When Marisa’s water broke at 1:30am on a Sunday morning, my bag was not packed, I was very asleep, and I was slightly hungover from substantial meals at two different Italian restaurants the day prior. Our OB had us scheduled a week out, which, to me, meant that date was 100% locked.

Turns out biology didn’t get the zoom invite.

8 hours later we had Austin, the second addition to our growing collection of kids.

Doublin’ Up

What an entirely different experience it is having your second.

First off, you don’t get bullied by the nurses any more - no more power plays using your naivete against you.

With Miles they loved pulling the “oh you must be first-time parents…” card. That swaddle blanket they give you? They wrap it up beautifully. Snug as a bug. You try it? Baby busts out in seconds. It’s a carnival trick. It’s unwinnable.

The second time, the minute they saw me pick up Austin and sling him around like a pro, they looked at me and said “second kid?” Once I answered in the affirmative we got a lot less “advice”. I even beat the swaddle game.

But for all the experience we had, I was amazed at how little I remembered about the first birth. I must have asked four times “is this a new policy?” only to hear “no sir, we’ve been doing this for 20 years.” The uncertainty of a new child, what it needs, and if you’re inadvertently doing something that will impede its chances of getting into an ivy league school overwhelmed my brain’s attempts to store memories.

The second time around, however, all the uncertainty is gone. You know what you’re doing, which means you can just chill with your kid in a way that was never possible with the first. For the past two weeks I’ve appreciated my time with Austin so much more, almost intentionally trying to fill my memory bucket because I know this tiny human stage is fleeting.

Same Same But Different

The one wrinkle to all this parental self-assurance is size. Miles came out as a percentile cube: 96% in height, weight, and head circumference. 9 pounds 3 ounces isn’t a normal baby: it’s a big hoss with durability.

Austin? 6 pounds 10 ounces. WTF? What is that? What do I do with that? Do I use chopsticks to hold him?

Miles had legs out of a Fernando Botero painting.

Austin’s legs looked like a discarded pile of picked over chicken wings.

He was, and is, immensely cute and fun to hold onto, but my word, what a curveball.

After three days in the hospital changing this baby who had basically no butt and no body, we arrived home back to Miles, now 30 pounds. Boy were we in for a shock.

The first time I changed Miles again it was like changing a fully grown human male. I took off his diaper to find a grown man ass with a grown man poop staring up at me. Ever thought about changing your friend’s diaper? It was like that. Everything about him was enormous relative to Austin.

Brothers in Arms

Which brings us home to the biggest question mark surrounding any second birth - how will the first react? I’ve heard stories of kids covering their baby siblings in clothes to pretend like they don’t exist. I’ve heard kids say “ok, they can go now!” I’ve heard parents tell of mammoth meltdowns as the first can’t comprehend a contender for their throne.

Fortunately, Miles went all in as big brother (except one or two mild freakouts). What an absolute relief. He loves nothing more than going up to Austin and just touching his head for a solid 30 seconds. He says “Auw-ten” (but not “Mommy”, which I find hilarious). Any dad’s hope is that they have sons that can hang out, wrassle around, and generally expend energy together. 14 days in and it’s looking good.

Of course there will be moments where both need something at once and it will seem overwhelming. Of course Austin won’t be a carbon copy of Miles and there will be new problems to solve. But overall we are as excited about being parents of two kids as we were about one. It might even be more fun.

When you have your first child, it is momentous. A small human that was not in the world is suddenly very much so and is completely your responsibility. Their face is smooshed, they’re covered in fluids you can’t pronounce, and they’re just as uncertain about the next few hours as you are.

All of the sudden, you are a parent.

Candidly, I did not have some sort of religious experience upon the birth of Miles. “Being a parent changes you, man” some people say, the italics insinuating that the emergence of a son is similar to a weekend on ayahuasca in the mountains of Mexico. But all my changes have been normal. Or rather, they have been external. I now have a new person in my life that I love. Fantastic. That person doesn’t know how to talk, drive, or use the toilet. Not so fantastic.

My world has changed so I have changed.

And one of the biggest changes has been how I see this new world. What you know is what you notice, and moving from a non-parent to a parent has meant seeing things that previously blended into the background. Fortunately, as much as I loved the absurdity of single life, the world of parents is crazy on a major league level. One year in, here’s what I’ve noticed thus far.

Disclaimer: I did not read my last post on being a parent before writing this one. What follows could be incredibly contradictory and inconsistent. Isn’t that fun?

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Your Child, The Therapist

Anything difficult you used to say your to your wife’s face, you can now say through your kid. It’s groundbreaking. It’s passive aggressive, but it’s so passive the aggressiveness can sneak through unnoticed.

• “Hey Miles, do you think daddy took out the garbage? Let’s see!”

• “Yeah Miles, I agree, Mom’s chicken is a bit undercooked.”

• “What’s that Miles? Daddy is driving a little fast?”

Better yet, it’s not even one way! You can also use your kid to respond, or even have a full conversation.

• “You know, Miles, I was going to take out the garbage but then I got busy changing your diaper!”

• “Miles, do you think Daddy knows he set the temperature on the oven too low? I don’t think so either!”

• “Hey Miles, are you cranky? Did you want to get home asap before having a meltdown? Oh so you want me to drive a bit faster?”

I see no negative repercussions for our children after enduring 18 years of this, and, in fact, we could see thousands of dollars saved in marriage counseling.

How are more people not talking about this?

How To Judge Other Parents In The Right Way

To be human is to judge. We can’t help it. The car someone drives, the music they listen to, they way they use emojis in their texts - we’re always judging whether we like it not.

Before being a parent, I absolutely judged other parents. Whether their kid was 3 months old or 16 years old, I saw parenting in action and I had a view on it. More often than not, that view was “I could do it better.”

Ha!

A year in, I’ve created a new rule: I can only judge parents in situations I’ve already experienced. This unfortunately significantly reduces my universe, but it also acknowledges that I can’t not judge, so I might as well judge what I know.

Have a six month old but also have a 3 year old? You get a free pass. All my knowledge on what I think works for your baby is heavily diluted by the fact that you also have a 3 year old terrorist stalking your house.

Have one kid that’s two years old? I so badly want to think that Miles is close enough in age that I can dispense nutritious nuggets of wisdom upon your family. But given three months ago Miles couldn’t even walk, how can I possibly know what he’ll be like when he’s 100% older than he is now?

I know, I know: even if someone is in the exact same situation I am, there are a million unknown external factors that are different. Of course there are, but until you find my judgement switch, I need some sort of outlet!

Intentionality, Not Certainty

Have you met someone who is absolutely certain about everything? Do you like that person? Probably not.

My interactions with other parents have been the same. The least enjoyable other parents are the ones who are certain that how they are raising their kids is the single best way. This certainty then insinuates that you, as a different parent, are an idiot for not doing the same.

Search “parenting” on Amazon and you get 65 results all with 4.5+ star ratings. That means that for the first book, there are thousands of parents saying “this worked for me!” That means that for the second book, which says something different than the first book, there are thousands of parents saying “this worked for me!” And so on and so forth for book after book after book.

No one has cracked parenting. Science has not yet been able to scan a baby and say “there is a 100% chance that if you breastfeed, let them outside once a day, read these three books each night, and have them do cold plunges on Sundays, they will be in the top 1% of humans.”

Even worse, in 50 years we’ll look back in horror on something we’re doing now. Remember plastics? In Dustin Hoffman’s 1967 breakout role in Mrs. Robinson we learned “there’s a great future in plastics”. Fast forward to 2025 and there’s a not-so-great future in microplastics. At least one mainstay in our life right now, some thing that our kids are exposed to, will turn out to be harmful. Can you guess which one?

That’s why certainty is so irritating. With so much unknowable, how are you professing to know it all? That’s why my favorite parents are the ones who have intention and consistency. They are the ones who sit down, think about it, choose a path that feels right to them, and then follow it until something indicates they should change. When you talk to them, they lay out the why’s and follow it up with “what about you guys?”

When that’s your approach as a parent, I don’t care if you’re renting baby orangutangs to help socialize your kid - if you’ve got a reason and are open to it not working, then have at it!

The Great Screen Debate

Before kids, I was one of those people who said “it’s really sad. You go on a plane and all these kids are just zombied out in front of screens the whole flight. It’s just negligent.”

Here’s what I didn’t know: over the age of 6 months, planes are a kid’s worst nightmare. Oh we flew to Florida and France and California when Miles was under 6 months. We were young and fancy free parents with a kid who could travel anywhere. Then, a day before we left France, Miles learned to crawl. There is nothing else he wanted to do, and for 9 hours on the plane, crawling was the one thing that wasn’t allowed. Also Marisa had bad Covid. It was a catastrophe.

With the introduction of a phone and Miss Rachel and Coco Melon and other mildly annoying shows out there, Miles now sits still. Is this a dangerous sedative we’re now employing that will have long term impacts?

Here’s the answer which I didn’t appreciate before: screens used with a purpose - to endure a stretch of time that otherwise would be miserable for all involved - is a win for everybody. My prior assumption was that all these kids were living 24/7 in front of their screens, that the scene on the airplane was representative of their entire life. For some, it might have been, but for others, it was a short term salve that was removed when the plane ride ended.

Screens obviously will be a part of any kid’s life - 2nd graders use iPads now instead of textbooks - but my initial judgement around exposing kids to screens was based on the moment in time I was most aware of it: the airplane I was stuck in for hours. Now that I have a kid to manage 24 hours a day, I am as far from worried about screens as you can get.

Final Grade: B+

One year in I’d give us an B+. It was an A, but I took us down one third a letter grade for every 75 times Miles has bumped his head. Also he almost choked on a small leaf he took from a bush outside but I didn’t know plants were a threat so I’m giving myself a pass.

He’s alive. He’s happy. He seems to be thriving. He still likes to share for the time being. I think we’re doing a pretty good job.

Now if we can just follow the same exact playbook for the second, third, and fourth we’ll be golden. Wait what? Kids can have different personalities? Oh boy.

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Prior to being a dad I pontificated on how to be one. Now that I have 6 months under my belt, I feel certified to offer advice to anyone and everyone. I’ve cracked parenthood. An online course is forthcoming for the low price of 12 payments of $24.99.

At the very least this 6 months has given me a wonderful vantage point from which to view the magic and mystery of having my own kids.  Far from advice, this is a quick rundown of certain lessons that have consistently crept up. And if this is the result of only 6 months with only one kid, I can only imagine how much more I still have to learn.

Parenting Cannot Be Equal

I view myself as a proud member of the Fatherhood 2.0 generation. It’s a more hands-on, shared responsibility, time-in-the-trenches approach to being a dad than the model of the last 2,000+ years. While I do believe I deserve heaps of credit for my sacrifices, it’s worth pointing out that it is almost impossible to create a truly equal parenting structure.

Using time spent with your kid as the main metric to measure parental contribution is the source of the problem. Very quickly an illusion forms that if, at the end of day, we both have spent 12 hours total taking care of our kid, then the parenting is equal.

But then it only takes a few reflective moments to realize how much work Marisa is doing behind the scenes. That onesie I just grabbed out the drawer didn’t just magically appear. The daycare and pediatrician visits didn’t schedule themselves.

Fatherhood 2.0 very much relies on Motherhood 1.0.

Tell Me Why Your Kid Is Special

I believe there are two reasons pediatricians tell you what percentile your kid is in for weight and length. The first is scientific: once you know the percentile, you can figure out if your kid is growing in a healthy trajectory. The second is purely psychological: parents are looking for any fact they can share with the world to prove how amazing their kids are, because in turn it shows how great they are as parents.

Miles is currently in the 99th percentile of length. I do not consider this an accomplishment for anyone involved. Yet I’ve heard other parents brag about these very same statistics. I get it. Everyone wants to be in the 1%. But I think we’re all grasping at straws for this one. Do you know what it takes to be in the 99th percentile of height for a 33 year old male? 6 foot 3. Not exactly life-changing stuff.

Over the next few years, I will meet parents whose kids are veritable prodigies. I will hear how Timmy tied his shoes two months ahead of schedule. I’ll need to feign fascination as Sammy’s dad revels in her preschool reading ability. Certainly there are landmarks to applaud, but in these early years the time span between accomplishments is so condensed that to think any one person or family has already won is absolutely absurd.

Why Is Everyone So Negative?

When you first tell people you’re going to have a kid, they respond with joy. They hug you and tell you what a blessing it will be. There is no better community than the one surrounding you from pregnancy until you give birth.

But boy does that community turn dark quickly. 

Tell someone your kid is sleeping through the night and they’ll immediately respond with “well that will change, just wait until their sleep regression…” Tell someone you’re having fun with your first kid and they’ll respond with “you know what they say, your second kid is going to be a nightmare.” I’ve even heard stories of women telling other women they had an easy childbirth only to find themselves excommunicated from the Church of Eternal Suffering.

