Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.
I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.
The transaction arrives in milliseconds. A purchase attempt — a gas station in Phoenix, a grocery store in suburban Atlanta, a wire transfer at 2 a.m. — and somewhere in the authorization chain, a system has to decide. Not later. Now. The clock is already running.
When I led the fraud detection team at Visa, this was the problem that lived in your chest. You couldn’t see what you needed to see. You couldn’t know whether the person presenting that card was the person who owned it, whether the account had been compromised six hours ago in a breach you hadn’t yet detected, whether the behavioral signature of these transactions was the legitimate cardholder running errands or a fraudster working methodically through a stolen number before the window closed. You could only see what the transactions said. You could never see the state underneath.
That distinction — between what you can observe and what is actually true — turns out to be one of the organizing problems of our time. It has a name, a formal structure, and a history that runs from mid-century mathematics through the trading floors of quantitative hedge funds to the frontier of artificial intelligence. The name is the hidden Markov model. But the problem it addresses is older than the math, and more human than the jargon suggests.
The world is shrinking. Or so we’ve come to appreciate. Jet travel has made it possible to get almost anywhere on the planet in less than a day. And yet.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve become increasingly reluctant to do the kinds of things I wouldn’t have hesitated to do as a younger man. Travel. Driving in busy traffic. Walking the streets in a sketchy urban neighborhood. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary texture of a life lived outward, which turns out to require a kind of low-level willingness I don’t always find in myself anymore.
I’ve been trying to understand this.
When I turned 60 I did something I’d never done before. I looked up my life expectancy on a CDC table. The number that came back was 22. I sat with that for a moment. Twenty-two years. I had been alive for 60 and I had 22 more in the actuarial average, which meant I was already three-quarters of the way home. Nobody had told me this was coming. Not the number exactly, but the feeling the number produced — the sudden rearrangement of the geometry, the sense that the horizon had quietly moved while I wasn’t watching.
I’ve been watching it since.
The metaphor I keep returning to is a camera lens. When you’re young the aperture is wide open. You travel. You navigate. You walk into unfamiliar neighborhoods without thinking about it because the lens is just doing what lenses do — starving for light, taking it all in, indiscriminate in the way that only the young can afford to be indiscriminate.
Then it starts to stop down.
Not all at once. There is no morning when you wake up and find the aperture closed. It happens gradually, a slow tightening over years, and you don’t notice because you’re still inside the frame, still moving through the world. Until one day you notice you’re thinking about the trip before you book it. Weighing it. The weighing itself is new.
What I didn’t expect is that the closing doesn’t feel linear. It feels exponential. The rate accelerating in ways that keep outrunning my revised estimates. You recalibrate. Then you recalibrate again. The next recalibration comes sooner than the last.
A friend saw Paul Simon in concert last night. That sent me back to Kodachrome, one of his early hits, a young man’s song about color and vividness and the wide-open lens of youth. Everything looks worse in black and white, he sang at 31. Something about that lyric now, from this side of the aperture, makes it more true than it probably was when he wrote it.
He just thought he was writing about being young.
As a young family with two kids we toured southern England staying at farmhouse B&B’s. One of those vacation memories that linger. We visited the Cotswolds. A place where the stone is the color of late afternoon even at nine in the morning. The thing that catches you there isn’t the famous honey-colored villages but the little creeks running through them — water moving in ways you didn’t expect, off to the side of what you came to see.
I won’t go back. Not because I’ve decided not to. Simply because the aperture has moved and the Cotswolds is on the other side of it now. Still lit. Still there. The creeks still running through in their surprising way.
This is not tragedy.
It is just true.
A stopped-down lens has a property that took me a while to appreciate. The depth of field becomes enormous. Everything in the frame holds with equal sharpness — the near thing and the far thing, the room you’re sitting in and the long accumulated past the room contains. You lose the beautiful blur. You lose the selective mercy of a wide aperture that lets the background go soft and permits you to choose, by implication, what matters.
Now the background insists.
Nothing escapes attention. The specific quality of a morning. The thought that arrives before anything is being asked of you. The idea carried for years, worked through carefully, finally put into words.
Hermann Hesse understood something about this. The deepest lesson of Siddhartha isn’t something the protagonist learns from a teacher. It’s something he has to live until he knows it. Wisdom of this kind cannot pass from one person to another. It has to be earned on the inside, in real time.
Which is another way of saying it cannot be taught at all.
I can describe the aperture. I can hand you the metaphor. But you will only know what I mean when you are standing inside it yourself.
I couldn’t have written any of this at 60. Couldn’t have written it at 70. The aperture had to close this far before whatever this is came into focus — the particular clarity that arrives not despite the narrowing but because of it.
Nobody told me that was coming either.
That’s what I wanted to say.
There is a sound that men who heard it never forgot. Not the roar exactly, though it roared. Something beneath the roar — a note, almost musical, that settled into the chest and stayed there. Four Rolls-Royce Merlins at full throttle on a Lancaster climbing out of Lincolnshire in the dark, and sixty years later old men would close their eyes trying to describe it and find they couldn’t, not quite, which was itself a kind of description.
