casket. He stands in his short coat. His small hand raised in perfect military form. He performs a ritual he cannot possibly understand. He knows only that something has ended. That the world has changed. He lacks the vocabulary to name what has been lost. That image, innocence confronting rupture, a child suddenly forced into knowledge, captures something essential about the moment we now inhabit as a nation.

We are that boy now. Standing at attention before something we only dimly comprehend. The living generations of Americans have reached the end of our own childhood; the conclusion of an era that began in the turbulent years of the 1960s, when the civil rights movement and the cultural revolution that accompanied it created a new American identity, one built on the promise that progress was not merely possible but inevitable, that the arc of history bent inexorably toward justice. For sixty years we lived inside that assumption, sheltered by the belief that the moral victories of that decade had set us on an irreversible course. That childhood is over.

Bruno Macaes observed something crucial about postwar Europe. It built itself around a negative principle. The Holocaust must never happen again. Not what Europe was. What it would refuse to become. The entire architecture of the European Union, the elaborate systems of international cooperation, the careful monitoring of nationalist sentiment, all of it built on the foundation of absence, on the determination to prevent a return to a specific horror.

There is power in such a commitment. But also emptiness.

Now Europe faces enemies at the gate. A resurgent Russia. The pressures of mass migration. The fracturing of the postwar order. And Europe finds itself paralyzed by its own construction. When your identity consists of what you will not do, what happens when circumstances demand affirmative action? When not being the past proves insufficient to meet present dangers? The European crisis reveals the fundamental weakness of building a civilization on negation: it provides no reserves of conviction when conviction is required, no sense of what is worth defending beyond the abstract commitment to avoid repeating history.

America followed the same path. We knew what we would not be again. Not the nation of segregation. Not separate water fountains and back of the bus humiliation. Not lynchings and legal discrimination. This knowledge was crucial. Hard won. Purchased with blood in Birmingham and Selma, with the assassination of leaders and the courage of ordinary people who risked everything to demand their rights.

But somewhere in the translation of civil rights victories into ongoing political momentum, the positive vision became obscured. What emerged instead was a narrative that defined America primarily through its sins. The message became not “this is what America can be” but “this is what America has been and must never be again.” Where was the articulation of what America was, in its fullest sense? What affirmative identity could citizens embrace beyond the commitment to avoid past evils?

Most Americans (or people) struggle with an identity built on inherited guilt. They are rarely satisfied with being told that their national story is fundamentally one of oppression. That racism is not a historical wrong to be overcome but a permanent, systemic condition embedded in the nation’s DNA. Not because Americans are incapable of confronting hard truths; the civil rights movement itself proves otherwise. But because an identity built solely on negation and guilt provides no path forward, no way to participate meaningfully in building something worthy of devotion.

Into this vacuum came MAGA. Make America great again. Whatever else one might say about this slogan, it offered something the progressive narrative had ceased to provide: an affirmative vision. A sense of what America could be again rather than merely what it should avoid becoming. It spoke to people hungry for a story about their country that included them as protagonists rather than villains. The appeal was not about policy. It was about narrative. About being offered an identity that felt like an invitation rather than an indictment.

Trump’s political success marks the end of an era. For decades, progressive causes benefited from momentum protection; the sense that they were riding the inevitable wave of history. That to oppose them was to be on the wrong side of progress itself. Dissent could be dismissed not through argument but through categorization. To question prevailing progressive orthodoxies was to mark oneself as regressive. As someone who had learned nothing from the moral lessons of the 1960s.

That protection has expired. Trump’s presidency served as the angel of death for the assumption that progressive momentum was self sustaining. The childhood of our post civil rights world has ended, whether we were preparef for it nor not. What comes next will require something different: The hard work of persuasion. The construction of arguments that convince rather than coerce. The articulation of a positive vision that can compete in the marketplace of ideas without relying on the rhetorical (even if accurate) shortcut of labeling opponents as bigots.

