💋 Pinecones & Satellites: Of Firelight & Friendship (vol. 1)

27 Aug, 2025

i.
COVID's Quiet Blessing
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.
The Presents of Presence
It didn't hit me until days later what felt different.

I'd just spent the weekend with my daughter and her friends, a beautifully tight-knit circle. The girls moved in an easy rhythm, their laughter carrying across the pool. The flawless weather made everything feel effortless. The days drifted by in swims, workouts, long drives, surprise visits. Nights meant grilling, unhurried dinners, movies.

The best part for me was the steady stream of conversation—their recent trip to Sicily, thoughts on the AI 2027 report, updates on friends and family who'd lost homes in the Los Angeles fires, Hulu's new Amanda Knox drama, old fascinations with Helter Skelter and the Manson girls, and the eerily parallel deaths of Princess Di and JFK Jr. This is what I love most about their bond: how it can hold all of it at once—the light and the heavy, the tragic and the trivial, life in its full, sprawling register.

When they left on Sunday, the house went quiet and still. But instead of emptiness, there was an afterglow, the echo of their laughter still hanging in the air, the unmistakable warmth of time well spent. It’s always special with them, but something about this time together shimmered differently.

It took me a few days to see it clearly. The difference wasn’t what was there but what was missing. Their phones. For three days, I hardly saw one. No faces bowed in thrall to the glow, no restless scrolling, no half-listening while half-elsewhere. Just their presence. Undistracted, unbroken, utterly human. Conversations that stretched and deepened, easy, comfortable silences, attention that did not splinter. In a world strained to the brink by distraction, the simple grace of their undivided presence was nothing short of miraculous.

What a gift it was. To me, to themselves, and most of all to each other. The sheer, luminous present of being fully present.

iii.
The Most Successful Friend Group In History & The Fragile Geometry of Trust
At the human scale we build friendships; at the civilizational scale we build alliances. Both are invisible architectures holding chaos back. If friendships keep a person from collapse. Alliances do the same for empires.

Military historian Phillips O'Brien recently told Paul Krugman that America's post–WWII dominance wasn't just about being the biggest economy or the strongest military (though we had both). It was because the U.S. built the most successful friend group in history. NATO, the UN, trade pacts, and endless behind-the-scenes ties. Our hard power was about money and force, but our real power—our soft power—was about who showed up when we called.

Like all relationships, friendships and alliances are complex and dynamic. Constantly shifting and changing. Fading, fracturing, deepening. So much lately has been made of our changing geopolitical relationships that I began to wonder if there was a way to measure the health and depth of these alliances, a way to understand if our friendships around the world make sense. This gave me a rather strange idea. Could Tim Urban's simple, almost childlike "Friendship Matrix" help me understand our geopolitical relationships in this tense moment in history?

The "Does This Friendship Make Sense" Matrix maps friendships across two dimensions—Health and Enjoyability:

• X-axis → Health of the Friendship → trust, reciprocity, balance, positive vibes
• Y-axis → Enjoyability of the Friendship → fun, ease, stimulating, shared purpose

From this four quadrants emerge:

• Q1: Healthy + Enjoyable (Ideal): These are the friendships you'd do anything for. Mutual trust, shared values, no hidden agendas. If they call, you show up. No questions asked.
  Think: the U.S. with NATO, Japan, UK, South Korea.

• Q2: Healthy but Unenjoyable (Strategic): Solid, useful, but not soul-stirring. You collaborate out of necessity, not love. These are second-tier friends, just one level up from mere acquaintances.
  Think: U.S.–Saudi Arabia relationship of calculated tolerance.

• Q3: Enjoyable but Unhealthy (Volatile): Exciting in the moment, but power dynamics makes these "friendships" thin on trust and high on drama.
  Think: Hungary, Turkey, maybe even India now. These are flirty "situationship" alliances.

• Q4: Unhealthy + Unenjoyable (Toxic): Energy-draining, dangerous, sometimes outright hostile. These aren't your friends, and if they are, they shouldn't be.
  Think: Russia, North Korea, Iran. Frenemies at best, existential threats at worst.

For 75 years, the U.S. sat at the center of a vast Q1 ecosystem of alliances. But over the last decade, and in particular the first Trump Administration, and especially now, under the second Trump Administration, we are stress-testing and dangerously destabilizing that network by "burning bridges" and all but rearranging the map of trust while pretending the laws of gravity don't apply. We're playing Jenga with 80 years of geopolitical alliance-building by pulling out random blocks with no plan for what to do when the tower tilts.

• We're treating our NATO allies like Q2 "acquaintances."
• We're courting volatile Q3 partnerships as if they're Q1 "friendships."
• We're flattering and empowering Q4 adversaries while pulling oxygen away from long-term Q1 allies and friends.

Healthy alliances, like healthy friendships, compound over time. They build resilience. They buy you options. But once trust breaks, it calcifies. The real danger is that we won't know we've crossed into Q3 and Q4 territory, geopolitically speaking, until we're already there, surrounded by "friends" rooting for our failure.

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