The engine was a miracle of the wrong era. Liquid-cooled, sixty degrees of vee, twenty-seven liters of displacement producing over a thousand horsepower from something you could fit in a large kitchen. Rolls-Royce had been making engines since 1906, had learned things about metallurgy and tolerance and the behavior of superheated gases under compression that couldn’t be written down, only accumulated, passed hand to hand through decades of making things that had to work when nothing could be allowed to fail. The Merlin was the distillation of all of it.
And then — this is the part that stops you — they couldn’t build enough of them.
Britain in 1940 was a country running on nerve. The factories were working. The workers were willing. But the math was brutal and the math didn’t care about willingness. So someone made a phone call to Detroit. To Packard. A company that had spent thirty years building luxury automobiles for American industrialists, cars with interiors like drawing rooms on wheels, cars that announced their owners had arrived at exactly the place they had always intended to be. Packard looked at the Merlin blueprints, converted the tolerances from imperial to metric and back again, retooled their entire production line, and started building the engine that would power the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, and the P-51 Mustang.
Think about what that required. Not just the engineering, though the engineering was extraordinary. The belief required. That these tolerances mattered. That this particular arrangement of pistons and supercharger vanes and coolant passages was worth the disruption of an entire industrial operation. Packard’s engineers didn’t question the design. The design had already proven itself.
You built the Merlin because the Merlin worked.
The question — the one that takes longer to arrive — is what you do when the thing the Merlin is for doesn’t.
Arthur Harris believed.
That is the first thing to understand about him, and maybe the last. He believed in the bomber the way certain people believe in a technology so new and so powerful that the believing itself feels like vision. Strategic bombing would break Germany. Not assist in breaking Germany. Not contribute to a larger effort that would break Germany. Would, by itself, through the systematic destruction of German cities and the German will to continue, end the war. Harris had held this view before the war began and he held it after the evidence came in and he held it, unmodified, until he died in 1984.
This is not stupidity. The most costly certainties never are. Harris was shrewd, forceful, organizationally gifted, genuinely courageous in the sense that he was willing to send men to die for what he believed and knew he was sending them. He understood logistics, understood morale, understood the brutal arithmetic of attrition. What he could not do — what the structure of his certainty would not permit — was update.
The evidence arrived slowly enough that you could always explain it away. German war production increased through 1943, then through 1944, even as the bombers came night after night. The factories dispersed. The workers adapted. The morale that was supposed to crack showed instead a remarkable tendency to consolidate under pressure, the way populations sometimes do when the threat comes from the sky and cannot be reasoned with. The theorists had a model of human psychology that turned out to be wrong, and the model’s wrongness kept arriving in the data, and Harris kept flying.
Fifty-five thousand men.
Picture Harris alone. The commander in the early morning after the casualty reports come in, before the day’s work begins again. The loneliness of a certainty that has become structural — no longer a belief you hold but a belief that holds you, because the alternative is not just being wrong but having been wrong, which means all those boys went down over the Ruhr for a theory, which is a weight no living person can carry and continue to function. So you don’t revise. You recommit. You ask for more aircraft, more crews, more nights.
You build more Merlins.
This is the mechanism. Not malice. Not indifference. The certainty becomes self-protective, which means it becomes invisible, which means it becomes the water you swim in rather than a position you hold. Harris stopped being a man with a theory about bombing and became a man for whom bombing was the answer to every question, including the question of whether bombing was working.
The Lancaster crews knew something was wrong before Harris did. You could see it in the casualty rates, which they could calculate as well as anyone — better, actually, because they were doing the calculating with their own lives as the variable. Forty-four percent didn’t survive their tours. They knew this. They flew anyway, because courage doesn’t require certainty about the strategic framework, only about the man beside you and the mission tonight.
The Merlin started and you went.
The Merlin outlasted the theory. It kept flying for decades after the war, in civilian aircraft, in racing planes, in the occasional restored Lancaster that still tours airshows in Britain, where crowds gather on summer afternoons to watch it pass and hear, carried on the wind, that sound. The note beneath the roar. The thing that settles in the chest.
Beautiful, people say, watching it go.
And it is. It genuinely is.
What they couldn’t know — what none of them could know — was that the engine was the most reliable thing in the entire enterprise.
The conference rooms all look the same after a while. Same long table. Same chairs that cost more than they should. Same window with the same view of the same parking lot baking in the same California sun. You stop seeing them. You develop a kind of practiced receptivity, a professional openness that is also, if you are honest, a professional distance. You have heard the story before. You know where you are in the presentation without looking at the slide number.
Until the day someone sits down across from you and closes their laptop and says: can I just tell you our story?
Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has spent forty years learning to tell the difference between founders who can build and founders who can make you believe. The skill he overweights now, he’ll tell you plainly, isn’t technical. It’s selling. Recruiting, fundraising, convincing customers, inspiring teams. “Actually being able to write code,” he said recently, “is probably not a big deal anymore.” What matters is whether you can cross the distance between your vision and someone else’s imagination and deposit something true and alive on the other side.
Most founders never figure this out. They build the deck instead. They pull the projector cable from the drawer — there is always a drawer, there is always a cable — and the room fills with blue light and bullet points and the comfortable geometry of a prepared presentation, and what never happens is the thing that needed to happen.