But we also have to confront a darker possibility. The void left by the collapse of inevitable progress creates space not only for new positive visions but for something more dangerous. Nihilism. When no one believes in anything, neither in the progressive narrative of inevitable advancement nor in any competing vision of what America should be, they may come to believe in the only thing that remains viscerally real: chaos and pain.

The risk of domestic political violence grows not from conviction but from its absence. From the sense that if nothing means anything, then destruction becomes its own purpose. The only authentic act left available. We’ve already seen glimpses of it. Not the violence of ideological commitment but the violence of those who have concluded that the system itself is empty theater. That breaking things is the only honest response to a world of manufactured meanings.

This is the gravest danger of the transition we’re deperately trying to navigate. That in the space between the old childhood certainties and whatever maturity might replace them, we will see a proliferation of violence born not from belief but from the absence of it. From citizens who have given up on the possibility that anything might be worth building and have embraced destruction as the only remaining form of authenticity.

Yet this transition, painful and dangerous as it may be, offers the possibility of genuine progress. If we can navigate it. If we can resist the pull of nihilism. If we refuse the backsliding into the worst of our history. Real advancement cannot rest on protected status or on the assumption that history moves in only one direction. It requires engagement with reality. With the actual views and concerns of citizens. With the necessity of building coalitions through persuasion rather than presumption. When progressives can no longer rely on the inherent rightness of our position as self evident. When we must make our case rather than assert it, the quality of thought and argument can improve.

The test now is whether we can find leaders capable of guiding us through this new landscape. Leaders who can articulate a vision of America that includes both an honest reckoning with historical injustice and an affirmative sense of national purpose. Who can inspire without manipulating. Who can acknowledge complexity without surrendering to cynicism. We need voices that can speak to what America is and can become, not merely what it has been and must avoid repeating. Most critically, we need leaders who can offer American something to believe in before the belief in nothing metastasizes into something far worse.

That photograph of the small boy saluting reminds us that endings come whether we are prepared for them or not. That history moves forward regardless of whether we understand what we are losing. But it also reminds us that life continues after loss. That the child in the photograph grows into his own man. That new chapters begin even as old ones close.

Our task now is to write that next chapter. With clearer eyes and steadier hands than we have shown in recent years. To move beyond the childhood of our post civil rights era and into a maturity that can sustain the work of building a more perfect union not through assumption but through achievement. And that can offer a compelling enough vision to pull us back from the abyss of meaninglessness that threatens to swallow us whole.

What message is going to drive us into the future? Who are we going to be?

Philip K. Dick understood that problem long before neural nets. His fiction isn’t about spaceships or laser guns so much as realities inside realities—fragile, counterfeit, barely coherent. The people in his novels are trapped in worlds that look real but prove to be projections, scripts, or someone else’s hallucination. To read Dick in 2025 is to recognize the danger of mistaking predictive imitation for life.

In A Scanner Darkly, undercover agents wear scramble suits; shifting masks of thousands of identities at once. You can’t pin them down. It’s a defense, but also a trap: the wearer eventually forgets who they are.

That’s our digital life. We blur our faces in photos, use burner accounts, scramble our identities for privacy. It protects us from surveillance. It also chips away at coherence. The cost of avoiding predictive capture is fragmentation. You are visible everywhere and recognizable nowhere.

Dick didn’t need the internet to see how anonymity can curdle into decay. One of Dick’s most consistent themes is that entropy is undefeated. Eventually it all unravels.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? gives us the Voight-Kampff test, a machine for detecting empathy. In Dick’s world, empathy is the last line between human and android. But if it can be tested, it can be faked. Today, “empathetic AI” is the hot feature. Chatbots tuned to comfort, sentiment analysis that “reads” emotions. But empathy as an input/output system is just mimicry. It’s performance with no moral weight. The Voight-Kampff in all of us can detect most of what companion AI’s give us. And so we’re bound to Dick’s reality again. That once empathy is a script, anyone can run it. A machine. A sociopath. An actor. The test stops measuring humanity and starts measuring compliance. Entropy again moves in.

