But I didn’t really appreciate his show until I heard long-time contributor Starlee Kine interview Phil Collins on the Break-Up episode shortly after a tough divorce

.

Over the years, I’ve listened to this episode again and again, and each time I’m in a different place. Each time I hear something different. Creativity, heartbreak, renewal, and always… compassion.

I think this might be the most authentic and healing radio piece I’ve ever listened to, and I’ll probably be a fan of radio until I die and they hold my funeral in VR :)

If your heart is broken, try giving it to Ira and Starlee for a bit. I promise you they will make it better.

Break-Up — This American Life

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/339/break-up

Resources:

• Tiny Habits are TRULY the only way to get started. I used this science to break the chain FIRST.

• Govert Van Lankeren Matthes is truly the real deal as a yoga teacher. I looked all over the world and recommend him as the top teacher who really gets it, AND gets how to teach it.

• You need strong foundational training to do it safely, and I always recommend 90-min hot Bikram training from an intact hatha lineage like Kata Hot Yoga or people they reccomend. Afterwards, you can maintain a daily practice with Ashtanga. I use this book.

• Intermittent fasting was the answer for me, but in the industrialized world, you'll need this book for food. Tosca Reno nailed and democratized the food science and chemical reduction with the Eat Clean Diet.

I think something about the originality of the song, the way it rewrites itself each verse, the compassion, and the awe she expresses toward life sticks with me.

Regina seems to sing this gladness with a round, and stable voice. This one is for all my friends who sense the exquisite pain of the beauty and bitterness of the wheel of time.

As we face global environmental crisis, increasingly global economic and health systems, the need to reevaluate the US justice system, and politicized strife in many countries, we can all benefit from how an island nation solves its problems. What do you do when you don’t have space for a feud? What do you do when there is nowhere to run, and you don’t want to fight?

Hawaiians worked this out 5,000 years ago and we can learn from them.

Hoʻoponopono is defined in the Hawaiian Dictionary as:

(a) “To put to rights; to put in order or shape, correct, revise, adjust, amend, regulate, arrange, rectify, tidy up, make orderly or neat, administer, superintend, supervise, manage, edit, work carefully or neatly; to make ready, as canoemen preparing to catch a wave.”

(b) “Mental cleansing: family conferences in which relationships were set right (hoʻoponopono) through prayer, discussion, confession, repentance, and mutual restitution and forgiveness.”

Perhaps most telling is where the process starts. Instead of “conflict” or “dispute,” Hawaiians see the problem as “stubborn dispute,” “having difference,” or “entanglement.”

Can this mantra help us find resolution?

I find her work deeply soothing. I also want to give a shout-out to all the adult caregivers out there. Susan is someone who really gets it.

Nez Percé traditional lands covered northeastern Oregon, southeastern Washington, and central Idaho, but any perusal of history will show Chief Joseph was a great leader, facing a terrible future for his people with dignity, candor, and courage. Anyone living on these traditional lands needs to read his words, as they speak of a custodianship that must be honored.

I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians.

If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

— Chief Joseph, 1879, Washington DC

No speech from Chief Joseph as a leader can be free of grief, gravitas, and historical unfairness. But his words stand as a testament that no one’s circumstances define their bearing and ability to express themselves.

There is a reason people sang this song at this time. I think it might make more sense to people who live in Northern latitudes who understand the cyclical nature of deep winter and early spring.

I liked this article about the phenomenon. Here’s an EDM Remix of the Viral “Wellerman” TikTok Sea Shanty — And It’s Actually a Banger. There was something about the call to hope that resonated in its leadership, and the echoing response.

We ought not forget our species’ strengths when we fight to overcome its weaknesses.

@thats.mindblowing#duet with @_luke.the.voice_ #bass #xyzbca #xyzcba #stitch #foru #foryou #fyp #banger #seashanty @nthnevnss

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Two best-practices to prevent difficulty with scientific authorship include: discussing authorship early and often, and using acknowledgment statements to clarify contributions. Newer trends like co-first authorship hold promise for more flexible structures in future.

