Through Another Lens Podcast

Mark Sylvester
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The podcast that flips conventional wisdom upside down. Where hidden truths become competitive advantages. marksylvester.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    What I Tell TEDx Organizers Before They Pick a Speaker

    A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “The Empty Shelf.” I had the list in my hand so I could glance down at it. It’s called Ten Things To Know, eight years of coaching TEDx organizers boiled down to one page, and I know all ten by heart. I hold the page anyway so I don’t sound like I memorized it. Nobody who watches a TEDx talk online sees the room where the show gets planned. TEDx is the independently run, local version of TED, and the people who organize it are often doing it for the first time. This room was Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara, twenty students and two teachers getting ready for their 2027 show. Half of them had produced the last event and half were new, and I ask a lot of questions in these rooms because I like to get them talking about the individual pieces of the show. I’ve worked with high school students for a long time, in a lot of different ways, and the one constant is that I challenge them to think bigger. It’s the right age for it, and it’s why I keep coming back. Libraries had been on my mind. I’m working on a digital one, and in August I’d produced a show in Columbiana, a small town in Ohio, where the first job in any planning room is finding the ideas. When I lead that conversation I like to start with a picture, and the picture I’d carried for two months was a library, and I had never said it out loud to anyone who would use it. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The speaker item Then we got to the item about speakers. Most organizers start there, because speakers are visible and ideas are abstract. You know someone impressive, and you build the show backward from the person. I’ve done it myself. I looked down at the page and didn’t read it. Eight years of work sat in my hand and the library had never been tried on anyone, and I said, “Imagine you have this library,” and I felt very connected to that room. It’s a circular room and you’re standing at the center, with shelves curving away in every direction. On them sits every TED and TEDx talk ever given, sorted by category, then subcategory, then subcategory again. Which shelves are crowded, and which are almost empty? One shelf is packed, resilience and mindset and getting through the hard thing, stacked three deep. A story of struggle and recovery is easy to pitch to a committee and it fills seats, and a local event rewards what the audience already recognizes, so in the planning room it’s the quiet default. It also fills the shelf that’s already overflowing. The main TED stage, which one curation team builds for the whole world, leans toward technology and science, while local events lean toward personal growth. Read them as one pile and the local talks bury the main stage, so read them apart and each shows you what it misses. The empty shelves Other shelves have gaps nobody has noticed, and the gaps follow a pattern. Engineering, agriculture, and the work of keeping things running barely register, and when they show up at all they arrive dressed as something else, like gene editing in crops or drones over forests. Say a researcher has spent fifteen years studying how the sound of a city shapes a child’s thinking, and she has never been on a stage. Say a logistics engineer knows how to rebuild a supply chain after a flood, and nobody has asked him to explain it in eighteen minutes to the people who could use it. Those talks belong in the library, and they don’t exist yet. Before we talk about speakers, I ask organizers three questions, in this order: why this idea, why right now, why this person. Put the idea first and you end up standing in front of an empty shelf. The pause The show will happen in the school gymnasium, in front of a few hundred kids and adults, and that matters. Then I told them the real audience is the world, and I stopped talking. A kid in Bangalore, I said, a kid in Frankfurt, hears one talk from a show like theirs and something shifts for that kid. I let it sit. Twenty-two people looked back at me and nobody said a word, and I knew they were with me because I make a point of looking at every one of them, and at twenty-two that’s easy, and I’ve stood close enough to enough of these talks to say it plainly: ideas change everything, and these twenty are about to go find one. Here’s the number behind that pause. One talk from one of the school’s own shows has been watched more than four million times. Every talk you’ve ever watched started in a room like that one, with somebody deciding it was worth a shelf. I don’t know which shelf these twenty will choose. If you’ve ever thought about giving a talk, don’t start with the story you know will get applause. Go stand in the middle of that library and find the shelf that’s almost empty. See if there’s a gap you could fill. Listen to “The Empty Shelf” on Suno. Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

