PINECONES Ӝ SATELLITES (vol. 1)
The Blessings of COVID-19 — Conspiracy of Interests — Steel Lions v. Glass Lambs — Happier or Smarter — The Quiet Grace of Nothing Terrible Today
Introducing PINECONES Ӝ SATELLITES
PINECONES Ӝ SATELLITES is something new I'm trying on BEEW, an experiment in sharing my idea stream as essays-in-miniature.
The predicament: as I move through the world—watching, listening, talking, reading, remembering—I’m flooded by a firehose of ideas. A sentence in a book that stops me cold. A story that won’t unclamp from my brain. Something I noticed last week demanding a hearing this week. A stranger’s throwaway remark in a coffee shop. A memory from twenty years ago colliding with something I just saw on the street.
The challenge: I simply don’t have the time to give every idea the hours and care it deserves. But many refuse to be ignored. The most alive, urgent, funny, haunting, soulful, or personal ones lean in heavily and demand their turn.
The response: PINECONES Ӝ SATELLITES. An outlet for ideas too restless to wait—a live channel for getting them out into the world, in real time. Some will stand alone as miniatures. Others will take root and grow. Still others will spark conversation that pulls them somewhere new.
Volume 1
i.
The Blessings of COVID-19
For all the damage and carnage from the pandemic—and there was plenty—it also left behind a few unplanned gifts. We closed schools and shut down college campuses. We locked kids indoors, cut them off from classrooms, friends, and coaches, from games and dances and rites of passage. Two whole generations of young people lost something they will never get back. Many are already paying dearly. We all are.
Amid the wreckage were pockets of sublime, unexpected beauty. I saw it in my daughter's circle of friends, a group marooned together when their campus shut down and the bars and Greek life went dark. Days at noisy football games and nights at sweaty parties turned into dinners at a shared table, long walks, and hours of talking until dawn. From isolation emerged a rare kind of belonging. What began as a stopgap became a family. A deep, dense, forever bonded, tight-knit circle of comfort, loyalty, and love.
It wasn't the loose ties most of us remember from college, the fleeting bonds that dissolve when people scatter, marry, move on. This was something different. Something stronger. Less like vines curling for a season, more like roots pushing deep, unseen but permanent. Like iron hammered in fire. An experiment in closeness and intimacy none of them will ever forget.
My hunch is that it wasn't just them. I suspect pockets like this bloomed all across the country. Young people who went into lockdown as clusters of friends and emerged as families, held together by something no party, no semester, no four-year arc could have ever forged.
In the middle of so much loss, this was the quiet gift that continues to give—that in being driven apart, whole circles of young people found themselves bound closer together than they ever dreamed.
ii.
Conspiracy of Interests
Scott Horton—libertarian radio host and antiwar.com editor—calls it the "conspiracy of interests." Not a smoky room of villains plotting world domination at old oak tables, but something quieter, more insidious. The way poor incentives and self-interest line up, one rung of the ladder at a time, to make sure nothing ever really changes.
Daniel Ellsberg—the American political analyst, RAND researcher, and principal author of the Pentagon Papers—once described his early years working under Robert McNamara's team at the Pentagon. His job, he said, was less about finding truth than about making his boss look good. Even when the policy was failing, you stayed quiet. The plan was to keep your head down, get promoted, and someday you'll be in a position to fix things. But by the time you arrive, you've built your whole career on silence.
I saw the same logic up close as a college kid in then-Congressman Bill Nelson's office. He backed a piece of legislation that didn't serve the country but played well in his district. I asked him why. His answer was simple: "You have to get reelected before you can pass any laws. And to get reelected, you have to give your voters what they want."
And this didn't just happen in the past. Look at how climate policy is handled today. Everyone in Washington admits the costs of delay will be catastrophic, but the short-term incentives—donor money, quarterly profits, election cycles—always outweigh the long-term. Another rung on the ladder. Another year lost.
The game is incumbency. If that's all anyone is really playing for, no wonder nothing gets done. It made little sense to me then; it makes even less sense to me now. Maybe the real conspiracy behind America's slow fade isn't masterminds pulling strings, but ordinary ambition, multiplied by millions, aligning in ways that guarantee dysfunction.
iii.