The problem with authorship

Science is experiencing a reproducibility crisis that stems from systematic bias (1).

Systematic bias in medicine comes in many forms. It may mean selectively reporting positive results, doing selective analysis, or designing research with incorrect specifications (2). It can also come in writing, publishing, and authorship. The incentive structure of biomedical research has a pervasive influence on how and what biomedical research gets published (3).

High-profile scientists such as Marcia McNutt, former Editor-in-Chief of The Journal Science, have called for system-wide authorship reform (4).

In this article, we examine authorship bias and propose two simple practices to prevent both authorship bias and authorship disputes.

Many scientists are familiar with at least one well-documented instance of authorship fraud. However, authorship fraud is just an extreme example in the more subtle issue of authorship bias, which systematically corrupts the accuracy, equity, and quality of published clinical evidence (5,6).

Typical examples of authorship bias

In a 2011 survey, authors of nearly 900 articles at six high-profile medical journals — Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, and PLoS Medicine — estimated that 8% of their published studies lacked an author. A further 18% of studies had authors who had not met the criteria for authorship (7).

• Missing authors. Valid contributors intentionally or unintentionally omitted from scientific credit. This practice is a leftover from an era when authors of disadvantaged populations — minorities, the developing world and women— were unrecognized for their various scientific achievements (5, 8,9 ). One example of this form of selective credit was popularized in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, which dramatizes female African-American mathematicians at NASA.

• Ghost authorship. The practice of omitting professional contributors from scientific credit. Ghost authorship is a growing issue in bioscience. It is related to an increase in professional medical writers and pharmaceutical-sponsored research.

• Honorary authorship. The practice of “guest,” “gift” or “legacy” authorship. This term refers to senior authors taking credit for a junior author’s work. It may also be an author included in a publication out of respect rather than legitimate scientific contribution. Credit confusion is one of the most common reasons for academic disputes, often involving a hierarchical power imbalance in medicine, academia, or other sciences.

Solutions for authorship

Scientific authorship has two simple functions: credit authors for their work, and document responsibility for its authenticity.

An accepted standard for authorship is the International Committee of Medical Journal Editor’s (ICMJE) 4 criteria:

1. “Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND

3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND

4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.”

However, ICMJE criteria are often misapplied, used as evaluation criteria at the end of a research project, instead of when they are most valuable — at the beginning.

Proper scientific authorship combines credit with accountability. This means that good authorship is intrinsically bound to research execution. A first-author is accountable for all aspects of a research project, including ethics approval, data collection, data analysis, write-up, and submission of their work.

While authorship can be renegotiated as workflow and research groups change, it should never be unclear at any point in a research project for any member of the team.

Two simple research practices can help scientists clarify authorship and prevent embarrassing complications down the road:

1) Discuss authorship early and often

Be upfront, candid, and practical about authorship in your work group.

Researchers are more comfortable with their contribution to a project when authorship is coupled with research workflow, which in turn, helps prevents academic fraud.

Attributing proper authorship is an ongoing and responsibility. It is important when a research project is first being considered and can be used as an aid for defining research tasks. It should clearly spell out who does what as new work is assigned or evaluated.

Authorship is also relevant when clinical partnerships are formed, as research personnel come and go, or as publication dates change.

A good co-authorship agreement will cover all the essential points on authorship, but an attitude toward discussing authorship openly and without rancor as a prelude to contribution is more valuable than a written agreement to clinical research collaborations.

2) Put authorship on the front page of the drafted research work

Let contributors see their formal credit when writing starts.

The historical practice of allowing the PI to assign authorship when work is submitted is outdated.

With today’s cloud-based collaborative writing projects, coauthors have access to drafted work in real-time. By placing authorship on the first page of research drafts, coauthors have the opportunity to review and clarify their contributions to a research project right off the bat and apportion their time and energy appropriately thereafter.

The first page of every research draft should have a title and an authorship list as it will appear in the final published work. It should also have an ‘acknowledgments’ section to differentiate between authors and contributors. This way, all collaborators can see their work recognized and understand how it intersects with others.

