Through Another Lens Podcast

Mark Sylvester

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

  1. 6h ago

    Citizen Zero

    I had coffee with an 80-year-old stranger this week. His name is Roger. I’m 73. We connected on LinkedIn, discovered we both lived in Santa Barbara, and decided to meet. We started with coffee, Cortados actually, and then talked a little about our backgrounds and what we’re doing these days, the usual things you cover when you’re getting acquainted. About ten minutes in, I said something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “We all get older. Some of us choose to become elders.” That’s when the conversation changed. We went from getting acquainted to talking about values, responsibility, and what it means to have lived long enough to gain some perspective. You know how sometimes you meet someone and discover you can skip the entire escalator ride and go straight to the top? That’s what happened with Roger. We were at 50,000 feet, conversationally, without climbing through all the usual introductions. It felt like one elder recognizing another. Chris Anderson, 2003 It reminded me of something Chris Anderson told me back in 2003, when we were building the first version of TED Connect, software designed to help members of the TED community find one another. Chris said people connect on values more than anything else. That was a three-minute conversation more than 20 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. This week, I experienced it again. It also got me wondering where those values come from in the first place. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Age five Later in the week, I was talking with my friend Ger Graus, an educator whose conversations regularly send me down intellectual rabbit holes. I have this idea that my brain is a petri dish. Throughout the week, ideas drop into it. Some go nowhere and others begin to grow, and I’m always wondering which one will become my Sunday Story. Ger and I got onto the subject of children and when they begin to understand right from wrong. I asked him how early he thought our fundamental values are established. Three? Four? Five? Six? Ger said around five. That got my attention. By the time a child is five, they’ve spent years watching the people around them. They’ve seen how their parents treat one another, how adults respond to frustration, what happens when somebody tells a lie, and whether people are kind to strangers. Nobody has to announce that today’s subject is integrity. Children soak it up long before anyone gives it a name. My hypothesis is that much of the foundation of our personal value system takes shape in those early years, and we spend the rest of our lives pressure-testing it against the world. I don’t believe values are permanently fixed at five. We develop them, challenge them, and sometimes replace them. But I wonder how much of what I believe today began with something I saw before I was old enough to remember it. I certainly can’t remember being five. My father left when I was two. My mother was a nurse who worked shifts, so my brother and I grew up with caregivers. I have warm feelings about those years. I remember being cared for, though I have very few specific memories. What I don’t remember is anyone sitting me down to talk about values. I wish someone had. I’d love to ask my parents what they believed they were teaching us, which values mattered most to them, and what they hoped we’d carry forward. I can’t have those conversations now, but I can remember the people who became important teachers later in my life. The kitchens When I moved to Santa Barbara at 19, I began working in professional kitchens. Over the following years I worked at Vista del Monte, Westmont College, Cate School, and eventually with the Jesuits. I was lucky. Wherever I worked, an older chef seemed to take me under his wing. Chef George Grayson at Westmont was one of those people. He was a wonderful teacher and, in many ways, a father to me. Later I worked with Chef Veene, an old-school chef who was about 65 when I was 30. We worked together for a year before he retired. I remember both men clearly. They taught me about cooking, of course, but what stayed with me went far beyond recipes and technique. They taught me to listen, to pay attention, to respect the people around me, to work as part of a team, and to see hospitality as something much larger than serving food. Mostly they did it by example. When I eventually left cooking and helped start Wavefront Technologies, a 3D computer animation software company, I carried that hospitality ethos with me. I treated customers the way I’d treated guests in a restaurant. It was simply how I believed people should be treated. Looking back, I realize those chefs had been teaching me values all along. I just didn’t recognize the lessons by that name. Five tenets Which brings me to martial arts. Kymberlee and I are both black belts in Hapkido, a Korean martial art. I’ve always appreciated how explicitly the philosophy is taught. At our school, five tenets hung at the front of the room. Courtesy. Integrity. Perseverance. Self-Control. Indomitable Spirit. We repeated them when we stepped onto the mat and again at the end of class, every single time. That repetition felt powerful. Those five words became familiar long before I understood everything they asked of me. As the years passed, I found myself applying them well beyond the dojo, in my relationships, my work, and my hardest decisions. I think of it as living a martial life. For the first time, I had a set of values I could name without hesitation. They were written on a wall, spoken aloud in every class, and practiced on the mat. Unconscious competence There’s a concept in learning called unconscious competence: when you’ve learned something so thoroughly that you do it without thinking. Many of our values live there. We behave a certain way because that’s how we’ve always behaved, and we make decisions based on assumptions we’ve never examined. So what changes when we become conscious of our values? What changes when we can actually name them? I’ve written before about living on purpose, which to me means making deliberate choices about how we want to live rather than letting life happen to us. Our values are essential to that. The five tenets of Hapkido happen to be mine, and they’ve served me well, but there are countless ways to build a meaningful personal ethos. What matters is that you choose yours on purpose. Could you name the five values that guide your life? Would the people closest to you recognize them in your behavior? If you’re a parent, have you thought about which values you’re modeling for your children, intentionally or not? And if you’re an elder, have you considered the responsibility that comes with having lived long enough to understand what those values mean? Stairs and curtains Ger and I spent quite a bit of time on that last question, and he offered an image I loved. A mentor helps you climb the stairs. An elder opens the curtains and shows you what’s beyond them. I think about Chef George Grayson and Chef Veene when I hear that. They helped me learn my craft, and they also showed me something about how to live. Now, at 73, I find myself in conversations with younger people who aren’t looking for technical advice. Sometimes they’re looking for perspective. I don’t have all the answers, not even close. But I’ve accumulated a lifetime of experiences, mistakes, decisions, and relationships that have helped me understand why certain things matter. That’s part of an elder’s responsibility: helping people discover what matters to them. Citizen Zero One more idea came out of that conversation, and it belongs to Carla Rinaldi, the Italian educator who helped shape the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood. She died in 2025. I think of her idea as Citizen Zero. The premise is that we become citizens the moment we’re born. We have rights from the beginning, and as we grow, we take on responsibilities that fit our age and understanding. If citiz… Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