    What I Tell TEDx Organizers Before They Pick a Speaker

  2. Sep 27

    Show Me You Want It

    A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Come Back Up.” I sent William back to his seat. He’d walked up to pitch a movie. Six kids, one long butcher-block table in a junior high maker lab, a bundle of orange pencils in the middle nobody had touched. I’d asked each of them the same thing before they started. How bad do you want this movie made? William said very badly. I asked if he wanted it more than the three kids who’d gone before him. He thought about it and said, I wouldn’t say so. So I said okay, go sit down, and called the next kid. Then I watched his face. That’s the moment I drove home thinking about, and it’s the reason I’m writing this instead of a tidy lesson on story structure. I’ll get to the structure. It took seventy-five minutes and it worked. But the thing that happened to William’s face took about four seconds, and it’s the part that matters. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The room The class is the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s youth film program. Claire Waterhouse runs it. Over twenty-four sessions these six kids will make short films and screen them for their parents in a real auditorium in December, and my job on the second Tuesday was to get them from nothing to a story they could say out loud in one sentence. I did a version of this at the festival’s summer camp and wrote about it then. This is the junior high edition. Same idea, a room with less patience for anything that isn’t a game. The games So we played games. Zip, zap, zop around the circle, eyes on the person you’re passing to, because on a set a light can fall on you if your head isn’t on a swivel. The name game, where everybody picks a word that starts with their first letter. Magical Mark. Intelligent Isaac. Kindly Kenneth. Wonderful William. Zany Zephers. Calm Claire. You have to step into the middle and say it with some volume, and the first kid who tried gave it about a two out of ten, so we tried again at a three. Then the Pixar spine, taped to the cubbies in Sharpie. Once upon a time. Every day. Until one day. Because of that. Because of that. Until finally. Ever since then. We went around the table and built a story one line at a time, and the first thing this group did with a hero was kill him. Second story, a girl gets expelled and her mom takes her phone, and she dies too. Junior high has a strong sense of how things end. The writers room I put the expelled girl back on the table and ran a writers room on her. Why’d she get expelled. Fourth fight. Why four fights. Cyberbullying. Then somebody added a dad, and somebody added a brother who died, then didn’t die, he ran away, he lied about his age and joined the army at seventeen. The story got darker with every hand that went up and I kept asking the only question a producer gets to ask, which is who’s buying a ticket to this. Don’t kill the son. Show the happy scenes at school. School’s her escape. Maybe she writes and someone discovers what’s going on at home. Maybe the story is that she’s strong and nobody gets to knock her down. One kid said, I would watch that. Then I stopped it and said what I was seeing. Too many threads. Was there a dead brother or not. Were the parents abusive or just fighting. What happened to the online bullying, which is where this whole thing started. That’s the job of the room too, somebody has to hold the core idea while everyone else piles on, and for one afternoon that somebody was me. Then I needed three story ideas from each of them. Five minutes, three real things from your own life. Something that happened to you, something that bugs you, something you’re curious about. Pairs. Pick your partner’s best one. Then the pitch, four parts, hook, want, stakes, and why you’re the one telling it. And here’s where the TED part of my life showed up, because the first question I ask anyone who wants the TED stage is the one I asked these kids. What’s the idea the world needs to hear, and why now, and what gives you permission to say it. The pitches Jose went first because I made him. A true story about a teacher, told with a straight face, and the ending hasn’t happened yet. Zephers pitched the e-bike he wants and his parents won’t buy, the friends who ride off without him, the crash you can see coming. Kenneth, after I made him say nine out of ten, pitched a mean, lonely guy who pays a shady stranger for a perfect friend, and what shows up at the door is an exact copy of himself, and then the accidents start. Isaac closed with a company called Engenetics and Tech Biology, a 1979 training tape, and a corporation that turned its own workers into machines, found out, and kept going. Four seconds And in the middle of all that, William. He came back up before I asked him to. That’s what I saw on his face while Isaac was walking to the front, the thing that happens when a kid decides. The mouth sets. The shoulders come off the wall. I said okay, then show me you want it, and he stood up straight and gave me a ten-year-old who finds his lost cat, brings it home, and walks in on his fifteen-year-old brother eating raw steak and raw fish at the kitchen table, and the brother looks up, says oh, hello, and jumps out the window. Fade to black. It’s a strange little movie and I’d watch every second of it, and the reason it exists is that for four seconds William sat in his chair and felt what it was like to have his story passed over, and decided he didn’t like that, and did something about it out loud in front of six people who’d just watched him get sent down. The part I can’t teach is the moment a person decides the story is worth wanting in public, where it can be turned down. That’s the whole class. I could teach want, obstacle, change to anyone in twenty minutes. The part I can’t teach is the moment a person decides the story is worth wanting in public, where it can be turned down. Most adults never get there. They pitch from the chair, hedged, ready to shrug if it doesn’t land, and then they wonder why the room didn’t lean in. William got there in junior high because I gave him a reason to, and the reason was a small, honest no. WAIT and WAIST We ended with one sentence each. Then two words I made them write down. WAIT, Why am I talking? WAIST, Why am I still talking? Learn the first one and people will let you keep going. Learn the second and they’ll ask you back. Somebody asked which of the five I’d fund. Kenneth’s clone and Isaac’s corporation, I said, and I’d put both in front of an audience and see. The core idea in Isaac’s is a company that knew years ago and didn’t fix it, and if that’s true, what else is true? Where do those people eat, who do they trust, what do they love. That’s the next twenty-two sessions. I’ll be in the auditorium in December. Five films. I already know which one I’m watching for the kid who came back up. Listen to “Come Back Up” on Suno: Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Sep 20