“Kipple” was Dick’s word for the junk of consumer life; empty packages, broken gadgets, useless debris that reproduces itself until it buries everything. Our kipple is data. Click-trails, duplicates, low-value posts, bot-written filler. AI is trained on it. And worse: AI now trains on AI outputs, piling synthetic kipple on synthetic kipple until the signal drowns.

Entropy isn’t a bug; it’s the whole arc. Dick’s junk-cluttered apartments were prophecy for the age of content farms and hallucinated footnotes. Left alone, kipple wins.

What’s left is memories. Or something like a unit of mental past. Dick loved the idea that memory itself could exist apart from our minds. That’s our reality now. Platforms resurface curated “memories” in slideshows. Our past gets packaged and replayed on demand. Deepfakes take it further: memories manufactured outright. But if memories can be sold, who owns the past? The person who lived it, the company that stores it, or the algorithm that edits it? Dick’s characters often can’t tell. Increasingly, neither can we.

Dick’s realities often unravel at the edges. Objects flicker, worlds fall apart, counterfeits expose themselves by mistake. Those glitches aren’t failures. They’re revelations. They prove the world is a construct.

AI’s hallucinations do the same. When a model invents a book or a court case, it’s not just wrong. It’s showing you where its training ends. The glitch is the crack in the wall. That’s where the truth leaks in.

Personalization builds a world tailored just for you. What you see feels true because it feels meant for you. But that “revelation” is just the softest form of control: shaping what you notice, nudging what you believe, selling you what you already want. The cage is invisible, and it’s comfortable. Dick would have called it a prison.

The most radical Dickian idea for our time is the one that resists capture altogether. And it doesn’t even come directly from Dick’s writing. Instead it’s the logical progression of an his idea, as so much of sci-fi is. In Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin imagines “wall-facers”—people who keep their plans entirely in their heads, inaccessible to any surveillance. In Dick’s work, the survivors are often those who keep something opaque, unshareable, off the record. Pre-cogs only share some of the truth. Replicants can only know what they’re allowed to. There can be no alternate reality if all that is known is kept in the flesh and blood substrait of the last frontier; the human brain. The sin of so much of Dick’s books is its corruption.

That’s our last defense against predictive AI. The air-gapped mind. The conversation not posted. The notebook that never gets scanned. The part of life that doesn’t live on a server.

If AI sees only what it can scrape, then the unscripted, the unwritten, the face-to-face becomes a civic virtue. A strategy of keeping reality alive by refusing to let it be indexed.

AI builds an endless surface world…predictive, generative, smooth. Dick’s fiction insists that the real world is fragile, glitchy, entropic, and irreducible. He warns us not to confuse the replica for the real.

The lesson is not nostalgia for a pre-digital past. It’s something sharper: a reminder that the most important parts of life are the ones that can’t be modeled. Empathy that can’t be scored. Memories that can’t be replayed. Decisions that remain undecided until they’re lived.

Dick wrote realities within realities. We live in one now: the reality of the world and the reality of the model trained to imitate it. His stories remind us that the line between them is not academic. It’s real. As real as anything is ever going to be again.

People usually believe first and understand later. I change few minds. But I try to build a bridge from the belief to understanding in order to set the conditions for introspection in those who seek it. Not that many actually do. And so I haven't quite reached the fever level that pundits do. But I plug away nonetheless. Someone should.

That said, I do have my share of beliefs. And in times like this, it's good to go on the record. Silence sometimes is consent.

What I believe (among other things): I believe the last two-plus centuries of the American experiment have been the light that has led the world forward into liberty and self-governance; imperfectly, fraught with injustice but still striving towards a more perfect union the way that only an accountable system of government can. And so I root for neither side. But for the system of American politics to function well within the world of ideas and words. To be a place in which its characters give us something to react to. To understand what it feels like to hear a perspective we agree with. Or one we can't.

