There’s a song for this one. The Last Ten Feet.

First session had just let out. I was standing in the doorway between the theater and the lobby, taking the temperature. How’s everybody doing. Enjoying it so far. That kind of thing.

A guy came up to me.

“Are you the TEDx guy?”

I don’t know what made him pick me. Maybe I looked official. Maybe I looked like I didn’t live there.

“How could I help?”

He said, “Why did you bring TED to our small town?”

I didn’t blink.

“Because small towns need big ideas.”

He said thank you.

I said, “Next year when I come back, I want you to bring twenty of your friends.”

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The red letters

We didn’t bring TED to Columbiana. TED is the big conference. Big Ted, we call it. Vancouver for years, San Diego next. What’s in Columbiana is a TEDx, independently organized under license, run by people who live there.

He didn’t know that. Almost nobody does. He’d been watching talks in front of big red letters his whole adult life, on a phone, on a laptop, on a screen some teacher pulled down in a classroom. Now the letters were in his town and he was sitting in front of them.

So he had the facts wrong and the feeling exactly right. Something did come to his town. I wasn’t going to be the guy who corrected him on the licensing.

And I know why he thought it.

Because the set was very good.

A thousand talks

I’ve been going to TED since 1994. A thousand talks, give or take, live in a room. That’s a strange thing to be able to say out loud, and what it gives you is a bar. You learn what a room feels like when a talk lands. You learn how much of that is the talk and how much is the room it landed in.

When the chance came to produce them, we started at home, with TEDxSantaBarbara, and built a reputation for shows that ran clean. That’s how Greg Smith found us.

Greg lives in Columbiana, Ohio. Six thousand people, a traffic circle, and a theater on Main Street that everybody calls the CAT. He came to us years ago and said he wanted to bring this to his hometown, and would we help him figure out what that looks like. My wife Kymberlee and I have been helping him produce it ever since.

I’ve been producing or helping produce these since 2010, and I hold teams to a standard. The letters. The lighting. Where a speaker walks on and where the light finds them. The transitions. The sound. Months go into all of it, and the reason is simple. Nobody sitting in that theater should have to grade on a curve. A town that gets a lesser show learns it deserves a lesser one.

So a man sat down on Main Street in a town of six thousand and watched something that looked exactly like what he’d been watching on his phone for the better part of twenty years.

Of course he thought TED came to town. That isn’t an accident. That’s the job.

He’d been through one other thing that morning, and it matters more than it sounds.

Nearly everyone has seen a TED talk. Alone. On a screen, while doing something else, and then you close the tab and go back to your life.

Almost nobody has sat in a room for a whole day of them.

Fourteen or more of them in a row do something the same talks can’t do one at a time. They start talking to each other. A line from the second one lands differently after the ninth. Your brain stops evaluating and starts absorbing. And you’re not alone in it. You’re shoulder to shoulder with people who heard the same thing at the same second, and when it breaks, you all spill into the lobby at once and the room gets loud.

That’s what he’d walked out of when he found me.

The electrical room

Here’s what he didn’t see.

Backstage at the CAT is the electrical room. Blue panels down one wall, a rack of red parts bins, a commercial vacuum parked next to the fire extinguisher. Somebody hung a red clothes hanger off a ceiling pipe. The greenroom is a garage on a residential street, string lights and folding tables and bottled water in red plastic baskets.

Nobody cleaned any of it up. Nobody was going to. Every TEDx backstage on earth looks roughly like this. The front of the house is designed to be seen. The back of the house is designed to get people ready.

The clipboard

The two women in that photograph are a speaker and her coach.

The coach is Kymberlee. She spends six months with each of these people. Helps them find the idea, cut it to the bone, build it, then teaches them how to walk out and deliver the talk of their life in ten minutes with nothing in their hands.

Look at what’s still in hers.

That’s the clipboard with the speaker’s script on it. Kymberlee follows every line from the wings, watching a monitor you can’t see from this angle, pushing everything she has at the stage. Ten minutes of not breathing.

The speaker came off. Kymberlee never put the clipboard down. She opened her arms with it still in her hand.

And she’s the one with her eyes closed. Nobody claps for her.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that hug. One year a speaker came off and found me. Big guy, my height and my weight, and he sank into my arms and I had to hold him up.

People underestimate what these speakers put themselves through. Six months of work and six months of dread, compressed into ten minutes, in front of everyone they know, with no notes and nowhere to hide. Then the ovation. Then they walk off, and the whole structure they’ve been holding up lets go at once.

They melt. Almost every one of them. You can feel the relief come off them.

That’s the photograph. It’s the part nobody sees, and it’s the part I’d put first.

We’ve produced hundreds of these talks by now, and here’s what makes six months a reasonable price. One person, one day, ten minutes. It changes the life of the person who gave it, almost without exception. Then it goes up on ted.com, and it can reach thousands of people neither of us will ever meet.

That’s the arithmetic Kymberlee is running in the wings with the clipboard in her hand. She isn’t counting whether it goes well. She’s counting who it reaches.

No second tier

The guy in the lobby wasn’t asking why TED. He was asking why here.

Because a town of six thousand can hold the same ideas as a city of six million. The second tier was never a size. It’s a choice about what somebody’s willing to build in the back, where nobody claps.

Small towns need big ideas.

And I meant the other part. Bring twenty of your friends.

There’s a song for this one. The Last Ten Feet.

TEDxColumbiana is an independently organized TED event held at the Columbiana Arts Theater in Columbiana, Ohio. Photograph published with permission.