    Catching Noah's Light

    A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Small Bursts of Light.” I filmed my own laptop screen with my phone. That’s the part that still makes me laugh. I was sitting in my studio, phone held up to my monitor, recording a video call I was already on, so I could play it back to the man on the other end of it. Noah benShea is eighty one. A poet, a philosopher, the kind of man who has a serious composure until he doesn’t. We’d been talking for months over Zoom, working on forty years of his writing, and there was this one small problem neither of us could fix with words. He’d forget the camera was above his screen. His eyes would drift down to my face on his laptop instead, and on my end, it looked like he was reading something off a page. It broke the one thing I didn’t want broken. The connection. The Eye Line So I found a camera that clips onto the top of a laptop, with a little arm that swings down so the lens sits right where his eyes naturally land. No studio, no crew, no budget. Just a small piece of hardware and his own Mac laptop. He wasn’t sure it would work. I wasn’t completely sure either. Then I played it back for him. And I watched his face change. That’s when the smile came, the one that breaks through the composure. He was tickled. Genuinely tickled, like a kid who’d just seen a magic trick land. He thanked me afterward. Not for the technology. For the fact that, for a few seconds on a screen, it looked like he was looking someone in the eye again. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Coffee With Noah We’ve known each other for about thirty years. Noah’s a fixture in this town, the kind of person everybody in Santa Barbara seems to have a story about. A few months ago we were having coffee and he was telling me about Jacob the Baker, a series of books he wrote years ago that got turned into a film and still sits on Amazon today. People had been asking him for a prequel, and he was doing the math out loud, how many years a book like that takes to write, how many years he actually has left to write it. It wasn’t self-pity. It was just arithmetic, the kind you start doing at eighty-one. I made a joke. I told him I’d written a book the weekend before. He laughed, then he stopped laughing and asked how that was even possible. I’d used my own platform, the one I built for myself long before anyone else touched it, to write something called A Moment in Time, a six-hundred-page illustrated book that looks at history sideways, tracking eight different countries at once from a thousand years before Christ to twenty years from now, so you can see what else was happening in the world the moment something famous happened somewhere else. He’d heard vaguely that AI could write things. He’d never sat across from someone who’d actually used it to finish something real. He asked if I could help him. That was it. That was the whole beginning. One offhand joke over coffee, and a few months later we have a website, a Substack, a strategy for Facebook and Instagram, a mailing list, songs written from his own words, and a business built entirely out of forty years of one man’s writing and philosophy. He’s spent his whole life trying to get his words out into the world. He just never had anyone who could move as fast as the thoughts arrived. That camera arm cost less than dinner for two. It solved something money alone never would have. And it’s a small example of the same pattern that started at that coffee table, technology doing the moving so his voice doesn’t have to slow down to fit it. The Fear of Missing One He didn’t have a name for the thoughts that kept arriving. They just showed up without warning, while he made coffee, while he sat with his wife, and he’d text them straight to me, asking me to add them to our notebook. For a while that meant watching my phone for his messages and copying them over by hand, and it was the fear of missing one, of some thought slipping past me and disappearing for good, that finally pushed me to build something better. First Light was already the name of the whole project, so light was already the language we were living in. Fireflies just showed up as the obvious next word. Small bursts, there and gone, unless you catch them. The Same Jar Twice So I built him a jar. Not a real one. An app, simple enough that an eighty one year old who has never called himself technical can open it and just talk, or just type, the moment a thought arrives. It wasn’t until later that I remembered he’d already written about a jar himself, decades ago, a short parable called The Pickle Jar about the kind of solitude that sneaks up on a person in the middle of a crowded room. I hadn’t borrowed the idea on purpose. It had been sitting in his own forty years of work the whole time, waiting for someone to notice the two jars were really the same jar. Every firefly he catches goes somewhere now. Into the work. Into the website. Into the strategy we’ve been building together for four months, all of it drawn from forty years of writing that already exists, never invented, never put in his mouth. If it sounds like him, it’s because it is him. I made a rule early on, nothing gets conjured. Every word traces back to something he actually said or wrote. What He Handed Me I’ve wondered what it feels like to have your phone buzz with your own thought before you’ve finished thinking it. Noah didn’t really answer that when I brought it up. He handed me something he’d already written years earlier, in a collection he calls Small Truths, small enough to read in a minute, sturdy enough to carry a lifetime. “Sometimes you hear something at just the right moment to answer something for which you very much needed an answer. You can think this is a coincidence but the word coincidence at its root means ‘things falling together.’ And in a world which so often feels like things are falling apart, sometimes the unexpected arrival of an idea or thought appearing unexpectedly is a sign that things are falling together for you. And that is a sacred sign both for who sent and who received.” That’s Fireflies, four years before Fireflies existed. What I Actually Built I didn’t set out to build technology. I set out to solve one problem for one friend, how do you get a lifetime of wisdom out of a man’s head and into the world before it’s too late to ask him what he meant. The eye line camera and the firefly jar are the same idea wearing different clothes. Both exist so something true can travel the short distance between one person and another without losing anything on the way. I’ve spent two years building a platform around that idea. This week, we’re four weeks from putting it into other people’s hands. But if you asked me what I actually built, I’d tell you about a smile on a screen before I’d tell you about the software. Listen to “Small Bursts of Light” on Suno Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts You can read Noah’s words on the Substack I’ve built for him. Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Sep 13

