Every year, organizations and institutions invest heavily to convene practitioners, experts, and leaders in shared physical spaces. Between registration fees, travel logistics, and dedicated time away from daily operations, industry benchmarks reflect a massive collective investment in face-to-face gathering. We make this investment because we recognize something fundamental: deep alignment, strategic breakthroughs, and genuine human connection cannot be replicated through a screen.

I have experienced the power of this investment firsthand. Over the past two years, I have logged hundreds of hours across policy forums, civic engagement summits, corporate strategy sessions, global affairs convenings, and higher education conferences as I try to acclimate myself to my new career in academia. Sitting in a room where people get to hear game-changing ideas, innovative frameworks, and sharp analyses of our most pressing issues is an extraordinary privilege. As someone whose dream and ambition is to routinely stand on those very stages and deliver powerful keynotes, I believe deeply in the unique magic of the physical room. There is nothing like the energy of high-caliber minds coming together to tackle the future of our fields, to prepare the current and next generation of leaders, and to figure out how we interact with a complex world.

The gathering itself is not the problem. The problem is that our panel architecture has not evolved to match the value of the human beings inside the room.

If you have attended a professional conference recently, you know the script. A moderator introduces four experts with reading-list biographies. Each expert takes twelve minutes to deliver what is essentially an abstract of an executive summary. The moderator asks two polite, scripted questions. Then, with six minutes remaining, the floor opens for Q&A, accompanied by the mandatory, desperate plea from the stage to please make sure your question is a question and not a statement.

We tend to blame the attendee who then steps to the microphone, clears their throat, and delivers a three-minute monologic manifesto. We roll our eyes and tweet about microphone etiquette. But that attendee is not a nuisance; they are a symptom of a design failure.

When people insist on making speeches from the floor, it is a clear indicator that the event provided zero space for meaningful human interaction, zero opportunity for relational friction, and zero avenues for participants to process, challenge, or contribute to the ideas floating around the room. The comment-as-question is simply a desperate attempt to be recognized as an active, thinking entity in a space that has spent three hours treating everyone past the second row as a passive receptacle for content.

We have built a conference culture optimized for broadcasting rather than processing. In an era where information is instantly accessible and trivially easy to summarize with a single prompt in a large language model, gathering experts in a physical room just to perform information transmission misses the point. If a presenter is going to deliver a dry report that attendees will run through an AI summary tool anyway, they should not do it from a dais. They should send a link.

The true value of gathering in person has never been the unidirectional broadcast of information. The value lies in what happens when ideas collide, when theoretical frameworks are tested against messy operational reality, when professionals are allowed to sit with genuine disagreement, and when sustained relationships are forged across institutional divides. Yet, the modern professional conference seems almost explicitly designed to prevent those dynamics from taking root.

Consider the physical reality. We ask high-performing practitioners to sit in standard banquet chairs in structured rows for six to eight hours a day. We know, scientifically and intuitively, that prolonged sitting on unpadded surfaces degrades cognitive function, drains energy, and induces physical strain. We expect people to be creative, strategic, and collaborative while enduring hours of physical immobility.

Then there is the networking problem. We like to pretend that the real work happens in the hallways during coffee breaks. But we have erased the social scaffolding required for actual human connection. Research published in Harvard Business Review on social capital reveals that without deliberate structure, over 80 percent of participants in unstructured networking environments default to self-segregating, talking almost exclusively to people they already know or standing alone on their phones. Throwing two hundred tired professionals into a foyer with paper cups of lukewarm coffee and expecting transformative connection to occur is not a strategy; it is lazy design. In this century, people need structured pathways to learn how to talk to each other again.

If we want to honor the immense value of these gatherings, protect the health of our attendees, and elevate the impact of the brilliant speakers on stage, we must re-engineer how we assemble.

First, we need to implement a strict no-reading rule on stage and replace passive panels with Live Friction Sprints. Presenters should be given seven minutes max to lay out a single, high-stakes trade-off, an unresolved operational dilemma, or a provocative vision. Immediately following, turn the house lights up, divide the room into rapid-response working pods, and give the audience twenty minutes to test, debate, and apply the framework to real-world scenarios. The experts should not sit back on stage sipping bottled water; they should roam the floor as designated evaluators, listening to how practitioners are wrestling with their ideas in real time.

Second, we must trade polite consensus for structural engagement. The most transformative moments in professional life do not happen when everyone nods along to sanitized, safe platitudes about institutional alignment. They happen when an operational practitioner directly challenges a theoretical model, or when an insider forces a room to confront uncomfortable realities.