But there was this one morning.
He came in with his cofounder in the flat gray light that Silicon Valley gets in February, when the rain has stopped but the sky hasn’t decided what it wants to be. They were early. He set his bag down and sat directly across from me — not at the presenter’s angle, not with one eye already calculating the distance to the screen — directly across, the way you sit with someone you already know, or intend to. Neither of them reached for the cable in the drawer.
He looked at me with the particular steadiness of a person who has decided not to manage the moment.
Can I just tell you our story?
I want to be honest about what happened next, which is that I felt something shift before he said another word. Not a decision exactly. More like the precondition for a decision, the ground tilting slightly in a direction I hadn’t chosen. I was, in some way I couldn’t have defended rationally at the time, already with him. And I knew it, and I knew it was not an entirely reasonable response to a man who had been in the room for less than a minute, and I felt it anyway.
The laptop stayed closed for the next twenty minutes. No transitions. No bullet points. No hockey stick arcing toward a number reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Just his voice and what he believed and the quality of attention you give a person when there is nothing else in the room to look at.
The deck came later. It was beautiful. By then it didn’t need to be anything except true.
Storytelling is not a skill in the way that financial modeling is a skill. It is older than that by such a margin that the comparison almost doesn’t make sense. What we are really talking about is the oldest technology human beings possess — a person in a room, a voice, an image made of nothing but words and the willingness to believe in them. It was doing its work around fires forty thousand years before the first conference room was built, and it has never once required a projector.
What the great storytellers understand, and what the best founders understand in the same unspoken way, is that a story is not a transfer of information. It is a transfer of inner states. When it works — when it really works — something that existed inside one person gets reconstructed inside another, and the listener emerges changed. Not persuaded. Not informed. Changed. These are different experiences, and only one of them makes a person willing to bet their career on something that doesn’t exist yet.
The deck puts glass between the teller and that possibility. The founder stands at the edge of the blue light pointing at things, and the room evaluates the things, and what never happens is the transfer. Everyone files out having formed opinions about the slides rather than beliefs about the person. Opinions and beliefs are not the same.
Wilson understands this even if he wouldn’t use these words. When he says the skill is selling, what he means underneath the selling is: can this person walk into a room and make other people inhabit their vision? Not convince them. Inhabit. The difference is the difference between reading about a place and being there. One of them changes how you act. The other one you forget on the drive home.
The projector cable is still in the drawer. Someone will pull it out next week, and the room will fill with blue light, and another founder will stand at the edge of it pointing at things, hoping that the right font and the right graph will do the work that only a human being, exposed and without props, can actually do.
It won’t. It never does.
The CEO who closed his laptop had been carrying a story he believed in, and he knew the story was the thing, not the packaging around it. He understood that the oldest container is also the most powerful one. His own voice. A room. Someone willing to listen.
I was ready to work with him before he said another word.
There are five words that do something to me that no other announcement in travel can match. Not the captain’s voice telling you you’ve reached cruising altitude. Not the gate agent calling your boarding group.
The dining car is now open.
I heard them on the Coast Starlight somewhere south of Portland, the train barely clear of Union Station, the Willamette still visible through the windows, and something in me that had been clenched for months — or maybe years — quietly let go.
I have been thinking about trains lately. About three particular trips, and what they add up to.
The first was the Coast Starlight south — San Jose to Santa Barbara, departing at ten in the morning, seven hours of California unspooling past the window.
There is no faster way to understand the state than from a train at that pace. The Bay gives way to the agricultural flats of the Central Coast, and then somewhere past San Luis Obispo the tracks swing toward the ocean and you are suddenly running along the edge of the continent, the Pacific filling the window, and you realize you have been holding your breath.
Near the end the train passes through Vandenberg — the base stretching out on both sides, the coastline raw and largely empty, the light in late afternoon doing what California light does. I arrived in Santa Barbara at five o’clock feeling like I had traveled through something, not just to somewhere.
That distinction matters more than it used to.
The Portland-to-Seattle leg was different. Shorter — four hours — but charged from the moment we pulled out of Union Station. Portland’s Union Station is the kind of place that makes you believe train travel is a civic act, not just a transaction. The great waiting room, the clock tower, the sense that someone once thought arrival was worth celebrating architecturally.
We were barely moving when the announcement came.
The dining car is now open.
I was traveling alone, which is the only way to truly hear those words. Alone, you are available. You have no one to talk to, which means you might talk to anyone.
I made my way to the dining car and was seated across from two strangers, the way Amtrak still does it — the old practice of filling tables, not preserving privacy. We were somewhere in Washington by the time we finished. I no longer remember their names or even what we talked about, but I remember the quality of the hour: the moving landscape, the food that was fine without being remarkable, the particular ease that comes from conversation with people you will never see again and therefore can be entirely honest with.
There is a word for what the dining car produces. Serendipity is close but not quite right. It is more like availability — the condition of being open to whatever the next hour brings. Air travel has systematically eliminated every version of this. The seat-back screen, the headphones, the tray table as personal bubble. Train travel still creates the conditions for encounter. The dining car announcement is an invitation, and what it is inviting you to is not just food.