For example:

Acknowledgements: Author A and Author B conceptualized the topic. Author A and Author C contributed to research design. Author D oversaw data collection performed by Author A. Author E performed data analysis. Author A led the writing of the article and was assisted by all authors. All authors reviewed, revised and approved of the final article.

The future of authorship

The practice of scientific authorship is quickly evolving. One way to accurately acknowledge the diversification of scientific contribution in the future is by using more advanced authorship metrics.

For now, we can start by applying the metrics we do have with greater finesse. Good authorship points to a future of good science.

References:

1. J. P. A. Ioannidis, Why most published research findings are false. , e124 (2005).

2. N. S. Young, J. P. A. Ioannidis, O. Al-Ubaydli, Why current publication practices may distort science. , e201 (2008).

3. M. K. McNutt, Transparency in authors’ contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. , 2557–2560 (2018).

4. Y. A. Shen, J. M. Webster, Y. Shoda, I. Fine, Persistent underrepresentation of women’s science in high-profile journals. (2018), doi:10.1101/275362.

5. S. Cummings, P. Hoebink, Representation of Academics from Developing Countries as Authors and Editorial Board Members in Scientific Journals: Does this Matter to the Field of Development Studies? Eur. J. Dev. Res. , 369–383 (2017)

6. D. M. Bennett, D. M. Taylor, Unethical practices in authorship of scientific papers. Emerg Med (Fremantle). 15, 263–270 (2003).

7. J. S. Wislar, A. Flanagin, P. B. Fontanarosa, C. D. Deangelis, Honorary and ghost authorship in high impact biomedical journals: a cross-sectional survey. BMJ. 343, d6128 (2011).

8. D. Sarna‐Wojcicki, M. Perret, M. V. Eitzel, L. Fortmann, Where Are the Missing Coauthors? Authorship Practices in Participatory Research. Rural Sociology. 82, 713–746 (2017).

9. S. Cummings, P. Hoebink, Representation of Academics from Developing Countries as Authors and Editorial Board Members in Scientific Journals: Does this Matter to the Field of Development Studies? Eur. J. Dev. Res. 29, 369–383 (2017).

10. R. Smith, Authorship: time for a paradigm shift? BMJ. 314, 992 (1997).

11. R. Smith, Authorship is dying: long live contributorship. BMJ. 315, 696 (1997).

This article was written at the request of Research Medics, a professional research writing website, and is reprinted with permission. Originally published at Researchmedics.com on October 22, 2021.

I’m obsessed with this psychology science project run by Brian Nosek at the Open Science Collaboration. Researchers basically dropped Institutional siloing in favor of figuring out what science was good in psychology.

DM me on LinkedIn if you're into open science and want to hack biodiversity science for the planet. Instructions in the links below.

I could probably explain this more simply, but explaining it precisely helps me narrow the interest level. Feeling lazy, lots of work here!

I’m starting to appreciate how much of Savimbo’s work falls under a single word: ethics.

The endless ball of awesome chaos

This came from the big Savimbo cosmic soup. Which is three years of rapid growth — and currently 8M hectares of semi-public ecosystem protection at the equator.

As a result we’ve been pulled into so many negotiations, rights conversations, allocations of limited resources, and cross-cultural translations that the pattern is impossible to ignore. Our network now reaches about 400 Indigenous leaders, in 45 countries, across 100 Indigenous nations — friends, not members in the classical sense. It extends into Afro-descendant and tribal organizations, and into smallfarming communities.

It’s an endless ball of awesome chaos that powers the whole organization — charity arm and business arm both — from a protected space within. Or maybe it’s an interconnected web. I don’t really know.

We don’t define it much. It kind of defies logical explanation.