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♪ This one comes with a song, “Butterfly Lane.” Linked at the end. ♪

We were finishing a business meeting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; Jonah was our host when he asked if we had a few more minutes. We checked our watches, the way you do when you are trying to look responsible, and said sure, what’s up. Would you like to see the butterflies, he said. We said yes before he finished the sentence. He already had the look of someone who knows the thing he is about to show you is going to make the rest of the day irrelevant.

On the way, he opened a door we would have walked past a hundred times without noticing, no sign on it, and took us down a hallway that was not part of any tour. He stopped us at a pane of glass we did not know was there. On the other side, a tech was unboxing a shipment of chrysalises just in from Costa Rica, lined up like cargo, each one a butterfly that had not happened yet. It is not the kind of thing you think about when you buy a ticket. Somebody has to receive the shipment

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The sound first

The exhibit is called Butterflies Alive, though everyone just calls it the pavilion. The permanent structure has its own name too, the Sprague Butterfly Pavilion, built in 2018, and it turns out it was nominated for Best Butterfly Garden in USA Today’s 10Best awards last year. I did not know that until I went looking. What caught me off guard was the sound. Step into that netted enclosure at the edge of the museum grounds and you hear it right away, a thousand sets of wings moving at once, quiet but never actually silent. I did not expect that. They call the path through it a lazy river, which is exactly right. You move with the current, families and children drifting from one section to the next, and every few minutes a chime sounds to mark the transition. The chime is not for atmosphere. It is the signal to check yourself before you leave, to make sure nothing has decided to come with you.

A tail, apparently

We were somewhere in the middle of the river when Jim said, quietly, that I had a tail. I turned to look and could not see it, which is the nature of tails, and there was only so far I could twist without doing something ridiculous. Jim took a picture instead and turned his phone around so I could see. An owl butterfly had landed on the tail of my shirt, right at my waist, and it had been there long enough that it had apparently made a decision. I did not reach back to check for myself. The last thing I wanted was to hurt it. It was not resting. It had chosen. The wings were open and still, the eyespots looking out at the room with the calm authority of something that does not worry about meetings or agendas

I did not try to stay still. I just kept walking, aware the whole time that I was carrying a passenger, something that had made its own decision about where it wanted to be. People gathered the way people do around small beautiful things. Someone took photographs. The butterfly stayed through all of it, through the attention and the murmuring and the phones, apparently unbothered by any of it, and it held on for nearly the whole walk.

There is a specific kind of stillness that comes over you when something wild has decided you are safe. It is not the stillness of standing frozen. It is the stillness of being momentarily reclassified.

Jim’s turn

Jim got tagged too. He sat down for a second on a bench along the river and a giant swallowtail landed on his leg, wings folded up in that yellow and black checkerboard they wear. He did not want to move, and as far as I could tell he did not, not until it decided on its own to leave. Both of us walked out of that pavilion having been chosen for something, whatever that something was

The blue morphos never stopped moving, which is how they survive, that impossible blue coming from structure-bending light rather than pigment, never sitting still long enough to photograph. I stopped trying and just watched, which is what you are supposed to do anyway.

Butterfly Lane

On the way out, I mentioned to Jonah that the street behind our house, probably three miles from where we were standing, is called Butterfly Lane. He knew it, of course. I have lived in Santa Barbara fifty-four years now, and I found that name decades before I ever lived near it, back when it still sounded like a rumor, and it took years to understand it was not one. It is named for the migration that used to happen there every year, tens of thousands of monarchs arriving in the eucalyptus groves to overwinter. In the twenty years we have lived in Montecito we have walked that street more times than I can count, down to Butterfly Beach and back, a stretch of sand that stays mostly local because you have to already know it is there, eucalyptus towering on both sides the whole way, and I still close my eyes sometimes and try to see what it looked like when those trees were actually dripping with them. The numbers now are a fraction of what they were. I already knew that. Days like this one just make it heavier.

A hundred monarchs

About ten years ago, a friend handed us a chrysalis, the kind of thing that sends you straight back to sixth-grade science class, and we watched it through to the end. We loved it enough that within a few years we had a garden full of milkweed and were doing it on purpose, caterpillar to chrysalis to wing, launching them off our own back porch into their six weeks of life. We probably helped a hundred of them make that trip. Every stage of it felt like a small magic trick performed slowly enough that you could see how it worked. Now, when we are out somewhere in town and one drifts past, usually while everyone else keeps walking, we stop. We do not say much. We just watch it, then look at each other, both of us back on that porch for a second before it flies off.

Checking for hitchhikers

The chime sounded before the exit, the reminder to check. A volunteer was waiting there with a feather duster and had us spin around slowly while she checked us for hitchhikers, working the duster along our shoulders and sleeves like she had done it a thousand times, because she had. There is also a large mirror so you can inspect yourself, and an exhaust fan above the door that discourages anything from slipping through regardless. I checked my shirttail in the mirror. The owl butterfly was already gone, sometime between the chime and the mirror, departed without ceremony back into the warm air of the pavilion. We walked out with the kind of smiles you cannot manufacture, and the agenda from earlier was already ancient history. I said it then and still mean it: every meeting should end this way, a little recreation and a little education bolted onto the back end. But the afternoon had already been reclassified, and my waist still carries a kind of memory that is hard to explain to anyone who was not there.

♪ Listen to “Butterfly Lane”: suno.com/s/9TA3jLYk6DbQj9sI ♪

🎧 This one's also up as an episode. Hit play above, or keep reading below.

“Got your back.”

That’s what Harnoor said, hand on my shoulder, thirty seconds before we walked out to do something neither of us had done in front of an audience before. Just the two of us. Two-prov, the form where there’s nowhere to hide, nobody else in the scene to lean on.