The third trip was Richmond to Sacramento — short, almost a commuter run — with my friend Doug Kaye. Where the Coast Starlight rides were solo and expansive, this one was intimate. Two people who have known each other long enough not to need to fill the silence, watching the Bay Area give way to the Sacramento Valley, talking about whatever came up.
Sacramento’s station is the right destination for a train. Old and grand and close to things worth seeing — we walked to the California State Railroad Museum, which is the kind of place that makes train enthusiasm feel entirely reasonable. Steam locomotives the size of houses. The history of the transcontinental laid out in artifacts and photographs. I have been a train person since childhood, since the Union Station in Dayton, since riding the Spirit of St. Louis on the Pennsylvania Railroad with my sister, Mom and Dad, and the museum felt like confirmation of something I had always known but rarely said aloud.
Afterward we walked to the State Capitol. At some point in a hallway we passed Gavin Newsom, moving with purpose in the way governors do, and we nodded in that California way — the implicit acknowledgment that yes, here we are, all of us in the same building, going about our days.
Then lunch at Biba’s.
Biba Caggiano ran her restaurant on L Street for decades. The food was Bolognese in the way that actually means something — rooted in a place, in a person’s memory of that place, translated carefully onto plates in Sacramento, California. I had a tomato onion soup that afternoon that I have spent years trying to duplicate. I have come close. I make it at home now and when I do I am back at the table with Doug, the Capitol visit still warm, the museum still vivid, the train ride from Richmond already receding into the pleasant blur of a good day.
Biba’s closed during Covid. It did not reopen.
I think about what connects these three trips and keep coming back to the same thing.
Train travel insists on a kind of presence that other forms of travel have abandoned. It insists on time — you cannot compress the Coast Starlight into something efficient. It insists on landscape — you will watch California go by whether you planned to or not. And it insists, at least in the dining car, on the possibility of other people.
We have built a travel infrastructure almost perfectly optimized against encounter. Against presence. Against the accidental afternoon that becomes the one you remember.
The dining car is still open, if you know where to find it. The soup I can make at home. The rest requires a ticket and a willingness to sit across from strangers, moving through the world at a speed that still allows you to see it. And time to just talk and share.
I had a ham shack when I was in high school. A tight corner of my bedroom, a transceiver, an antenna wire running out through the window frame to somewhere up on the roof. Late nights mostly. The ritual of it: power on, headphones on, find a frequency, make sure it’s clear. Then send CQ. CQ. CQ. A call to no one in particular, to anyone, to whoever happened to be listening on that frequency at that moment anywhere on earth.
Sometimes nothing came back. Sometimes someone answered from a place I had no reason to expect — a voice, or rather a pattern of dots and dashes that resolved into a voice, from a callsign I didn’t recognize, from a grid square I’d have to look up on a map afterward. We would exchange signal reports and names and locations and often we talked longer. Our gear. What we did that day. Ordinary things, transmitted at forty words a minute across a great distance to a stranger I would never meet.
I did not know then that I was practicing something. I thought I was just playing radio.
We have decided, sometime since, that luck is a system. That serendipity is an architecture. That the people to whom good things happen have engineered the conditions for good things to happen, and that the people to whom good things do not happen have, at some level, failed to present the right surface to the world.
I am not sure when we decided this. Sometime after we stopped believing in fate and before we started believing in algorithms, in that narrow window when we still believed, provisionally, in ourselves.
The self-help literature on luck is a literature of verbs. Expand. Broadcast. Reframe. Sabotage your algorithms. The verbs are always active, always transitive, always aimed at a future in which the random becomes, retroactively, inevitable. You will look back and see the architecture. You will understand that the flight delay was an opportunity, that the canceled meeting was a gift, that the stranger in the adjacent seat was not a stranger at all but a node in a network you were already, without knowing it, building.
What the literature cannot account for is the canceled meeting that was simply a canceled meeting. The flight delay in which nothing happened except that you sat in a molded plastic chair in Terminal B and ate a sandwich that cost fourteen dollars and thought about everything you had not yet done. The stranger who remained a stranger.
I have been thinking about a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, at the corner of Dwight. Shakespeare & Co. It smelled the way all serious used bookstores smell — dust and possibility, which are not always different things. The shelves ran floor to ceiling and were not organized in any way that rewarded efficiency. You found things there the way you find things in dreams: without looking, and then suddenly they were in your hands.
I found a paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem there. Someone else’s margin notes in blue ink, a handwriting I did not recognize and have never been able to stop thinking about. Whoever they were, they had underlined the same sentences I would have underlined. They had written yes in the margin next to things I did not yet know I believed.
I have no way of knowing whether that was luck or whether I had simply been the kind of person who wandered into bookstores and stayed too long. The kind of person for whom that particular door was already, structurally, open.
Buildings have architects. Someone drew the plans. But I cannot find, looking back, the moment I became that person. I can only locate the book.
The word serendipity was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, who derived it from a Persian fairy tale about three princes of Serendip who were always making discoveries by accidents and luck, of things they were not in quest of. Accidents and luck. The word has always contained both. What the contemporary literature has done is quietly eliminate the accident and keep only the luck — reframed now as preparation, as readiness, as optimized openness. The princes were not prepared. They wandered.