The purpose of the American political machine is not to bring us together. It's not to serve broad bipartisan ends. But to divide us. Not in our responsibilities but in our choices. The function of American politics is to provide access to the American people to provide their consent. Without the taking of sides, there is nothing to decide. We can dislike politicians and pundits. But we have to honor the place they serve.

Washington's farewell speech is often cited as some sort of sage guidance about political parties that we've ignored at our own peril.

"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

In reality, the warning is not about the parties. It's about us. It’s the universal warning that sin is not in the nature of the device. It's in the place we let it hold over our souls. Politics and politicians serve us. It's not the other way around. It's in that hierarchy that we can see just how gross a failure political violence is. It's a sin, as most sins are: a result of when we forget our own purpose and give control to something that was designed to serve us. It's a defect, reserved for groups that have been locked out of the liberties every single American has the right to. It's when something is broken. An alarm to react to.

If your response is anything other than regret or a burning need to shout it down…if it's joy or even "whataboutism," then you've forgotten yourself. And you've forgotten what your role is in this great society. Violence begets violence. It's a game without a winner.

Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was murdered for engaging in the duty of American political discourse. If you were a fan of Charlie Kirk, then you saw the best of him. If you weren't, then you saw the worst of him. What is undeniably true was that he chose freely to enter into the world of politics. And in that surrendered his standing to be protected from public opinion. The instant that also means he's surrendered his standing to be safe from violence, we've lost our way.

Robert Bolt’s fictional version of Sir Thomas More’s words should be ringing in our ears.

"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man's laws, not God's—and if you cut them down... do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

Within the last two decades, North Korea has gained that capacity. While arguments can be made about the performance of their weapons, the way progress works in weapons development means they're never going to be less capable than they are today. Tomorrow they will be better. And sometime soon we won't have any realistic arguments against the reality that every day a place like North Korea doesn't decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Washington DC is a day they chose not to. This brings us to the scenario that Jacobsen's book takes on.

I'd try to avoid spoilers, but surprise isn't really the book's strength. Instead, it's the detail of how exactly the inevitable end we all want to avoid would unfold. It is, as she makes clear throughout, one scenario of many—purposely chosen to illustrate the madness of nuclear war. In it, North Korea launches a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Washington DC and multiple other U.S. locations. What ensues is a cascade that ends in the destruction of civilization in a little less than 72 minutes. For frame of reference, if you sat down to watch Jaws at about the time the first missile launched, with the world being exactly as it is today, downstream of millions of years of hominid evolution and tens of thousands of years of human history and progress, it would all be gone 10 minutes before you saw the shark. Much of the book's intended shock power is delivered through just how little time anyone has to do anything once the bubble goes up.

For me, there were three thoughts that the book kept surfacing that are worth unpacking.

The Silence Around Nuclear War

The first is just how little we talked about nuclear war during my time serving. One of my earliest memories was the 1983 made-for-TV nightmare movie The Day After, which detailed what would happen in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. It scared the daylights out of everyone, including President Reagan. Shortly after, the first significant bilateral discussions around nuclear disarmament ensued. Nukes and Russia were the biggest story of my entire childhood. Three years before I joined the service, the Soviet Union collapsed. And during my entire career, other than in my Annapolis differential equations class where we did word problems to calculate guidance systems on missile systems, I never had a professional discussion about nukes.This includes a decade when I had the highest security clearance a DOD member can have and served as the head of operations for a major Naval Special Warfare command.

During that time, multiple countries gained the capacity to strike the mainland United States with nuclear weapons. During that time, I had zero discussions or briefings on the nuclear capability of any nation in the areas we were operating. Granted, my direct focus didn't revolve around that capability, and I am over a decade removed from having any clearance at all. But it's reasonable to say that someone of my access level and seniority should not have been surprised by nearly every aspect of how nuclear capabilities and response processses currently work by reading about it in a book by a national defense correspondent.