Fifty Years

Two months before that night, Harnoor told me they were putting a two-prov show together and asked if I wanted to try it with him. There are fifty years between us. My first thought wasn’t the one you’d expect from a future scene partner. It was closer to a question: why me? I could have spent a week running that scene in my head, finding every reason fifty years makes this the wrong pairing. Instead I answered what he’d actually asked, not what I assumed was underneath it. I said yes.

I said the same thing. Got your back. Then we walked out to two chairs and a black curtain and nothing else. No idea, not one single idea, of what either of us was about to say.

And I felt safe.

That’s the part that still gets me. Not excited, though I was that too. Not nervous, though I was that too. Safe. The kind of safe you feel when you’ve done the reps, and you know it, when the only thing left to do is stop thinking and let go.

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The Reps

It took years to earn that tap on the shoulder. Classes, then more classes. Years of group scenes where you could always step back if you froze, let someone else carry the moment while you found your feet again. Two-prov takes that away on purpose. There’s no back row. You either trust what you’ve built with your partner or you don’t walk out at all. Harnoor and I walked out because the reps were already banked. The rehearsal wasn’t for the audience. It was so that on the night, neither of us had to think.

Two-prov strips out everything you’d normally lean on. In a group scene you can watch, wait, step in when you’re ready. With just two of you, you’re always on. You look at your partner, and in an instant you’re reading a character off the way they’re standing, the set of their face, before either of you has said a word. Then someone speaks, and whatever they say becomes the reality of the scene. Not what you planned, not what you saw in them a second ago, but what they actually said.

The World Now

I remember one where I clocked Harnoor looking tired before we walked out, and I had a line ready, something about a hard day at work. He beat me to it. He came out as the one running late. “Sorry, professor, I know I don’t really have an excuse.” And that was the world now. I’m a professor. He’s a student. He’s late, and some part of me had to decide, right there, whether this was the first time or the tenth, whether I was the professor who let it slide or the one who didn’t. I didn’t get to keep the story I walked out with. I had to answer the one he actually gave me.

That’s the whole form, right there. You build a world out of nothing, hand it to your partner, and then you live inside whatever they hand back. No net. No do-over. You can’t talk your way back to the version you had in your head.

Here’s what took me longer to see. That’s not an improv skill. That’s the skill. The tap on the shoulder before we walked out wasn’t a promise that nothing would go wrong. It was a promise that whatever version of the scene showed up, tired or late or off-script, I’d stay in it with him. Got your back doesn’t mean I’ll protect you from what’s true. It means I won’t leave the room when the truth walks in wearing a different face than I expected.

Off Stage

I’d already done that once, before I ever stood on those two chairs. Harnoor asked, and the rehearsed answer was every reason fifty years between us made this the wrong pairing. I didn’t give that answer. I said yes, and found out the assumption was the only thing in the way. I notice the same reflex off the stage now, in meetings, in conversations headed somewhere I didn’t plan for, when someone walks in already carrying something- a bad morning, a decision half made- and my instinct is to run the scene I’d already written in my head. Drop the line you rehearsed. Answer the person actually in front of you.

Harnoor and I didn’t get good at this by talking about it. We got good at it by doing it badly, in front of people, enough times that the thinking finally got out of the way. Nobody tells you that’s how you arrive at trust. You don’t decide to trust your instincts. You rehearse your way into it, so many times that on the night it matters, there’s nothing left to do but let go.

The Other Sixty

Here’s the math I keep coming back to. An hour with those two chairs is supposed to move something in the sixty hours of life that come after it. Not the bit, the practice that gets you there. If it only shows up under a black curtain, it’s a hobby. If it’s still there Tuesday morning in a meeting, or at dinner, or on the phone with someone having a hard week, the hour on stage was never the point. It was the rehearsal for the other sixty.

Two people, two chairs, no net. Turns out that’s not a stripped-down version of real life. It’s the most honest version I’ve found. You don’t get to choose who walks into the scene or what they bring with them. You only get to decide, before you walk out there, whether you’ve got their back.

🎧 This Sunday Story runs as a podcast too, if you'd rather listen next time.

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called Both Words. Put it on while you read if you like, or save it for the end. Either way it belongs to the piece.

Their anniversary was Thursday, and I missed it, which is how this started. I went digging through my phone for pictures of the wedding, three years back now, and the first thing that came up wasn’t the ceremony at all. It was a picture I’d taken of a picture.

My mother, in a veil and wire glasses, standing next to my father in a dark suit at the front of a church, candles behind them and white flowers in tall stands on either side. Somebody had brought that portrait to the wedding and set it out on a table where people would walk past it. I stopped and photographed it with my phone because I don’t own a copy myself. I still don’t.

A wedding I got to write.

Elsa is my niece. She and Brian asked me to marry them, which I had never done, and I said yes before I’d finished hearing the question. Then I sat down and realized I didn’t actually know them. Not as adults. I knew a kid I’d seen at intervals and a young man I’d met a handful of times, and I had a wedding to write.

So I went after it. Phone calls, questions, the kind of research you do when you’re afraid of standing up in front of a hundred people with nothing true to say. It took weeks. It worked.

Brian served in the honor guard at Arlington. That’s a young man in dress blues standing at attention beside the worst day of a stranger’s life, folding a flag into a triangle for a widow he has never met. Elsa is trained as an expert in American Sign Language, so her whole skill is making sure a person gets understood when the ordinary channel doesn’t reach them. They have both built a life around showing up for people who need something.

I stood between them on July 23, 2023, at an old brick house in Virginia that had been there since the Civil War, in a gray suit with a black folder, and gave the talk. Elsa’s veil ran all the way down to the brick. Brian wore a blue suit that struck me as exactly the right amount of confident

It took me until this week to notice what was happening in that photograph. A man whose training is standing in a formal role at somebody else’s threshold. A woman whose training is closing the gap when communication fails. And me in the middle, doing both jobs at once, for the only time in my life.