Anymore we are often uncomfortable with just wandering. Wandering has no metrics. A waste of time.
There is a thing that happens when you pick up a physical newspaper, one you did not choose from a menu of personalized recommendations online but simply lifted from a rack at the library because it was there. You read stories you would never have clicked on while reading on an iPhone. Not because you lacked interest but because no algorithm had yet determined that you had it. The story finds you before the system can decide whether you are the kind of person who would want to be found.
I go to the library some days for precisely this reason. It is a considered refusal — the same one the princes of Serendip were practicing, though they had no word for what they were refusing. The library does not know what I clicked on last Tuesday. It cannot optimize my morning. It can only offer everything, indiscriminately, and trust me to wander.
Life feels richer on those days. I have tried to understand why and have arrived, after some time, at this: on those days the world is larger than my prior assumptions about it. That is not a small thing. That may, in fact, be the whole thing. Here comes the sun!
Shakespeare & Co. closed in June 2015, after fifty-one years on Telegraph Avenue. The owner said the past few months had been unsupportable. He taped a note to the door and served his last customer and locked up around eight in the evening and that was that. Someone who worked there was quoted saying that the serendipity of finding a book that changes your life doesn’t happen on Amazon. Indeed. He meant it as an elegy. The infrastructure of accident had to be built by someone. It had to be maintained. It had to be, on some Tuesday evening, locked for the last time.
The owner locked up around eight. He had served his last customer. There was nothing more to do.
The margin notes are still in the book.
It was later in his illness. Someone had set up a folding table in the garage and Chris was sitting at it in a folding chair, working through a stack of photographs. Signing them, one by one, telling me the story inside each one as it came up — where he’d been, what was happening just outside the frame, what he’d seen in the viewfinder that made him press the shutter at that exact moment and not a half second later. The garage was quiet. Outside, Menlo Park was doing whatever Menlo Park does on an ordinary afternoon. In here, a man was accounting for his life in pictures and I was standing there holding a camera, not quite sure what I was witnessing.
I made a photograph of him.
It’s at the top of his Wikipedia entry now. That’s how the world knows his face — a picture I made of him making sense of his pictures, in a folding chair, near the end. I don’t know what to do with that except carry it.
Chris Gulker had been a photographer long before he was anything else. Staff photographer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer. Published in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. He had the eye first. Everything else — the virtual newsrooms, the blogrolls, the hacked-together color systems that dragged newspapers into the digital age — all of it came from the same instinct: look carefully, see what’s actually there, build toward what you see.
When I first met him he had just gotten a Leica M8. He talked about it the way he talked about everything he loved, which is to say with specificity and without apology.
He had driven an Audi TT. He had a Leica M8. He was not a man who made concessions to the ordinary.
He had glioblastoma. Diagnosed in 2006. Surgery, radiation, the whole negotiation with a disease that doesn’t actually negotiate. He knew the terms and he kept going — kept shooting, kept writing at gulker.com, kept thinking out loud about what was coming next, as if the tumor were an inconvenience and the future were the point.
He walked when he could walk. He talked when he could talk.
He died in October 2010. He was fifty-nine.
Twice a week in those last two years I’d put Lily in the car and drive over to his house. Lily was small and opinionated and she understood the trip as hers. We’d pick Chris up after breakfast, when the morning was still cool, and do the loop — one mile, flat, because flat was what worked. Then we’d come back to find Linda moving through the house, Chris’s wife of nearly thirty years, the still point of everything that was happening to them. Sometimes she’d join us and the conversation would open into something more alive, the kind of talk where someone says something offhand and suddenly everyone is leaning forward.
One of those mornings the three of us decided to start a local blog for Menlo Park. Linda would write and edit. Chris would shoot. We called it InMenlo.com.
When Linda wrote Chris’s obituary, that’s where she published it.
People talk about spending time with the dying as a kind of grace extended downward. It wasn’t like that. Those mornings were a gift — the ideas, the talk, the way Chris described what was coming as if he could already see it clearly from wherever he was standing. I left those visits more alive than I arrived. That’s the debt I carry. Not grief exactly, though there’s grief. More like an obligation to keep paying attention to the future he spent his life building toward.
Last month a man named Demis Hassabis closed a two-hour technology showcase in Mountain View — twenty minutes from where Chris and I used to walk — and said seven words I haven’t been able to put down since: We are at the foothills of the singularity. The audience applauded. Then everyone went home.
I keep thinking Chris would have had something to say about that.
Not the singularity part, necessarily — that word carries a slightly rapturous charge, too certain of its own prophecy. But the foothills part. The careful humility of it. The acknowledgment that what we can see from here — AI systems autonomously building operating systems, models that predicted a hurricane’s landfall and saved lives — all of it is still just approach terrain. The mountain is what comes after.
Chris spent his whole career in the foothills of things. Slightly ahead of the moment, always building infrastructure for a future that hadn’t arrived yet, always explaining to people who weren’t sure they wanted to know. He pioneered the blogroll. Built one of the first online newspapers. Hacked color into the San Francisco Examiner with Macintoshes and ingenuity when the system said it couldn’t be done. He was the wrong man for the present tense. He belonged to the next sentence.