It’s like everyone has the flu and is mad at you for not having it. If “having kids is the best” why does it seem like once you’re in it, everyone wants to linger on the downsides instead of celebrating the upsides? I get wanting to bond over the common hardships all parents face, but bonding over the the times that are a ton of fun seems like a healthy - and necessary - counterbalance.

I’m happy to acknowledge that raising kids is not all rosy, but if 25%+ of my life is going to be spent focused on it, you better believe I’m not hunkering down for two decades of depression. Is this going to dictate who my parent friends will end up being? Almost certainly!

Why Infants Strain Marriages

Speaking of downsides, a baby’s potential negative impact on our marriage is one thing we heard over and over again. Before having a kid, it made sense conceptually, but now it’s very clear how two adults who love each other can devolve into incompatible monsters.

It all starts with sleep. The ability to tolerate stress, rationally solve problems, and clearly communicate is all strongly linked to how rested you are. 

An infant tips both sides of the scale. In those first few weeks, a baby Oppenheimers your entire sleep schedule. All the while, they introduce an unsolvable puzzle into your relationship. They don’t care what parenting books you read. How they are feeling now is completely unrelated to how they were just feeling. Like Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious, they live their life one quarter mile at a time.

Without sleep, you’re both working at 60% capacity. It’s easier to blame the other person for not doing something right than to spend the energy to collaboratively come up with four different solutions, none of which may work.

There’s no one way to overcome this, but there are ways to mitigate it. Can you make sure one person is rested at any given time? Can either person find a way to raise their hand when they’re absolutely spent and say “heads up, I’m a zombie!”? And when something goes wrong can you find some time to sketch out what you’ll do next time?

The smallest steps can lead to happiness all around.

Frustration vs. Despair

Babies are blobs. Babies make noises. Babies seem helpless. So when you see a helpless blob on the floor making noises that sound an awful lot like crying, the first instinct is to pick them up or solve whatever problem you think they’re having. 

I, personally, don’t think we’re giving babies enough credit. First off, we have to forgive them for only having one way to communicate. After extensive research I’ve found that “WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH” means anything from:

• I think I have fingers, which kind of freaks me out.

• There is a toy I want that is out of reach.

• A strange noise just happened and I may have been responsible.

• I’m incredibly hungry.

• I thought you had disappeared.

• I bonked my head and it hurts.

• I’d like to travel to that side of the room but I can’t.

• I make noises because I can and it’s fun.

It took a little time to overcome the “my baby is in peril” instinct that a wail/cry induces, but my god it was great once we did. Because then we were able to let Miles be frustrated, to figure it out, to learn what was merely a passing discomfort. And then of course we were there when things really did go south.

Principles vs. Playbooks

Expectations are everything. And kids have a habit of not adhering to any of your expectations. There are certainly step-by-step guides on how to execute every aspect of parenthood, and each of those guides has plenty of positive views on Amazon, and at times, each of those guides directly contradicts one another.

We learned this the hard way when we wanted Miles to sleep through the night. We read four different books, and tried to follow them all. Ever try to mix four different recipes? The outcome is very bad banana bread.

Having principles vs. tactics has been far more helpful in their flexibility and adaptability. I want our kids to be resilient, curious, kind, and self-motivated. (That list has not been vetted with Marisa and it will probably change, but it feels like a good starting point.) 

That means “sleep training” is less about waking a baby up exactly at 4:15am for exactly 4.5oz and more about the kid learning that it’s ok to wake up and go back to sleep. It means that sometimes they sleep less and sometimes they sleep more. It means that schedules are more like the New York City subway than the trains in Zurich - it’ll get you there, but within a 20 minute window.

We’ve “failed” on this front in really only one area so far: freakin' Miles won’t eat unless the bottle is perfectly warmed. Absolute diva. Doesn’t touch it if it’s too cold. That’s on us, and honestly if we want to overcome it we’d have to endure a few terrible feedings but we’d probably win out in the end.

Getting Back to Normal Life

This one I think we’ve done a decent job at, but not a great one. Of course there is no going back to the exact same life, schedule, routine, flexibility etc that we had before becoming parents. But we both thought it was extremely important to inch our way in that direction from day 1. 

Travel was a huge priority. Be it NYC to Florida car rides or NYC to LA flights, we bit the bullet early and cannonballed into the deep end. As with most things in life, the fear and pressure you feel standing in the security line with a baby and car seat is 80% imagined. Did I hate being the people holding up the line? Of course. Did my heart rate elevate as the car seat didn’t go through the first time because I didn’t yet know that the handle needs to go into a certain position? Yeah, I wasn’t thrilled. Does anyone in that line remember who I am four months later? No, of course not.

Just as with learning stick shift, having a baby plops you right back into normal life but with reduced skills. All of the sudden, you, hi, you’re the problem it’s you with the crying baby or stroller blocking the sidewalk. You’re the one who’s a little less willing to venture out because staying home is just that much easier.

A few things got us over this hump. First off, the more new situations a baby is put in the better (resiliency, curiosity). Second off, the happier we are the happier our baby will be. I don’t know if there’s any science behind this but I can’t imagine it’s great for the kid to feel responsible for the parents losing out on life. Third, it’s all actually easier than we thought. The first time is always the hardest. Find ways to be ready to feed them and let them nap on the go and you can get away with a lot.

6 Months In, 6^3 Months to Go

There you go. That’s all you need to know in just a few paragraphs! The good news is I’m sure it only gets easier when they stop being a blob, start moving around, start talking, and start having opinions. I’m also pretty sure adding a few more kids to the mix doesn’t change anything. Don’t worry - I’ll be sure to report back.

Imagine if tomorrow Denmark invaded Latvia, Malaysia invaded the Philippines, and Israel invaded Palestine - what would the front page of the New York Times look like? Which would get top billing? Which would get left off the front page entirely?

Let’s make it even more interesting. Say all those things happen tomorrow, but then add in that:

• The U.S. men’s soccer team also wins the World Cup

• A Republican Congressman is found to have leaked sensitive documents to the Russians

• A Democratic Senator is caught embezzling $10 million meant for semiconductor subsidies

Each newspaper and media outlet would have to decide what to emphasize. Each front page would look different. And each reader would have a slightly different view of the world based on who they chose to read.

Is The News Facts?

At its most general, the news is just humans sitting at their desk, doing their job, spending their days making a living. It’s humans making things for humans. That’s why I find it a little funny how, especially since Covid, news organizations have reached sports-team levels of loyalty. Who you are is who you read, and you better be ready to fight about where you get your news from!

For most people I know, they lean on one, maybe two, publications. The usual defense of their preference comes down to some form of “objectivity”, as in “the New York Times has lost the plot; the Wall Street Journal I’ve found to be far more objective.”

This is where I start to chuckle. Because the issue is all news is subjective! A human’s judgment is involved in every part of the process. Whether it’s a daily newspaper or a weekly magazine like the Economist, each one creates its own universe.

I’m most likely the 12,000th person to state this point, so I thought it would be fun to share what I find to be the quite humorous - albeit essential - process of reporting the news.

Caveat: Who am I to explain the news, you may ask? Well in 2009 I interned on a CNBC talk show for a summer. That’s the sum total of my experience. Feel free to hold it against me.

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The News, Start to Finish

A thing happens in the world

• Be they large or small, millions of things happen each day.

• Examples: the opening of Kazakhstan's largest mall, a mudslide in Oregon, the Guatemalan President’s daughter’s quinceañera, a tech IPO creating a new world’s richest person.

A news organization finds out that thing happens

• Be it through Twitter, wire services that exist to break news around the world like the Associated Press, or through the news organizations’ own reporters.

The head of the news organization or head of one of its divisions decides to report on it

• An organization’s mandate, its values, its understanding of its audience - some secret potion of leadership’s opinions combines to say “on this day, we have decreed that we will cover this story. We also have decreed that we will not cover that other story.”

Someone on the staff is assigned to investigate the story

• That reporter then needs to reach out to both people they know and don’t know to get details on the thing they’ve been assigned to cover. Who, what, when, where, why.

Based on who the reporter is able to speak with and research, at some point they decide they have enough to write a story

• If a reporter has a source they have become close with, and that source gives them details, then those details make it into the story.

• One government agency has a set of numbers on Covid transmission based on a certain approach to data collection. A think tank has a different set of numbers based on their own approach. An internal research team has created their own proprietary methodology. The decision to make one of them the authority will most likely change publication by publication.

• Corroboration, multiple sources etc probably vary depending on the standards of the organization.

The reporter writes the story and the editor edits it

• Was a 52% to 48% election victory a “landslide”, a “drubbing”, a “historic win”, a “contested battle”, a “narrow defeat”, an “upset”, or merely a “52% to 48% election victory”?  

• The feelings of the writer, the values of the organization, and the overall style guide mean any number of outcomes are possible. Yet the words used will inform how the story is consumed and how the consumer will understand the event.

The final story is placed by the organization’s leadership on the website and newspaper

• Front and center on Page 1, punctuated with a picture, is miles from a mere 500 words on Page 12. The number of people who consume the news beyond the first four headlines most likely decays exponentially.

• What we read is what we believe, so the first four headlines shape our world.

Other considerations:

• A journalist gets a tip about a potentially large story. The organization needs to decide if it’s worth spending time investigating over a period of weeks or months to see if it holds water. That decision most likely varies depending on the topic, the industry, and the people it may impact.

  • One organization spends money investigating Trump’s potential collusion with Russia. The other spends money investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop. The readers of each will see more stories about whichever story an organization has chosen to pursue… regardless of the final outcome.

• The editorial section of a paper theoretically is independent of the news section. The editors write out an opinion on a subject that is then considered the opinion of that organization. But more likely than not, the views of the editors correlate with the news that is then reported by their organization. A conservative view most likely means you will see more news stories about frackers being hindered by regulations. A liberal view most likely means stories about Congress blocking subsidies for solar panels.

Just Leave Me In Peace To Read My Paper

As an overthinker myself, I understand that getting too meta about anything can turn your brain into meta-mush. There’s no reason you can’t just read a news story and say “huh, that’s interesting.” But having a general awareness that a story and the words used to describe the story were chosen for you makes you less likely to treat any one news organ as gospel. 

At the very least, defending any news organization as the paragon of objectivity seems a fruitless hill to die on… because how many humans do you know that are objective?

About a year ago, I floated the idea of a podcast to a couple of my family and friends. I said “I love talking to people about what they do for work, what if I just created a podcast around that?” One family member said “that sounds boring.” One of my buddies responded “is that really what you want to spend time on?” And then at a group dinner, three times I mentioned it and three times my friends all pretended I hadn’t said anything and continued the previous line of conversation.

Colby Howard Wants Your Job

Yet a year later, here we are, three episodes into Colby Howard Wants Your Job, the podcast where, yes, I literally sit people down and talk to them about what the hell they do with their day. Because, if we’re being honest, your friend who’s a lawyer… do you actually know what they do when they go into the office? I sure don’t.

I find that odd. Alongside sleeping, work is where we spend most of our lives. Yet if we look into all those windows of all those buildings on all those streets, we know so little about how any of us is spending our hours. When I lived in L.A., it was uncouth to talk about work (most likely because all my acting friends couldn’t get a job). Fortunately, I live in New York City, where work is work, work is life, work is social, work is identity. This fits my specific curiosity perfectly.

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No One Needs Another Podcast: SOLVED

Now let’s quickly address the collective groan I heard when you all read the headline of this post. Yes, in this world overflowing with content, I have thrown yet another voice into the ring. No, I am not a celebrity or athlete that has juicy behind the scenes stories about working with Martin Scorsese or Simone Biles. But, hear me out, I think I’ve got something here that could lead to longevity and some sort of success.

While choosing the title “Colby Howard Wants Your Job” is inherently self-promotional and self-serving, I am not actually the star of the show. This means you don’t have to love me to love the podcast. My job is to make each of my guests the star, to take regular people doing regular jobs and allow them to shine. Each listener, me included, then has the opportunity to walk away knowing a bit more about how the world works. If I’m a bad interviewer this all falls apart, so we’ll see.

The topic itself is both a blessing and a curse. Done poorly it will be dry as aged dust; done well it could be a topic with hundreds of jobs to explore and thus unending possibility. Most podcasts die of exhaustion before getting to episode ten, so knowing that I can interview literally anyone is a nice comfort. Of course, trying to convince and schedule people is certainly more work than if I chose to just monologue at a camera for 30 minutes and call it an episode, but I’m hoping that success - whatever that means - will be more forthcoming if there is substance and education packed into each.

Illuminating each job also means that each episode could potentially be evergreen - reacting to George Santos claiming to be a volleyball star at a college he didn’t attend feels more tied to the time it happened than an interview with a white collar criminal defense lawyer walking through how he navigates the US judicial system. I could watch the latter a year after it was published and feel just as satisfied.

Potential Downsides

As for the risks, there are two that stand out

1. What if the guest is boring?

2. What if people don’t want to come on because no one’s trying to get fired?

As for number one, I’ve filmed seven of these already and only one guest had any experience in front of a camera. All seven turned out to be fascinating. It’s on me to ask good questions, it’s on me to prepare, and it’s on them to wonder out loud how I know so little. Most guests have voiced concerns about coming off as boring, to which the answer is easy: what is obvious and mundane to them is interesting to everyone else. They do it every day; we’ve never done it. 