The Contrast of Response Times

The second thought was just how different my experience in a conventional response to an attack on the U.S. was. In this, I have a unique perspective that only a few people on the planet share with me. I was on the ship that fired the first Tomahawk missile into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. While the earth ended in 72 minutes in Jacobsen's scenario, our response to 9/11 rumbled out of the forward launch tubes of my destroyer on October 7th, the day after Reuters reporters showed up to embed with us. Over the previous weeks, our ship made multiple trips in and out of the Gulf while, I presume, national leaders were weighing a myriad of responses. Eventually other ships met us off the coast of Pakistan (a nuclear armed country), where we all waited for a while. A few weeks later, the war started. It lasted 20 years; my whole career.

The feeling I can't shake is that so much focus was spent during the time I served on small-impact, counter-terrorism, small-unit SOF-focused capabilities that it's hard to understand how the same government organizations could own both ends of the spectrum of capabilities. It took us 10 years to find bin Laden and another 4 months to plan and execute the mission that killed him. There are more Navy SEAL movies than I can count. More guys I've worked with have written books about it than you would believe. There's a whole subculture of people cosplaying by wearing tactical gear as everyday clothes. Yet, I can't escape the sinking feeling that in the face of such terrifying power, we were all just angels dancing on the head of a pin. In truth, there's a version of that existential crisis for everyone.

The Moral Trap of Retaliation

The last thought is the one I know Jacobsen wanted me to have. Somewhere well into the scenario, it becomes clear that the die was cast. Our responses against the aggressor have created a cascade that has brought other players into the game, and the nuclear destruction of the United States is inevitable. The tension that followed was all focused on our ability to respond. I found myself rooting for the command structure to do what it was designed to do, to respond with a similar salvo that would ensure the destruction of the country that had joined to seal our fate. We were already dead or dying. And so the only way we could keep from losing was to ensure the world's fate would be sealed too. I couldn't easily come to the conclusion that the only truly human thing to do was to not response; to let someone live.

The point of the book is that this is how it will be for everyone. And countless war game scenarios show this. The whole system is based on deterrence. And once that fails, we're left with our instinct to keep score and exact retribution.

The Reality Check

The book is based on a scenario where most of the probabilities of outcomes were framed as a 1 or a 0. And all of the 1's stacked up to end the world in 72 minutes. In reality, that's not how probabilities work. If that were the case, and there really were only six minutes for the president to respond to an attack and 66 minutes later we'd all be dead, then what happens if it's Sunday? What happens if it's Christmas? What happens if it's at 2 AM?

Those questions take a little starch out of the reality of how the scenario is actually likely to work. But that doesn't erase the main theme of the message: Nuclear war is madness.

While the question of whether, at the margin, the existence of nuclear weapons makes us safer or brings us horribly close to annihilation is possibly unanswerable. There are certainly many better questions to spend time on that help keep us safer from the threat.

I asked GPT-5 to do a layered analysis of just how likely it was based on how the carrier skipper pipeline works and how the Naval Academy Brigade of Midshipmen is structured. And the numbers told me what I already knew. The chance that any Naval Academy grad is selected to be a carrier skipper is roughly 1 in 300; orders of magnitude higher than any other educational institution for obvious reasons but still highly improbable for any one graduate. The chance that two skippers come from back to back classes and were in the same one of 36 Brigade companies puts that number at close to 1 in 100,000.

There have only ever been 90,000 graduates of Annapolis over the last 170 years; only about 60,000 since modern aircraft carriers were a thing. Once you add in the likelihood of their assumption of commands happening in the same few weeks, the probability starts to spiral off into the exponentially low. There is no documented proof of it ever happening before (happy to be proved wrong). And we're not likely to ever see it again.

Besides the novel peculiarity of the event, there's another reason I'm writing about it. It was my company. And the years they were there were my years. One of them was my roommate. The other was in the same 12 person squad with me. For me, this is example number infinity that the real treasure of military service is the remarkable people you wander into when you serve. And the lesson of standing around next to one day towers of professional success when they were dumb college kids is worth sharing.