Conference organizers must stop building panels where four people agree on every premise. We need formats built for disciplined collision. Create Fishbowl Arenas where opposing viewpoints are debated on stage, but leave two chairs permanently open for audience members to walk up, deliver a sharp counter-analysis, and step back down. Build Real-Time Simulation Labs where attendees are assigned competing institutional roles and forced to negotiate a crisis under tight time constraints. When you give people a complex problem to solve together rather than a lecture to endure, the artificial awkwardness of networking disappears. Trust is built through shared tension and shared labor, not small talk over fruit platters.

Third, we must radically re-engineer the physical environment and break the sitting monopoly. Throw out the straight-line lecture hall layout. If a room cannot be configured to allow people to face one another, stand comfortably, or move, it is the wrong layout.

Integrate physical movement directly into the intellectual work. Some of the sharpest, most rigorous debates happen when people are in motion. Convert passive morning sessions into Cohort Walking Briefings, where small, structured groups walk outside or through designated hallways while debating a specific prompt, returning to the room only to pitch their conclusions. Movement increases blood flow, lowers stress, and flattens the artificial hierarchies that form the moment someone steps behind a podium.

Fourth, treat relationship building as a core tradecraft rather than an afterthought. Connection is not an innate talent that magically activates during a cocktail hour; it is a discipline that requires architecture. If an event claims to build a network, it must actively facilitate the mechanics of that network.

Abolish the generic mixer and replace it with Problem-Matched Micro-Cohorts. When participants register, group them not by their job titles or seniority, but by the specific operational headache they are trying to solve that year. Maintain these four-to-five-person cohorts as anchor groups throughout the entire conference, scheduling mandatory fifteen-minute debriefs after major keynotes. When you give people a structural home base and a shared mission, you eliminate the social anxiety of cold outreach and replace it with immediate, functional peer-collaboration.

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One of the biggest limitations of your future isn’t time, talent, intelligence, or work ethic. It’s exposure which is something far more structural, quiet, and definitive.

Your brain can only set targets for things it knows exist according to an interview I listened to by a neurologist. Every single day, our minds filter through millions of bits of sensory and situational data, desperately trying to decide what is relevant for survival, what is useful for progress, and what is simply background noise. If you have never seen a specific path walked up close, your brain’s gatekeeper, the salience network, simply flags it as background scenery. It ignores the opportunity because it does not recognize it as a viable destination. It assumes the boundary lines of your current environment are the boundary lines of the world. But once you are exposed to something beyond those borders, an immediate shift occurs at a neurological level.

I recently reconnected with an old friend who told me how proud she was of the work I am doing. As we talked, she reflected on the weight of representation, noting that she could only imagine what it meant for others to see someone like me in my position, explicitly breaking down the mechanics of the field and creating an intentional work ecosystem for them. That conversation stayed with me for days because it hits directly at the core of a phrase my mentors used to tell me: You can’t be what you can’t see.

When you see someone who shares your identity, your background, or your struggles thriving in an unfamiliar, high-stakes, or historically exclusive environment, the cognitive friction associated with that space evaporates. The achievement is instantly dragged out of the realm of mythology and dropped squarely into the realm of methodology. It stops looking like an unattainable miracle, and it starts looking like a sequence of repeatable steps. It ceases to be magic and begins to look like a system.

Under these conditions, your brain begins collecting evidence. It starts noticing open doors, hidden levers, and tactical opportunities that were previously invisible or ignored. What was once considered extraordinary or out of reach suddenly becomes possible. The horizon moves because your internal map expanded. Yet, if we stop there, the phrase “you can’t be what you can’t see” inadvertently becomes its own psychological ceiling.

If human ambition were strictly bounded by direct, literal representation, no one would ever be the first to accomplish anything. Every breakthrough in human history would be a logical impossibility. The pioneers of any movement, discipline, or institutional architecture had to look at rooms, industries, and power structures where absolutely no one like them existed, and they had to project themselves into those spaces anyway. They had to operate in a vacuum of precedent.

They achieved this through a cognitive process known as combinatorial creativity. The human brain does not merely mirror what is directly in front of it; it possesses the unique capacity to synthesize fragments of disparate realities. A pioneer does not need a perfect, identical mirror image to build a vision. Instead, they take the grit observed in a family member, the strategic acumen read about in a historical text, and the structural design witnessed in an entirely unrelated industry, and they fuse those pieces together. They construct a composite map for a territory that has never been mapped before.