As for people getting fired, yeah, that would be a real problem if every one of my guests got canned for saying things on the podcast. But again, everything I’m doing is designed to make them a star. They can speak freely and I just edit out anything that wouldn’t be viewed positively by anyone in the outside world. The point isn’t to uncover every illicit workplace romance, the point is to expand our horizons just a little bit more. So far, the proof is in the pudding. The top white collar criminal law firm posted my interview with Josh on their website. Guess it was positive…

The Point Where I Reflect

I said this wasn’t about me, but the amount I’ve learned already - not only from the guests but also the process of getting this off the ground - has been extremely gratifying. In each interview, there have been at least three separate points where I think “am I bad at this? Quick ask a new question! Oh no this is the episode where it all falls apart.” Inevitably I look at the footage afterwards, see that there were numerous great moments, and then edit it into a 35-45 minute chunk of content that everyone will enjoy.

Even better, I’m at the beginning of this journey so there are so many easy things to get better at. At first my chair resembled a Cuisinart with all my nervous swiveling. Then I overcorrected in some posed form of insinuated relaxation. Then I found a happy medium. At first I didn’t prepare at all, then I overprepared, and now I’m tinkering with having some consistent set of prepared questions. At first it took me five hours on a Sunday to merely edit my first episode. Now it takes me only ~3 hours a week to do everything from interview, edit, and prepare the highlights for social media.

Above all, the dumber I’m willing to seem, the better the episode is. To quote my first episode guest, Clay Skipper:

I love that I’ll continually get better.

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The Next Episode, The Next Job

So far I’ve interviewed a:

• Journalist for GQ

• White Collar Criminal Defense Lawyer

• Cattle Ranch Manager

• Executive Search Recruiter

• Netflix Producer

• Fashion Designer

• Private Equity VP

Have someone who would be great to interview? Let me know!

And in the meantime, take a listen, if you enjoy it, share with your friends! Listen on Spotify or watch it on YouTube. Can’t wait to hear your feedback.

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If you were to look at some of my past posts you could very easily get a sense of wandering, dabbling, and dilettantism. “Oh so he’s writing country songs now? Whatever happened to that site he made around recommendations for where to live? Seems like he hasn’t posted on the blog recently either, guess that’s another thing that didn’t last…”

That would not be an entirely unfair assessment. In the beginning, I was just bopping around, pulled in different directions by impulse and interest. In my free time I would work on something up until the point where it was ready to interact with the outside world, and then I would move on. Country songs I wrote basically for myself. I got them to a finished product, something I was proud of, then declined to cross the massive chasm that separates creative completion from commercial success. It’s a chasm so rarely conquered, and I decided it wasn’t worth my time and energy. 

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Same with RELO, the recommendation platform I built for where to live. I finished it, people could use it, and I even leaned on it to get some insights on where Marisa and I should move next. But then figuring out how to get other people to visit and use it? To figure out what advertising looked like? To, I don’t know, get an influencer to mention it on TikTok? That was a massive effort and might have been a good amount of money as well. In the end, I didn’t think the opportunity was big enough, nor the amount of time I could commit to it great enough to merit continuing. (And thank god I didn’t. AI + Redfin is pretty cool.)

It turns out that with these endeavors I had a vague sense of strategy that has since crystallized in hindsight: to pursue and build something up to the point where I could properly evaluate if it had legs. For country music and RELO, the answer was no (at least for now). But eventually, the theory was that if I pursued enough things, I would find one where I believed the effort to commercialize it would be worth it. I would be convinced enough of its viability that I would be willing to run against all the requisite brick walls until one cracked.

And So I Wrote A Book

This meant that in late November when I told myself I was finally going to write the book on my time acting in L.A., I couldn’t know if the end result was going to be another creative exercise or the thing that finally hit. The beauty of writing the blog, building an algorithm and website from scratch, and writing country songs was that I knew I would at least enjoy the adventure, and thus the adventure was worth taking - regardless of the outcome. All of my previous endeavors also underpinned the feeling that I had reached a point of confidence and competency to tackle a whole book. I had no guarantee other people would enjoy reading it, but I felt well-enough equipped to at least complete the project.

Fortunately I did finish it, but unfortunately a book is the thing I’m deciding to pursue commercially. I say unfortunately because I’m not a celebrity, not a known entity in the literary world, and didn’t escape the Taliban - in other words, my memoir has almost no chance of getting professionally published.

But that’s what makes this so exciting. I get to learn from all the mistakes I made acting in L.A. in pursuit of getting a book published about acting in L.A. How fun! For example, every publishing industry process and rule is designed to keep me out, which means I can’t actually follow the industry rulebook. And unlike my time acting, I don’t pay the rent through writing so I can afford to play the long game, a precious advantage. Finally, unlike my acting skills, I think the book is very good, something worthy of being published. As any salesperson will tell you, it’s a hell of a lot easier to sell something you believe in.

My next post will be about the absolute blast that was writing the book and some things I learned along the way, but for now, I leave you with a quick synopsis. Whether in six months or six years, I hope we’ll all be able to pick it up in a bookstore. (Know any agents? I wouldn’t mind talking with them…)

How to Lose It All In L.A.: A Quarter-Life Crisis Gone Hilariously Wrong

In this comedic memoir a twentysomething investment banker leaves everything he knows to pursue acting in L.A. As he descends deeper into the dark recesses of the entertainment industry, Colby meets Hollywood’s shadiest characters, endures debilitatingly embarrassing auditions, and loses his life’s savings twice over. Unsparingly honest, How To Lose It All In L.A. is a hilarious and poignant recounting of the truly questionable decision-making of a man learning everything the hard way.

It's Liar’s Poker meets The Kid Stays in the Picture with a heavy seasoning of David Sedaris’ clear-eyed satire and wit. It’s a story of a quarter-life crisis that is both timely and timeless.

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Here we go folks, it’s time for…. climate change!  A completely non-contentious topic where conversations vary from “Is the science clear?” to “What can I even do about it?” to “Why aren’t we doing more?”

As someone who is surrounded by liberal viewpoints and also believes that, indeed, the climate is warming, the fact that I have so many darn unanswered questions and conflicts should be telling about the situation we find ourselves in today.

Given how big a problem I think warming will be, I’ve been doing more and more reading on the issue itself and possible solutions. Unfortunately, the more I learn the harder it gets.  The more information I gather the more it seems we’re talking about the wrong things.

Below is an attempt to summarize the central discrepancies, roads to nowhere, and fixes for the future that seem apparent thus far.

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Everything we have is due to everything’s that’s happened

To set the stage a bit: the ways we entertain ourselves, the ways we eat, the buildings we live in, the ways we travel, the ways we shop, the things we can shop for – all of it is the culmination of hundreds of years of technological improvement.  That progress is in some form or fashion based on fossil fuels.  Could there have been some alternate timeline where oil wasn’t discovered and everything was based on something else?  Sure, but that’s not what happened and here we are.

Now though, we’re all thinking “huh, we kind of put ourselves in a bind here didn’t we? Seems like how we live is making the very thing we’re living on less livable”.  Turns out almost every single part of our lives involves fossil fuels that cause emissions that aren’t good.  Petroleum is either used as a direct ingredient - rubber, medicine, fertilizer, plastic, and concrete to name a few -  or as an indirect ingredient – if it needs heat or electricity to run, most of that power comes from oil.

You and I didn’t invent any of this, but we sure use all of it.  I took a long hot shower yesterday. I then ordered a tube of toothpaste off Amazon that will arrive in a big box tomorrow. Later I threw out my Halloween costume, but not before cooking up a big juicy steak.  I want what I want when I want it, and companies will continue to give it to me. 

That’s the world we’re living in, and I have a hunch a lot of people are similar to me.  

How bad is the problem? It’s hard to figure out.

Stop using goddamn Celsius!  Can anyone please explain why the people who seemingly care the most about climate change keep talking in language that 300 million people can’t understand?

How on earth is anyone in the U.S., one of the biggest emitters, ever going to act upon climate change if people keep repeating “well the research is saying we have to keep it under 1.5°C or else we’re doomed.”

Here’s some PhD level math I had to do on my own to figure it all out:

• 1.5°C is 2.7°F

• We’ve already gone up 1.1°C, which is ~2°F

• We only have 0.72°F left until that 2.7°F mark

• All of this is compared to the average global temperature in the pre-industrial period

• Scientists can’t quite agree on what years “pre-industrial” should refer to, but working backwards from our current average temperature of 57°F, it was probably around 55°F

Americans don’t respond to Celsius, a 2° change sounds small, and 57°F sounds like sweater weather. Mother Earth needs a better marketing team.

What’s our current playbook?

This is where I’m the most confused about the messaging right now.  Ever since the 1.5°C/2.7°F target came out, we hear updates every few years to tell us how terrible we’re doing.  Ask yourself: will it be at all surprising when they come out in 10 years and say “we just blew right by 1.5°C and now we’re heading for 2!”  We’ve been emitting more and more since 1800; are we magically going to unwind 220 years of civilization to get to *zero* emissions?

When Covid happened, Americans were forced to stop doing everything, and emissions fell 13%.   Only 87% to go!  And then after Covid we went right back to normal.  

Adding to my skepticism that we have any shot is the toolkit we’ve been given thus far.  

Like what about recycling?  To create the plastic water bottle in your hands, oil had to be taken from the ground, then the oil had to be heated by a furnace (that was also run by oil), and then it had to be combined with other chemicals and formed into shape, all of which took machines that run on electricity which most likely came from oil.  Let’s say we choose to recycle that water bottle.  90% of the damage has already been done, and turns out most recycling just gets burned because we don’t have the capability to recycle.  We used to send it to China and they would dump it into the ocean, but they got tired of that.  Given how expensive it is to correctly recycle, very few towns in the U.S. actually have the ability to recycle at all.

Planting trees is another high hope/low return proposition.  Same with recycling clothes.  Electric cars are much more climate friendly while you’re driving them (no emissions), but a ton of oil still went into making them (plastic, metals, batteries etc).

Aren’t we getting more sustainable though?

It feels more and more like “sustainability” is out there to make us feel good but doesn’t actually do much good.  Doing something is doing better than nothing, but don’t we keep seeing that we need to do so much more than “something”, and that we need to do it quickly?  Big Oil ad companies came up with the phrase “carbon footprint” to try and put the climate onus on individuals. Part of me thinks they had a hand in “sustainability” as well.

Even if we got to zero emissions right now, the planet would still keep changing as it adapts to the most recent few years of warming.  We’re partially screwed now and we’ll be more screwed later.

Where does this bring us? The human species will find a way to adapt; it usually does.  “When I was your age, people used to go to mountains and ski down them on snow!”  “When I was your age, people actually lived near the equator.”   Some changes will be inconvenient, others disastrous.  We will change with them.

But selfishly, I want my world to stay the same. I actually want my childhood world back.

Don’t make me turn this car around.

Here’s where this keeps leading me to. If humans, and corporations run by humans, aren’t going to change in time, and all our small-ball tactics don’t move the needle, doesn’t that mean the only way to win is to take our emissions out of the atmosphere?  

Yes, carbon removal is insanely expensive. But in terms of where to focus and where to spend dollars, it kind of feels like the only way we hit any of these goals we keep not hitting. Instead of mitigation, it’s reversal.

Either everyone stops eating meat, stops driving, stops building, stops flying, and stops using electricity, or we find a way to make sure none of those activities use any oil.  Does that seem likely?  If not, then we’re kind of in hail-mary mode.  

So shouldn’t 90% of climate-related investment go towards something that doesn’t depend on human-behavior change?

We’ve been emitting for centuries and we’re going to continue to emit for decades more. We’re just used to it.  We’ll get better and better, but let’s get going now on cleaning what we’ve sullied.

I have no idea what happens and how quickly it happens if you remove 50% of the carbon from the atmosphere.  Do the ice caps immediately re-form?  Does weather go back to “normal”? Or do we create an alternate 1985 like in Back to the Future 2? (Biff was such a big emitter).

I have so many more questions, but logically I haven’t been able to convince myself that reversal isn’t the only real solution we have.  Time to keep learning.

P.S. My favorite book I’ve read on this so far? The Story of C02. Highly recommend.

Marisa and I recently returned from our Honeymoon, a lovely two week jaunt through Italy and Greece that led to some fantastic memories: eating outrageously good croissants while overlooking the Mediterranean in Oia, taking a cooking class hidden up a hill in Positano, late-night weaving through the brightly bleached streets of Naoussa in Paros, and walking through the misty courtyard of the Santa Maria Maddalena church on a rainy day in Atrani.

But the trip also had its share of head-scratchers.  “This is is what everyone raves about? Are we the ones who are crazy?”  You see this was our first trip where we encountered the Molotov cocktail of supercharged tourism in a post-Covid, social media-fueled world.  We spoke to some local shopkeepers in Italy and they said business was up over 60% when compared to 2019.  Business has been a-boomin.  