Now, I could spin a retroactively biased narrative of how there was something uniquely dynamic about my subgroup of academy friends to have such unlikely success happen twice. I'll pass on that, tempting as it is. For there really to be something there, we probably need a third skipper to pop out to make this more than a crazy coincidence. The better story to tell is what is gleaned from watching the extreme outliers of my once peer group over the last 25 years. That's the good stuff.

The lesson, contrary to many self help optimization books, is not really about talent or motivation. I've had the good fortune of working in extremely high performing groups. So I've mostly been surrounded by energetic, talented, smart, charismatic people. Nearly all of them have not made it to the top of their domains though. Because that's not how the tops of career mountains work. There's always just a few. And the few that have, these two carrier skippers included, don't separate themselves by talent or motivation. Instead, they all seem to have two zero defect things in common:

The first is focus. If you're talented and motivated, you can be anything. But you can't be everything. So if the top of the mountain is what you seek, you usually only get one mountain that big. And it helps to start climbing it early. That's lesson one.

The second one is really the great filter. And it's not a popular one because it goes against a lot of current popular social narratives. It's commitment. And the hard reality that most of the time, you really can't have it all.

There are lots of focused, talented people. But there are few that are truly committed. And by committed I mean willing to drag themselves and everyone they care about through decades of sacrifices most people would never consider for any reward in the world. They live places they don't want to live. They spend months and even years away from loved ones. They miss holidays and birthdays. They deal with bosses they hate and unwinnable tasks they can't walk away from for pay they almost always could improve on if they chose to jump ship. They put off buying homes. They never live in homes they bought. And their families are mostly defined by being the spouses and kids of whatever it is that they had their eye on being. It's not for everyone. In fact, it's barely for anyone at all. Which is the point.

Lesson two is that you can have it all. As long as the all that you seek fits into the suitcase you're willing to haul up the mountain.

Focus. And commitment. Those are the two filters that narrow the talent peak. You can make mistakes and survive. You can move at variable speeds to the goal. But you can't get off the mountain. And you can't get to the top of one by completing an equally daunting task of climbing many smaller ones.

One of the great experiences I've had in life is watching old friends realize their lifelong goals at the end of the massive sacrifices they've made. This experience is another wonderful example. I remember those two when we were where we were together. I'd be lying if I said I thought that either of them would be where they are today. Not because I doubted their ability. But because the thing that was going to decide it was the sort of thing you just can't see when you're starting out. There are no shortcuts. You've got to go through it. And they did.

I knew pretty early on that I wasn't the one path sort. That doesn’t mean that I was immune from the pangs of envy along the way, watching my peers take command of ships and fighter squadrons or being named to the C level of powerful multinational firms or drive to work every day to the White House. It helped me come to the reckoning that while my approach cost me the upper bounds of focused success, I'd bought an amazing and eclectic path of my own. And that's its own mountain in and of itself.

Once you cross that mental bridge, perspective is easy to find. And you're free to experience the wins of those that were a part of your journey as you should; with the joy and appreciation that really only comes from witnessing success end to end. Family wins are the best wins. And that's what this was.

Bravo Zulu Gents. You’re a long way from deck 4-2. And we're all damned proud of you. Free 19.

What's remarkable is that, without grasping cultural cues and with only a partial understanding of the "messages," he still gravitates toward content of higher quality; more precisely, to individual scenes he replays again and again. That tells me something bridges how I see the world and how he sees it, running at a level below intellectual comprehension.

The scene where Master Oogway ascends to the afterlife is close to perfect.

Finding Nemo is nearly perfect end to end. Albert Brooks is flawless in it. So are multiple moments in Wall‑E.

