Recap for those in a hurry
I’m starting to fall in love with going live. While DEFIANCE is focused on the here and now challenges, these lives give me a place to widen the timeline a bit more - reviewing the past and thinking about the future.
We are 80 years into mutually assured destruction and still organized around competitive nation-states built for a world where resources were scarce and economies were isolated. That world doesn’t exist anymore. When the Strait of Hormuz goes down, all of us pay. The weapons are too catastrophic, the economies too intertwined, and yet here we are.
I grew up around a global community. My father was an Olympic champion wrestler. The countries that dominate wrestling — Russia, Iran, Cuba, Japan — were the same ones we were supposed to fear. Once you’ve actually been around “the other” like I have, the idea of lining up across from them on a firing line feels genuinely insane.
I also got into how we pick leaders. We reward hyper-ambition and self-aggrandizement. But the most valuable person in any real community is almost never that guy — it’s the person quietly tracking everyone’s needs and making sure things stay copacetic. We’ve built a civilization that selects against that kind of leadership and we’re living with the results.
On the political moment: Bernie and Trump both ran on the same diagnosis in 2016 — corruption, corporate capture, a rigged system. The message works because it is the core problems so many Americans see clearly. We just need a movement to carry the message cleanly, without the baggage that lets half the country tune out. Root out the corruption and trust that better policy follows.
Thank you Tamie Swain 🌊📎, igor isa 🤘⚧️, Linda, Maura, Susan J, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
