Stephanie Balzer

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission.  Stephanie here. In 2014, I attended a conference for researchers and data analysts in higher education at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Everything about the experience was new to me—I’d never been to the Strip for work before, and hadn’t been at all in years. Vegas, I would have told you, wasn’t my scene. And yet, I remember walking through the Cosmo’s conference center halls and thinking, “I like that painting.” Then, “Wait, that can’t be right, can it?” Over the course of a few days, between seminars and networking events, more and more installations, photographs, and digital displays caught my eye from artists all over the world. I had to grapple with the idea that this wasn’t your average “hotel art.” I realized I might be a Vegas person after all. It wasn’t only because my suite offered condoms next to the mixed nuts in the mini bar. (Did they mean this to be funny?) It was also the milky pink Venetian glass chandeliers that looked like beautiful sea creatures dropping from the ceiling outside the Boulevard Tower elevators. It was the towering columns in the lobby that projected digital displays of strange and wonderful images, including “Voyage,” a gigantic glowing library of old books (also funny). Perhaps the Strip wasn’t only a place where you could sleep in Paris, tuck a dollar in a Chippendale’s thong, and buy a plastic calculator shaped like a yellow M&M all in the same day.Something else was going on. It was the mishmash of culture in near proximity. Everywhere you turned there was more art, hidden in plain sight, across from poker tables and slot machines.A few months later, I went back to Vegas, this time for pleasure. A poet friend in L.A. recommended that we check out Akhob, the James Turrell immersive art experience tucked away on the fourth floor of the Louis Vuitton store in The Shops at Crystals. Akhob is like stepping into a sensory deprivation tank of pastel light. It’s a bath you only enjoy for 15 minutes, however, while accompanied by a polite, chatty host who is there to ensure that no one gets rowdy or hurt.WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.My Next Electric is a hella-fun online crash course about how to move from gas to electric cars and stoves. Sign up for a classNoah here. I've got a new newsletter about brands and AI called BrXnd Dispatch. If you're in marketing, creative, or just interested in understanding what's up with AI, check it out. Subscribe to BrXnd DispatchWhy is this interesting? When the opportunity to move to Vegas presented itself three years later, I leapt at the chance—in part due to these encounters with art.Southern Nevada is one of the largest metros in the U.S. without an accredited art museum, but there’s visual and installation art, murals, and sculptures everywhere you look. Some of it is decorative and complementary in nature, sure. Casinos want you to be impressed but also stay in the zone of feel-good fun. Here, art is a secret brand beneath the wrapping of a city of sin. Part of the value lies in discovering it for yourself—it becomes something to take in after the money runs out and the party winds down. For locals like me, it is a scavenger hunt. An experience that’s been gamified by accident. The Aria, for example, advertises a tour of its fine art collection, which includes 23 installation pieces from artists such as Maya Lin, Sanford Biggers, and Frank Stella, among others. But the tour, it turns out, is self-guided. The concierge desk even stopped printing the tri-fold tour maps and instead tells you just  to look at a PDF of the print version on your phone. Imagine trying to read the brochure as it squirrels around under your thumbs, then wandering around the property, lost and disoriented in time and space. That’s the tour.Akbob isn’t advertised either. And while you can find information on The Cosmo’s art collection in general on its website, if you want to know about a specific artist or piece, you’re Googling on your own. I only discovered “Vegas,” a 7-panel painting of waves and clouds at the Delano, by accident when I met friends there for dinner. I recognized it as Sush Machida’s work because he’s my neighbor. Then there’s “Tulips,” Jeff Koons’ metallic sculpture, acquired for nearly $34 million, which sits amidst the Wynn Plaza Shops. Down the way is Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh multi-media sculpture, “Arrows and Flower Neon Sign.” I walk past both, and their security guards, all the time. I’m usually the only one who stops to look.For years, casinos tried to build on the concept of a traditional gallery, and The Bellagio still has one. (Remember Julia Roberts played a gallery curator in the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven?) But Santa Fe-arts collective Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at AREA15 is probably the city’s most popular curated artistic attraction. Meow Wolf’s heavy advertisements turn it into the equivalent of a Piccaso or Monet blockbuster show, except it has an aura of DIY credibility and is housed in an old warehouse off the Strip. And because it is hyped so much, it adds even more currency to the allusivity of the resort collections. Luxury does not like to be loud.Meow WolfMaybe art in Vegas works better broken up and strewn about, or maybe this is a temporary waystation in a city that’s perpetually anew. It’s tough to believe this secret brand is accidental, though, when every other casino aesthetic element is intentional and controlled, from the loud carpets, to the nondescript clubby version of elevator music, to the floral or beachy scents. Speaking of scents, I finally figured out that The Cosmo smells like a mall, which is to say an amalgam of new clothes, makeup and perfume, electronics, and leather. Oh, and make sure you check out the murals and graffiti art along the Cosmo’s parking garage walls—the Shepard Fairey is my favorite. Pass it on. (SB)—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Stephanie (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Art in Vegas Edition