Mandy Patinkin is perfect in The Princess Bride a film that is one of the few live action works that makes it into the rotation, because if any live action story has characters, pacing, and dialogue so precise they feel animated, it's The Princess Bride. Rob Reiner should know his movie can be watched 200 times and the sword‑fighting dialogue never wilts.

Whatever makes a piece of two-dimensional media with sound "perfect" is more than we understand. It isn't just the visuals, the music, or the jokes. There's a pace and texture to the dialogue my son can feel without tracking it at the intended intellectual level.

But, I promise I will not kill you until you reach the top.

That's VERY comforting, but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.

I hate waiting.

We don't know exactly what shapes Aidan's cognitive profile. He shows tremendous spatial intelligence and can solve many complex tasks. In some ways he follows directions better than a typical teenager; in others he lacks the context to manage basic things. Brain scans show everything structurally sound, but much of his capacity seems rerouted into sensory channels. He has near‑eidetic memory for places and recalls the pitch and rhythm of every scene he loves. He "leaves us" and acts them out, replaying them in his mind.

Yet his selections aren't random.

The moments he can't stop watching are deeply crafted visual and auditory works. Some common ground exists between the artists who designed those scenes and whatever is happening inside his head, and that ground is untouched by his disabilities.

Whoever animated the rose petals that carry Oogway off into eternity created something beautiful in both my world and my son's. In that beauty we meet. I'm trying to live more in that shared space, because it feels like a core part of being human.

Which brings me to the contemporary conversation on AI. Large language models and image generators use mathematical prediction on unimaginable data sets to mimic artistic and intellectual choices. When I watch my son rewind Wall‑E dancing with Eve, I wonder: does an algorithm built on rational data inputs see what he sees? Can it replicate that experience?

LLMs might write poems. But I'm not sure they're traversing the same mental highway that connects us. Their artificial neural network is on the outside of Thomas Nagel's What It's Like to Be a Bat problem. It can mimic what the product of our imagination is. But they don't have the ability to understand what it is like for us…to be us. The math that is them is still downstream of Nagel's key claim, which is that an organism is conscious if there is "something it is like" to be that organism. This "what it is like-ness" (qualia) is tied to the organism's particular sensory point of view: a bat's echolocation, for example, yields a mode of experience humans cannot fully grasp or reconstruct from the outside.

My son does not have the same sensory input that I have. Or at least it's not routed to the same parts of the brain in the same ways as a neurotypical person. And so, like Nagel says, I don't actually know what it's like to be him. Not in a way where I can't empathize with other people with wide personal experience differentials from me. In a way so profound that he can't actually exist productively in a world that is built for a differently shaped consciousness.

Even if we build a system whose information processing and behavior are functionally indistinguishable from ours, Nagel says we still have no guarantee that there is anything it is like to be that system. Functional descriptions, source code, or objective read‑outs may replicate what brains do but do not capture what experiences feel like. Thus the mere fact that a large language model (or a future robot) passes behavioral tests such as the Turing test cannot settle the question of sentience.Nagel's challenge is "the explanatory gap": a gulf between objective accounts of physical processes and the emergence of first‑person experience.

Aidan’s experience with cinematic art, though, actually gives me some hope to believe.There are still bridges between us humans AI may never actually truly realize at a conscious level, but still may traverse in a way that connects us. What I see in the explanatory gap between my version of consciousness and my son's represents a hard block to artificial sentience. But not for utility. In the sort of Wall Facer problem that blocks out the bot's ability to predict what it's like to be him because he has no ability to share his internal reality with the mediums that create the data required to predict. The machine can only use what is outside of our heads. It can be from us, but not of us. But it can connect us.

Aidan’s a bat. And I can't create a common consciousness between a bat and I. But I suspect AI will one day. We've come a long way creating a shared world with people we once thought hopelessly impaired when we decided not to throw them away. And maybe in my lifetime, or his, we can do it with people like my son. For me the AI discussion isn’t about whether we can create consciousness where there is none yet. But instead connect ones divided by the abyss of perspective.