There’s every reason to applaud the revival of tourism, especially to those places that lost so much of it during Covid.  But as a tourist, it also means that places have changed, which means the rules of choosing where to go and why need to change as well.  

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Rule #1: If you see a location on Instagram, you’ll see Instagrammers on location.

Since American soldiers got a glimpse of the Amalfi Coast during World War II, it has been an established place to holiday, mixing Italians and foreigners alike. Positano in particular, with its quaint, 3 square miles of hillside buildings, has grown steadily in popularity.

Now it’s saturated.  The internet made organizing trips there easy, flights made it accessible, and social media made it more desirable for millions of people to visit.  In 2022, everyone and their 4th cousin seemed to stop by.

That explosion was palpable when we stayed there.  As we walked around the streets of Positano, the crowd was around 75% Americans, 15% other nationalities, and 10% Italian.  About 25% of those Americans seemed to be in line outside of the bar at Le Sirenuse, which led to another line to get to the one spot that everyone posts from on Instagram.  

It’s simple geometry: all of the U.S. found out that taking pictures in Positano got you a lot of likes on Instagram.  And those pictures showed all of the U.S. how picturesque it is. Then all of those people, millions more than in the past, descended on an area that remained only 3 square miles.  It’s tough to find the charm when a leisurely stroll down a side street feels like the running of the bulls.

The same thing happened in Santorini, Greece.  The town of Oia is an impossibly beautiful combination of whitewashed buildings built directly into the side of a cliff overlooking an endless ocean and volcanic islands (also, it has great croissants). 

Oia, from the outside, is undoubtedly a treasure.  Step inside, however, and the narrow streets are jammed with tourists hustling to get to the western-most tip of the town so they can take sunset photos.  Cruise ships, floating cities of over 6,000 people each, dump their human cargo onto the island every day, immediately tripling the population of the town. 

That town is only 7 square miles, half of which is covered by hotels.  The smooth, white, cobblestone main street is only 20 feet wide, and half of it is taken up by people dressed up like they’re heading to a charity gala; they lean off ledges, judging the wind like expert meteorologists as they ensure their dresses blow perfectly to the side; their cadre of friends capture every angle in pursuit of the perfect pic.  Just like in Positano, there are lines for the spots you most see on Instagram.

Rule #2: People are lying to you.

If you’re talking to people who have visited the Insta-popular place of the moment, there is a good chance they won’t be totally honest with you.  We had spoken to so many people who raved about Positano and Oia, and yet when we got back and shared the thoughts above, a lot of them were quick to say “oh yeah we felt exactly the same way, we definitely wouldn’t go back.”  What??  

This feels like when I grew my hair out to my shoulders in Los Angeles and when I cut it back to normal everyone came out of the woodwork saying “this is so much better, you didn’t look good at all with the long hair.”  Thanks, friends.

For popular movies, books, restaurants and vacation destinations, people love to love what’s trendy, even if they didn’t like it at all.  It lets others know they’ve seen/read/eaten/traveled to a thing that’s desirable, and, barring the people who love to hate what others love, shows that they are a part of the scene.  

Social media has heightened that sense of trendiness.  Unfortunately, the “it” place is now more “it” than ever, simultaneously making it more popular than ever while ruining the very essence of it.  Be wary, not covetous, of what is blowing up in TikTok.

Rule #3: It’s really hard to call a city too touristy.

I love cities.  If all my vacations could be to cities I would be a happy man.  They are beacons of that region’s culture and always have fun, unpredictable doses of outside influence.  They also have the square mileage to offer multiple respites from the crowded city centers. In other words, it’s hard for social media to ruin a city.

Some people like to call Florence, Italy too touristy and not worth visiting.  There are 400,000 people in Florence proper and over 1.5mm if you include the surrounding areas.  Over 80% of them are Italian.  If you go to the places you read about on American blogs (which I already wrote about), you’re going to run into all the Americans.  It’s like saying you shouldn’t visit Manhattan because of Times Square.  Are there places where there are a  lot of tourists?  Yes. But the law of large square miles means there’s plenty of local culture to find.

London, Lisbon, Milan, & Barcelona are incredible cities bursting with local people who live, work, and play there.  Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, & New York are exactly the same.  In any of those places, if you want to find the tourists, you absolutely can.

So where should we travel!

Destinations around the world have been tourist hotspots for decades.  To say that you shouldn’t visit a place because it’s popular would be absurd.  But the landscape has changed.  Globally there are more people with the means to visit more places.  Ironically, social media has the tendency to narrow the field of places that people want to go.  So more people are left jammed into the same locations.

That means it’s probably best to avoid the places that all of the sudden everyone is talking about.  Maybe don’t visit Positano right now and let it calm down a bit.  Same for Venice, Italy.  In a few years the spotlight will be on different places.

There’s also the hidden benefit of saving money. A place that is having its moment is going to be much more expensive than normal. I have it on good authority that hotel and Airbnb rates are increasing more than 50% next year on the Amalfi Coast. They didn’t see the 2022 boom coming. They won’t make the same mistake in 2023.

The world will also continue to expand as more places develop.  There’s a very real chance our children will be Googling “best beaches in Africa” and Dakar, Senegal will be 2045’s version of Positano.

Popularity and reputation helps us choose places that we would enjoy.  Other people have visited and confirmed it’s worth traveling there.  With the emergence of social media influence, however, we just now have to be a little bit more careful about where and when we go.

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I think it was back in 2013 when I started to really enjoy coffee.  More than that, I enjoyed answering “how do you take it?” with “black”.  Years of Hollywood and spy novels went into delivering that small hit of dopamine every time I got to order my coffee like a real man. 

Even more absurd?  Someone once asked me if I liked Turkish coffee. I said that I did, despite the fact that I had never even tried it. In my mind, I had some idea that I was a tough guy if I signaled my ability to survive the “strongest” coffee out there. I actually finally got to try it last month in Greece.  Imagine pouring yourself a cup of coffee, dumping it in the sink, and then drinking the grounds from the filter instead.  That’s Turkish coffee, and it is unequivocally bad.  What in the world was I thinking?

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Who Are You Anyway?

If you watch yourself and others, you’ll quickly find that life is a constant cycle of projecting your actual self vs. projecting what you think other people want.  I lied about trying and liking a certain type of coffee from a country halfway around the world in pursuit of some increase in status that I had made up in my head.  Given it’s taken me a long time to recognize and own who I really am, I’d guess more than half of things I’ve said or done over the past 32 years were things I didn’t really believe. 

Once you start looking for examples, you can quickly catch yourself, and others, in the act.

A recent transgression of mine first started back in 2019. I had just moved into my tastefully furnished West Village apartment on Bleecker and Charles, and Marisa got me a record player as a housewarming gift, really tying the room together.  But the minute I got it, I was overwhelmed with both the opportunity and the risk ahead of me.  Because that record player needed records, and my records needed to fit a certain image.

Which ones would I buy? What if I bought the wrong ones? Which would project the vibe I’m going for? Jazz is cool right? Old hip hop?  Do I even know any of the songs on this one?  The album covers obviously need to look cool. Can it be brand new or does it need to be bought from an old record shop?

I was hamstrung by my estimations of other people’s expectations.  It was as if my stature would elevate or diminish forever based on records in my collection.

Big Advice From a Big Drinker

Fortunately, the best advice I’ve ever heard on the topic came from a supposedly-Italian man named Peter.

It was during our honeymoon that we took a cooking/drinking class in Positano, Italy.  Peter, our Italian host with pale skin and a British accent, took us down to his wine cellar after our third course.  There, in a cavern that dated back to 300 A.D., he started bringing out bottle after bottle.  For one of them, he mentioned that he thought it would explode in value over the next five years. Every dollar-hungry American in the class perked up. One of them then asked how to identify and collect similar types of bottles.  Peter’s answer was simple: “collect the ones you like.”

Wait a minute, if I’m building a record collection, I should buy the ones I like to listen to?  That can’t be the answer.  Does that mean I shouldn’t buy a record because it has one famous song on it and the rest are garbage?  Does that mean I shouldn’t purchase that famous album everyone has because I actually don’t like it that much?  

Initially it feels more risky to lean into yourself.  When you try to fit in there’s at least comfort in numbers.  But unconsciously following the crowd then means you never get to add anything new to the conversation. 

And guess what! You’re allowed to buy a record just because you like the cover art. You’re allowed to pour a whole gallon of milk into your coffee. You’re allowed to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert even though you only really know two of his songs and the rest all blend together (God he’s so good live). Just own it!

I’m at the point where I walk up to the bar and shout “I’ll take the lightest beer you’ve got!” Why? Because I’m done chewing on these quadruple IPA’s. Talk about manly…

Stick Your Neck Out To Stand Out

When I was younger I absolutely judged other people for pursuing things or having opinions that made them stand out.  Now those people are my favorites. Freely curating your record collection is a small first step in the right direction. Buy what you like.  Do what you like.  And if that’s scary, maybe it’s time to find out what you like.

100% of us know what Facebook is.  95% of us know who Mark Zuckerberg is.  40% of us know about his plans for Metaverse domination. 0% of us know if it will work.

The problem is, “Metaverse” as a term is now part of an illustrious group of words that carry so much baggage and varying forms of interpretation that it’s almost impossible to use them in conversation.  Other words like that: “crypto” and “woke”. Let’s throw in “crossfit” for good measure.

Marketing is everything, and the Metaverse people have severely botched it. 

Why am I talking about it now?  Because it’s fun to think about how technology will be different and better in the future.  Because we rarely stop and think about how much we’ve progressed in the last 20 years and how that means we’ll progress in the next 20. And because the Metaverse specifically is not some sci-fi concoction – it’s actually a pretty straightforward progression.  It doesn’t even take that much dreaming!

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Let’s Go Back To The Past

In the year 1999, my dad was pretty cool.  He wore a floor-length Barbour trench coat with wire Revo sunglasses that made him look like Neo whenever he strolled up to my soccer games.  He also had a Motorola StarTAC that he could plug in and out of his car.  He was most assuredly a man about town.

Now imagine if he and I were walking back to the car after a game and a man from the future wearing a black turtleneck approached us. He says his name is “Steve”.  He has a device in his hand that he says we can use to video-call anyone else in the world that has this device too.  Do you think we would have fainted as if we had encountered an alien species?  No! I probably would have screamed “that’s so cool!”  Because in the end, it wouldn’t have felt that far out of the realm of possibility.

The Present Keeps Moving Forward

That was 20+ years ago. The same will go for someone showing us what the Metaverse looks like 20 years from now.  And what is the concept of the Metaverse really?  It’s a better, easier, more comprehensive set of online experiences.  Meetings, social events, recreation, transactions… all without leaving your home.  

Doesn’t that make sense? Think about it: we spend an absurd number of hours in front of phone, tv, and computer screens each and every week. Some of that is personal, some of that is professional, and some of that is even social - time spent hanging out with other people. In fact most of our life could be considered virtual already when you consider the amount of our waking hours we spend interacting with the online world. 

Now imagine if that virtual world starts to feel more and more real.  Imagine if it was basically lifelike.  Imagine if the online version of yourself mirrored your facial tics, your arm movements and everything that is conveyed in real life. Isn’t that just FaceTime on steroids? Does that happening in 2042 feel at all absurd?

No one is suggesting your entire life moves online. It’s just another space that you can go to meet up with a lot of people quickly, to keep in touch with people, or just to have fun. Yes, there are some people that will spend their entire life online, just like some people currently spend 10+ hours a day playing Fortnite, watching TikTok, and posting on Twitter.  

In 20 years, maybe “metaverse” as a term doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s as ubiquitous as “internet” is today. You won’t say “I’m going to hop into the metaverse” you’ll say “I’m gonna hang out with Deanna and Travis.” The point is we’ll be doing things differently in the future, in a more technologically sophisticated way. It doesn’t matter what you call it.

It’s Not Surprising If You Can See It Coming

Thinking in binary terms - online or offline, for example - is a consistently incorrect way to think about technology.  Life is in-person interactions, digital communication, losing yourself in a book, losing yourself in nature, zoning out watching a movie, or going out to dance.  It all just swirls together, and will continue to do so. In the future, there will be weddings done completely online… just like people did zoom weddings during the pandemic and just like my sister and brother-in-law FaceTimed in for mine. Online and offline already mix fluidly.

So limiting our scope of what’s possible based on what we see in the present is just a lack of acceptance of how we grow alongside technology's steady improvement.  We live with it every day, so we don’t think about the small jumps forward.  The iPhone debuted to much fanfare, and then 3 months later it was an accepted part of our lives.  

Sit back and think about 20 years from now: do you think that the technology we’ll be using will be significantly better than what we are using now?  I’d bet it will be.  So is the “metaverse” or online world all that wild to imagine?

Optimism is a future-focused word.  It usually insinuates that the future will be better; or at least, the future will be good.  Americans are inherently a future-focused bunch, and traditionally we have felt pretty damn good about our chances.  It’s a spirit that has sparked westward expansion, leaps in technology, and brand new ways of thinking by entrepreneurs.