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote the Art in Vegas Edition.Stephanie here. I love lip gloss. For starters, I love the words lip and gloss together. I love its shininess, stickiness, evenness—terms borrowed from Chanel’s sensory evaluation protocol but also product attributes I have studied myself.In general, people have agreed that personal grooming, including applying makeup, should be done in private. But even the most blue-blooded arbiters of social etiquette make exceptions for lipstick—or its more viscous cousin, lip gloss. Per The Emily Post Institute:… putting on lipstick without using a mirror and without fanfare is one grooming ritual that can sometimes be performed in front of others. It’s okay to quickly apply lipstick at the table if you’re with close friends or relatives in a non-business situation, and at a non-deluxe restaurant. Fanfare, that airhorn of a word. In 2011, Angelina Jolie made news when she quickly re-applied her gloss at the Golden Globes. In a video from that night, she’s seated next to then-partner Brad Pitt, swiping her lips with a wand with so little fanfare that she barely glanced away from the stage to focus on what she was doing. Then there’s Rihanna, who gave us the most fanfare during her 2023 Super Bowl half-time performance. In the middle of the show, a backup dancer handed her a Fenty Beauty compact and she feigned checking her face on stage. Less social statement than product placement, her line’s new lipstick—The MVP—debuted that night.Why is this interesting?The lipstick and lip gloss markets are global, multi-billion dollar industries. That means there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide, mostly women, who are staking their take on the nuanced rules of application.I wonder how many of us have personal stories tied to lip products. For example, I can remember dates, events, and even whole seasons of my life this way. I still miss favorite discontinued colors. Jane Iredale’s Cotton Candy was the best pink with a summer tan. Bobbi Brown’s Bellini was an ideal pale winter tint. One time a stranger asked if I always “wore black lipstick.” It was MAC’s Desire, a sheer, deep purple.January 2012 is defined by the time I spent in the ICU with a friend after his double lung transplant. We couldn’t take many personal items into his room, so I would slip a gloss in my pocket before I donned my paper gown and scrubbed my arms with disinfectant and wrestled my wet hands into blue surgical gloves. One day, in the hospital hallway, I took a picture of all the glosses I found in my handbag while fishing for a specific one. To see that photo now—it’s the absurdity of carrying around four tubes of practically the same shade of pink juxtaposed against a backdrop of my desperateness that insisted something amusing still mattered.It mattered because I intended to share that photo as its own kind of fanfare. Here, this is what I held onto and documented, the colors and habits that made up our lives. (SB)Want to run a WITI classified? Want to reach 20,000 brilliant readers? WITI classifieds start at $250, and you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.The Mandate is a newsletter on topics men don't like to talk about. Written by Olympic Medalist & NYT/Men's Health contributor, Jason Rogers. Subscribe for free—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Stephanie (SB) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing. 