The nearest Gringos

Because we’re often the nearest Gringos, and because we run a “community concierge” hotline anywhere we work, a lot of cases find their way to us: human rights cases, geopolitical conflicts, territorial disputes, negotiations that are — frankly — somewhat extreme. Including the hardest ones, the emerging-technology cases, where new tools meet traditional cultures in ways that are sometimes profoundly good, sometimes profoundly harmful, and sometimes simply undetermined.

Last month, I hit my saturation limit on the decisions I could make alone. Some are bicultural. Some are steeped in uncertainty. So I reached out to close friends looking for an ethicist — a peer.

I didn’t find one.

There are medical ethics, international-development ethics, military ethics. There are Indigenous elders. There are emerging-technology and science ethics, legal ethics, animal and Nature ethics, and plain old “my-neighbor-is-a-jerk” ethics (big fan of Kwame Appiah, Jonathan Kimmelman and A Course in Miracles). But there is no clear practice discipline at the intersection of all of them — especially not when everything is moving this fast, and a single misstep can land on an entire population or ecosystem.

We need planetary ethics. I wish there were a better word for it.

What is planetary ethics

I went looking and the term exists, it turns out — but only in the academy, as a theory of what we owe the Earth. Not as a practice. Not as who you call at 2am.

Here is the definition I keep returning to: ethics is making decisions from a position of power, under uncertainty. And the ethics of inaction are another level entirely. Most people default to inaction. “I can’t help” — or “I refuse to perceive that I could help, so it’s someone else’s problem, or no one’s” — is a common response to the cases we handle. But that refusal is itself a choice. So is standing there and making the call.

That’s what Savimbo does differently, if you’ve ever wondered why. Ethics. The hard, accountable, responsible judgment call — made now, with the best intercultural wisdom we can scrabble together, at the right moment, when it actually matters. It is really not easy to be the one standing there.

I have a serious advantage in that I was explicitly trained on anthropology, ethics, and consent as a doctor. I often call on that training, which many biologists, ecologists, and business people trying to work with grassroots populations in a position of power imbalance don’t get formally trained on.

But I couldn’t do it without a serious core of Indigenous and industrial domain-specific advisors who answer my midnight calls, form pop-up panels, and help us think through this in real time. We try to make our results public. But this deserves far more attention than it’s getting.

We need planetary ethics.

Tom Hopper & Emmy Raver-Lampman are Dancing in the Moonlight in episode 6 of The Umbrella Academy. They don’t seem like professional dancers, but that makes the precision and delight of this dance even more beautiful.

I can’t get over what a perfect job they did in expressing the wonder, light, awkwardness, and joy of love.

We have a policy that continually saves our capital for action. We never "pay to play". We've been playing this global negotiating game for >3 years, and at first, I confess, we really did get suckered with the invites. I estimate we lost about $40k over the years to wealthy people inviting us to present at their events because it would be "good for us."

But the harsh and painful truth is that we were the entertainment and the beard, for groups that really are not reducing their consumption or sharing their resources. In other words, groups that do not accept the limits of growth, do not want to change, and want us to agree to that tacitly by showing up to beg for crumbs at the table.

We don't agree.

These climate "strategy" events are no different from the Met Gala or any other form of conspicuous consumerism. True, it does have a special flavor of obtuseness and hypocrisy, but it IS partying on the deck of the Titanic, and we can't afford it.

Savimbo is involved in, and truly globally symbolic of, the rapid, equitable, and efficient deployment of lifeboats.

So here's our filter: the serious players are already moving capital to the ground. They're buying credits. They find us off a targeted Google Search. They're funding the work, virtually, today. They don't host dinners, and they'd never want communities spending their own money on fine dining, international flights, and conference clothes.

We do a very high number of planet- or national-scale negotiations virtually from the jungle with Starlink. That's how it works now — if you're serious and you actually want tangible action.

So if you don't see us at a conference, that's why. We really, truly are doing something different.

It remains one of the most startling and inclusive experiences of my life.

This was perhaps the most gruffly adorable inclusion message I ever saw in my life. The ’you can play’ campaign was all the more authentic for being so direct.