    Chefs write recipes. Cooks follow them. Which one is running your business?

    A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Write It Down.” Every AI prompt you borrow from someone else is a recipe you didn’t write. That’s the whole thing. That’s what I want you to sit with this Sunday morning before we go any further. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The fence and the foundation Corporate speak calls it a Standard Operating Procedure. A chef calls it a recipe. The difference isn’t semantic. The SOP is written to prevent deviation. The recipe is written to enable it, to hand someone enough structure that they can eventually make the dish their own. One is a fence. The other is a foundation. AI rewards you for showing up as yourself. It doesn’t reward good prompting. It rewards the chef in ways it can’t reward the cook. Three years ago Three years ago, when ChatGPT was still new and everybody was scrambling to figure out prompts, I was right there with them. I’d try one, it wouldn’t work right, I’d try another. Same as everyone else that first year. There’s nothing wrong with that. Someone has to get dinner on the table before they can write the recipe for it. Around then I started noticing the come-ons. Download this prompt pack. A hundred prompts that will change how you work. I downloaded a bunch of them, out of curiosity more than anything, and started running the same test on every one. I’d hand the prompt to my own AI and ask it a single question: aren’t we already doing this? Nine times out of ten, the answer came back the same. Yeah, you’re already well past that. I didn’t know it yet, but that question was the whole education. A borrowed prompt only tells you what someone else already figured out. It can’t tell you what you’ve already outgrown. Stop asking it and you’re not cooking anymore. You’re gambling on whether someone else’s ingredients work twice. The book that changed it What actually shifted things was a book, Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. One rule in it stuck harder than the rest: treat AI like a smart but error-prone intern, not a tool. I was head chef at a novitiate for five years in my twenties, so I heard that differently. Sous chef. Give it a station, real context, a clear bar for what good looks like, and it preps exactly what you need. But the chef still tastes before anything goes out, because hand it the whole kitchen and it’ll confidently plate something that isn’t ready. That’s the whole move, writing a recipe instead of handing someone a fence. That’s the moment I stopped being a cook. What’s actually in the recipe Once I stopped downloading and started writing my own, I learned what actually has to go into a recipe that works. Audience first: be honest, who’s actually reading this, not who you wish were reading this. Tone is next: what does this person sound like when they drop the performance. Purpose: what does this piece need to do. Sections matter more than most people think, because the architecture that holds issue three together has to hold issue fifty-three together too. And then the hardest ingredient, what done looks like, because without that you’re just cooking until you get tired. That last one stops most people cold. They’ve never defined what done looks like for their content. They publish when they run out of time, not when the dish is ready. A chef doesn’t write the recipe once and walk away. They make it, they taste it, they add salt, they pull back the acid, they let it rest longer. In AI terms, that means running the system, reading the output with real critical attention, and adjusting the prompt before you publish anything. The system gets better because you’re paying attention, not because the tool is magic. Freestyle needs training Some people need the recipe. They follow it exactly until it becomes second nature. Some people want to freestyle from day one. Freestyle isn’t automatically bad, and it isn’t automatically good. Training underneath it decides which one you get. You can get that training a few ways: take a workshop, read a book, or sit down and treat the whole thing like a lab. Try something. Watch it fail. Adjust. Try again. Cognitive scientists have a name for that part: creative struggle. The people who study how learning actually sticks will tell you the same thing every chef already knows. Skip the struggle and the lesson doesn’t land. I got lucky. I had the time to sit with the failures, add more salt, pull back the spice, and let the recipe come together slowly instead of copying someone else’s and hoping it worked. I’m on the other side of that now. I’m comfortable in the kitchen. AI is my kitchen, and it’s working. You already know what you make. You don’t need a better recipe card. You need to write down the one you’re already using. Tell me what you’re actually cooking with AI right now. Not the prompt you borrowed. The recipe underneath it. Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. This one comes with a song, “Write It Down.” I copied someone’s recipeFollowed it word for wordNever changed a single thingNever wrote one of my ownA chef creates, a cook repeatsOne of these is you and meA chef creates, a cook repeatsWhich one are you gonna beThen I checked one against my own wayAgainst how far I’d already goneNine times out of ten I’d passed itI’d been cooking on my ownA chef creates, a cook repeatsI found out which one was meA chef creates, a cook repeatsNot repeating anymoreCheck it for yourselfSee how far you’ve grownAsk the same questionYou might already knowA chef creates, a cook repeatsThat’s the one I’m choosing to beA chef creates, a cook repeatsWrite your own, don’t just repeatChef, not cookChef, not cook Every Sunday Story comes with its own song. Hear the others in the podcast archive: Listen on Apple Podcasts Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