Exposure, therefore, does not just mean finding a perfect reflection of yourself in a position of leadership. It means aggressively gathering the raw, foundational building blocks of excellence wherever they exist, and having the intellectual agility to assemble them into something entirely new. You do not wait to see yourself in the room; you study the mechanics of the room from the outside so that you can reconfigure it upon entry. There is, however, a critical catch to this dynamic: simply being in the room is never enough.

We often operate under the comforting illusion that environmental exposure automatically triggers transformation, that if we just surround ourselves with high performers, elite institutions, or innovative spaces, osmosis will do the heavy lifting. We assume that standing near power or talent will rewrite our internal programming by default.

But proximity without engagement quickly devolves into passive consumption or inspiration voyeurism. It turns the success of others into a spectator sport. You can sit in the audience of an ecosystem for years, watching the tradecraft of experts up close, without a single synapse changing shape.

True neuroplasticity, the actual, physical rewiring of your neural pathways, is an outcome of friction, not just presence. Your brain does not change when it observes comfort; it changes when it encounters a demand for adaptation. Neurological reorganization requires intense, sustained attention and a high degree of cognitive effort. It demands the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine and acetylcholine, which are only triggered when you are actively wrestling with a problem, taking a calculated risk, or operating at the absolute edge of your current capability.

This means that exposure is merely the spark that alters your internal filter. It opens your eyes to the existence of the game, but it does not give you the skill to play it. Rigorous translation, focused immersion, and relentless execution are what actually build the target. The real rewiring occurs during the awkward, high-friction phase of doing the work, when you are forced to speak a language you haven't mastered, navigate protocols you didn't grow up with, and handle the weight of real responsibility.

The ultimate shift, then, is moving from a passive witness of an environment to an active decoder of it.

When my friend pointed out the impact of providing advice and building an ecosystem, the true breakthrough for the people in that space wasn't just the visual of representation. It was the act of translation. It was taking the unwritten rules, the implicit strategies, and the hidden operational tradecraft of a complex professional world and making them explicit. It was turning an exclusive domain into an accessible curriculum.

By existing transparently in those spaces, you provide the structural blueprint that allows the brains of those around you to start collecting their own evidence. You lower the barrier to entry not by lowering the standard, but by demystifying the path to reaching it.

The prescription for stagnation is simple but uncomfortable: you must deliberately expose yourself to the depth of the environments that intimidate you. Seek out the spaces that make your current assumptions feel small. Stand in rooms where the conversation forces you to stretch, where the expectations are mercilessly high, and where your current toolset feels inadequate.

Do not look at these environments as elite fortresses designed to keep you out; look at them as data-rich fields waiting to be analyzed. Gather the evidence of how things are built, how influence is wielded, and how systems are run. Endure the acute discomfort of being the uninitiated novice in the room. Decode the system from the inside out, master the tradecraft required to operate within it, and then turn around and build the ecosystem that allows those coming behind you to see it, understand it, and surpass it.

This is a mass grave of monks killed in the Black Death in 1348.

Of course we know nothing about these particular monks, but who doesn’t welcome a good post on the Black Death? So let’s start with the simple fact that the sheer scale of death from the arrival of the Bubonic Plague was unprecedented and really unbelievable. Put in this way–by about the 4th century or so, apocalyptic talk about the End Times in Christianity had largely faded. It remained in the background of Christian thought for 1,000 years. The Black Death brought it back.

How many died? Hard to say, but it could be up to 50 million. It’s true of course that death was effectively everywhere all the time in the 14th century, especially in Europe with its notoriously filthy people and cities. So it’s not as if disease wasn’t part of the daily landscape. But nearly everyone seemingly dying overnight, I mean, how do you even begin to consider that? Covid might be the closest experience in our lifetimes–and let’s hope it remains the closest experience even if RFK and Donald Trump are working their hardest to ensure that we surpass it by Tuesday–but there’s not even the beginning of a comparison. The only other real comparison since then was the diseases of the Columbian Exchange that came with Europeans and destroyed Native populations in the Americas and other isolated places that were not exposed to the filth of Europeans before this.

We don’t even completely know where from and why the plague spread to Europe in 1347, though the path is clear enough–fleas coming over with traders from Genoa after one of their visits to the Crimea. And then it spread like wildfire through Europe. It was all the way to England by June 1348, hit Norway in 1349, and was as far as Moscow in 1353. There were a few places that mostly escaped its ravaged, the few places that really were isolated from global trading networks, such as some of the Swiss cantons and some remote areas of Belgium, as well as most of the Basque world. But the reality was that even mid 14th century Europe was part of a pretty globalized economy and so disease could spread through the networks as well as goods.