The phrase came from a piece Patrick Burke wrote on Outsports after his brother Brendan Burke (who came out publicly in 2009 and was killed in a car accident in February 2010) — "If you can play, you can play." Patrick co-founded the You Can Play Project in March 2012 with Brian Kitts and Glenn Witman in tribute to Brendan.

The phrase came from a piece Patrick Burke wrote on Outsports after his brother Brendan Burke (who came out publicly in 2009 and was killed in a car accident in February 2010) — "If you can play, you can play." Patrick co-founded the You Can Play Project in March 2012 with Brian Kitts and Glenn Witman in tribute to Brendan.

I don’t know why this video still hits me so hard, but it’s just the best piece of work on meritocracy I think I’ve ever seen. Still use this mantra in our work to this day.

“Werfel, a 6-year old Austrian orphan, beams with unbounded joy as he clasps a new pair of shoes presented to him by the American Red Cross.” — LIFE magazine, original caption December 30, 1946

Something about this image is so strikingly lovely. I think it’s been overused a lot as a guilt-bludgeon (starving orphans in [insert-country here]).

But for me, the image holds this transcendent gratitude. It’s something needed… and found. This child is so honest in how he savors that moment.

Does the need or its method of resolution really matter? This embrace, and its loveliness, is something we all have access to the next time we find our car keys.

Christmas topics often revolve around injustice and lack, but they could just as easily be about finding what we have when it arrives.

Shout out to his recent work as well on Kidding, which is a more adult version of the same deconstructions.

It sometimes reminds me of the involuntary nature of a dog’s tail wag. The way his feet escape him.

It seems to me that sometimes people who struggle with depression understand happiness more fully than others.

It’s a digital ninja playbook for those of us who don’t think might makes right. And yes, I do follow Ninja Tips for Healthy Living. Consider this article a hard-earned #11.

It’s written by me, for me, in solidarity for the times I’ve been specifically stolen from by corporations. Corporations that bullied me and exhausted my appeals and took things I needed that I’d worked really hard to earn.

This article is about defending ourselves as consumers against automated theft by corporations. And how to let the emotions of frustration and helplessness go afterwards.

The exact play

I have been on the receiving end of this exact play three times.

2002, Best Buy. I had saved for over a year to buy a $3,000 laptop. I worked hard for that money as a wildland firefighter (hotshot) in the LA foothills. When the laptop developed a hardware issue, a button was sticking, I sent it back to Best Buy for warranty repair. The box came back to me a few weeks later. I opened it. Inside was my precious computer in pieces, covered in sticky soda pop that had spilled across the keyboard. The laptop was dead. A technician in their service center had, obviously, been drinking a soda while working on it, knocked the can over onto the open machine, and — knowing exactly what they had done — closed it back into the shipping box and sent it to me anyway. No one at Best Buy would acknowledge it. The story was unprovable from where I was standing. A tech somewhere had done the math and concluded: who’s she going to tell, and who would believe her? They were right. I spent months in tears at their customer service desk. Then ate the $3,000.

2021, Airbnb. I ran my ass off during COVID, up every 2 hours for years, handling test results in two countries with 300 employees. When the vaccine came out, I scheduled a company retreat with our savings, which turned into a nightmare. We cancelled the $8,258 booking in Bali within the refund window because Indonesia’s borders had been closed to Americans the whole time. The host had lied to us in the booking: “There are no such regulations that Americans cannot enter Indonesia.” This was false and documented, but Airbnb simply took the money and refused to refund. The chargeback I filed was initially awarded, then reversed by my bank. Airbnb was deploying its legal team to dispute all refunds. By September, Airbnb told us we had to bring it to court to get the refund we were owed. Our company ate the $8,000, and my staff never got a well-earned vacation.

2026, Expedia. I booked a flight to Brazil with Expedia. They cancelled the flight and simply removed it from the interface. I had to buy a $1,000 emergency flight at the airport to get home so I didn’t miss an important business meeting. Eight chatbot agents over five weeks. Cases merged silently. Refund promised, then denied. Finally, in writing: “Please use Copa Airlines’ website to request a refund.” The merchant of record disclaiming refund duty to the supplier, then Copa ran the same play on my team.
Different decade, different platform, different continent. Same playbook, winning with brute mega-indifference against a weaker opponent.