    Chefs write recipes. Cooks follow them. Which one is running your business?

  5. Sep 6

    Nobody Talks Like That

    I put two years of posts into a machine and asked one question. What do I keep coming back to? It read everything. Then it handed me this: “You return to a singular, unresolved tension. The friction between structured, automated efficiency and the raw, vulnerable somatic presence required for true human connection. This tension is never resolved. You hold both sides against each other, asking if the ease of the system is eroding our actual ability to show up.” Nobody talks like that. But it wasn’t wrong. It found the argument exactly. I’d never have put it that way, and it took me a minute to see that’s the whole point. I’m sitting in the same chair I sat in two years ago. Back then I was writing one of my first pieces and teaching myself AI at the same time. What came back scared me, and not because it was bad. It was competent. Clean sentences, correct structure, nothing I could point at and fix. It took me a while to find what was wrong, because what was wrong wasn’t in the writing. There was nobody in it. So I drew a line, and I’ve held it since. I’m the creator. The machine is the editor. It doesn’t get to make the thing. It gets to help me see the thing I made. Here’s what took me two years to notice. I’ve done this before. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The first time I cooked for ten years. Restaurants, institutions, a knife roll and a schedule. Then I sat down at a café table in Santa Barbara with Bill Kovacs and Larry Barels, and by the time the coffee was cold we were talking about building a computer graphics company. I knew nothing. That’s not modesty, it’s the actual condition. I had come out of a kitchen into a world with its own language, its own math, its own people who had been at it for years while I was learning to break down a chicken. Every day had the potential to hand me something I couldn’t have imagined the day before. I wanted to make computer generated images. Not as a business plan. As a personal quest, the way you want to learn a piece of music or get a sauce to break the right way. And when there was something I wanted to do and couldn’t do yet, I’d go find someone on the team and describe it, and they’d conjure a tool. Then it turned out a lot of other people wanted to make computer generated images too. The second time The last two years have felt exactly like the first two years of that. Same condition. So much to learn, so much I don’t know, and every morning carrying the possibility of another unlock. Same personal quest, except now the thing I want to make is an essay instead of an image. Same wrestling with tools I don’t fully understand, and the same refusal to hand myself over to them. The one difference is that I conjure the tool myself now. Nobody down the hall builds it for me. That part I did not see coming. And it’s turning out the same way. A lot of people want their thinking to reach somebody. They can feel the difference between writing that carries a person and writing that doesn’t. That was true about images and it’s true about sentences. Same thing. Different medium. Where it breaks The parallel is nearly perfect and then it breaks, and where it breaks is the entire subject. At Wavefront, nobody worried that the software was making the film. The tool lived in one medium and the work lived in another. A renderer computes light. It has no opinion about what the shot means. You could hand it everything and it would still hand back exactly what you asked for, no more. The tool I use now works in the same medium as the work. It makes sentences. Sentences are the thing I do. That’s why I needed a line this time and didn’t need one then. I drew it before I could have explained why. Two years later, the paragraph up top explained it for me. It came back correct. It found something in two years of my writing that I had never named, and it named it in words I would not use if you paid me. Somatic presence. Structured, automated efficiency. Nobody says that at a dinner table. But the thing it named was mine. What the worry is missing We’re all worried about this now. Slop, watermarks, detectors, a whole industry standing up to answer one question. Did a person make this. The worry is real and I share it. What I notice is that it stops at authorship, as if who typed it is the only thing at stake. It isn’t. That paragraph proves something harder. A machine can find what’s true about you and still be unable to say it like a person. It got the diagnosis right and the language wrong, and we keep collapsing those into one skill when they’re two. So which one is the writing? That’s what I’ve been circling for two years without knowing it. If a system can name what I mean before I can, and I can say it in a way it never will, then where does the line I drew actually sit? I don’t have an answer. I’m spending September on it. Can a system hold you, or does it replace you? Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. [Warm downtempo soul vocal: gravelly bass-baritone, older male, chest voice, speak-sung, close-miked, dry, no vibrato, Rhodes and programmed kick underneath, analog warmth, male vocal only] I fed a machine my words Two years of them, all of it I said now tell me what I mean It took about a second I cooked ten years before this Then I learned a whole new trade I know the sound of my own voice I have earned that much It came back perfect Not one word to fix It said the thing I meant to say And there was nobody in it Nobody in it So I made a rule that morning And I have kept it ever since I write it, the machine reads it It does not hold the pen You can build a thing that helps You can hand it too much rope There is a line in there somewhere I found mine early It came back perfect Not one word to fix It said the thing I meant to say And there was nobody in it Nobody in it Then it read me back to myself Found the thing I never named Used words I would never say And the thing it found was mine Two years arguing with myself Never knew that is what it was Took a machine to say it plain In a voice that was not mine It came back perfect Not one word to fix And it was true And it was right And there was nobody in it Nobody in it Somebody has to be in it Somebody has to be in it Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Aug 30

