I have a thing about how I spend the time I’m meant to spend with my son entertaining other calls.

So as the sun did one more dance across the sky for what was arguably a beautiful sunset, and my temperament and tone shifted to a not so beautiful moment, I knew the register had shifted.

Not the call’s register. Mine.

He was right there. The sky was doing what it does in the last twenty minutes of light, when everything goes gold, then rose, then gone. That stretch of the day has an owner in my house, and it is not me. And there I was, phone to my ear, giving it away in a voice I did not like the sound of.

I am not going to tell you what was said. That is deliberate. What was said matters far less than how fast it wanted an answer.

Here is what I will tell you. The voice arrived heavy. It came with a verdict already reached and a clock already running. There was a gravity to it that the content had not earned, and a pace that left no room for a question, only a reaction. React now. Explain now. Be afraid now.

And for a few minutes, I did. My shoulders went up. My sentences got shorter. I started assembling a defence for a case I had not yet agreed existed.

I have language for this, and I want to use it carefully. That was a low vibrational moment.

A moment. Not a person. I have no interest in sorting people into high and low, because the second you do, you have stopped observing and started judging, and judgment is its own kind of low moment. Moments are things we enter and leave. We create them and they get created around us. I have made plenty myself. I was making one right then, at the edge of a sunset, with my tone.

But a moment can be read. A moment has mechanics.

The mechanics, it turns out, live in a formula most of us met at school and promptly forgot.

P = E/t

Power equals energy divided by time.

In physics, power is not how much energy you have. It is how quickly energy moves. The same energy delivered in half the time is double the power.

Sit with what that means between people. The one who brings the alarm does not need more energy than you. They do not need a better argument, or more authority, or even to be right. They only need to shrink the t. Compress the clock and whatever energy is in the room moves faster, and it moves toward them. Urgency is the cheapest way to manufacture power. It costs the person creating it almost nothing, and it costs the person receiving it everything they were about to do with that time.

And here is what I could not unsee once I saw it. The t on that call was not mine alone. It was my son’s. The clock being compressed was one I had already promised to someone else.

This is the architecture of chaos. It is not disorder. Disorder has no beneficiary. Chaos of this kind has a floor plan: alarm at the entrance, a narrow corridor of time, and a single exit that leads to the architect. Your attention goes in. Their authority comes out.

I have watched institutions run this play for most of my career. The deadline that appears from nowhere. The crisis that needs your signature by end of day. Large economies do it to small ones with price shocks and shifting terms. Those who set the pace stay comfortable. Those who absorb it stay tired. And tired people do not author anything, which is rather the point.

Somewhere in the call, I stopped. Not dramatically. I simply stopped supplying speed. I let a silence sit. I said I would come back to it once I had thought about it, and I did not apologise for the thinking.

Nothing about the content changed. The moment did, because I had put the t back. Lengthen the clock and the power in the exchange falls. You do not have to raise your voice, win the argument, or spend anything at all. You only have to decline to be fast.

There is a second formula, and it is the more famous one.

E = mc²

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

It says that matter itself is stored energy, in quantities that are hard to hold in the mind. A very small amount of mass contains an enormous amount of energy. Nothing has to be taken from anywhere else. It is already in there.

I think of mass as substance. Your history. Your craft. Your convictions. The people who poured into you. The things you know in your body before you can explain them. And physics offers a second gift here, because mass is also inertia. The more of it something has, the harder it is to accelerate. People of substance are hard to rush, which may be exactly why so much urgency gets aimed at them.

A high vibrational moment is one where energy is transformed instead of transferred. Nobody is drained. Nobody’s clock is taken. What is already present becomes something else: an idea, a decision, a poem, a repaired evening.

I owe you one honest note about that formula. Releasing the energy held in mass is not easy. It takes the conditions of a star. Transformation is slow, deliberate work, and it needs the one thing a low vibrational moment is built to take from you. Time. Guarding your t is not selfishness. It is how the conversion happens.

I ended the call. The gold had gone to rose. There was still a little light left, and he was still there, which is a grace I do not take for granted.

You do not have to accept the transfer. You can change the moment without changing the person, and you can do it by changing nothing but the clock.

The sun will do its dance again tomorrow. I intend to be watching.