But I’m noticing the downside of optimism lately.  By focusing on the future, there is a lack of appreciation for the present.  Thinking that tomorrow will be better than today does not have to preclude acknowledging that today is worth valuing.  Today could be pretty damn good.  Even if today isn’t great, there’s a decent chance that our future selves will find a way to look back at it fondly.

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How does always looking ahead impact us?

Parents who are in the cyclone of raising a new kid seem to get caught in the “can’t wait” dilemma.  They “can’t wait” until their newborn starts to have a personality.  They can’t wait until their kids start to walk and do things.  They can’t wait until they are potty-trained. They can’t wait until they are out of their bratty teenage years. 

Taking this example to the extreme, there’s a chance that your kid hits 18, moves out of the house, and all of the sudden you have to settle for “can’t wait-ing” for them to come visit.  You’ve future-focused your way out of two decades of the journey of creating a human.

The same goes for jobs.  “Optionality” and “exit opportunities” are the buzzwords of so many career-starting kids in their 20’s.  They see some jobs purely as avenues to unlock what they actually want to do afterwards.  It’s no wonder that the opportunities that provide the most optionality are referred to in a particular way.  I “did” investment banking for a few years. I “did” business school or law school.  Not worked at or attended.  Did.

You Are Where You Are When You Are

Acceptance of the present as a thing to be enjoyed and not endured isn’t something that comes from repeating a mantra over and over again.  Instead I’ve found that it’s an appreciation of life as a series of stages.  Each stage is something that will inevitably end, and so it should be lived-in fully while it’s happening.  It would be tragic to miss any of the literally once-in-a-lifetime stages of your existence.

You might be in high school ready to skip that Podunk town for the big university.  You might get to college and feel impatient to start your life in the real world.  You might dream of making a ton of money and finally getting out of your closet apartment.  You might dream of when the kids are out of the house so you can get quiet once again.  You might dream of retiring and playing golf all day in Florida. 

What if instead of dreaming about the next steps, you acknowledge that they will inevitably come?  And if they are going to come, then that means you are actually free to enjoy each successive stage.

Part of this is knowing what each stage is and what the best parts of them are.  If you’re in your 20’s, understand that it’s the most ideal time in your life for working hard, taking risks, and meeting a ton of people that will help you down the road.  That way in those dark nights when you’re still grinding it out in the office, you’re not pining for the future, but instead appreciating the hustle you’re giving in this time of your life.  Think about the things you will lose in the next stage and appreciate them now.

For the raising-a-family stage, it’s both terrifying and helpful to know that each two month period equates to 1% of a kid’s life from zero to 18 years old (Daddy come back! We only have 30% left!).

Let’s say you’re a parent and a job opportunity comes along that could mean huge financial rewards down the line; it would also mean a lot of time away from home. I know many parents who have pursued that opportunity, arguing that in return for the missed time with their kids - those percentage points - they are creating more opportunity for “better” time down the road. Maybe that’s a trade worth making.  But always remember that each 1% ticks by unrelentingly, and they always reach 100%.

What You’ve Done Impacts What You’ll Do

Flipping it around, there is also the fact that stages are not independent; they build on top of each other.  Stages aren’t guaranteed; they change based on decisions you make in past stages.  If you put every dollar you had in bitcoin in 2012, your stages changed (you’re rich!). If you did the same exact thing but in November of 2021, your stages changed as well (you’re poor!). Reputation, friends, dollars… these all will carry with you from stage to stage, adding, subtracting, improving, and declining.

Different people have different stages as well.  If college isn’t for you, then you won’t have the college stage.  If you don’t have kids then there may be a few different stages spread throughout that traditional 18 year span.  No matter what, we transition between various experiences and various spurts of growth throughout our life. 

And to not understand what stage you’re in, that it will end, and how to make the most of it while it’s happening, is to waste a truly limited resource.

P.S. Of course in truly bad situations, it’s best to try to rocket to the next stage as fast as you can.

(Listen to this article on Spotify)

The pandemic was bad.  Economically, it was really bad for restaurants.  They depended on in-person visits and already barely made money (if they were lucky).  The pandemic hit and it was Armageddon. Some places shut down immediately, never to come back again.  Some places resorted to jury-rigged outdoor setups. Most, however, were salvaged by delivery.  Restaurants that did even a little delivery in the past went all-in after March 2020.  Those that would never deign to deliver were all of the sudden shipping out $50 steaks and wedge salads to home-bound eaters.

But then the pandemic ebbed.  Or at least our willingness to ignore it overwhelmed any surviving restrictions.  What didn’t ebb?  Delivery.

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To-Go > To-Stay

We were in Chicago a few weeks ago at a local breakfast shop.  Wood beams, high ceilings, prime character through and through.  As we were walking in, I noticed cars pulling up to the curb and baristas walking out to deliver bacon, egg, and cheeses right up to their window.  Talk about service.  We walked in, immediately put in our order to eat-in, and then waited.  And waited.  And waited. 

Meanwhile, we saw baristas and waiters getting their steps in for the day leaving behind the bar and delivering to cars outside.  Weirdly enough, when those baristas left to deliver things, they weren’t barista-ing and making things.  The kitchen was cookin, the drinks were flowin, and it was all going outside.  30 minutes later, we got our food and drinks and sat down for a 2019-style breakfast. (Side note: it may not have helped that Marisa was interpreted as “Bernesa” and perhaps our food was ready earlier than we thought. Ironically they would have gotten her name right if she’d ordered online…)

Another example: At the Starbucks in the airport, we were standing in one of those long lines that inevitably form at airport coffee shops. Marisa got impatient, hopped on the app, ordered our coffee and latte, and 3 minutes later, her name was called.  Meanwhile, we had only moved one spot up in the line.

Can People & Profit Co-exist?

Again, the pandemic was really bad for restaurants.  Yes, it ushered in a new era of utilization and adaptation of technology when it comes to ordering food online.  Of course, this technology saved their businesses and offered a new source of revenue as the world re-opened.  

But what happens now?

What happens when the in-person restaurant experience gets second billing to delivery?  And for that matter, what happens when these small restaurants who 3x’d their tables through outdoor dining and thus 2x’d their wait times start to feel the pinch of a sub-par dining experience?  Will they even care?  Profit does trump all, and with more dollars flowing in, maybe they won’t mind some diners flowing out. 

As a diner, I want 2019 dining back.  The kitchens haven’t gotten bigger, but the table count has.  The staff hasn’t expanded, but one or two are now dedicated purely to delivery.  I’m sure there’s a happy medium somewhere.  These restaurants were certainly never full every day of the week, and delivery helps them fill the gap. There might even be a sustainable business model somewhere in here.  But at some point you’re at capacity.  And who’s going to win?  Diners or delivery? 

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Pre-parenting (definition): the attempts by a childless male to add some intentionality to raising his future children. Usually based on his own experiences growing up. Most likely futile.

Kids will be kids. Each one is different and each one is special, I know, but there are stereotypes and old tropes for a reason: kids naturally go through phases as they figure out who they want to be.

• There’s the fawning phase, where your parents are your heroes and you want to do everything you can to make them proud.

• There’s the rebellious phase, where your Dad could be Ghandi and you’d still find a way to resent him for being too nice to everyone.

• There’s the questioning phase, where you learn that your parents are humans with flaws and that they may believe things you don’t; this is the one where you think “I’ll do things differently.”

• Then there’s most likely an acceptance phase to come full circle: appreciation for the things they’ve done and an understanding of where and why they fell short in your eyes.

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Rebel With Rules

I’m interested in the rebellious phase. That’s where things can go sideways real quick as kids try new things, new personalities, and new friends as they find out who they really are. They are usually at an age in their teens where they feel virtually indestructible and untouchable. If they haven’t gotten in major trouble before, they’ve most likely done things and gotten away with them; they think this will last forever.

As a parent, attempting to shortcut the rebellious phase seems like a bad and impossible idea. Any parent reading this has certainly seen a few examples of “don’t do this” directly leading to “I’m going to do this now that you said that.” In fact, you probably want some level of rebelliousness and questioning so it’s not bottled up for a later date. What’s the saying? “All these well-behaved French kids keep growing up to be revolutionaries”?

If I can’t and don’t want to stop it, then I do want to put guardrails around the rebel phase. I don’t want my kids to die and I don’t want them to make decisions that will negatively impact them for the rest of their lives. They, of course, don’t think either could happen. Me just saying “don’t die and don’t make decisions that negatively impact your future” sounds good in principle but is too high-level and conceptual to prompt any real follow through.

The key here may be changing the traditional parent/child relationship. Instead of an adult that kids view as being from a different world, a different time, I can become someone who went through a lot of what they will go through, and now has the benefit of added wisdom. Said differently, the more shenanigans I did growing up, the better lens I have into what my kids will be tempted to try. The more I did myself, the more authority I can have imparting that wisdom to my kids.

Passing along that knowledge so that they don’t think they have to learn it firsthand seems to hinge on two basic things:

1. Picking the few, most important guardrails I want to build

2. Actually sharing my f*ck-ups to make sure those guardrails are solid

Where to Let Your Kids Mess Up

A laundry list of “do-nots” will dilute each specific one and won’t allow for the most important ones to shine through. That means understanding that kids are going to do dumb things and learn from them, just as I did. If I were to categorize my own rule-breaking experience it would look like this:

• 60% of the time I got away with it scot-free

• 35% of the time I had a close call or minor injury

• 5% of the time I really hurt myself

The close-call 35% is where you learn the most. The experience you earn imparts the lessons you remember. This is the 35% I so badly want to protect for my kids. All it takes is almost burning down a forest when a firework goes sideways to make sure you’re always more careful next time.

The 5% is different. The 5% is when the risk-tolerance of a teenager far exceeds their capacity to understand permanent consequences. This is where my real-world experience of close-calls and failures - those of mine and my friends’ - comes into play.

For what it’s worth, cars and drugs seem to make up the bulk of the 5% ; online idiocy is the new third leg I suppose. Whomever thinks that 16 is the right age to get a license is a complete looney toon. 3,000 pounds of metal going at 80mph is a rocket… and it’s being directed by a kid who believes not a thing can go wrong. Add in alcohol, and you’ve compounded the invincibility while subtracting physical ability.

Which Rules Matter?

What few lessons do I lean into? It goes back to my earlier parameters: don’t die and don’t do permanent damage. Both cover a lot.

Dying is: driving recklessly, driving while drunk, taking too many drugs, taking drugs laced with not the drug you wanted, jumping off things that are too high, and most physical dares that are accompanied by “c’mon, don’t be a pussy”.

Permanent damage is: getting caught cheating in school, fighting in school, getting arrested, starting an accidental family, sexual misconduct, scandalous photos on the internet, and anything you do at 15 that might still hold you back at 45.

Looking back on my childhood, I or the people I was around checked a heck a lot of those boxes. For example, growing up I heard phrases like “I’m the best drunk driver” said in absolute seriousness, so I know what it feels like to look at a completely hammered friend telling me he’s good to drive and feeling like I have to hop in.

Why On Earth Would They Listen?

Getting your kids to listen on these guidelines is where first-hand experience comes into play. First off, you won’t even know about all the situations your kids could get into if you haven’t seen them yourself. So experience allows for awareness. Second, if your kids think you’re freaking out over some old-white-man op-ed you read in the Wall Street Journal, you will have absolutely zero credibility.

“Hey, you’re going to want to get A’s, and there are going to be assignments or classes where it’s going to be so easy to cheat. You’ll definitely see your classmates doing it. Most of them are definitely going to get away with it, too. That guy that gets caught though gets ostracized from everyone else, and might even get kicked out of school. I saw it numerous times growing up; always screwed them on anywhere they wanted to work or go to school next. In the end your final grade will be a ton better if you did the work on the intermediate tests along the way.”

“Hey, if you’re starting to see harder drugs at parties, everyone is going to be loving them and odds are no one has overdosed. Problem is you can’t really trust a drug dealer, and the shit they put into that to make more money can kill you. We were all at a party growing up and one of my friend’s eyes rolled back as he was laying on the couch. Three hours later he was dead. Everyone else had almost taken what he was on. Why be that one kid everyone reads about in the newspaper?”

There is the very real chance they respond “Dad, that was just you - I know what I’m doing” or “Dad, you saw it go wrong so now you’re overreacting.” But the more you’ve felt that feeling they will feel, that decision point where they decide to take the left instead of right, the more likely the details in your stories will ring true when they face those situations. In addition to the stories above, maybe it’s also coming up with strategies to use to get out of the constant onslaught of peer pressure.

You’re An Adult, Not Jesus

So yes, this is a absolutely a case for sharing the key missteps you’ve made early on. It’s a case for not building yourself up as an infallible human in the eyes of your kids, but rather one that’s grown and one that was actually a kid just like them facing the same tough situations they are facing.

