A truth obsession
Report 1 | Sep 15, 2025 | View in browser | Sign up
One day, I plan to make movies. Sounds grandiose. But ever since childhood, I’ve overflowed with impractically precise opinions about cinema. In particular, I care about the logistical details no one else seems to. If the adventurers flee to the woods, I wonder, where will they sleep and what will they eat? Plot holes pain me and most choreography causes me to tug at my face. To my wife’s annoyance, I'll walk out of a theater early over a “broken suspension of disbelief.”
It's something about those careless representations of reality. They bother me.
That's why my first movie would be a sprawling epic about California. Filmmakers seem to not know that its history far predates the Spanish and that what came before is far more interesting. This land's inhabitants flourished for long millennia in a cultural topology richer and stranger than any fiction. Shellmound Street in Emeryville is named after the bay’s first peoples who subsisted on such quantities of bivalves that they deposited the shells in layers to form platforms upon which families would build whole compounds. Over generations, they’d bury their revered dead within, and add—raising the shell mounds dozens of feet high.
When Spanish caravels broke the mists of what is now the Lost Coast, they were greeted by tribes maneuvering canoes made of redwood trees—nearly the length of the Spanish ships and with larger crews. Farther south, people have been colonizing the islands off the coast of Santa Barbara for 4,500 years, traveling nine miles over open water against the salt spray in reed canoes, spurred on by chanting priests shimmering in abalone sequins and wearing dolphin skulls.
Even further South, in San Diego, there is purported evidence of a quarry where early humans butchered mastodons that is 130,000 years old.
Now, what use is all this, you might ask? Isn't this newsletter is about writing, design, and creative work? Yes. And that is the point of his project, The Rewild. I am reacquainting myself with all my long forgotten creative interests and seeing how those might inspire better stories and strategies. And delivering what I find as a perennial source of work inspiration.
I'm already seeing this change—and how my love of cinematic coherence can make my work better. Last year, when a large accounting firm asked how we might package up their annual reports, I thought about the movie Boyhood, filmed over 15 years. According to the director, you obviously can't know what your actors will be like in the future. But you can create a structure within which characters can evolve. So too, that client's reports—the executives and material will change, but we could create a structure forgiving of all that.
I suppose it's also a practice in learning my own mind. My logistical obsession is, at the heart of it, is a truth obsession—a love of precision far in excess of what’s actually warranted. I love things to fit and to be honest. I believe we’re shaped by the stories and media we consume, and that lazy thinking and sharing impoverishes us. I’d love to see a B2B writing culture where the fluff pieces and thought leader-ing go extinct and are replaced by marketers who see themselves as naturalists on discovery, with that level of scientific humility and rigor.
That’s the aim, and these are the types of stories you can expect from this newsletter and this project, which is by the way, entirely participatory. I’d love to hear how you’re rewilding too—and I mean it. Please, always feel invited to reply.