Officiating puts you eighteen inches from two people at the exact moment they become each other’s family, close enough to hear them breathing, and the whole job is to say the words and then get out of the frame.

I got out of the frame. Came home, and went straight back to seeing Elsa at twelve years old, all elbows and momentum, running around somebody’s yard.

The arithmetic

People assume there has to be a rupture behind a gap like that. There was a fight, if you want one. My brother and I went at each other constantly as kids, and I moved out at seventeen. We patched it up years ago, and we’ve been fine since, so the fight isn’t the answer.

The answer is arithmetic. He’s 71, and I’m 73, two years apart, and he married late and had Elsa when he was nearly forty. By the time she was that kid on the lawn, my own daughter was grown. Opposite coasts, different decades of the same life. Nobody chose it. Our calendars never once overlapped, and then it was thirty years later.

Dinner on the way south

In June, Amy texted. Elsa’s mother, two full weeks ahead, asking whether Kymberlee and I would be around, because she and Elsa were driving down to see Elsa’s grandmother and wanted to stop for dinner.

We ate outside. June gloom, that gray lid Santa Barbara puts on the start of summer, everybody in sweatshirts by six. Elsa wore an oversized tour shirt from 1993, the year before she was born, with soft pants and sneakers, dressed for comfort rather than company. She’s pregnant. Her first, my brother’s first grandchild, due any day now, possibly the day this goes out.

What I remember from that dinner isn’t the baby. Elsa and Amy ordered in tandem and then ate off each other’s plates without ever discussing it. One would reach across with a fork, and the other wouldn’t look up, because there was nothing to look up about. They have obviously been doing it for years.

I watched from across the table and felt something rise in my chest that I’d have to call intense happiness, which is a strange amount of feeling to have about two women sharing a meal.

It took me a while to work out why the volume was so high. I was a latchkey kid, and I’ve written before about seeing my father twice a year, so I’ll leave that part where it is. What I haven’t said is what a twice-a-year childhood does to everything around it. Nobody drove anybody anywhere to sit at a table together. When I met Kymberlee, part of what pulled me toward her family was that they did it constantly, on a Tuesday, for no particular reason. Nobody over there thought a shared meal was an occasion. I did. I still do.

Elsa and my daughter Melissa are close. They talk most days. I know that because Melissa told me.

My mother’s face

What I love in Elsa is the way she looks at things. Bright and sparkly, lit up before she’s even decided whether the news is good. It’s very Sylvester. It’s also my mother’s.

My mother died in 2012. Elsa was seventeen. There were seventeen years when both of them were alive inside the same family, and I could not tell you whether they ever sat in a room together. That’s the sentence that stopped me cold this week. The answer is one phone call away. Amy would pick up, she’d know instantly, and she’d be glad I asked. I’ve had her number the whole time. So this isn’t distance doing something to me. This is a thing I have not done.

Which also means the resemblance may not be mine to hand over. It could be the ordinary observation on their side, said at every Thanksgiving I wasn’t at, so worn in that Elsa has heard it since she was a girl. Or nobody has ever said it. I can’t tell you which, and that’s the part I keep turning over. Missing the years costs you the years, and everybody knows that going in. What nobody warns you about is losing the ability to tell whether the thing you noticed is rare or completely ordinary.

The folder

Here’s what I can’t get around. I have already closed this gap once. I did it in a matter of weeks, well enough to stand up in Virginia and say true things about two people in front of everyone who loved them. I know how to do this. I’ve proved I know how.

I only did it because somebody handed me a folder.

That’s the mechanism. Please give me a role, and I’ll cross any distance you name. Please send me an occasion with a date attached, and I’ll handle it thoroughly. Without one I’ll stand at the edge for thirty years and call the whole thing circumstance.

Both words

She’s due any day. Somebody is going to hand me a title again, and I’ll take it, the way I always do.

She’s been handing me one since she could talk. She calls me Uncle Mark. She has always used both words, and I notice it every single time, which probably means some part of me has been treating the title as a loan.

Amy texted two weeks ahead. Melissa and Elsa talk most days. Elsa says, Uncle Mark. I’ve spent thirty years grading the Sylvesters as a family that doesn’t do this, while they did it in my direction the whole time, with no occasion attached and nobody assigning it.

The next time she says it, I’m going to answer.

Listen to Both Words on Suno: https://suno.com/s/SS1m6iRyoi9WLWhP

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called None of It Was Mine. If you’d rather listen first, the link is at the end.

Two hours into the lesson, I’m standing next to my wife in a room that used to be a dry cleaner’s, except none of it is real. There’s no dry cleaner. There are no photographs on the wall behind us, no five generations of somebody else’s family, no great-great-great-grandfather who started the business. Phyllis Katz put us there with eleven words. A married couple. He’s getting the business in the divorce. Go.

The Family That Never Existed

Kymberlee started naming them. Her mother. An aunt who sewed buttons. A great-great-great-grandfather who was, she decided on the spot, the queen’s tailor. Each name landed as it had always been there. I stood in the middle of a family that had existed for maybe four seconds, feeling something I did not expect to feel at seventy-three, in a room I’d paid to be humbled in on my birthday.

I felt small, and not because Kymberlee was funnier than me in that moment, though she was. The more names she gave to that lineage, the more real it got, and the more real it got, the more I understood that my character had married into something enormous and had brought nothing to it. No trade, no history, just a man who’d noticed she was staying in a business she didn’t want, staying because leaving felt like disappointing relatives who were already gone. I told her that in the scene. I told her the thing she actually wanted was the music, the guitar she wouldn’t put down, and that I’d left, eventually, because she never did.