    The One Story

    There’s a photograph of my father on the deck of a ship. I don’t have it, only a picture of it on my phone, and I couldn’t tell you where the print went. He’s nineteen. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth, hands on his hips, deck jacket open over a sweater, looking straight down the lens like the camera owes him money. A crane behind him, a deck winch beside him, ships out on the water. He is the only thing in the frame that isn’t working. James Russell Sylvester. United States Navy, Second World War. Nineteen and colder than he wants to be. He didn’t talk about the war. What I had growing up was that he worked in the kitchen and made ice cream. For most of my life, that’s what my father did in the Navy. He made ice cream. He made it on a ship, in a war that ended before I was born. I never tasted any of it. The one he told There was one story. Before a landing craft drops its ramp, it has to hit the beach straight. Come in sideways and the next wave takes it broadside and rolls it. Turtles it, was the word at our house. So men went over the side into the surf with ropes, holding the boat square while it ran in. My father was one. I don’t know the island and never will. I couldn’t tell you whether he said eight men or two, and I’ve caught myself telling it both ways. The Navy had a name for the rope. Anti-broaching line, printed in the manual with a diagram, held by a beach party that came ashore with the third wave. On a real beach, in the first wave, the rope existed and the hands didn’t. Whatever my father was doing out there, he was improvising a fix for something the Navy had written down and not yet manned. He never put it that way. He gave me four sentences and was done. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What my brother told me At his memorial service in July of 2022, on what would have been his birthday, my brother told me our father had been the cook for the executive officer and senior staff. The wardroom. He fed the men who ran the ship. I was sixty-nine years old, standing at the end of the Santa Barbara breakwater with my family, and that was new information. I’ve spent my working life around kitchens. In the summer of 1971, at eighteen, I learned to cook in a diner in Auburn, California, flipping pinto beans in a dry pan until I could do it without spilling them, and weeks later put two eggs in two pans on Van Nuys Boulevard and landed them clean. That’s the whole reason I had the career I had. I knew my father worked in a galley. I did not know he ran the officers’ mess. Nobody told me until he was dead. I asked my brother again this week. Nothing more, and I’m fairly sure he’s forgotten he ever told me about the wardroom. So what’s left is my memory of my brother’s memory of a man who didn’t talk. The list There’s one more piece. When the ship made port, my father was handed a list and sent ashore to do the buying. The officers didn’t eat out of the ship’s stores. He walked into markets in countries he’d never seen and bought the food. For twenty years I traveled the world for the software company I helped start, and the best mornings were the ones I got up early in some city and went to the food market. I couldn’t cook on those trips, I was there to work, and I went anyway every time and couldn’t have told you why. Nobody told me about my father’s list until years after I’d left that company. I’d have liked to walk one of those markets knowing he’d done the same thing. The sentence I said something this week I’ve said for years. I don’t have veterans in my life. I care about the work and support people who do it, but I’ve never sat with one. Everything I know is secondhand. I said it four days after standing in the lobby of a TEDx in Columbiana, Ohio, with my arms around a Green Beret. That’s Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, United States Army, retired. Twenty-three years in uniform, nearly eighteen of them in Special Forces. He goes to that TEDx every year to coach veterans through their talks, and I see him there and hug him because I love the man. Doc Diego was there too. He’s a psychologist, he works with Scott, and his whole subject is what soldiers carry home and can’t put down. We talked twice, at length, and I could have gone all day. The first sentence This week I went back and reread a piece I published in February of last year. It opens like this. My best friend, Tom, just got his draft notice. Vietnam is calling, and that’s it. That’s the final push we need. July of 1971. I’d graduated from high school a month before. Tom’s notice came, we got in the car and left Los Angeles with six weeks to burn. Somewhere north, around midnight, a pickup pulled up beside us at a red light and Tom went rigid. It was his father, the one he hadn’t seen in years, in a town neither of us could have named. He motioned us to