Steel Lions v. Glass Lambs
Every era has its race. The Space Race was about technology supremacy and bragging rights. The Cold War was about land and nukes. Now it's the AI Arms Race—U.S. vs. China, or so the headlines frame it.
This got me thinking. The real contest here—the thing we should all be watching much more closely—isn't technological; it's human.
In China, the CCP treats its youth like a long-term project. Screen time for minors is rationed. Video game play is limited to a few hours a week. Social media is heavily policed for addictive content. Schools drill math and science relentlessly. Physical fitness is mandatory. National pride, sacrifice, and endurance are woven into the curriculum. It's authoritarian, yes—no one should mistake it for freedom—but it reveals a recognition that tomorrow's strength depends on today's youth.
In the U.S., we've chosen a very different path. Our economy is built to monetize distraction. Our kids grow up on infinite scroll and engineered outrage. Anger and frustration at ten, porn at eleven, gambling at thirteen. Public schools cut physical education while childhood obesity spikes. We hand out devices like candy, normalize addiction, and medicate attention with pharmaceuticals. We glorify "freedom," but the freedom we're offering is the freedom to be consumed.
The result is that China is deliberately, if harshly, conditioning its youth to focus, endure, and defer gratification. We are conditioning ours to fracture, crave, and collapse. They are building steel lions. We are raising glass lambs.
So when people talk about "winning the AI arms race" as if it all comes down to faster chips and bigger models, I can't help but wonder: really, with what army? You can own the fastest GPUs on earth, but if the next generation comes up thin-skinned, dopamine-jacked, and attention-fractured, how do you win anything that truly matters?
The Cold War ended with "our side" on top, but losing one round doesn't mean you stop racing. Russia regrouped. China lost a century to Mao's Cultural Revolution, and they've been sprinting ever since to make up for it. They treat human weakness as a liability to be stamped out. We treat human weakness as a business opportunity.
This naturally raises questions about the real contest: when it comes, which future are we really training for—steel lions or glass lambs?
iv.
Would You Rather Be Happier or Smarter?
On a recent episode of Josh Szeps's Uncomfortable Conversations, he asked Tyler Cowen a deceptively simple question: would you rather be happier, or smarter?
Cowen hesitated, then said he'd rather "know things, even if it made him sad." Szeps pushed back and he was right to. Was Cowan mixing up sadness with depression? Sadness points to something very real that says you cared, you lost, you loved. Depression, however, is something else entirely.
I know. I've been inside the belly of that beast. That ruthlessly, sickeningly horrific crucible. And, I can tell you that depression isn't mere sorrow or sadness. Depression is the erasure of all texture. It is the flattening out of life so intense that you can't even feel sad in a way that makes sense. Depression is unendurable in a way "sadness" never is.
Listening in, I realized that Szeps and Cowan weren’t just circling happiness and intelligence. They were circling language itself. What do we really mean when we say “happy”? Or “smart”? And what about “intelligence”? Is it knowing? Understanding? Wisdom? As their words kept slipping, the whole exchange began to blur.
It struck me that maybe “Would you rather be happier or smarter?” wasn’t the right question after all. The better, sharper, more dangerous versions, I think, would be: “Would you rather know more, or love more?” “Would you rather see more clearly, or feel more deeply?”
v.
The Quiet Grace of Nothing Terrible Happening Today
A little later in that same interview, Szeps asked Cowan a harder question: "If your teenage self could see your life now, would you take it as-is or roll the dice for another shot?
Cowan didn't talk about his books or his career. He talked about luck. He said he'd take his life again, because he'd been spared the worst: no devastating accidents, no catastrophic injuries, no terminal illnesses. In other words, his happiness was defined less by what he gained than by what never struck.
And I can't stop thinking about that. Maybe the real measure of a life isn't how much joy we collect, but how much disaster passes us by en route to ruining someone else's life. Maybe what we call "happiness" is just the simple grace of nothing terrible happening today.