The Actual Assignment Is Silence

The gift itself was simple. My birthday landed this week, and Kymberlee arranged two hours alone with Phyllis Katz, a founding member and former director of the Groundlings, one of the people who helped build the school itself, decades in television, film, and stage, still teaching, still sharp enough to stop you mid-sentence. Two of the six people in our improv group were there too, Harnoor Lai and Louis John. Our regular coach is Navaris Dawson, Thursday nights over Zoom, here in Santa Barbara. Phyllis subs when he can’t make it, which means a founding member of the Groundlings is our backup, a fact that’s been ironic on a dozen different levels since the first night we found out. Mostly, what Phyllis gave us that day was silence.

Not the kind that happens because nobody has anything to say. The kind you build on purpose and then refuse to fill. Two people up at a time, a relationship, a moment that matters, and one instruction underneath everything else. Find the awkward silences. Do not talk your way past them.

I am not good at that. I’ve spent a career, four decades of it, making rooms comfortable, filling the gap before anyone else has to feel it. Phyllis was asking me to do the opposite on purpose, in front of people, for no reason except that the silence was where the scene actually lived. Every instinct I have said, keep talking. She kept saying Stay.

Productive Struggle, Mid-Scene

So there I was, an invented husband standing in an invented business that belonged to an invented family that was not mine. The actual struggle of the whole two hours had nothing to do with remembering a game or hitting a mark. It was standing still. Letting the moment sit there, ugly and unresolved, instead of rescuing it with a joke or a line or anything at all. I have a word for what that felt like now, one I picked up a few weeks back from a teacher talking about how children learn: productive struggle. I was in it, mid-scene, wanting badly to fill a hole Phyllis needed me to leave open, not knowing yet whether I could.

I pushed forward instead of talking. I let the pause sit past the point where every part of me wanted to say something, anything, to make the discomfort stop. Kymberlee let it sit too. And in that stretch of nothing, standing surrounded by five generations of people who had never existed until she named them, something actually happened between us that no line of dialogue would have gotten to faster.

None of what happened in that room was real. The two of us, standing in it, were completely real. That’s the difference between listening and waiting for your turn to talk.

Later, working with Harnoor, Phyllis said something I wrote down without meaning to. His character already had the answer, she told him. He just had to stop getting in its way. Once you actually know who you’re playing, the character thinks of it. You don’t have to. It gets fast enough that it starts moving on its own, and that speed isn’t a trick. It’s just enough time inside the thing that your own thinking finally gets out of the way and lets the truth through. I recognized what she was describing. It’s the same reason I could stay inside a silence by the fourth scene without bailing the way I’d wanted to on the first. Fluid and authentic turned out to be the same word, arriving late, after enough of it that I stopped deciding what to say and started actually being there.

None of It Was Real, All of It Was Real

Here’s the part I keep turning over since. None of what happened in that room was real. The photographs weren’t real. The dry cleaning business wasn’t real. The great-great-great-grandfather was invented on the spot by a woman who had never met him, because he doesn’t exist. We built the whole thing out of nothing but the words we chose to say to each other.

But the two of us, standing in it, were completely real. What passed between us in that silence, the discomfort, the decision not to fill it, the actual attention we were paying each other instead of waiting for our turn to talk, that part wasn’t pretend. That part is the same skill whether the room is invented or not. It’s the difference between listening to someone and waiting for the gap where you get to speak next. Most conversations I’ve had in my life, the good ones and the forgettable ones both, come down to which one of those two things I was actually doing.

I’ve run companies. I’ve produced over a hundred TEDx talks from the wings of a stage in Santa Barbara. I’ve built systems meant to help other people say what they mean. None of that taught me to sit in a silence I’d built with someone else and let it stay uncomfortable until it turned into something true. Phyllis Katz taught me that, at seventy-three, standing in a fake dry cleaner’s, surrounded by a family that was never mine, on the one night of the year built entirely around the fact that I was born.

The Pause I’m Supposed to Keep

Kymberlee teaches her speaking clients something she calls the Power of the Pause, a breath, a beat, room enough for what was just said to land. What Phyllis had us do was the same thing stretched longer and left raw, uncomfortable on purpose, never rescued.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it away from the stage. I know the silence is still there, the next time someone I love is talking and I’m already deciding what I’ll say back.

Listen to None of It Was Mine on Suno: https://suno.com/s/seXowXziIKjJryR2

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called Knock Twice. Read first and let the song land after, or listen first and let it open the door. Either order works.

I get on a video call with a stranger named Patrick Phillips, and the first thing I learn is where he’s sitting. A coworking space that could be anywhere, across a twenty six mile bridge from New Orleans. Forty one years old. Alone at a desk most days, building things nobody asked him to build.

Twenty six miles of causeway across Lake Pontchartrain connects his side of the water to New Orleans. He crossed it for high school, then again for college in Baton Rouge. His father was a Marine, so home was wherever the next base happened to be. Louisiana is the place that stuck.

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The Skip

A few weeks back, he was coding a project management tool for himself, the way some people build model trains. Twenty years in government will teach you every framework and every throwaway best practice there is. So when the AI helping him build the tool suggested a system he’d never heard of, that got his attention. He didn’t stop to study it. Instead of researching the framework the way he’d researched everything else in his life, he skipped straight to a person. Close by, in New Orleans. He found the guy online and just connected.

When Matt Hayne, an EOS coach, heard Patrick’s story, he said, “You gotta meet my buddy in Santa Barbara, Mark,” and sent the intro. When Matt sends me someone, I pay attention. He knows I love meeting new people.