To focus on England here, the plague was first recorded, again, in June 1348, when a sailor who had come over from Gascony died of it. By the autumn it was in London and by early 1349, it was across the entire country. 1349 was a year of mass death. It wasn’t until December that the plague began to die down. Over that year, probably half of the country died. That’s really crazy. Half? Could even be 60%. Of course, this was not the only incidence of this. A second round of plague hit England starting in 1361. That killed 20% of the population. By this time, there was of course a lot more understanding of what was going on–not in terms of cause or anything, but of what this was and how to handle a mass death event like this. So the social upheaval wasn’t quite as enormous as it had been. But let’s not kid ourselves, that’s still a gargantuan number of people. Then in 1369 came the third major epidemic, which killed about 15% of the population. There were several pretty big epidemics in the 15th century as well. Eventually, people began to understand ideas of quarantine and so a greater effort was made to act quickly. The last major plague outbreak in England was in 1665-66, which did manage to kill 20% of London, though less in other places.

Now, the fact that this is a grave of monks actually matters, as opposed to other people. The reason is that people felt the Church was totally hypocritical. The Church loved to talk about how people were sinners. When the plague hit, the message was that people had sinned and God was punishing them. But what did it then mean when monks died at huge rates, even higher than the rest of the population? Of course, today the reason for this is not hard to suss–it’s because they lived in tight quarters and weren’t mobile. But if people believed in the Church’s message about the plague, it said to them that God was punishing the clergy most of all because they were the real sinners, not us. The fact that so many priests abandoned the people in their times of immediate death also undermined the power of the Church in English society. Disgust at the fear of the clergy was rampant.

So one major impact of the plague in England was to reduce the clergy’s power. John Wycliffe and his proto-Protestant ideas rose in this context. The people of England did not become less religious. Rather, they began to personalize their religion more and looked to the clergy as mediators between themselves and God less. Thus more private chapels began to be built, and not just by the nobility but among anyone who could afford them, which even meant merchants sometimes.

Incidentally, the term “black death” to describe the plague did not get coined until the mid 18th century. I had no idea about this. Fascinating what you learn.

This is not in fact the first memorial site I’ve seen to victims of the plague. Before I started doing the grave series, I was in Vienna, touring the big cathedral there. It’s really too bad I wasn’t doing the grave series because they had big jars with the preserved (supposedly) internal organs of various royalty and an explanation of the system by which said royals had their bodies divided up after death. Now that’s quality material! Anyway, there was a glassed off section as you headed down to the organ jars and on the other side, it was a huge pile of bones. It was a mass grave of plague victims and this is how the church decided to recognize it. Again, quality material. We haven’t crossed the Rubicon of bone piles in the grave series. But I need goals for the last years of my life. This can be one of them.

These monks are buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

In terms of overall death toll, which is very different than per capita, the 1346-53 version of the plague is probably 4th all time, behind the Spanish flu, the Plague of Justinian (which was probably also Bubonic plague), and HIV/AIDS. If you would like this series to visit dead Americans from the Spanish flu, which should be called the Kansas flu since it started on a disgusting military base in that state and is probably the most definitional contribution of Kansas to global society, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edward Kidder Graham is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Lunsford Richardson (inventor of Vicks VapoRub, which evidently did not work for him) is in Greensboro, North Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits a (Non) American Grave, Part 2,205 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

tournevis-real:

vulcartist:

I translated the Ea-Nasir complaint into vulcan and engraved it in on a cooper plate

The tumblrest sentence I have ever seen

Lucifer, you old dog!

Thanks for all the success you’ve granted me and the lads, Luci. Must say we were surprised that you didn’t want our souls in return, just a chance to write a song together. But great!

Also delighted you sent your proposed new lyrics in the form of a demo cassette. Such a deep bass singing voice!

Before the band records, I wanted to check in about a couple of word choices.

At the intro, you use a bunch of interjections. There’s “Hey!” and “Look at me!” and “Devil time!” At one point, I think you yell, and I could have it wrong, “How are you?” Feels wordy. Maybe I could just yell “Yeow!” here and there?

Now the opening line, you have:

Please allow me to introduce myself.
I’m Satan. Hello there!

I wonder if that gives away the game a little bit early. Maybe just keep the first sentence?

Loving the “wealth and taste” bit. In terms of wanting to set up a riddle, the thing about being around with Jesus, I mean, that kind of narrows things down, age-wise? Puts us in the realm of immortals pretty fast. A lot of our fans are quite stoned, though, so maybe they won’t guess yet.

Digging the transition to Pontius Pilate. Smooth. Right now, your lyrics are:

Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Cause washing hands is important, you guys,
Stop those germs before it’s too late.