He had the photographer’s instinct underneath all of it — the knowledge that you have to look carefully, that the light is always changing, that if you wait too long the moment is gone. He put the Leica to his eye and he saw. He put his hands on a keyboard and he built what he saw toward.
Lily is gone now too. She outlasted Chris, which felt right — she was stubborn and she loved the route.
I still think about those mornings. The cool air, the flat mile, Lily pulling us both forward. The way the real conversation started when we got back. The way Linda might appear and the whole thing would open into something none of us had planned. The way Chris talked about what was coming — not as speculation but as something he could already see, the way a photographer sees the shot before he raises the camera.
He always knew something was coming. He had a gift for the future tense I’ve never quite encountered in anyone else — and a photographer’s understanding that the future, like light, doesn’t wait.
I wonder what he’d make of the foothills. I think he’d already have the Leica out. And I know we’d still be talking about it.
There was a building along Route 270 in Gaithersburg, Maryland where people kept secrets for a living. Not the cloak and dagger kind. The corporate kind, which in its own way requires just as much discipline. The IBM Washington Systems Center occupied a two-story modern building that looked, from the outside, like any other outpost of late twentieth century American business. Inside it was something else. It was where IBM sent its hardest problems, and where the largest IBM customers in the world — the ones whose names you would recognize immediately — sent their most urgent ones back.
I worked there as a manager. But before I was a manager there, I was a hire. And before I was a hire, I was like every other IBM professional on the outside of a particular line — a line I didn’t fully understand until I crossed it.
At IBM there was a protocol so embedded in the culture it had almost ceased to be a rule and become something closer to a religious observance. New products were not discussed until they were announced. Not hinted at. Not alluded to. Not whispered about with a favored customer over lunch. The announcement came in the form of something called a Blue Letter — a formal communication from senior leadership that functioned as the official moment a product entered the world. Before the Blue Letter, the product did not exist in any conversation you were permitted to have. After it, you could talk about nothing else.
Violation was not a career setback. It was a firing offense. Full stop.
That clarity had a kind of elegance to it. You didn’t have to calibrate how much you could say or navigate gray areas. The line was absolute. And because it was absolute, and because everyone knew the consequence of crossing it, the culture enforced itself. You didn’t need surveillance. You needed people to understand the stakes, and they did.
What I didn’t understand, from the outside, was what that line was doing to my imagination.
When you can’t see the roadmap — when the strategy and the unannounced products and the long arc of where the company is going are all behind a wall you have no access to — you don’t experience that as absence. You experience it as depth. The things you don’t know feel like they must be there for a reason. The gaps in the announced picture feel like the gaps in a great iceberg — what’s visible is impressive, but what’s below the surface must be more impressive still.
I had faith in IBM’s strategic intelligence the way you have faith in things you can’t fully see. And faith, uncontradicted by evidence, tends toward beauty. The hidden roadmap wasn’t just unknown — it was, in my imagination, a thing of coherence and intention and vision. It had to be. The alternative was too unsettling to consider.
Then I got hired into the Washington Systems Center and crossed the line.
There was no single moment of disillusionment. No specific product that shattered the dream, no strategy document that read like a disappointment. It was more like a gradual adjustment of the eyes — the way they adapt when you move from bright sunlight into a room lit quite differently than you expected. The room isn’t dark. It’s just not what you anticipated. And once your eyes adjust you can see perfectly well, but you can never quite recover the image you had of the room before you entered it.
The reality on the inside was messier than the dream on the outside. More improvised. More human. We were, in ways I hadn’t anticipated, almost making it up as we went along. Not carelessly — the people at WSC were extraordinary, the work was serious, the commitment was real. But the beautiful coherent roadmap I had constructed in my imagination from the outside bore only a partial resemblance to the actual thing. Strategy, it turned out, looked different up close. Less like architecture. More like weather.
I absorbed this alone. Nobody sat me down and named what I was experiencing. Nobody had the conversation with me that I would later learn to have with others. I found my way through it by degrees, the way you find your way through most things that don’t come with instructions.
What came out the other side wasn’t cynicism. It was something more useful — a clearer eye, a more grounded relationship to the institution I was part of. The faith hadn’t been wrong exactly. It had just been innocent. And innocence, once lost, can’t be recovered. But what replaces it, if you’re lucky, is something steadier.
Years later I was the manager. And I was hiring IBMers — good ones, experienced ones, people who had spent serious careers on the other side of the blue line. They knew the products cold. They knew the customers. They knew how to work. What they didn’t know, couldn’t know, was what waited for them on the inside of the wall they were about to cross.
I knew it. Because I had been them.
There is a particular expression that crosses a person’s face when the actual roadmap becomes visible for the first time. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s more like a subtle recalibration — a slight stillness, a momentary adjustment behind the eyes. The person in front of you is doing quiet interior work, reconciling what they imagined with what they’re now seeing. The gap between those two things is doing something to them, and they’re not sure yet what to do with it.
I learned to watch for that expression. And when I saw it I knew what was coming if I didn’t get ahead of it.
The danger wasn’t disappointment. Disappointment is temporary, and smart people move through it. The danger was what disappointment hardens into when it isn’t named and worked through — a corrosive cynicism that poisons not just the person carrying it but everyone around them. A talented IBMer who had invested a career in faith, discovered the faith was misplaced, and decided the whole enterprise was therefore hollow — that person could do real damage to a team. I had seen it happen, or the early stages of it, which was enough.