The key is to share the few that resonate most. The last thing you want to do is spur behavior “because my Dad used to do it.” Oversharing nostalgia from when you were their age is a recipe for tacit approval of them doing it too.

Instead I’ll think about what stories I have in my arsenal and consider the right ages to share them. I’m hopeful there is an opportunity to save my kids from their worst instincts at their worst moments without sacrificing the authority necessary to guide them or sacrificing the sacred ritual of making their own mistakes.

P.S. There’s another whole article to be written about how a better way to avoid tragedy is to give them something positive to work towards, not just how to get them to avoid the bad. Playing basketball instead of joining a gang, building robots instead of huffing glue, community service instead of sleeping with the entire lacrosse team, etc etc etc.

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In the great documentary about The Who, “The Kids Are Alright”, the interviewer asks the band why they keep playing if they’ve made enough money to retire. Roger Daltrey (lead singer), John Entwistle (bassist), and Keith Moon (drummer) all scoot away from Pete Townshend (guitar/vocals) because only he can answer the question.

You see for all the band’s fame and success, Townshend wrote most of their songs.  And in the hierarchy of royalties, the songwriter sits King.  Entwistle once said “we became rich later than I expected”.  A way to continue that would be “though I realized who got rich very early on”.

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How Bands Create Songs

Bands can have many different methods of producing music; some are collaborative, some are solo efforts.  For U2, The Edge writes melodies, Bono writes the words. For Elton John, Bernie Taupin wrote lyrics and Elton built the music around them.  For the Beatles, McCartney and Lennon bounced back and forth, and Ringo and Harrison got a crack at one or two songs an album. 

For The Who, Townshend created mostly on his own.  An upstart group doesn’t much care in the beginning.  They grow up together through basement-bar gigs and part-time openers at small clubs.  One day they get discovered and need to collate their songs into their first album.  That album is a raging success.  Critics swoon, listeners consume, and their venues balloon.  “We must be rich,” the band thinks.  Yet when the royalty checks start coming in, it is soon clear that “we” is not all-inclusive.  The checks are different sizes, and the main songwriters are getting most of the money.

The First Time Is Charmed; The Second Can Be Cursed

In the midst of these realizations the calls for a second album grow louder. The studio knows the fickle public and wants the cooking to continue while the kitchen’s still open.  Most people attribute this rush and distraction as the key component to deteriorating quality.  Some say that the first album holds all of their best, original ideas, mined from their life experiences; the second album must be picking at the scraps.  It’s the change in the band dynamic, however, that can also derail the second attempt.

Songwriting credit is the key to the safe.; everyone now wants their turn.  The problem is, their original roles defined the band’s sound.  The lead guitarist may have written the songs but their own specialized talents coming together made them hits. Now each one charters their first voyage into songwriting.  Personal ego and financial gain, rather than the practical roots of the band’s success, guide their decision.

Take a look at The Who’s first three albums and their songwriting credits.

1. My Generation: 9/12 songs by Townshend (James Brown wrote two of the remaining ones). 

2. A Quick One: each band member got to write two songs. 4/10 were Townshend. 

3. The Who Sell Out: 9/13 Townshend.

The reversion to Townshend continues through The Who Sell Out, Tommy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia (representing their best run of albums).  A Quick One lags as the weakest offering, and least “Who” album of the bunch.  The more Townshend could write, the better the songs were, and the better the album as a whole could be.

Obviously The Who was one of the greatest bands of that era.  They were talented enough and had enough studio backing to push through, find their sound, work out their differences, and etch their names into the rock canon.  The question to ask is how many bands have permanently lost their way after the second album falters?  Have the original fans tuned out?  The great ones may push through, but how many very good bands have we lost at the hands of the songwriting cash-grab?

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If you’re always making sure you’re not getting in anyone else’s way...  If you have an extremely sensitive radar for being judged…  If you carry yourself with a confidence that comes from only doing things you’re already good at…

Learn to drive stick shift in Manhattan as an adult.

As people who know me can tell you, I don’t sweat.  As in, my threshold for physically perspiring is extremely high (I also get cold very easily so maybe those are connected).  After my two stick shift lessons over the past week, however, my lower back was absolutely soaked.

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Why Learn Stick Shift At All?

To set the stage a bit: I have always wanted to be able to drive a stick shift.  There’s something extremely cool about it to me.  Same goes for riding a motorcycle (cue the alarm bells for my future in-laws).  It’s a man and machine type thing. These machines respond only to what you do, rightly or wrongly.  It’s why I loved go-karting around a track at 45mph, leaning hard into turns, wondering where the grip was going to break.  It’s why my Dad gave me the perfect 16th birthday present of BMW driving school down in Spartanburg, SC.  It’s why I chose to drive over 140mph back in 2011.  It’s understanding the tools you’re working with. It’s finding your own personal risk limit as well as the limits of the machine itself.

There is another, even more vain reason, to learn stick shift: a vintage Fiat convertible will just so happen to be at our upcoming wedding in Italy, and you must be out of your mind if you think I’m going to endure the never-ending ridicule for just sitting in a car pretending to drive it and not actually knowing how.  Me, that Fiat, and my future wife are definitely going on a drive.

Where Do You Even Take Lessons These Days?

When I finally decided to take action on my driving education, I realized finding an opportunity to learn was harder than it seemed.  If you ask anyone older what they did growing up they’ll give you a completely unhelpful “oh I just used my neighbor’s car and figured it out.”  I’m not sure how applicable that is in today’s world, and it’s definitely not a thing in NYC.  Also rental cars in the US are all automatic, and renting a vintage car is expensive and probably a bad idea.

As it turns out there is a driving school in Murray Hill that still offers stick shift lessons on a 1995 Honda Civic Coupe.  Vroom Vroom baby!  The instructor actually said that he’s seen a pickup in manual lessons as people go more and more to Europe.  (That’s actually the third reason I wanted to learn manual – European automatics are almost double the rental price of stick shifts.  It’s a perfect way to gouge Americans.)

Learning On The Job

I showed up nervous but excited.  The meetup spot answered my first question right off the bat: “where in the hell do you learn how to drive in NYC?”  Turns out, you do endless loops around Stuyvesant Town because it’s super quiet and there’s almost never traffic.  Gary, the instructor, was a complete cowboy that was far too trusting.  After 10 minutes of prelim talk and getting used to the fact that my left foot is now essential to making the car go, we were doing loops around Stuy Town in first gear.  Only 20 minutes later, we were on 19th street in the chaos that is people jumping out in front you, sudden stops, quick accelerations, and impatient trucks behind you.  Gary was all sink or swim, even though in this case “sink” meant “get into a car accident.”

As context, stick shift basically takes the automatic driving experience and says “we’re gonna need your help at pretty much every step”.  Turning on the car, starting to move, switching each gear up and down, and not rolling down hills backwards can no longer be taken for granted. Your left foot on the clutch is the key to all of it.  The engine is running, and you’re using the clutch to decide if you want to connect the wheels to it. 

To make it even more confusing, you can connect it too much or too little.  Remember those automatic pencil sharpeners where if you didn’t put in the pencil enough the machine would turn on but it wouldn’t be sharpening anything yet?  And if you pushed it too hard the whole thing would shut down?  Imagine that, but with a 3,000 pound car - and that’s just the process to go from 0 mph to 1 mph.  You miss the sweet spot connecting the clutch and your whole car just turns right off - doesn’t matter if you’re in a parking spot or in the middle of the intersection.

Sorry! My Bad! One Sec! Please Stop Honking!

As I said before, this is a nightmare for a confident adult.  You are 32 years old, in a car, doing a thing - driving - that everyone around you assumes you know how to do.  In fact, you think you’re pretty damn good at it. Except now all the rules have changed. You’re a beginner.  You’re at a stoplight, the light turns green, and instead of pushing the accelerator, you’re trying to make sure you’re working the clutch just right.  Cars are honking behind you because it’s been 5 seconds and you’re only just starting to crawl forward.  Or you’ve stalled, had to restart the car, and now the pressure to successfully do the thing you just failed at has grown exponentially.

You are battling your own expectations for your own performance, adding the in-the-moment judgment of everyone else around you, all the while reminding yourself that you’re learning something new.  

Plus, there is the chance that you actually do get into a fender bender.  Nowhere is this more likely than on a hill.  Automatic cars don’t roll backwards.  They stay where they are and wait for you to hit the gas. On hills, manuals need to be convinced to stay put, and need even more convincing to move forward.  Do it wrong, and you roll back and hit the car behind you.  

Cowboy Gary didn’t seem worried about any of this when he told me to take a left up 37th St.  I hit the top of the hill and BAM!, red light.  BAM!, new Ford F150 rides right up on my bumper.  BAM!, my mind cycles frantically trying to remember what Gary had said about emergency brakes, hanging on the clutch, using the normal brake, and when to hit the accelerator.  Light turns green, I think I close my eyes and pray whatever combination of pedals and brakes I use works out.  We pull forward with no rollback at all.  Phew.  Gary tells me he hasn’t heard me breathe in over two minutes.  

After four hours, I had the hang of it. Highways, parallel parking, hills - I had checked the box on all of them.  I had endured learning in public, specifically a New York City public that is notoriously unforgiving.  I learned quickly because I had to.  

Confidence Reborn

When you’re younger, everyone expects you to not be good at something and you are constantly being put in new situations you haven’t seen before.  As we get older, that happens less and less.  We have the autonomy to choose to avoid those new situations, opting to stick with the familiar.  Coming out the other side of my driving lessons, there was a newfound appreciation and desire for new situations.

The more you learn new things, the less daunting learning new things becomes. The more you successfully go from nervous and not knowing anything to being capable, the more your confidence grows that you know you can get there in the end.  Strip away your own judgment and that of others, and your opportunities all of the sudden get much more interesting.

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Actors do weird things - most often out of view.  That suave leading man might crack an egg on his head while on Fallon, but the public’s view of Hollywood’s top talent is more often a highly choreographed set of moves showing them as supremely clean and constantly on trend.  So it may surprise you to know that behind the scenes and between movies, these people are spending hours laying on the floor focusing on breathing, posture, or what animal spirit to emulate in their next role.

Jack Gyllenhaal running around LA pretending to be a coyote preparing for Nightcrawler? Check.  Robert De Niro studying crabs before filming Taxi Driver? Double check

It can be weird. It can be wild.

However, it’s very easy to relegate the off-screen actor work to mere happy hour trivia. What if there is something here you can use to improve yourself?  An actor spends his whole life trying to free up his body, because really it’s all he can use.  You don’t want to see Robert De Niro in a movie.  You want to see Vito Corleone, Jake La Motta, or maybe even Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents (oh, Jack talk Thai).  

In order to pull that off successfully, they try to get rid of all their habits, good and bad, so as to try and have only the character’s good and bad habits.  It includes posture, voice, twitches, gait etc: Daniel Day Lewis’ Bill the Butcher vs Abraham Lincoln, for example. 

An Oscar might not be in our future, but we can certainly cultivate better self-awareness if we steal the best of what actor-training has to offer.

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Listening

There are those shows that you turn on and it only takes 15 seconds to think “wow this is terrible, that guy is an atrocious actor”.  Odds are “that guy” is so concentrated on how he’s going to say his lines – if he’s going to yell or wink or cry – that he isn’t listening one bit to the actor across from him. 

Remember when you were in middle school and you thought of a question and kept your hand raised for five minutes?  Usually by the time you got to ask it the teacher was on a completely different subject.  Now think about how often that happens when you’re talking to someone, especially someone you just met. 

She starts to tell a story about how she got backstage at Coachella, and all you can think about is letting her know that your friend’s brother is the backup banjo player for Mumford & Sons.  You wait for the story to end so you can say something you think will sound cool, when in fact it’s now irrelevant and the conversation screeches to a halt. 

Instead listen to the story and think about responding to the last thing she said.  What if she ends the story with “and that’s how I ended up living in Australia for a year”?  If you’re really listening then you’ll pick up where she left off and talk about Australia or living abroad in general.   Being interested is receiving information from someone else and then asking questions about it.

Posture

Take a look at all the elderly people walking around hunched over.  No way you’ll ever end up like that, right?  Now realize that all those over 60 spent more than half their lives without computers or cell phones.  And now take a look at how you’re currently sitting at your desk, reading this article.  Or look over at the other guy in the coffee shop: is he reading his phone with his neck at an impossible 90 degree angle to his body?  At this rate we’ll be lucky to stand up at 80 years old. 

Actors strive to have great posture, and then from there adapt it to suit a character.  It could be a limp, or depression-induced hunch, or even a strut a-la Travolta.  If they’re playing a leading man-type, they know great posture is immediately more pleasing and sculpture-like to the eye on screen.  There’s a reason people make heroes out of movie stars. 

How to go about this yourself?  If you think “sit up”, you’ll straighten, tense, and then slump back down in 10 minutes.  One popular movement/posture approach is the Alexander Technique, and it teaches direction.  Imagine your head is being held up by a balloon.   Feel your neck lengthen, your shoulders drop, and your body balance.  There’s a floating sensation. 