That’s how a former Treasury employee turned solo builder ended up on a video call with me. I’ve spent forty three years building software. Six Academy Awards worth of it.

Patrick spent most of his career in government, mostly at Treasury, then a stretch at a private consulting firm doing portfolio oversight work most people have never heard of and wouldn’t enjoy hearing about if they had. Somewhere in the last year he started building his own tools instead of buying software built by other people. He hit walls the way everyone does who tries this. Then it worked, and it was, in his own words, the best feeling in the world.

Cortado Buddies

Matt and I didn’t meet through business either. A couple of years back, he was in Santa Barbara visiting clients and went looking for an improv school to sit in on. He found the one my wife and I run, and turned out to be the funniest person in the room. We found out we were both coaches, different disciplines, and started meeting for coffee whenever he was back in town. We both liked the same drink, it turned out. A cortado. We became Cortado Buddies. Years of it now, pictures of coffee sent back and forth, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. He’s careful about who he introduces me to. That care is the entire reason the introduction meant anything.

The Tour

For the next hour, Patrick got the tour. The Atari user group in Santa Barbara, Cold War engineers who taught a kid who couldn’t code how to make graphics because I kept showing up and asking. The company that came out of it, Wavefront, three friends, six Academy Awards for visual effects software that ended up inside Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and pretty much every Marvel movie made since 1999. The TEDx events, two hundred seventy five of them and counting. Cooking for seven families during the lockdown because I used to be a chef and nobody could get to the store. Teaching myself to build my own tools to run all seven menus because that’s what a chef does when the machine shows up and I happen to be bored.

None of it was a pitch. It was me answering a question a stranger asked, at length, the way you do when you like the person on the other end of the call.

The Aside

Then, close to the end, something shifted. I’d asked him if he had a family. No, he said. Ten years with someone he loved. It didn’t work out. No kids. Forty one now, and honestly, right now, focused on getting the next stage of his life off the ground. He mentioned the coworking space again, a shared room full of strangers all staring at their own screens, building their own things, alone. He said it almost as an aside. I don’t really have many people to bounce ideas off of.

I didn’t fix that. I didn’t offer advice. I said, Cool, cool. Well, you’re in.

Two words doing the actual work of an entire hour.

The framework was never going to be what mattered. What mattered is that someone was standing on the other side when he knocked. I let him in.

The Knock

Here’s what’s strange about how this happened, from where I sat. An AI recommended a framework. A stranger read the recommendation and, instead of researching it alone the way he used to at Barnes and Noble as a kid, decided to knock on an actual door. The framework was never going to be what mattered. What mattered is that someone was standing on the other side when he knocked. I let him in.

Somewhere near the end of the call, talking about nothing in particular, I told Patrick something I tell my improv students. If you try to be funny, you will fail. If you just try to be human, the human condition is hilarious, and you’ll be awesome without trying. I was talking about improv. I was also, without quite meaning to, talking about the hour that had just happened between us.

A coding tool suggested some homework. A stranger did the homework. And somewhere in Louisiana, a guy who spends his days alone in a room full of other people stopped being quite as alone as he was an hour before.

Listen to Knock Twice on Suno: https://suno.com/s/D7I3XZinoWazpmL9

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Nine Feet Up.” Read first and let the song land after, or listen first and let it set the room. Either order works.

Duey Freeman rides a horse named Moon, and when he does, the top of his head is nine feet off the ground. He spent sixteen years on search and rescue in Colorado, and when the terrain got too rough for vehicles, they sent crews of six or eight horses out in formation across the plains and into the boulder fields. From that height, you could see three times what a person on foot could cover. But the real advantage wasn’t the altitude. It was the silence.

You could hear people. Sometimes it was shouting, sometimes it was crying, and sometimes, in the worst cases, it was just breathing. That sound, a human being making the smallest possible noise to signal they were still alive, is what found them in the places where nothing else could.

Then the drones came, and that part went away.

Duey is clear that drones are remarkable. They go where horses can’t, they cover ground faster, and with the right equipment, they can read heat signatures through terrain no human team could navigate. The tool genuinely solved a problem. But the drone’s rotors make noise, constant noise, and that noise filled the very silence that used to carry the signal. You gained a camera and lost an ear. The team got more altitude and less contact. Those two things happened simultaneously and they weren’t separate events. They were the same event.

Every Tool Upgrade Is a Sense Trade

Every tool upgrade is a sense trade. It sharpens one kind of perception and dulls another, in the same motion, no exceptions. This isn’t a complaint about technology, it is just the architecture of how tools work. A tool extends one capability by concentrating energy there, and that concentration always costs something on the other side of the ledger. The drone designers weren’t careless. They were solving the visibility problem, and they solved it. The hearing problem wasn’t in their design brief. It wasn’t even visible to them as a problem, because they had never been nine feet up on Moon in a boulder field listening for someone’s exhale.

The tool doesn’t know what it is missing. That isn’t a flaw in the tool. It is the definition of a tool. The flaw only enters the picture when the person operating the tool forgets that the tool’s ignorance isn’t the same as their own, and stops trusting what sixteen years in the boulder fields already taught him.

Having the Tools Isn’t Having the Taste

Having every tool in the kitchen doesn’t make you a chef. The knives, the pans, the right burner, none of that turns out a good plate.

What turns out a good plate is having cooked the same dish wrong a thousand times until you know, by smell and by feel, when it’s finally right. That’s taste.

It doesn’t come from the equipment. It comes from having been in it long enough to trust your own judgment over anyone else’s, including the machine’s.