    Citizen Zero

  2. Oct 25

    An Hour a Day

    Every week I talk with my friend Jonathan Goldman. He’s an artist in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I’m in Santa Barbara. He’s used technology to make his work his whole life, and he picks up any tool that helps. This Tuesday we talked for an hour. Before we hung up I told him I’d write about it on Sunday, and I asked for a picture of the two of us. Then I told him about the six hours a week I give to conversations like this one. No agenda. We find thirty-five minutes of meat and potatoes. If I’d lived in Paris during cafe society, I would have been at the table. Probably as the waiter. He laughed. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Three shocks The iPhone arrived in 2007. By 2016, the leaders I worked with had all come up through the same school of thought. Plan the year. Run the quarter. Manage the people in the building. Then three things hit inside ten years. Mobile put the internet in every pocket. COVID sent the building home. ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 and put a tutor, a writer, and an analyst on every desk. None of the three stayed local. They reached everyone, everywhere. Gallup, the research firm that tracks workplace engagement, reports that global manager engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025. Nine points in three years. Jonathan asked whether this is partly a generational age out. Maybe it is. I’m 73, and by any count I’m one of the old guard. Where I see the split is in who spends an hour a day learning. What held Two things I learned long ago still work. At Wavefront, the 3D software company I co-founded 43 years ago, we sold in product families. Group what you offer by who needs it. Tucker Howard, who builds IdeasOut with me, writes every feature as a user story in the Agile method. As a person, I want this, so that I can do that. Both come down to one question. Who is this for, and what do they need done? That question survived the phone, the pandemic, and the chatbot. What changed is speed, and how a person learns. During COVID I cooked for seven families. Each had its own needs. I wrote seven menus, built the shopping list from them, and put an ordering app in front of the families. Product families, user stories, a working tool. I did it in weeks, with software I couldn’t have touched five years earlier. The contact sheet Jonathan is a sculptor trained at MIT. His current project, Truth Lost at Sea, is a forty-eight-foot floating sculpture. I worked with him on it. He also has tens of thousands of photographs from forty years of work. When he started using AI on that archive, he skipped the search box. He asked for a visual contact sheet, the way a photographer reads a roll of film. Each image gets a verdict. Keep, leave, or delete. The tools sort in the background while he looks. He saw how he’d use the machine before most people finish asking what it does. That’s an artist’s leap. See one I learned see one, do one, teach one in kitchens. Watch a cook break down a chicken. Break one down yourself, badly. Then show the next person. That loop works on AI too. See someone use it on a real problem. Do it on your own. Then teach it to somebody else, because teaching is where you find out what you don’t know. The struggle in the middle matters. Researchers call it desirable difficulty. Learning that costs you effort sticks. If the machine hands you every answer, nothing stays in your head. Use it to push on the problem, and keep your hands on the work. Five steps AI is generative. Ask it to do something twice and it finds two different ways to do it. The models change underneath you, so the process changes too. At Coastal Intelligence, we’ve come up with a way to approach AI and run the same five steps every time: Intent, Data, Envision, Validate, Apply. It’s called IDEVA. Intent: why does this work exist, and who is it for? Data: what do I already have that the work should draw on? Envision: what does good look like, written down so it can be scored? Validate: where does the draft break when I push on it? Apply: put it to work, then write down what made it work. IDEVA is new. It’s too soon to tell whether it holds up for anyone but us and our clients. I personally run it ten times a day, and the output has gotten steadier. When the tool changes, the process doesn’t. The hour When I think about a week, there are 168 hours. Call 50 of them your professional life. Ten percent of that is five hours, an hour a day that I can spend learning something new. When I’m building something, I spend closer to thirty percent. You don’t need that much to start. Trade one status meeting for an hour of learning. Spend it on a real problem somebody handed you this week, with a real person waiting on the answer. It’s an investment in your relevance. Five to ten percent of a work week, and the return compounds. The table Here’s what Tuesday taught me. You have to be human to learn all this. You need someone across from you who’ll laugh at the waiter line, challenge the age-out question, and say show me the contact sheet. So I keep a standing conversation outside the building. An hour with Jonathan, no agenda. Neither of us brings a deliverable. We bring what we’re working on, and we leave with something neither of us had at the start. Find your table. Show up at the same time each week. Bring a problem and an open mind. I’ll be there Tuesday. Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Find it wherever you listen, and subscribe here on Substack so the next one lands in your inbox. 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