But this time it’s an automated playbook.

The dark refund pattern

I call this the dark refund pattern. It’s a corporate play against a consumer, executed at scale. We’ve all experienced it. And in health insurance, it kills people, most recently Brian Thompson.

1. Gaslight on the underlying facts.

2. Refuse to apply the published policy.

3. Lose paperwork, merge cases silently, deny employee actions, break continuity.

4. Tell external regulators (BBB, DOT, AG) you’ll resolve it directly. Don’t.

5. Win chargeback representations using merchant-controlled documentation or specialized legal teams.

6. Close communication. Direct the customer to your registered agent for service of process.

What’s new in the last two decades isn’t the unwillingness to make customers whole. Companies have always preferred to keep your money. What’s new is the cost structure.

How dark refunds change in an AI era

When customer service was human, denying a claim cost the company something — a rep’s time, the cognitive load of saying no to a person who could become a bigger problem. Customers won by being annoying enough to be more expensive than the refund. The negotiation was real because both sides paid.

Automation, and the institutionalization of plausible deniability, changed the cost asymmetry. The platform’s cost of denial dropped to approximately zero. A chatbot loop costs nothing to run. A silent case merge takes a database write. A registered-agent redirect is a templated reply. “I can’t prove our tech did it” is free to say at corporate scale. Meanwhile, your cost of pursuit stayed human — your hours, your attention, your sanity, your willingness to relive the same story across eight escalation agents who can’t see what the previous seven said.

They are not breaking the rules. They are pricing the rules out of your reach.

How to beat AI-generated dark refunds

Here is what I have learned, having just run every move on the list inside a single weekend:

1. Get everything in writing immediately. Chat transcripts are designed to be merged, lost, and disclaimed. The moment a phone call or chat gives you anything useful, send an email summarizing it back to the company. Their email reply (or non-reply) becomes evidence. Screenshot every chat before closing the window.

2. Stop fighting the company. Start documenting for regulators. After two or three good-faith attempts, you have already lost the customer-service war. Continuing to argue with chatbots is feeding the asymmetry. The remaining value of your case is as evidence for a third party. Pivot accordingly.

3. File the chargeback under the right reason code. Not “services not rendered” — that loses to representment because the company can produce a policy document. File under “not as described” (Visa 13.3) or “misrepresentation” (Visa 13.5) if there was a material misstatement in the listing or the dispute process. This single tactical choice is often the difference between winning and losing.

4. Use the regulator that matches the company. Airlines and ticket consolidators → DOT (airconsumer.dot.gov). Any California-headquartered business → CA AG (oag.ca.gov/report). Anyone → BBB as a supplement, not a primary. State Attorney Generals complaints have no statute of limitations on filing, and they aggregate. Your single complaint contributes to a pattern the AG may already be tracking.

5. Frame the regulator filing as pattern documentation, not a personal grievance. “Please help me get my $944 back” is triaged as a low-priority individual complaint. “I am documenting a structured dispute-suppression pattern that may be relevant to your office’s ongoing oversight” is read. Lead with the structural claim, name the legal hooks (in California: Business & Professions Code §17200, §17500), and explicitly subordinate your personal loss.

6. Send a formal notice with a deadline before going public. A clear, professional email stating the facts, the reason codes, the regulators you have filed with, the consequential damages you are reserving, and a response window — usually 10 business days — does three things. It creates a documented final attempt at resolution. It triggers internal escalation processes that don’t exist in chat. And it gives you clean grounds to go public if they don’t respond.

7. Hold public posting as a ripcord, not a first move. A well-documented thread on X or a Substack post with screenshots is one of the few moves that still costs the company something at corporate scale. It also costs you something — attention, comment-section engagement, retaliation risk. Save it for after the deadline expires.