follow. We followed the taillights to a house on the edge of Auburn. Tom and his father went inside. I stayed on the porch with a borrowed blanket and the crickets. That is the last of Tom. Two thousand more words about a kid learning he could survive a hundred plates on a Friday night, and the man whose draft notice started the car is gone by paragraph two. I published that eighteen months ago and never noticed. He reported. My number came up the following February and was never called, because the draft ended that December. He went and I didn’t. Then I lost touch with him. That’s the phrase I’ve always used, and it isn’t true either. Tom married a girl we met on that trip. She outlived him, and she has been at the edges of my family ever since, close to people I love, one phone call away for thirty years. His widow never went anywhere. I did. I didn’t lose Tom’s world. I stayed right next to it. I lost Tom. He’s dead now. I don’t know when, or how, or what he brought back with him, or whether anybody ever asked him. The habit In November of 2019, Scott walked onto our TEDxSantaBarbara stage and gave a talk he called The Generosity of Scars. He opened it in character, dying, a medic working his chest. Then he stepped out of the scene and told a theater full of strangers about the afternoon he stood in his bedroom closet with a loaded pistol and no intention of coming out alive. He heard his son get home from school. That’s the only reason he walked out. Six months later he told that story to a friend from Afghanistan who was somewhere darker still, and watched the color come back into the man’s face. He’d written a play about all of it by then. Last Out, four actors, twenty-eight cities. On our stage he cut scenes out of it and set them into eighteen minutes, stepping in and out of character and back again. My wife Kymberlee helped him build it. She was his speaking coach. I was in the wings, where I’ve watched a hundred talks go out. They were on their feet before he was off the stage. I watched that from behind him. I’ve been repeating that phrase for seven years like a man who understood it. The generosity is in setting the thing down where we can see it, on purpose, knowing the price, and it only works if somebody picks it up. My father put four sentences on the table and I let them sit for fifty years. My brother filled in the rest four years ago and I still said this week that I don’t have veterans in my life. Tom’s whole war I turned into the first paragraph of a story about myself. Neither of those men was out of reach. One of them lived until 2022. I have his widow’s number. I called her this week and she hasn’t called back. She has known for thirty years what happened to Tom, and in thirty years I never once asked. My niece married a Marine. Brian stood honor guard at Arlington, folding flags into triangles for widows he’d never met. When my father died he arranged a ceremony there for a Navy man who isn’t buried in that ground. He had a flag flown in my father’s name, and he brought my brother and me each one. We didn’t scatter him. My brother has an urn and so do I. My father’s ashes are in this room and the flag is right next to them. A surgeon rebuilt my left shoulder on Tuesday, so I’ve spent this week sitting still, talking into a phone because I can’t reach a keyboard. Sitting a few feet from both of them, saying out loud that I don’t have veterans in my life. If you’re a veteran in crisis, or you’re worried about one, the Veterans Crisis Line is 988, then press 1. Here are the lyrics to Four Sentences Nineteen on the deck of a ship Cigarette in the corner of his lip He is looking at me like I owe him And I don’t know the half of him He made ice cream out on that ship In a war that ended before me I never tasted any of it And that’s the whole of what I knew Four sentences about the war And then he never said no more Four sentences on the table I let them sit there fifty years Four sentences on the table Nobody comes and clears Men went over into the surf Ropes to hold the boat from the roll Was it eight of them or was it two I have told it both ways, that’s the truth He bought the food in foreign towns Handed a list and put ashore I walked those markets twenty years And never knew he’d walked them before Four sentences on the table I let them sit there fifty years Four sentences on the table Nobody comes and clears There’s a boy on a porch in Auburn With a blanket and the crickets and the dark His best friend’s inside with his father And a draft notice folded in the car I said I don’t know any soldiers I have said it half my life His ashes are here in the room with me And a flag folded up tight Four sentences on the table I let them sit there fifty years Four sentences on the table And now there’s nobody to hear He made ice cream I never tasted I never once asked him about it He was in the room the