So I developed what I came to think of as the god is dead conversation.
The name came from Nietzsche, though the application was strictly practical. What Nietzsche meant — or one of the things he meant — was that when the organizing faith of a civilization collapses, the collapse doesn’t leave nothing. It leaves a vacancy that has to be filled with something else, something built rather than inherited. The god is dead conversation was about helping someone through that vacancy quickly, before they filled it with the wrong thing.
It wasn’t a long conversation. It didn’t need to be. What it needed to be was honest, and direct, and delivered before the cynicism had time to set.
I would tell them what I saw happening. I would tell them it was normal, expected, that everyone who crossed this particular line felt some version of it. I would tell them the dream they’d carried on the outside wasn’t foolish — it was a reasonable response to incomplete information, and the information had been incomplete by design, and the design had served real purposes. None of that made them naive. It made them human.
And then I would tell them what I’d learned on my own, without anyone to guide me through it. That the messiness on the inside wasn’t a failure of IBM’s intelligence or intention. It was just what strategy actually looks like when you’re close enough to see the seams. Every institution looks more coherent from the outside than it does from the inside. That’s not a scandal. That’s organizational life.
The conversations were tricky. There was real care required. You were asking someone to grieve something — the beautiful imagined roadmap, the faith in a hidden coherence — without tipping them into bitterness about what replaced it. You were trying to accelerate a process that, left alone, might drag on for months and quietly corrode their effectiveness. And you were doing it while also being their manager, which meant you needed them functional and engaged on the other side of the conversation, not just unburdened.
What I had going for me was credibility. I wasn’t delivering a message from outside the experience. I had made the same crossing. I knew the specific texture of what they were feeling because I had felt it myself — the diffuse quality of it, the absence of a single dramatic moment, the gradual adjustment of the eyes. When I told them I understood what was happening to them, I actually did. I think they could tell.
Trial and error had taught me the shape of it. What didn’t work I had found out the hard way, at some cost, early on. What I arrived at had been load tested by real people in real situations. It wasn’t a framework from a leadership seminar. It was something I owned completely, which meant I could adapt it in the moment rather than execute a script.
Most of them came through it well. Better than well, actually.
What I hadn’t fully anticipated — though in retrospect it makes complete sense — was what replaced the faith once it was gone. It wasn’t the steadier, clearer-eyed pragmatism I had found my way to alone. It was something more potent than that. Something that surprised me the first time I saw it and then became one of the things I quietly counted on.
They came out the other side feeling superior.
Not arrogant. Not dismissive of colleagues still on the outside. But quietly, privately elevated — because they were now keepers of the secrets they had once only believed in. The blue line that had shaped their entire professional identity, that had defined the boundary of what they could know and say and imagine, was now behind them. They were on the inside. They had access. They had been trusted with the actual roadmap, the real strategy, the unannounced products that the rest of the world was still constructing faith-based pictures of.
The believer had become the keeper. And keeping, it turned out, was a more powerful identity than believing. The believer is passive — sustained by what they imagine. The keeper is active, responsible, trusted. They carry something real rather than something projected.
It solved my practical problem neatly, though that wasn’t why it moved me. What moved me was watching people find their footing on the other side of a genuine loss and discover that the ground there was solid — different from what they’d imagined, but solid. They hadn’t just survived the crossing. They’d been changed by it in a way that made them more valuable, more grounded, more fully present to the actual work.
Which was, I suppose, what the god is dead conversation had been for all along.
I think about that blue line often these days.
We are living through a moment when artificial intelligence is advancing faster than most people can track, and the organizations building it — the labs, the research teams, the companies placing enormous bets on where this technology is going — have their own version of the wall. Not identical to IBM’s. The competitive and legal architecture is different. The culture is different. But the basic structure is the same: there is what has been announced, and there is everything else, and most people are working entirely from the announced side.
Which means most people are doing what I did before I crossed the line at WSC. They are filling the gaps with faith. And faith, uncontradicted by evidence, tends toward beauty.
The unrevealed AI roadmap looks, from the outside, like a thing of coherence and intention. The capabilities that haven’t been announced yet must be more impressive than the ones that have. The strategy must be more considered than what’s visible. The gaps in the public picture feel like depth rather than uncertainty — like the part of the iceberg below the surface, which must be vast because the part above is already remarkable.
I am not saying this faith is wrong. I held the same faith about IBM and it wasn’t wrong exactly — it was innocent. The people constructing faith-based pictures of where AI is going are doing a reasonable thing with incomplete information. The information is incomplete partly by design, for reasons that make competitive and strategic sense, just as IBM’s secrecy made sense. None of that makes the faith naive.
But I’ve been inside enough walls to know what the inside tends to look like. And I think it’s worth saying, clearly and without cynicism, that the reality is probably messier than the dream. More improvised. More uncertain. More human. The people building these systems are extraordinary — the work is serious, the commitment is real — but they are also, in ways that might surprise you, almost making it up as they go along. Not carelessly. But without the complete map that the outside imagines must exist somewhere, fully drawn, waiting to be revealed.
