Life Beyond Platforms

There’s a lot being said these days about *the social platforms* and the way they’re just not what they used to be.

Social media has played a very big role in allowing me to do what I do- tell stories, promote causes and solutions, and engage my curiosity. But there’s no denying that sharing ideas and stories via the usual sites has gotten a lot less fun and rewarding in recent months.

This has made me start asking… how do I keep doing what I love doing in a world where social media vanishes? I’ve encouraged a number of teams and makers to think along those lines too. Even if that doesn’t happen… the thought experiment is a good creative exercise.

Here’s what I’m doing:

📲 My newsletter. Switching to Substack for 2023. Email’s advantage over social is that it delivers everything so the good stuff doesn’t get buried. I miss the blog era circa 2010 and developing my own consciousness through writing. I’m optimistic about seeing some of those sparks again.

📽️ I’m going on Year Three of making YouTube videos and I love the stories I’ve been able to tell so far. This is one spot where I still have a lot of fun making stuff.

It’s not so easy anymore to do the simple task of sharing stuff you care about with people you care about. With people who’ll care. If you’ve read this far, I think that’s you. If you dig the stuff I make, or just me as a person doing stuff, please subscribe! I’ve put the links in my bio.

The Most Direct Trade

My favorite coffee that I have at home is from Angel in Guatemala.

I bought it from Angel directly. I handed him the cash, he handed over the bag. We were in his house. His face is the literal label of the bag. No middlemen were involved. This is as direct trade as you can get, so Angel gets 100% of the sale.

That’s important. Much of what Angel earns from his coffee farm enables him to seek physical therapy for his six year old daughter who is developing her ability to walk after being born 17 weeks premature.

It’s good coffee. Really good. But the story behind it is what makes it my favorite.

Coffee by Angel

Angel was showing me around his coffee farm in Guatemala, talking about how everything needed to be in balance- from the shade to the soil- in order to grow coffee beans just right.

It occurred to me that I was basically doing what I would do for work… exploring a farm, interviewing a farmer, learning about agriculture and sustainability… except I was in the middle of a two week vacation. And it was my birthday.

I guess I’m doing something right if the thing I do for a living is something I would also do for fun, on vacation, on my birthday.

Angel

This encounter captures everything I love about travel, storytelling, and connecting with people.

I wanted to tour some coffee farms in Guatemala, with it being such a coffee haven and all. I wound up on the volcanic hillside of San Miguel Escobar with Angel, a sixth generation coffee grower who’d been drinking the stuff since he was ten. (I’m Guatemalan, he joked with me. What height do I have to worry about?)

I learned a bit about coffee growing in Guatemala, a country whose farming population has endured decades of exploitative practices. But I learned even more about Angel.

He was my same age. And he was a twin dad. Sadly, his twins came early- at 23 weeks gestation. His son didn’t make it. To pay for his daughter’s treatment, he had to take a job working in a restaurant to be eligible for the social benefits.

Today, he sells his coffee to shops in the US, Canada, and Europe, and this helps him afford physical therapy for his daughter.

Juniper Turns One

Juniper Sweet.

Happy birthday, my girl.

💥🌳🍄

Juniper keeps me laughing. All our kids do, but I’m pretty sure Juniper knows what she’s doing when she’s being a total chaos muppet.

Hanging with J-Sweet means a lot of dancing while holding hands, hanging on tight while she tries to thrash around, and making thizz faces at each other.

Juniper showed us her deep curiosity almost right away, and that very quickly evolved into being a really outgoing free spirit. From instantaneously bonding with her ‘gal gang’ in Guatemala to wooing whoever sits around us in church… I know she’s going to be the kind of person who makes a really big impact on people, with both humor and depth.

Kai Turns One

Kai. Dot. Guy.

Happy birthday, dude. My rally cat!

💮🎏🐈

Whoever thought Deanna and I would have such a large baby? Kai fills out that frame with the sweetest vibes all the way down.

Over the past year, Kai has discovered his love for shredded cheese, greeting people with a huge smile, and pushing unreasonably large objects around the house like he’s in a Norwegian strongman competition. The Phillies hit at least a hundred points higher slugging when he’s being held during their at-bats, making him the official rally cat of the house.

In a house of perpetual chaos, Kai mostly keeps everyone anchored with his perpetually chill vibes. It’s definitely a trait I can see growing with him… loosening everybody up during overwhelming times with his strong, gentle spirit.