  7. Aug 23

    Some Change

    This edition has a companion song, “Some Change,” written from the essay. The link is at the end of the piece. Press play, then read. The plane out of Santa Barbara was twenty minutes late, which meant the connection in Denver was already tight before we landed. My hip has me on a cane these days, which earns us early boarding and costs us speed everywhere else, and the terminal was the most crowded I’d seen in years, everyone walking fast in different directions at the same time. Stopping for any reason felt like an indulgence I couldn’t afford. I stopped anyway. There was a voice, the internal kind that doesn’t explain itself, and it said stop, take the picture, you’ll figure it out. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just knew I needed it. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The wall What I was looking at was a sign, dark brown lacquer, gold letters raised enough to read in braille underneath: Courtesy Phone. Above it, a No Smoking placard. Below it, an actual phone, the kind that used to hang in every kitchen in America, cream-colored, the handset heavy in a way plastic doesn’t feel anymore, a cord that coiled down toward the floor like it had given up trying to reach anyone. Around it, an Exit sign, a fire pull box, a keypad with a strip of red tape across the top. Emergency equipment on every side. And in the middle, one plaque that wasn’t emergency anything. It said courtesy. Kymberlee was next to me. Nobody else was looking at that wall. A phone nobody was going to use, promising something nobody rushing past had time for. The confession I took the picture instead of picking up the phone, which is its own kind of confession. Whatever that phone offered, I didn’t take it. I wanted proof that it existed more than I wanted the thing itself. We made the Pittsburgh flight with nothing to spare, and the moment I sat down I started writing. I don’t always do that. I’m always watching for the moment in a week that intrigued me, that’s the job I’ve given myself, but it’s rare that one grabs me hard enough that the seatbelt sign is still on and I’m already typing. This one did, and I think it’s because of the six weeks I’d just spent building a website for a friend, a poet-philosopher who has spent forty years writing about the space between what people say and what they mean. Working inside somebody’s language for that long changes how you walk through a day. You start seeing signs, literally and otherwise. So when I saw this one, the only person I sent it to was him. His name is Noah benShea. Author of the Jacob the Baker books, the ones that ended up on Starbucks cups and hospital meal trays, translated into languages he doesn’t speak. I’d been living inside his sentences for a month and a half, and the picture went to him before I’d walked away from the wall. Do you have change He wrote back before we boarded. First he said the whole thing was a kind of prayer, that you’d have to get on your knees just to make a phone like that answer. Then, in the next breath: I love this. Do you need some change to make the call on that phone, because there’s another anomaly here. It’s some old phone. Courtesy, does anybody even know what that word means anymore. And if you had to use change, do you have change. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. He was right. Underneath the joke was the actual question, the one he’s spent a career asking without ever making it sound like a question. When was the last time you had change for anything. The free call Somewhere over the Rockies I worked out what the sign probably meant. A courtesy phone is a free call. It’s a courtesy from a day when a call cost money, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a day before everyone carried a thousand-dollar phone in their pocket. The airport was saying: here, this one’s on us. Which only deepens the anomaly. It’s not for staff, staff have radios. It’s for a traveler, a stranger, someone who needed to reach somebody and didn’t have the coin. Somebody once looked at a terminal full of strangers and decided the building itself should be kind to them, and wired a wall to prove it. The fire pull is for an emergency. The exit sign is for getting out. The keypad is for getting in. Every other thing on that wall assumes something has gone wrong or needs protecting. Courtesy assumes nothing’s wrong. It just sits there, running on faith, the kind Noah named, where you get on your knees and hope whoever’s on the other end decides to pick up. Still on the wall Nobody uses it anymore, obviously. But somebody kept the plaque up, kept the phone wired, kept the sign polished enough to catch a wandering eye at a gate nobody remembers the number of. That’s the part I keep turning over. Not the phone. The fact that it’s still on the wall, in a building otherwise engineered to keep your eyes moving forward, rush, rush, gate change, boarding group, no time to read anything that doesn’t apply to you. I’ve been writing this since the wheels left Denver and I still can’t answer the simplest version of the question. If I’d picked it up, and it worked, and someone answered, who would I have called, and what would I have said. I had a cane in one hand and a phone worth a thousand courtesy calls in the other, and no change on me at all. Listen to “Some Change” on Suno Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

    Some Change

  8. Aug 16

    Small Towns Need Big Ideas

    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.” Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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. Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

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