The Trust Problem

This is where the conversation about AI lands, and lands hard. There is a version of working with these systems where the reps you’ve put in are still the final judge of what’s good, where the tool’s speed serves your taste instead of replacing it. Then there is the other version, the one worth worrying about, where you stop trusting what you know and start trusting what the system hands you, simply because it arrived fast and looks finished. You take the output at face value instead of running it through everything you’ve earned. That isn’t a tool problem. It’s a trust problem, and the trade is yours to make or refuse.

How the Habit Moves In

Handing your taste to the tool isn’t a dramatic failure. It happens in small increments, each one reasonable in isolation. You let the AI draft the language because it sounds close enough, so you stop asking whether it actually sounds like you. Absence stops registering. Not because you stopped caring. Because the machine kept moving, and it was easier to let it. The habit doesn’t announce itself either. It just moves in, one skipped question at a time, one place where your own taste would have caught something and didn’t get asked to. The crying goes unheard. Not once, loudly, in a way you could catch and correct. It goes unheard at scale, quietly, across everything you are producing, and the gap between what your work used to carry and what it carries now widens without announcing itself.

The Leaders Worth Watching

The leaders worth watching right now are the ones who still trust the thousand reps over the machine’s confidence. They use capable tools, and they bring something the tool can’t access: a long memory of what the work felt like before the tool arrived, a calibrated sense of what a real result sounds like versus a plausible one, and the discipline to stay in the search even when the drone is already in the air covering ground. You can see it in the small habits. They read the draft twice, not once, the second time listening instead of scanning. They ask what’s missing before they ask what’s polished. They trust the plate they know how to cook, not the recipe the machine just handed them. They aren’t Luddites.

Duey still gets calls sometimes, years after he stopped riding search and rescue. People want to know how he found the ones nobody else did. He never says the equipment. He says the ear. The ear caught the exhale nobody else heard, once, under a downed pine, in weather that would’ve grounded any drone, and the ear only knew what to listen for because of sixteen years spent trusting it.

Refined taste isn’t about selecting better tools. It’s about trusting what your own experience already taught you, over whatever the tool hands you first, and refusing to serve the plate before you’ve tasted it yourself. Nine feet up in the silence is where you learn the difference.

Listen to “Nine Feet Up” on Suno: https://suno.com/s/kNwnXcCGuwRQ99ZJ

A note before you start. This one comes with a song. It’s called “Looking Up.” Read first, then let the song find you on the other side.

Before they sat down, I was watching a bird.

It was working the banana plant at the table next to mine. In and out of the broad leaves, checking angles, very purposeful. The harbor was behind it. Boats in the channel. The mountains past that. A clear Fourth of July afternoon in Santa Barbara, the kind you drive across the state for.

Then the family arrived. Mom, dad, three kids, two grandparents. Tourists, obvious from the cameras and the way they sorted themselves into chairs. Good vibe. Having the grandparents there made it feel even better. The adults had chosen well: a great table, a beautiful day, the whole harbor to look at.

Then out came the iPads

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One in front of each kid. Snap, snap, snap. The kids went still. Heads down. Totally trained. The parents stood at the table long enough to order from the server, then walked away. Nothing at that table moved. The girls in their pink hats. The boy in the teal shirt. Three screens. The harbor behind them. Nobody looking.

I looked at my lunch companions and said, “I have to take a picture of this.”

I did. And I sat with what I was feeling, which took me a minute to name. It wasn’t anger exactly. It was something closer to grief. Because fifteen feet behind those three kids, through the glass, was the harbor. Boats. A holiday. And six inches into the banana plant, a bird was working very hard at being a parent.

It did not have a phone. It did not need one. Every single thing that bird needed to do for its young, it was doing.

I thought about my friend Michael.

Michael is a stay-at-home dad in Santa Barbara. His son is three. There is no TV in their house when he’s around. No phone screens. His son has essentially zero experience with them. When a friend texted Michael a photo and said “show this to your boy,” Michael didn’t. He didn’t open the phone. He didn’t show the picture.

Instead, they walk. Santa Barbara is good for walking, and they make the most of it. Michael teaches his son the way Sesame Street used to teach all of us, out loud, in the world. They count things. One of those, two of those, look at that. His son is three and he knows where he lives. He knows his street. He knows his neighborhood. Michael has taken the job seriously in the way only someone who has thought hard about it does.

Here’s the part I keep thinking about. Michael figured out that his son loves music. So he went to Suno and started making songs out of the lessons. Things they’d learned on their walks turned into songs. Now, when they drive somewhere, his son listens to songs his dad made for him. Reinforcement, joy, presence, all of it at once. Michael invented his own Sesame Street and put it in the car.

Three kids with iPads at a harbor restaurant and a dad making his son songs about the world outside the window. Both scenes happened this week. Both are real.

The question isn’t whether our kids should use technology. The question is what they learn to crave. What they learn to reach for when there’s a choice.

I’m at the Cold Spring AI Summit in Montecito this week. Two days, workshops, keynotes, people thinking hard about what AI does to kids and classrooms and learning. The question of AI and our children, from parents, teachers, and administrators in K through 12, is one of the most important we have right now.

But I keep coming back to the harbor.

I spend an enormous amount of my life in front of screens. More than most people, probably. It’s the nature of the work. And what I’ve noticed is that when I have the chance to be with humans, I put the screen away. Not because someone told me to. Because I crave the humans more than I crave the screen. I think most of us do, once we slow down enough to notice it.

The question isn’t whether our kids should use technology. They will. They already do. The question is what they learn to crave. What they learn to reach for when there’s a choice.

Three kids, three iPads, a harbor full of boats, and a bird working a nest in the banana plant twelve inches from the back of their heads.