Eagle River Trail

This was easily the best smelling place I’ve ever been.

Pretty much everywhere in Alaska smells like a Christmas tree farm, but that seemed especially true on our hike around the Chugach State Park. The trees keep everything fresh, so much so that it felt like every breath I take should count double.

The Eagle River Trail has to be the most beautiful hike I’ve done this year.

If you’re the kind of person who finds comfort in the humbling awareness of being one small person in a much bigger world with endless things to explore, learn, and question… this is the sort of place that feels just right.

What's Good for Nature is Good for Culture

What’s good for nature is good for culture.

And vice versa.

In Burundi, I was greeted by multiple Ingoma performances… dances set to the thundering royal drumbeats that carried throughout a hillside.

Then my friends showed me the tree the drums were made from. Cordia Africana. AKA Sudanese Teakwood. An endangered tree, whose wood is irreplaceable when it comes to getting the thundering sound just right.

In Alaska, I became intrigued and invested in native languages that were down to a few dozen speakers.

I found a map that showed the correlation between places where languages were going extinct and places where wildlife was going extinct.

And it all became clear.

Countless cultural traditions are at risk as habitats are threatened. But efforts to protect nature can help preserve culture. And promoting the agency of indigenous groups also has benefits to nature.

What’s good for nature is good for culture.

Alaska

Alaska was a whole nother level of beautiful.

I always feel so much more alive whenever I have mountains and forests in my line of sight. Do you get that? I don’t know how else to describe it, but there’s just a different feeling around mountain ranges that takes over and I was definitely feeling that up north. Even more so, knowing that the forests and mountain ranges I saw would just keep going on and on, up until the northern edge of the world.

Getting to sink my hands into the earth and seeing the deep black arctic soil reminded me so much of the richness of Iceland’s beauty, and I think I just have a thing for the far north and Arctic ecosystems. That said, I also like the far south… so maybe I’m just a fan of extremes.

Ethical Storytelling is Complex

Ethical storytelling is one of the biggest things I’m passionate about. Storytelling is powerful and can shape the way we see the world, but without a conscious approach, it’s a little too easy to create unintended harm.

Being on an actual storytelling trip always highlights the way it’s complicated. You want to portray what you’re seeing with honesty, but not in a way that perpetuates harmful stereotypes and tropes.

I think one of the most important things to remember is that the process of learning is never over. You always want to be open to the likelihood that you can do things better, that there are things you’ll want to course-correct. Perhaps the easiest way to cause harm when storytelling is to think that you’ve reached a point of immunity.

But when you truly listen to the people who share their stories with you with the intent of having them spread to the world, both the stories they tell and their feedback about your handling of the stories, you stay open to that necessary, constant improvement.

Byron Glacier

A visit to Alaska just wouldn’t have been complete for me without some proper time spent at a glacier. Byron Glacier was apparently really close to us, so we made the trek out and it was beautiful.

Being at the foot of a large glacier that grew as it ascended up a slope meant being at the part of it that gets interrupted by a river created from its own melt further ahead. I watched the steadily flowing water. The sound of the water flow created it’s own symphony, playing a little rough with the chipped rock floor below. This runoff would feed so many things on its outbound journey.

The interruption created a few hollowed out spaces in the ice. Caves. They didn’t look like the most stable formations so I kept my time there short and shallow, but it was still mesmerizing to have walls of glowing blue ice rise up around you.

Maps that Tell Stories, vol. 1

Maps, maps, maps. I will always love maps. I love that we have one Earth, and infinite ways of depicting it.

I’ve started collecting some of the maps that catch my curiosity along the way. From ethnolinguisitc maps, to ecological maps, to culinary cartography…

These are good reminders that what goes in the center of a map and what gets stretched is completely arbitrary… and that Brazil is just massive.

Europe in Your 30s

How does exploring a European city differ in my 30s from my 20s?

Lots of ways, but there’s way less pressure to see all the “big sites.” There’s a clearer sense of what will always be there, and what would actually make the visit more meaningful to you.

There’s still that sense of wonder that comes with being in a place of worship or grandeur that withstands centuries, but you can also find wonder in a sweet garden tavern or city park.

I also pay way more attention to things like city infrastructure, public transit, and livability.

There’s a lot you *don’t* see when you rush your way through a city. The groceries, the errands, the simple walks… those teach you things about another place guidebooks just don’t capture.