Strategy, up close, looks less like architecture and more like weather.
This isn’t a counsel of despair. It’s almost the opposite.
The IBMers who crossed the line and survived the god is dead conversation didn’t end up with less than they started with. They ended up with more — a clearer eye, a more grounded relationship to the institution, a more useful kind of engagement with the actual work. The faith they lost was the innocent kind. What replaced it was steadier and more durable.
I suspect something similar is available to anyone willing to look at the AI moment with clear eyes. Not the disappointed cynicism of someone who expected a beautiful coherent roadmap and found a human institution instead. Not the breathless faith of someone still on the outside of the wall, filling gaps with generous assumptions. Something in between — harder to sustain, more honest, ultimately more useful.
The technology is real. The progress is real. The stakes are real. None of that requires the roadmap to be a thing of beauty. It just requires it to be worked on seriously by people who understand what they don’t yet know — which, from everything I can observe, it is.
What I couldn’t give those IBMers, and what nobody can give you, is the experience of crossing the line yourself. The god is dead conversation only works because the crossing has already happened — because the person sitting across from you has already seen the actual roadmap and is already processing the gap between what they imagined and what they found. You can’t have the conversation in advance. The disillusionment has to be real before it can be worked through.
Most of us will never cross the line into the AI labs. We’ll stay on the outside of the wall, working from the announced picture, filling the gaps as best we can. That’s not a failure — it’s just the condition most of us are in, the same condition those IBMers were in for their entire careers before I hired them.
But knowing the wall exists, and knowing what walls do to imagination, seems like it ought to change something about how we hold our faith. Not abandon it. Just hold it a little more lightly. Stay curious about the seams. Remain open to the possibility that the most important thing about the unrevealed roadmap isn’t what’s in it — but what we’ve projected onto it.
The blue line is still there. Most of us are still on the outside of it.
And the hidden roadmap still looks, from here, like a thing of beauty.
This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero, and if you have never stopped there you should stop.
Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. The soup is what they say it is.
But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you.
The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front that were probably Christmas lights once. Inside, past the motor oil, there is a counter, and behind the counter someone is making carnitas that certain people — the kind who pay attention to such things — will tell you are the best in the Bay Area. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. It is cash only. There is a white sauce at the salsa bar that I have not been able to identify or replicate or stop thinking about.
There is a man who comes in at lunch — work boots, a particular kind of flannel — who does not look at the menu. The woman at the counter is already writing when he speaks. He sits outside. Eight minutes, start to finish.
California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss. The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything.
I keep going back.
Here’s a revised and extended version:
This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. It hangs in the cypress trees and in the low places between the hills, and some days it is still there at three in the afternoon, the light going gray and cold, the ocean invisible a quarter mile west.
Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero. Population 643. A post office. A feed store. A bar that has been a bar since before your grandfather was born.
Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. You should go to Duarte’s.
But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you first.
The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front — Christmas lights, probably, once, now just lights, strung there so long they’ve become part of the architecture, the same way certain things in certain places stop being decorations and start being load-bearing. Inside, past the motor oil and the WD-40, there is a counter. Behind it, someone is making carnitas. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. Cash only. At the salsa bar there is a white sauce that I have spent three years failing to identify and cannot stop thinking about.
There is a man who comes in at lunch. Work boots with the kind of dried mud that doesn’t come off, a flannel shirt the color of something faded, a straw hat with a cord that keeps it on in the coastal wind. He does not look at the menu because there is no version of this transaction in which he needs the menu. The woman behind the counter is already writing before he finishes speaking. He carries his food out back, where there are picnic tables under whatever sky the fog has left behind. His truck is parked along the side — an old Ford, the kind that has stopped being a vehicle and become a tool. Eight minutes inside. He stays longer out back.
If you walk up around the corner — it is a short walk, less than you think — there is an auto shop. The walls have been painted so many times in so many colors that the paint itself has become the material, layers of blue and cream and rust bleeding into each other like a tide chart, the wood beneath showing through in long vertical streaks. The doors are not garage doors. They are paneled, ornate, the kind of doors that belonged to something else in another century, pressed into service here and painted over until they forgot what they were. Above them, a small Ford dealer badge, neat and official, as if someone wanted to make sure you knew this was still a place of business.
Keep going. Cross the street. Further on, there is Saint Anthony’s — a white Catholic church with a steeple that rises into whatever the sky is doing that day, a rose window above dark red doors, a hand-carved wooden sign out front that someone made carefully, with time. It has been here long enough that the people buried in the surrounding hills were baptized here, married here, carried out those red doors for the last time. The man with the cord on his hat has probably sat in those pews. His parents almost certainly did.
If you keep walking — past the church, out along Pescadero Road where the land opens back up — you will find Harley Farms. They make goat cheese there, small rounds of it, sometimes rolled in herbs or edible flowers, the kind of thing that sounds precious until you taste it and understand that it came out of this specific soil and this specific fog and couldn’t have come from anywhere else.
California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss.
The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything. Neither is the church. Neither is the auto shop, or the farm at the end of the road with the goat cheese that tastes like the fog smells.
I keep going back. I’m still not sure I have earned it.
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