The bird saw everything.

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Listen to “Looking Up” on Suno: https://suno.com/s/NexgQwX5Tl2lae1J

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Two Words,” written as a companion to the essay. Listen first and let it set the room, or read first and let the song land after. Either order works. Both are short.

When I asked who wanted to work in the film business someday, I expected a forest of hands. Twenty-Five teenagers, the first morning of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Teen Film Camp, all of them there because they applied to be. This had to be a room full of future directors and editors and cinematographers.

Two hands went up.

These were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen-year-olds. Beautifully bouncy, gloriously distracted, the kind of room where confidence shows up and disappears on a ten-minute cycle. You can’t lecture a group like that. You have to show them something they can feel.

And the thing I most needed them to feel had nothing to do with a camera. In a few days, they would be making films in crews of three and four. Four teenagers, four people each privately sure their idea is the one that should win. Whether that crew makes one good film or four half-films nobody finishes comes down to something smaller than talent. It comes down to how they answer each other.

Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Circle

So we didn’t start with gear. We stood in a circle outside, and one at a time we tapped the shoulder of the person beside us, held their eyes, and said three words. “I’ve got your back.” Then we threw an imaginary ball around the circle until a banana and a frog joined it and the whole thing fell apart laughing. Both were the same lesson, wearing different clothes. Pay attention to the person across from you, or you drop the frog. Presence first.

No But, Yes But, Yes And

Back inside, I gave them three ways to answer a pitch. No but. Yes but. Yes and. Then I asked a team leader to stand up and pitch me the movie his crew was about to make.

He got a sentence in and I no-butted him. It’s been done, I said. The budget won’t cover it. The lead should be older. Every door shut before he reached it, and he slowed, then stopped, the way you do when you realize the person across from you was only waiting for a gap to say no.

I told him to start over, and this time I was generous. I nodded, I smiled, I yes-butted him. Yes, that’s interesting, but what if the ending changed? Yes, I love that, but the lead should really be older. By the third soft agreement, his idea wasn’t his anymore. I’d agreed with every word and walked off with the whole thing. That one is worse because it looks like collaboration while doing the same damage, and it’s the one that runs most of the meetings I’ve ever sat in.

Then I told him to pitch me one more time, and I said yes and. He gave me a kid who finds something. I said yes, and the thing he finds is alive. He came back fast, yes, and it’s been waiting for him. Yes, I said, and it knows his name. And he was off, both of us building the same thing in the air between us, the idea getting bigger every time it changed hands. He didn’t stop when he ran out of pitch. I had to tell him we were done.

He sat back down buoyant. You could see it on him from across the room, that lit-up thing a kid does when something he made got bigger instead of getting taken. I asked the room what was different about the three. They knew. Same pitch, same kid. The only thing that changed was the two words I chose to meet him with.

No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement. Yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying.

That is the whole game on a set. No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement, which is exactly why it survives in rooms where no-but would get you thrown out. And yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying. Being nice has nothing to do with it. Yes-and keeps an idea alive long enough to find out what it wants to be.

Everything I put them through that morning was improv, the same games I play on a stage on the weekends. Yes-and is its first rule. It turns out to be the first rule of any room where people are trying to make one thing together.

Intention

Once an idea is alive, you can ask the harder question, so I asked it. How do you want people to feel when they walk out of your film? That one landed like a foreign language. They’d been thinking about the shot and the gear and the cool idea, which is to say they’d been thinking about themselves. Almost none of them had pictured the person on the other end of the work. Yes-and is what carries a crew across that gap, because you can’t build toward a stranger’s feeling while you’re still guarding your own pitch.

Five Days

The clock on them was brutal. Five days to make a five-minute film, shot on iPhones, cut on laptops, every crew teaching itself to direct, light, cast, edit, and produce all at once, the whole thing due in front of their parents on Friday night. Under that kind of compression, talent is not what saves you. The crews that finish are the ones who can answer each other with yes-and. The ones stuck in no-but and yes-but spend five days defending pitches and screen a mess on Friday, if they screen anything at all.

The Back of the Book

Then I turned the intention inward. I gave them one quiet minute and a single instruction. Write down how you want to feel at the end of this week. Keep it private, in the back of the book where nobody will see it. And when the week gets hard, when you are stressed or sure your film is falling apart, open the book and read your own words back to yourself. I know that one works. I have watched it work on me for years.

Write down how you want to feel at the end of the week. When it gets hard, open the book and read your own words back to yourself.

Their films screened for their parents last Friday night, five days after almost none of them would raise a hand for a job in the credits. The films matter to me less than what got written in the back of those books, and what happened to the kid who felt yes-and work on him in front of everyone. That is the lesson I hope outlasts the week and the month and most of what they think they came here to learn. It is why I make the drive up to the Whittier Ranch every year.

Listen to “Two Words” on Suno

What's in this episode

• Why I never wrote a Father's Day piece until now

• My father, the sports page, and the decision I made at twelve

• Raising my son alone at twenty-one

• The orchids by my door, and losing my father and son the same year

• Three grandsons, one bay, and a photograph from a tug

• Older is what happens to you, elder is what you decide

This episode

• Read the full Sunday Story: https://marksylvester.substack.com/p/the-long-line-what-fathers-day-means

• Subscribe: marksylvester.substack.com

More from Mark

• TEDxSantaBarbara: tedxsantabarbara.com

• Mark Sylvester: marksylvester.com

• An Embarrassment of Pandas (improv, the Alcazar)

• Carpinteria Improv

Listen to “I Show Up” on Suno : https://suno.com/s/Q5dQJvKYhDyxMWkg