And then you abruptly stop the music and do a spoken word thing:

Really, to just be serious here for a moment,
I can’t emphasize hand washing enough
We all do it down here in Hell between crushing guys’ testicles
in our horrifying claw hands.

Just feels like a bit of a tangent? Germs (which you have in Hell?) aren’t really the focus of our song.

Okay, music starts back up—next verse:

And I went down to Georgia once
and I got into a fiddle contest there.
There was this kid Johnny,
and it’s actually a pretty funny story.

It DOES sound fascinating, and I want to hear all about it. I do wonder, though, if that’s a different song? We want to get our song on the radio so I’m watching the clock a bit.

Moving on. You have:

Stuck around St. Petersburg
when I saw it was a time for a change.
Bought a condo in Tampa instead.
Better vibe there across the bay.

I asked some of the lads, and there was a general consensus that Florida real estate doesn’t read as Satanic, at least not on the surface. Hey, I know: What about the Russian St. Petersburg? We can workshop ideas.

Gotta confess I’m on the fence about the Blitzkrieg part. Starts strong:

I rode a tank, held a general’s rank
when the Blitzkrieg raged,
and the bodies stank.

Then I think we get diverted again with:

My tank helmet needed holes cut out
to fit my little devil horns.

I really hate to mention this, but that doesn’t make you very scary, nor does the next one:

My cape got stuck in the hatch door,
and also I don’t know how to drive a tank
so I kept steering into a tree.

From the crying on your recording, I can tell this is a painful memory for you, and maybe you’re just not ready to explore it in a song? Also, you forgot to rhyme.

So many of your lyrics are really top-notch, Prince of Lies, and in many cases they just need a little tightening. Take, for instance:

I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all, it was the CIA
along with the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Cubans, Jackie Gleason,
and various high-profile Cadillac dealers.

Personally, I did not know ANY of that. Is our song the best place to reveal such sensitive information? Or is that just part of being evil? Again, so exciting to work together.

Let’s see. What else? Oh, I know:

Pleased to meet you,
hope you guess my name.
If you do, you win a prize.
I have these golden fiddles I give out,
they’re really great.

Again, let’s table the golden fiddle contest. Maybe take it to a different artist? Who isn’t us?

Alright, now we’re at the close:

Tell me, baby, what’s my name?
Tell me, honey, can you guess my name?
Tell me, baby, what’s my name?
I’ll tell you one time, you’re to blame.

See? Right there. Tell them just the one time. Less is more. Because the next bit you have is a little labored:

Do you get it? YOU’RE the Devil!
You did all these things! YOU’RE to blame!
Oh, I helped for sure! Cause I’m the REAL Devil!
But it’s on you! You’re like assistant devils!
It’s not an official job title! Don’t use it on a resume!
There’s no uniform! But you know what, you could make one!

Love love love the creativity, but you feel it kind of getting in the weeds, right? Like a tank driving into a tree. Haha. Oh, I should not have made that joke. I’m so sorry.

Okay! We’re making real progress here.

Love,
Mick

Mark Zuckerberg is not pleased that his investment in AI hasn’t led to the levels of mass unemployment he had hoped for. Or for people to really use it for much work related at all.

As Reuters reports, Zuckerberg admitted during a town hall last week that AI agents in particular aren’t progressing as fast as he anticipated, a devastating revelation following enormous layoffs that wiped out thousands of roles at the company.

The “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” he said according to a recording obtained by Reuters.

The reorganization effort’s timing was miscalculated and the job cuts were not “clean,” Zuckerberg said, while arguing that the plan had yet to “come to fruition.”

It’s only the latest indication of major chaos behind the scenes as the tech giant struggles to remain relevant in an AI race being fought out by its competitors. That’s despite Meta committing to spending a stunning $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, a record sum that could’ve paid for an untold number of salaries.

It’s so sad when your “job cuts aren’t “clean.” A good clean firing, now that brings warmth to the black heart of any plutocrat.

Beyond Meta’s frantic AI efforts, company leaders also had to address yet another major sore point during last week’s town hall. Last month, Meta was forced to pause its controversial employee tracking program — which was designed to record everything workers do on their work computer to gather data for AI — after sensitive employee information was leaked internally.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth vowed that the program would be “opt-in” if it’s ever turned on again.

“For people who are comfortable, that’s great, they can contribute to this kind of great human ⁠survey,” he said at last week’s town hall. “To ​people who are not, it is not an issue.

This is my shocked face to discover that tech companies are dystopian employers.

The post The Techbro Goal of Unemploying Everyone Not Going As Planned appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.