Now if you’re sitting, keep the floating head and sit on your butt-bones.  It could be at the front of the chair or firmly against the back of it.  Your feet are fully on the ground, and you can feel your toes, heels, and balls of your feet all making contact.  This is how your body wants to be – solid and fully supported, not crunched up like a ball - and it will reward you with relaxation and energy.

Breathing

Remember back to the last time you got stressed.  It could have been your intern claiming Gmail was down which is why you couldn’t reach him all weekend.  It could have been United telling you they have no idea where your bag is.

In these moments, what happens to your body and your breathing? 

You tense up, your shoulders are practically at your ears, your breathing gets super shallow, and your every word seems to squeeze out of your throat.  How in the world are you supposed to communicate effectively when you’ve created every possible physical obstacle to doing so? 

When actors are in a scene and are screaming their heads off in a fully enraged state and seemingly about to commit a crime of passion, you can usually understand clearly every word they’re saying.  Through all the sobbing about a dead loved one, there is still the script and the words moving the story along; actors need to be able to recite it coherently. 

The same goes for you when you’re stressed  You want to make sense.  You want to be able to listen to what the other person is saying and respond effectively.  You also want to stay in control.  You do this through breathing — in effect giving yourself time. 

First off, when people say “take a deep breath” to get you to relax, has that ever worked?  You’re usually so tense that you inhale and it’s almost painful.  One trick is to fully breathe out before breathing in, blowing out all the air left in your body so that your first “deep breath” has to be a big one.  So in those moments, before responding to whatever stimulus has riled you up, breathe out and breathe in. You can even think “I. Have. Time”.  And then decide how you want to respond. 

Actor’s are usually unstable beings, warped by an industry where skill and success are only loosely correlated. But the best ones know how to prepare and put on a show when it matters. If we toss out the alcoholism, divorces, and meltdowns, there’s a lot we can adapt to our own lives.

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Where to live is a massive question. In fact, it’s so overwhelming that most people seem to put more research into buying a TV than into where they will spend their next decade.  Why?  There is so much information and so few tools to cull it all down that we end up relying on clickbait-y Top 10 lists.

Which is nuts! Our physical location can determine who we meet, how we feel, and how our children evolve. It’s a lot like picking a college in terms of ramifications and process, but then imagine only visiting one or two campuses and then going “sure, this place is fine.”

As I’ve tried to figure out my own move after we hit our eventual Manhattan expiration date, I realized the research I was doing could help other people with the very same problem.

And so I built RELO (relome.io) to take everything I had been doing myself and streamline it into a recommendation and organization platform.

In doing this, there are a million different questions I could have answered. Given this is v1, I chose to focus on a key few. Below are the whats, hows, and whys of how it came to be, as well as dreams for what it might be in the future.

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How do you curate an entire country’s worth of places?

Love it or hate it, there are places around the U.S. that plenty of people live in but not many people would voluntarily choose to move to.  Curating the “viable” places down to 5,000 of the 33,000 zip codes could absolutely be controversial, and against my best efforts, I certainly may have missed some great places. 

The options are based on factors such as proximity to major and minor airports, overall amenities, and even basic things like having a population of over a certain amount (there are some zip codes with a population of 10).  Ultimately, it’s objective and subjective.  It’s a tool for me specifically, so there is definitely me questioning “would anyone actually choose to move there?” when I look at a place I haven’t heard of before.

Some of these places are obvious – cities, suburbs – but others are more up and coming with the Covid diaspora.  Las Cruces, NM. McCall, ID.  Quechee, VT.  Auburn, CA. All very cool, all very off your radar if you are on the other side of the country.

How can I create a ranking system?

Given Covid and the remote-work boom, there is a higher chance than ever that I’d consider moving far afield.  I wanted to somehow rank places I was less familiar with.  The final algorithm is based on the question “which are the towns that are a best fit for me?”  It’s personal.  My dad and I could do similar searches, but the small differences will impact in what order the results emerge.

How can I make 5,000 different zip codes feel similar?

All these websites – NYT’s Relocation Tool, Bestplaces.net, etc – just hoover up dirty, public data from the census and feed it back to us. But data without context is not helpful at all. 

Population density was a big one that I felt no one did well. I knew it mattered but the numbers could be wildly misleading.  For example, in massive, Western-state zip codes, the places people actually live can be pretty dense, but when divided by the total landmass of the zip code, it might look super rural. 

So, again, through objective and subjective approaches, I aimed to categorize each zip code based on “feel”.  Because in the end, that’s what I’m looking for as I search for a new place - feel.  Labeling each area with “City Vibes”, “Tight Knit Neighborhoods”, or “Spread Out Properties” enabled me to find similarities that felt familiar as I jumped from San Diego to Omaha to Upstate New York.

Of course some places can have one side of town that have many homes close together and then another side that has big properties, but my goal was to provide the label that worked more often than not.

The problem and opportunity with zip codes.

Zip codes are the compromise between data availability and location specificity.  There are some zip codes in cities that cover multiple neighborhoods, all unique in their own way.  There are some towns that are very much just one zip code.  Using zip codes allows for just enough specificity so I can ask “what area in Seattle is best for me?” 

Neighborhood labels would be amazing, and sometimes zip codes actually do get it right – just look at SoHo vs. Tribeca vs. Battery Park City vs. FiDi. I suspect there is much more to be done here with new types of alternative data sets.

What factors matter?

This is a massive question, and in RELO right now there are certainly not all the potential factors that I want. 

Things like Walk Score have done an ok job, but they still miss the fact that some areas have great, walkable downtowns, but it might take a quick drive to get there from your house.  “Nightlife” is similar.  Do you have to be within walking distance of a million bars?  Or do you just want to be within driving distance? 

Cost of living calculators are another broken feature everywhere I look.  Cost of living is almost always heavily weighted towards housing prices, but if you already know the cost of housing, then really what you want is how expensive it is to live your life there. For example, how much does it cost to eat out in Charlotte, NC vs Manhattan?  Anecdotally it’s around 25% less. Is milk 25% less expensive as well? And a Bud Light? I’m not sure.

Climate change is another one that I would love to incorporate. Is a location drought-ridden?  How likely are you to face a hurricane or tornado?  Where are the best places to ride out the next 10-20-40 years? Everyone’s pushing the Great Lakes region but data should be able to back that up.

The factors above take a ton of work and some money to figure out.  Instead I left those questions to be answered post-RELO search.  The things I could factor in now include age weightings, housing prices, region, political leanings, coastal/mountain proximity, weather, great public schools, and if it’s near a college town. 

Again, it’s not just regurgitating that data; it’s providing context so I can actually use it.  “Average home price” could be wildly misleading, as 4 bedroom homes are sometimes 3x the price of 2 bedroom homes.  So I broke out those distinctions.  “Days of Sun” is a figure that’s confusing as well, but armed with context about extremes and averages, I can quickly use analogy to get a read on a new place. 

Can I save houses and notes for towns I like?

This was a big one for me.  How many times did I end up with a million tabs open of different places and different houses?  I built the favorites tab in RELO to make that part of my search much easier.  I can quickly take notes on a specific place, plus easily save down any house from Zillow, Realtor, and Redfin into my profile.  That way when I look at it next week, I can quickly see thumbnails and key data on houses that piqued my interest, plus see all my notes.

Connecting with an on-the-ground guide (a real estate agent) would be a great next step, but putting together a referral system is another whole thing entirely.  And as RELO is just for me right now, I’m still left Googling what the best real estate agents are for each area I’m interested in.

User Experience Flaws

“If there’s a wrong way to do something, your users will find a way to do it.”

Unfortunately, if they are doing it “wrong”, I’m not designing it “right”.

Some things I’ve seen with people who have tooled around on RELO already:

• Everyone wants to click everything:

  • If you give people the chance to click “low tax”, “best schools”, “college town”, and “Liberal”, they absolutely will, even if that is a fairytale situation that doesn’t exist anywhere. Same goes for hitting “Rockies” and “Coastal”. So far I’ve fixed this by showing more general, ranked results whenever a search doesn’t bring anything up. Better than that would be identifying what the limiting factor is and taking it off for them.

• People say they want the “?” info buttons but no one actually clicks on them:

  • If I ask someone to walk through the platform with me, they’ll click everything, pretending that’s what they’d do in real life. Looking at user behavior anonymously shows they just dive right in and they assume they know what everything means. This points to making sure labels are are as clear as possible, because I’ll only get one shot.

• I’ll only get one shot:

  • If someone goes on and doesn’t get results that feel right, they’ll move on. “It doesn’t work”. That means it’s on me to convey all the value they can get by going through the process (like saving homes) so they can understand it’s worth their time to play around with the search functionality.

What’s Next?

There is so much RELO doesn’t do, but then there is so much it’s helped me with as I narrow in on where we should move. 

There’s a long wish-list that may or may not come to fruition over time. For example, where your friends, family, and job are could be the main factor in where you go next, so maybe a radius tool would be a great addition.  A quick tax comparison tool - income and property - would be super helpful as people realize that low income taxes can often mean very high property taxes.

In the end, as is, I hope RELO is as helpful to others as it has been for me! Play around with it and let me know!  relome.io

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There are very few things that have followed me from my 18 months of acting in LA.  Beyond some questionable short films, hundreds of headshots, and one or two lasting friendships, I mainly have memories of what happened there.

Seeing Chloe Fineman make it and then truly succeed on Saturday Night Live is one blast from the past that I should have seen coming.

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The Dark Side of Hollywood

First, some background.  You see when you’re grinding at the bottom of the acting world in Los Angeles you are desperate for direction.  You’re pretty bad at acting, you quickly lost any semblance of the confidence you rode in on, and you are searching everywhere for some magic potion to give you stardom (or even just a line on a psoriasis commercial). 

The dirty little secret of Hollywood is most of the kids who drive in from Portland, Tallahassee, Chicago, and Tampa don’t actually like acting - they like the idea of acting. They like the finished product of the 2 hours on the screen.  And they’ve read enough of the acting blogs to know that there actually have been a few overnight successes, so why not them too?

But when a hot dude, fresh from Houston, hops out of his truck and doesn’t get the call for Top Gun 2, he realizes that “overnight” might be a bit longer.  In fact, it might actually be forever. When success, not acting, was the goal, and that success is proving elusive, then the magic potion becomes the thing everyone looks for.  Yeah, acting a lot is the way to get better at acting, but that’s a grind.

Fortunately for all of us in LA, the magic potion is everywhere. It has thousands of names, and only costs ten sessions, $100 each, payable upfront. Cash please but checks work too.  They are acting classes, image classes, and voice classes. Taught mostly by those who had that one appearance in that one movie in 1989, they promise to teach you the secrets of how to make it onto the big screen.  In reality, they are four hours out of your week where you get to sit in a chair and pretend you are improving your skills when really 90% of your time is spent watching others act badly.

My First Impression of Chloe

So where does Chloe come into this?  She and I both signed up for the same magic potion class.  This one took Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” book and created some sort of acting course out of it.  It promised to find your core myths and descriptors so you could then embody those fully in your acting.  5 classes.  $500 total.  

The first $100 was spent getting to know our classmates.  Chloe was a quirky, bright eyed girl who stood out mostly because she was the first person I had met in LA who didn’t have a car.  She was all in on Ubers.  This was 2015, back when Ubers were $7, so the math actually kind of worked.

When I got home of course I looked up everyone in the class.  What I found on Chloe’s facebook profile was a ton of short videos of her doing impressions or wacky solo skits.  Some of her friends would give her a sympathy like or two, maybe even a “love this!” comment, but most lacked any appreciation at all.  So there I sat, judging this girl I had met earlier that day for being the over-posting weirdo.  Remember, this was 2015: TikTok didn’t exist; Instagram was basically all photos.  She was definitely an outlier.

What I Missed Completely

Looking back, what I labeled as weird was actually a frightening amount of self-confidence to put out to the world your “bad” beginning work.  It was a dedication to the journey of “acting to get better at acting”, knowing that you have to start somewhere to get to the place you want.  She actually understood it more than the rest of us.  Posting those videos and working with the Groundlings improv troupe eventually led to a cult following on Instagram, exposure to people who mattered, and finally a chance to be on SNL 4 years later.

It’s an incredibly compelling lesson in consistency, perseverance, and playing a longer-term game.  4 years feels like a lifetime from today.  But what if you started doing something now that you will almost certainly be bad at, for the purpose of being great at that thing 4 years from now?  Are you able to endure the cadre of perceived doubters in your head, the weird looks from people you know, or the self-doubt that improvement won’t actually come?

I was one of those doubters and judgers of Chloe very early on.  I wrote her off.  She had no idea obviously, nor do I think she would have cared if she had.  Recognizing her ability to keep going and recognizing how inconsequential I was as a doubter is a reminder I’ve kept with me as I try new things.

Looks like Hollywood taught me something after all.

Over the past month I’ve had the outrageous fortune to eat at some of the best restaurants in the world.  Apologies to all the dinners I’ve loved before, but there is, in fact, a difference between top-tier meals and the local café on the corner.  What makes them special, and what allows them to get away with charging amounts that could also book a trans-Atlantic flight, is what truly fascinates me.