    An Hour a Day

  3. Oct 18

    That Guy From the Backyard

    This week I did something different. I read the story out loud instead of making a song. Jesse Welles is a singer-songwriter, and a song of my own next to his story felt disrespectful. My friend and reader Mike Manchak also said the songs had run their course, and he’d love to hear me read one. So here you go. Press play, or read along right below. Kymberlee got us seats in the first row of the mezzanine at the Wiltern in Los Angeles. From up there, the view was clear, and I could see the whole room. The floor below us has no seats. A few spots for people who need them, and everyone else stands. On Tuesday, October 6, that floor was packed with young people who had come to hear one man and one guitar. It was a birthday present. We hadn’t been to a live concert in a long time. We found Jesse Welles the way most people do now, through a phone. Here’s what I keep noticing about him. Ask people if they know Jesse Welles and a lot of them say no. Show them a photo of a guy with a mop of curly hair, standing in a clearing in the Ozarks with an acoustic guitar, and they say, “Oh, I know that guy. I love that guy.” The picture arrived before the name did. The clearing indoors Then I walked into the Wiltern and saw that somebody had carried the clearing indoors. A full-size steel power-line tower stood center stage, with glowing cables draped from the rig and a field of small stars behind it. The floor was grass, scattered with daisies. The light kept changing, purple and pink, then blue with a yellow haze, then red, then green with orange. At one point he stood alone in a single pool of light, wearing a ringer tee from Norman’s Rare Guitars, a harmonica on a neck rack, a setlist taped near the stand. Later the band joined him, piano and two guitars and drums and bass. All night the crowd kept tilting its faces up toward those cables. His story is the reason the set makes sense. Welles grew up in Ozark, Arkansas, and got his first guitar from Walmart when he was about eleven. The Beatles got him going. He spent ten years as a working musician in rock bands in Nashville, released a debut album in 2018, and opened for bigger acts. None of it broke through. By late 2023, he was burned out on touring, and he put TikTok on his phone on a whim. A hospital room Then his father survived a heart attack. Welles sat in the hospital room with a Woody Guthrie biography in his lap and figured out what to do next. He started writing songs about what was happening in the world, and he filmed each one in a clearing cut for power lines near his home. Same spot, same guitar, same look straight into the camera. By late 2025, he had more than three million followers on TikTok and Instagram combined. He has been nominated for four Grammy Awards. The tower on that stage is the clearing, and the people in that room knew it. I don’t write about politics, and I’m not starting here. I’m writing about what happens in a room when one person with a guitar says out loud what a lot of people have been carrying. That experience is old, and it’s real, and it doesn’t care which side of any issue you stand on. How the songs are built What I can tell you is how the songs are built. They’re dense. Four, five, six, seven verses, biting and satirical, each line packed tight, and the crowd knew the words. He says he writes when he has an opinion about something. He also writes about turtles, because he loves turtles. In 2019, he told an interviewer that he’d been writing songs since he was twelve and had around 339 unreleased tunes sitting in notebooks and on hard drives. So the overnight success had a very long night behind it. I don’t know his process, and that’s what pulls at me. I was in a cover band in high school. We played the Beatles and songs like that, so I know how it feels to stand inside someone else’s songs. Writing them is another job entirely. Welles does it in front of a phone, then walks onto a stage like a man in his own living room. Dylan for the words. John Mayer for the hands and the ease. Nobody told me to see either of those in him. I saw it myself, from the first row of a balcony, before I’d read a word about him. The fifty years And then the fifty years folded up. When I was in high school, the Vietnam protests were on the news, and the music we listened to energized us. It told us we weren’t the only ones paying attention. Standing in that mezzanine, watching a young crowd sing every word back to a guy from Arkansas, I felt that again, the same charge, in a different century. So here’s what I’d pass along. When a song finds you on your phone, go stand in a room with it. Take someone you love. Get there early, and look up at the cables. Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story comes with an audio version you can hear on Substack and wherever you get your podcasts. Lyrics Jesse Welles, “Horses.” Read the full lyrics on Genius: https://genius.com/Jesse-welles-horses-lyrics Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Oct 4

    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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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?

  8. 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

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