Back-to-back meetings dominated the calendar, which is, by any serious measure, a scheduling philosophy that deserves to be retired. And yet, between the agenda items and the action points, something far more interesting was quietly competing for my attention: the Akira-inspired set design of Aus Taylor’s work in the orbit of Ye’s latest creative universe, and the kind of obsessive, refresh-every-ten-minutes vigil reserved for the Artemis II updates that in what can only be described as either cosmic irony or NASA’s most ambitious PR decision to date dropped on April Fools’ Day. Make of that what you will. What matters is that Mona is not making Vanilla 29, and if you know, you know.

Then there was Andre ‘DJ Puffy’ Parris, my brother, who offered something different entirely: an episodic narrative of his own ambition, shared with the kind of candour that makes you sit up straighter. Big scene, always!

Lana ‘FitGirlLanz’ Richards, my friend from when was bound for Miami prepped and ready for her first HYROX competition. We’ll call her Champion from now on! She did her big one! And somewhere quieter, Reverend Shana Maloney, my sister, deep in preparation for her Easter Sunday sermon. Scripture as foundation, yes, but the message underneath it was something far more universal: how we approach fear. Fear of others. Fear of things. Fear of self and the fullness of what that means when you finally stop looking away from it. Arguably very different dispatches from very different corners. And yet, reading them together, they form something of an accidental thesis for the week.

Here’s the thing…

I should say upfront: I made a commitment to myself recently. To create more than I consume. It sounds like the kind of resolution that lives comfortably on a vision board and dies quietly by February. But I meant it. And so I started where most people start when they finally decide to mean something… I started writing.

This is that writing.

There are other parts though…

Made In The Future is not yet a household name. It isn’t supposed to be…at least not yet. The arts and production house currently exists in the shared planning orbit of Tamira Persaud, Jody Forte, and me. We have agreed on this: a festival rooted in creativity, science and technology, slated for November 2026. A month that carries its own symbolism for those paying attention.

The soft launch is imminent. The prep work is constant. And in the middle of that infrastructural grind, the late nights, the logistics, the outreach, the careful architecture of something that doesn’t yet have walls the three of us paused.

We just talked (as we often do) about cool things.

It sounds deceptively simple. It was anything but.

The conversation found its anchor in Aus Taylor’s work, set design that doesn’t merely nod to its references but inhabits them. Anime. The otherworldly. The kind of visual language that treats symbolism as a structural material rather than decoration. For anyone who has spent time inside the machinery of production navigating what one might generously call an unrefined system of bureaucracy encountering work like that lands differently. It doesn’t just inspire. It releases something.

It was the moment to feel seen in the midst of everything else we were juggling in our respective corners.

That is not a small thing. When you have gone all in on a vision that demands you tolerate an unforgiving process, intellectual communion becomes something closer to oxygen than leisure. The conversation became that. A reprieve. A reminder that the dynamism we carry into this work is not incidental.. it is the entire point.

The discovery happened, in part, because we were actively scouting. Combing the internet for creatives to invite to our upcoming meet and greet, our research instincts, let’s call them research instincts, were operating at full capacity this week. Which means the algorithm, on this occasion, was working in service of something worthwhile.

What emerged from the Aus Taylor rabbit hole was a broader conversation about human appetite. Not ambition in the transactional sense, but something more philosophical: the tension between the need for exploration and the need for more. One is rooted in boundless curiosity, the instinct to move toward the unknown for its own sake. The other is a refusal. A refusal to be contained by comfort, by what already exists, by the quiet gravitational pull of enough.

These are not the same thing. But in the right room, with the right people, they become fuel for the same fire.

And perhaps that is what Andre’s narrative and Shana’s sermon were quietly saying too in their own registers, their own languages. Ambition and faith, when stripped back far enough, share the same root: the decision to move toward something despite not being certain it will hold your weight.

The week ended with an added item on the to-do list, a brainstormed idea from that rabbit hole that, by any rational calculation, expands the workload. We added it anyway.

And I ended it here. Writing. Creating something instead of scrolling past someone else’s creation and calling it inspiration.

Made In The Future is a project run by people constitutionally incapable of being at ease with what’s already there. Turns out, so is this column.

Repetition, they say, is God. So the posts will get better. So will the festival. So will the system. So will everything I turn my focus toward but honestly, that’s a post for another day.

We’re not waiting for any of it. I’ll be here in the meantime creating more than I consume, somewhere between soul and strategy.