To start: what does that even mean, “best restaurants”?  Of course it’s completely subjective. In this case, all it indicates is that people who get paid to rank these things have consistently put these restaurants near the top.  If there are over 20,000 restaurants in New York City alone, does that mean they’ve visited all of them? Of course not. But you’ve got to believe that through word of mouth and the reputation of great chefs, these critics and rankers are decently good at pulling out the best the world has to offer.

The two recent restaurants are these: Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Alinea; both were wedding presents to me and my fiancée (one of a couple reasons to get married).  And just because I think it merits it, I’ll also include our dinner back at Sushi Nakazawa in 2019.  Each is different in cuisine and approach, but there are threads that run through all of them.

Performance (Not Service):

When you think of a 5 star hotel, you often think of a concierge that goes out of their way to help you. Or you think of a 3 a.m. omelet that came 10 minutes later, perfectly cooked. (These are both guesses; I don’t stay in 5 star hotels.)  That’s service: responding immediately to the requests of clients, and even going above and beyond.

That’s not what happens at these restaurants.  Let’s start small. 

When we sat down at Nakazawa’s sushi counter, the chef immediately noticed that Marisa reached for her water glass with her left hand.  Without us even noticing, he smoothly moved her chopsticks and ginger to her left.  Each piece of sushi was then placed towards her dominant hand; same with mine.  Each waiter in the restaurant somehow also got the signal and adjusted their serving style accordingly. It’s a magical performance of the exact right things appearing in the exact right place…. before you even knew you needed them.

At Blue Hill, there was a ballet of servers for each plate that was put down and picked up, especially at the larger tables.  They would swirl in unison, stop and drop, stop and drop, stop and drop.  Choreographed.  The waiter would emerge at the end like he was announcing the next act and opening the curtain. “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you, fresh… from the farm outside… the red pepper egg yolk!!”  And just when you were finished, the same dance emerged to smoothly whisk away any hint of that previous course.  Again, magic.

If we’re talking about magic, then of course you have to talk about Alinea. At this point “great service” is an afterthought because they have thought of every second of your senses throughout the entire meal.  The soundtrack changes based on the course.  Fog emerges from below the table.  A roaring fire laps at a coconut shell in front of you while your salmon dish doubles as a piece of incense. 

Oh by the way, make sure to turn your dish over when you’re done because underneath are fish eggs that have been suspended in gelatin, waiting to be discovered while you, like an idiot, thought it was just a piece of salmon.  This is a restaurant that has their own dishware factory so they can custom-create a skull to serve that one bite for that one Mexican dish.  Performance.

Quality (The Foundation Matters):

There are some excellent chefs anywhere you live that can do some incredible things with the right spices, marinades, and combinations of ingredients.  Not everyone can afford to, nor wants to, go out of their way to get the best ingredients.  All three of these places would never dream of starting with anything less.

At Nakazawa, it’s a piece of fish, usually with little to no seasoning at all, resting on rice.  That’s it.  There is nowhere to hide.  You are trusting in their ability to choose great fish, store it correctly, prepare it precisely, and rest it on a tiny amount of perfectly cooked rice. 

That last part seems trivial.  You haven’t had rice until you’ve been to a sushi place that cares as much as Nakazawa does.  It’s buttery.  The texture lingers on your tongue, staying together to support the fish but breaking apart perfectly as you bite down.  It’s moist and the grains are perfectly sized.  Rice has no business getting this many words but this rice probably deserves more. 

Then add on a fatty piece of tuna and watch it slowly settle onto the rice before you pop it into your mouth, no soy sauce needed.  Marisa still makes fun of me for tearing up on my first bite, but my whole body literally reacted when I tasted it.  That, on a dish with two ingredients.

Blue Hill manages to pull off what is the easiest thing to parody. “I went to a fine dining restaurant last night and they gave me a stalk of fennel and five cherries.”  That’s a thing that happened, yes.  Those were 2 of our 15 courses.

How did they pull it off?  That fennel was from the farm right outside.  It was the most pampered piece of fennel on planet earth, and it was so good looking it should have starred in the Top Gun sequel.  The crunch was wild.  They somehow had managed to produce the perfect piece of fennel.  Now is the perfect piece of fennel worth paying hundreds of dollars for? Of course not, but it’s a metaphor for how seriously they take each ingredient. 

They also gave us two single-udder butters - that is two butters made from two different individual cows - that each tasted different and were the best butters we had ever had.  We then put them on four pieces of bread using baking methods from four different centuries - the best bread we had ever had.  I can still taste those bites.  The meats, the egg yolk shavings on a pea soup - each dish was simple and wild.  They had gotten the best out of nature and they knew it.

Alinea I feel like could use month-old tuna from Arizona and still find a way to make it delicious.  Fortunately, they decide to combine great ingredients with top notch cooking. There were a few dishes when they stepped back and said “here’s a simple dish just to show we’re not hiding the ball.”  They then used those amazing ingredients to concoct wild experiments that stretched the elemental table. It felt like a lesson in “master the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

Space (Where You Live For 3 Hours):

If any of these meals were served at a greasy New York diner, I would love them and eat there regularly (and probably get gout).  But my memories of each of these restaurants is so tied to the interior and the environment they create.  The images from all three nights will stick with me as much as the food.

Nakazawa is a black-stone temple of solitude, dedicated to the fish.  They’ve recently pushed a lot harder into dining room service as well so perhaps this bubble is punctured, but the memory I have is almost spa-like, or perhaps like an induction ceremony to a secret society.  “Welcome, do you accept this chu-toro as your eternal father and savior.”  “I do.”  You sink into the high backed leather stools and everything else melts away.  It serves to focus your senses on each bite of sushi.

Blue Hill is a constant reminder that you are in a temple of farm-to-table.  Each carrot has a backstory, each pheasant a name.  It’s barnyard chic, with a big centerpiece and a chandelier made of sticks and candles.  The windows overlook the farm you are eating from.  Mid-meal they took us to an actual barn just for us, with a slab of wood and benches, surrounded by pitchforks and lights coming down from the pulleys that used to hang bales of hay.  Perhaps the food tasted that much better as we consistently convinced ourselves of how fresh it was.

At Alinea we cheated a bit.  My Aunt is a master diner and reserved the room next to the kitchen. Nothing but a pane of glass separated us from the scientists creating our food.  The other two walls were mirrors, so there was no bad seat at the table.  The dinner lasted three hours but there was never any lull in the conversation: either another dish was on its way, another bite was being enjoyed, or another secret was being uncovered as we studied the chefs. 

To add on to it, they played with their space as well.  That fog I mentioned before?  It emerged during dessert.  The lights darkened, rock music blared, a red strobe light reflected off the smoke, and two chefs created our ice cream blocks/crumbles/fossils right in front of us.  The table was their counter.  The table was our plate. 

Now What?

These restaurants are at the top of the culinary heap. But if I had all the money in the world, how often would I go?  If I could get into Alinea and Blue Hill anytime I wanted, would I go every night? Every week? Every month?  What they have achieved is a masterpiece of cooking and showmanship.

But just like I wouldn’t go see Hamilton every week on Broadway, there is a uniqueness and feeling of wonder that feels best enjoyed sparingly.  I feel lucky that I got to go even once.  As for other restaurants, as long as the vibe is great or the food is good enough, it’s more about the people you’re with anyway.  The restaurant is the backdrop for a gathering. 

It is good to know, however, that restaurants do exist that are definitely the main event.

In 2018, I ran the New York Marathon.  But if you’ve ever known a marathon runner, that’s not the important part. It’s not actually about the 26 mile race that takes place over ~ 4 hours - it’s about the training that takes months and months and takes over every single conversation runners have with anyone.  The miles they’ve run, the diet they’re sticking to, the beers they aren’t drinking, and the muscles they definitely are hurting.

Runners training for a marathon turn into nonstop talkers for one reason - they are compensating for the unprecedented amounts of time they end up spending with themselves.  Because at mile 18, your head can become a pretty wild place.

Fortunately for me, four years later, I have a lot to show for my efforts.  I now have under my belt a completed marathon, a complete dislike for running, and a completed, radio-ready, country song.

Wild Thoughts

You see, during one early training run, as I was rounding the Southern tip of Manhattan and emerging into the weird, shadowed, underpassed streets of the Lower East Side, a chorus popped into my head.  A country chorus. 

“She got that bodysuit and denim, baby don’t you let em down easy…” 

It was summer in New York, girls wearing bodysuits and denim shorts were everywhere, and somehow my runned-out brain took my Southern college experience and my 2018 reality and bust out the beginnings of a country song.

I literally ran with it.  For the rest of training this chorus faded in and out. I toyed with lyrics and tune. 

“The way those hips are swaying, those boys don’t know you’re playing their heartstrings…” 

I started to imagine nights out when I was down South, quickly realizing that “bodysuit” made absolutely no sense in any memory I had, real or imagined.  “Cowboy Hat” it became.

Every few miles something new would hit and I’d chew on it.  How would a night out start? A dusty bar, a jukebox in the corner, everyone eyeing everyone else. 

“Look across the room and baby you don’t belong.  Flipping through the jukebox trying to find your song.”  

There it is.  Who would react?  And how?

“The girls they just can’t stand it… the way their men keep staring… each one thinking they could be the one…”

Bingo.

Getting In My Own Way

And just like that, it came to an abrupt end. The marathon came and went.  The song? It came and went too. 

Because what was I actually going to do with a country song?  I had a tech company in New York City; that’s who I was and who I could be. It was my definition.  At the time there was never one thought about the ability for that song to feasibly be anything more than half-finished notes on my phone.  The steps to get a real person singing it seemed as complex to me as arranging a trip to Jupiter.  It was a whole different planet.

So for 3 years the song sat there.  Then, ironically, came this blog (or is it a newsletter?).  I started writing The Reflection Point semi-regularly in mid-2021.  I loved writing. I enjoyed writing.  So I wrote more and more. The juices started flowing.   “The more you do the more you do.”  “Creation breeds creation.”  Whatever pithy phrase you want to use, writing here gave me the inspiration to keep writing over there.

Lyrics turned out to be the easy part.  I settled back into the dreamworld I had created in 2018.  A guy and a girl, going bar to bar, but the night ending with her leaving him wanting more. 

“I leave without her number… the memories they last longer… she said them country boys, they’ll break your heart.”

I was getting closer and closer to a song that I would want to drive to, chill in the backyard to, and most importantly, sing in a stadium to.  I was making a country song that I would love - the intro, the verses, the chorus, the bridge, that one part where everyone really starts belting it out.  I was loving every second.

Songs Are Hard

I reached a point where I figured I should probably start recording something.  Steve Jobs thankfully gave every clueless amateur access to Garageband so I took my iPad and sang straight into it. Steve Jobs did not, however, give every amateur flawless musical instincts.  I soon realized that my verses had some wildly bad timing.  Words that looked great on a page either had to be stretched out past any point of acceptability or jammed together like subway commuters.  I had reached the editing process.

Remember haiku’s in high school?  Remember counting out syllables?  I was snipping and rearranging to get my song back on track.  Fortunately, the tighter it got, the better it sounded, and the more excited I became.

As I got closer to a vocally-finished song, the question of how I would take my iPad version and create a real song out of it loomed larger.  In talking to a few industry pros, the music biz has turned into one where song demos can’t just be roughly-sketched ideas.  There is enough technology and talent where they are expecting it to sound like a finished product, even if someone else will be the one singing it in the end.

Thus came the Google search: “can you pay someone to sing your song professionally?”  Eventually I found that Fiverr and a few other sites have a whole industry of people who are great musicians that make side money quickly spinning up other people’s ideas.  They have the studio equipment and voice. You bring the song.  

My first attempt was a miss.  I chose a Spanish guy who I mistakenly thought had no accent but who instead was incapable of pronouncing “J’s”.  “Flipping through the yookbox trying to find your song…”.  Perhaps my song would be a hit in the South… of Spain…

The second guy was a hit.  I sent him my recording, he re-sang it, added instruments and mixed it professionally.  He sent it back, I paid him a couple hundred for the great work, and the song was mine.

I grinned like an idiot the first time I heard it.  It was the first time I actually believed it should go beyond me.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

That brings us up to today.  In my free time I’m embarking on a journey to get this sung by a great country singer, purely because that would make me happy. I think the song would make other people happy too.  I’m finding email addresses of agents and managers of top singers and reaching out. I’m hitting up artists known and less-known on Instagram.  I’m networking with anyone I know in the industry to see if I can slide in somewhere. 

This journey is a benefit in itself, talking to people I never would have connected with, and learning about a world I only tangentially experienced during my 18 months acting in LA.  It’s all gravy, it’s all upside.

The End.

Just kidding.  Can you imagine if I didn’t post the song?  Love it or hate it, I hope it will at least make you smile. Here’s to trying new things and seeing them through.

Song Link: Cowboy Hat & Denim