8. Recognize when to convert and stop. Not every loss can be recovered. The 2002 Best Buy file cannot. Some files are tuition payments toward learning the playbook. The point of doing the work above is not always to win — it is to make your file part of a record that eventually forces the math to change.

Once your file is filed, you are done. Let it go.

What this taught me

I consider this a modern analog of what Camus describes in The Stranger. Children with a rifle, kill a man on a beach — because people at a long distance look like dots.

And they aren’t.

They are people.

Globalization has taught us we don’t matter, and the truth is, we really DO matter. The single best business book I ever read was A Course in Miracles. To really get this right, and stop just trading victim-perpetrator-rescuer blows, we have to really get it right.

What did Stephen Covey say? “To be, and not to seem...”

Now I work in conservation finance, building infrastructure that contracts with Indigenous and local communities directly, without intermediaries. It is sometimes dismissed as utopian. What I have learned, three platforms deep, is that there is nothing utopian about it. Every layer you remove between two parties is a layer that cannot be used to extract from them. If you cannot insert a chatbot or a deniable employee in the middle, you cannot run the dark refund pattern on people.

Our companies have always run a concierge customer service hotline. As a founder, I have learned not to treat my clients like this. We run a human service. That means we don’t always follow through as well as a machine-enabled customer service line does, but we take our clients seriously and have always run businesses that treat them like people, not numbers.

The real defense

The real defense is doing something different

If you have a five-year-old refund file you never closed — or a soda-stained laptop you ate the cost of — you were not stupid, and you were not lazy. You correctly identified that the cost of continuing exceeded the expected return.

You might not get satisfaction from the people who wronged you. But strangely, you can definitely let the pattern stop with you.

And that in and of itself is satisfying.

Many people know I’m a climber and have been for many years. I don’t recommend free-soloing, but I do recommend this movie, and I’m okay with that discrepancy.

I think a lot of people have gotten caught up in the execution of this feat, but what I find truly beautiful is that it is an expression for something else, something beyond fear that Alex seems to have found.

I always think of this poem as a series of life tasks. Can base inclinations be transmuted to higher-order actions? What kind of energy does that take? Can it

become a habit?

This poem is gendered, English, many -isms — but think of when you have seen the crucible activities in it enacted in your own life and in the people you have known closely.

Like the classic series of yoga poses ritualized in Bikram yoga, or the barre techniques that comprise the core of ballet, perhaps there is a core of universal human strengths that can be developed to enhance the expression of our individual lives.

Read and enjoy.

Bear with me here, it’s worth appreciating.

Charles (Kazimierz) Dabrowski is often referred to as one of the founding fathers of positive psychology. In short, he researched giftedness before anyone cared. But he did so in an unusual context. A Polish citizen, he survived WW1 and WW2 as a psychiatrist in charge of a sanitarium.

A gifted scientist, he used his scientific credentials to support some 200 gifted students under his care at a “secret institute” disguised as an Institute for Tuberculosis. From 1942 to 1945 the institute sheltered and saved many war orphans, priests, Polish soldiers, members of the resistance, and Jewish children. Dabrowski was one of 38/400 polish psychiatrists to survive the war and this exposure shaped his theories. As he stated: “The juxtaposition of inhuman forces and inhuman humans with those who were sensitive, capable of sacrifice, courageous, gave a vivid panorama of a scale of values from the lowest to the highest.”

Dabrowski argued that neurodiversity held value to humanity, that falling apart was not always falling down, and he did so in and out of Stalinist and Nazi prisons.

The theory of positive disintegration is simple: some breakdowns are breakthroughs. Dabrowski believed that humans evolved by falling apart. Like the mythical phoenix. Read the theory, and appreciate the life that created it.

It’s truly beautiful.

But more deeply, beauty and the emotions it evokes can be seen as many colors with different intensity and hue, covering the gamut of human experience. The experience of shared beauty comes from all aspects of consciousness — history, art, literature, music, science, from many voices and from all cultures.

Please let this song soften you into the experience I am hoping to share with you. Many voices, joined in one purpose.

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