Hamilton/Wakanda Forever

Two babies and a toddler don’t let me go out and see movies very often, so I’m totally spoiled this week where I get to see both Wakanda Forever in a theatre AND Hamilton on tour in back-to-back nights.

This was my first time seeing a proper live Hamilton production, though I’ve seen a few iterations of it, including a high school skirting around licensing limitations by making a play about a school performing Hamilton… and sprinkling in a few Rent songs. It’s a deep enough story that each time different characters and moments stand out. This cast had a real good Angelica, and Dear Theodosia + Nonstop hit different this time around. That tension between being satisfied with life with those you love and wanting to change the world for them like you’re running out of time is real for me.

As for Wakanda Forever… seemed like the impossible sequel to write but never should’ve doubted Ryan Coogler. All the Mesoamerican inspirations and broad inclusions of the diaspora… feels like they’re making superhero flicks for international history nerds like me now.

Vienna Public Housing

There are a lot of things that make Vienna the world’s most livable city, from great infrastructure to good access to greens pace to a strong sense of peace and stability. BUT there’s one thing that sets it apart from other cities that also offer those things.

For over a century, Vienna has implemented a public housing system without rival.

Rather than building public housing as a last resort when homelessness becomes an inescapable and visible problem, they take proactive measures. They build public houses that are so attractive, desirable, and close to important access points that around 2/3rds of the city chooses to live there. Most people only pay around 15% of their income to live there.

Taking the burden of housing away has a lot of extended benefits. Employers don’t have to struggle to keep pace with a surging cost of living. People are less financially viable.

Musk Ox Farm

The musk ox is one of the oldest mammal species, having survived the Ice Age some 150,000 years ago.

In the 1800s and 1900s, these animals were overhunted and nearly driven to extinction.

Reintroduction and regulation helped the Alaskan musk ox population recover.

As large herbivores, musk ox primarily feast on young dwarf birch and gray willow.

This diet constrains the population of those trees, which are found in abundance around the Arctic. Curbing their population allows less common plant life to establish itself without the shade and competition.

Oh, and their growls sound absolutely prehistoric. It’s amazing.

State 50

To me, it made perfect sense to have The Last Frontier State by MY last frontier.

Going to all fifty states before turning thirty was something I always hoped to do. I made it to 49, but some years, there’s a pandemic, and other years you get pregnant, and soon that before thirty list has a few adjustments in pen to make it a before 33 list.

This summer, I finally got to go to my 50th state, which was Alaska- a state I somewhat deliberately saved for the very end because it seemed like the coolest note to end on. I was right. I’d love to go back, knowing how much more there remains to see and do.

I feel super lucky. To have seen so much of this big, complicated country. To have friends who want to share the adventure and celebrate this with me. To have kids just at the start of their own adventures.

My 50th State

My 50th state. What a milestone.

If it wasn’t completely obvious already, I’m a geography lover.

I spent a large amount of time in childhood bedroom with maps and kid-atlases, learning random facts about state flowers and longest rivers and things.

Whenever I visit a city, state, or country I haven’t been to before, I kind of feel like a kid at Disneyland meeting one of the characters in real life. “It’s you! I’ve heard so much about you…”

For a few years now, Alaska has stuck out as the only state I hadn’t been to yet. Getting to see all of them was a bucket-list level item, and as I try to do at least one of those every year, I got my chance this summer

I’m lucky to have seen so much of our big, wild, multifaceted, complicated country. Thank God for road trips and conferences, a few big moves, living out of a van in my 20s, and the upside of having friends that have spread their roots all over the place.

Now what? Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing more of Alaska. I’d love to check out the spots that are so far north things start to get a little weird.

32 in Guatemala

I’ve gotten to celebrate birthdays in Egypt, Argentina, and now… Guatemala.

I think the Guatemala celebration might’ve been my favorite one.

Taking a coffee tour in the morning, learning about farms and volcanic ecology, plus getting to spend the evening with my kids… I can’t really think of much else I would want to do with a day in the life.

You know you have it good when the activities you choose for your birthday resemble what you do for work and what you would typically do on any given weekend night.

Vienna Public Transit

Some people will visit a new city wanting to know all about its nightlife or art scene. You should talk to me about its public transit system.

Of all the places I’ve been, Vienna just might have the best one, getting all its different systems to work together, connecting you to pretty much anywhere in the city very easily.

And the best part? Riding costs about $1 for each day if you get a year pass.

One of the very best investments a city can make is making it easier for people to get where they need to go without being so car dependent.