A few blocks surrounding Almaden Boulevard had been closed off for what would be just about a week.
I knew that not from a map, but from my late arrival the night before hauling a much larger-than-practical green suitcase through streets already closing in on themselves.

Green, but not neon green. Not quite on brand.

On every corner, neon green branding filled the streets.

It was clear GTC was already in motion.

Not just as an event, but as a system taking over the city.

By morning, the city had shifted.

The sun that day felt a little more brutal than normal.
Around me, the kind of hustle and bustle familiar only to those who live here.

For me? Enigmatic.

Having arrived late the night before, I should not have been awake that early.
And yet, I was far too excited to sleep.

Now, as I write this with a bit more distance from the week, somewhere between the comedown and the clarity that follows I realise it wasn’t just the scale of GTC that stayed with me, but what it meant.

Not the headlines. The undercurrents.

The signals you only really catch when you’re paying attention.

If I had to distill it, it comes down to five things that haven’t left me:

1. Experimentation is now embedded into the operating model.

What stood out most wasn’t just the volume of innovation, but how deeply experimentation is woven into the way companies now function. It’s no longer a discrete phase or department; it’s continuous, expected, and systematised. And yet, as this becomes the norm, there’s a quieter question underneath it: whether this level of constant iteration is translating into proportional economic value, or simply becoming the cost of staying relevant. The system is optimised for testing but still learning how to measure what truly matters.

2. Intelligence is being produced at industrial scale.

The shift toward AI factories makes something unmistakable: intelligence is no longer crafted, it’s manufactured. Entire infrastructures are being built to generate, refine, and deploy it continuously. There’s a sense of entering a new industrial era, one defined not by physical goods, but by cognitive output. At the same time, it raises a more philosophical tension: whether scaling intelligence inherently leads to progress, or whether it risks amplifying systems that haven’t fundamentally evolved. The capacity is undeniable. The direction is still unfolding.

3. Orchestration, not compute is becoming the real advantage.

The conversation has moved beyond access. Models, tools, even compute at a high level are increasingly available. What differentiates now is the ability to coordinate across agents, systems, teams, and institutions. The challenge is less about building capability, and more about making it work together coherently. At the same time, this introduces a new layer of complexity: governance. As autonomy increases, so does the need for control, oversight, and alignment. The systems are becoming more powerful and more difficult to manage.

4. Narrative has become part of the infrastructure.

What’s being built is not just technology, but understanding. The way companies communicate on stage, in demos, across platforms feels deliberate, structured, and tightly integrated with the product itself. But as expectations rise, so does the need to sustain belief. Breakthroughs are no longer surprising; they are anticipated. And in that environment, narrative begins to carry weight equal to performance. It’s not always clear where one ends and the other begins but both are shaping the trajectory.

5. The real question is no longer whether we can build but what we are building toward.

Across the week, there was a subtle but persistent tension in how this moment is being interpreted. For some, the answer is acceleration, build faster, scale further, move without hesitation. For others, there’s a sense that speed alone doesn’t resolve deeper structural questions about progress. Both perspectives seem to coexist. And perhaps that’s the point: the future isn’t constrained by our ability to build anymore, but by our clarity on what that building is ultimately in service of.

What the week revealed is not just how quickly we can build
but how much room there is for those willing to think, and act, at scale.

Ambition, in this context, is not excessive.
It is required.

It shows up across proprietary and open models alike
not as a choice between them, but as a “yes, and.”

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The thought of doing the thing and then telling people I was doing the thing felt… counterproductive somehow.

Isn’t that wild?

In person, I could talk your ears off about a social problem, an experiment, or the latest and weirdest idea I’m obsessed with. But the moment it becomes public....a blog, a post, a creation with my name on it I freeze. (And yes, there’s evidence. It’s still sitting a post or two back. 😅)

So, I’ve decided to reframe it, not as content creation, but as a social experiment.
And well… I love an experiment.

So here it is. Between Soul and Strategy will be a space to share:
what I’m looking forward to, what’s coming ahead, and what you can expect to see, hear, and feel from me as I navigate this wild intersection of creativity, governance, and growth.

Maybe it’s part diary, part lab note, part confession, but mostly, it’s an experiment in staying open.

Stay tuned.

This is Between Soul and Strategy.

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