The Lip Gloss Edition 

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote the Art in Vegas and Lip Gloss editions. Stephanie here. Not long ago I had the pleasure of being the adult in charge of my nieces and nephew for a few days. One of my jobs was to pick everyone up from school, including the youngest who hopped in the car, gave me the lowdown on the playground, then told me about the book she’d checked out: Komodo Dragon vs. King Cobra: Who Would Win?I’m happy to report that we discussed author Jerry Pallotta’s cold-blooded thriller the rest of the way home, turning our speculation into a game. She took the side of the lizard so I argued on behalf of the snake. We debated their physical advantages—legs vs. no legs, the possibilities of venom, and who was cuter.WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.The Mandate is a newsletter about the weird world of masculinity | Written by Olympic Medalist & NYT/Men's Health contributor Jason Rogers. Subscribe here.The BrXnd Marketing X AI Conference is happening on 5/16 in NYC. Early Bird tickets are 20% off until the end of the month. Get your 20% off ticket today!Coefficient Capital and The New Consumer have teamed up to bring you fresh new insights in F&B ahead of Expo West! Check out our comprehensive reportThen I collected the teenagers—we really leaned into our screen time—made dinner, and did homework. Finally, it was time to find out who would win.I’m not going to spoil the ending in case you decide to read the book. But our speculation, and the process of drawing out the suspense by delaying the conclusion, reminded me of something similar that happened over the holidays. Late one night, we started watching The Glass Onion, a puzzle film, but then had to turn it off when people began to fade.Again, not to spoil too much—and hopefully you’ve already seen the movie in advance of the Oscars—but I do have to share one of the big reveals: there’s a second murder. We paused right after that, which definitely heightened the suspense. Throughout the next day, we made a game out of guessing what was happening: Who was the killer? What was their motive? Where did Kate Hudson’s character get that metallic rainbow dress?Why is this interesting?People are fascinated with mysteries and solving puzzles. What’s more curious to me, though, is our ability to design them. The philosophy of puzzles, games, and play is truly a rabbit hole. I’ve also been asking—probably to the chagrin of those who have been studying it for years—whether artificial intelligence can play, or how people might play differently than a machine. It’s all too much to include here, and others are more qualified to write about it anyway.But I did like this conversation between Ezra Klein and C. Thi Nguyen, who studies the philosophy of games and refers to them as an “existential balm”:…games are these weird things where people give you artificial constraints and artificial goals. And when you take them up, what you’ve done is you’ve accepted this artist’s design and now you’re in this experience of like— OK, so I’m a rock climber. And one of the interesting things about rock climbing is the goal is in some sense stupid. You’re trying to get up a rock the hard way.We are all inventing games all of the time. Sometimes they even transcend the boundaries of our personal lives to reach a larger audience. For example, everyone knows that a software engineer in Brooklyn created Wordle as a gift for his partner.Pickleball was invented in 1965 by a congressman and his friend who combined ping-pong paddles with an old badminton court. The next weekend, they taught their friends, and then they wrote down the rules. Tens of millions of people play pickleball today, and I try not to hold it against them.A friend and I made up a sport, too, when we were in college. It’s called trivetball, and it’s very similar to pickleball but played in a shitty apartment complex living room with wicker trivets for paddles. Unfortunately for us, we did not think to write down the rules.Still, trivetball illustrates a point, and that’s probably just as cool. The best of this genre might spring from circumstance and incorporate makeshift tools and resources that are readily available. Nguyen likened game creators to artists, and I see it. Perhaps we love games more because of their quirky constraints and imperfections, the way we like to see pencil marks as a vestige of the painter’s process in their masterpiece. (SB)—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Stephanie (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Game Creator Edition

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote the Art in Vegas, Lip Gloss, and Game Creator editions. Stephanie here. Just a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip and across the street from the gates of The Las Vegas Country Club, in a 1960s shopping plaza where the Rat Pack used to hang out, and Led Zeppelin played, and Drew Carey performed, you can walk into a particular office and pull out the drawers of small wooden cabinets to gaze at the beauty of useless ceramic capacitors sorted by color, or googly eyes in boxes organized by size, or tiny bottle-brush trees lined up in a row.Welcome to the Office of Collecting and Design, an archive of curated objects that belong to artist and filmmaker Jessica Oreck.Oreck has been gathering items since she was a child and opened the office in the Historical Commercial Center District two years ago. Guests are invited to touch, explore and play in the collection, which fits into a few cozy rooms and then is artfully organized on shelves and into cabinets, drawers, jars, trays, and dishes. The office only opens on Wednesdays or by appointment. Photography is welcomed. Tagging on social media, encouraged. Also there’s a small shop if you want to buy a souvenir.I went to the office last week with friends from Denver. It’s tough to describe the experience in a way that captures its essence, but perhaps it’s a bit like opening someone else’s refrigerator: maybe they have the same stuff you do—there's ketchup, creamer, eggs, and tangerines. Yet the whole feels different, from what it’s like to yank open the door to noticing where everything is kept. And instead of one jar of mustard, there are 27. Lots of people collect things, but this is a particular kind of archive: vintage, unusual, beautiful, analogue, and overlooked objects. Tiny stuff. Stuff that you might put in a junk drawer and then throw away after the sentimentality fades. A broken doll foot. Shaman stones. A resin toy telephone.Some of the office’s items are singular, like the camel in a top hat with only half of one leg. Others have accumulated by type or kind, warranting their own drawer, possibly with a label. Bags of powdered flocking for trees live together, for example. So do parts of zippers. So do cows, and string.We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.There are less than 10 tickets left for the BrXnd Marketing X AI Conference. If you haven’t got one yet, get yours today.Other objects are collected because they are miniature, like vintage plastic doll-sized television sets or pencil stubs. Still others are included for their vibrant color and beauty, like jars of Japanese pigments or old sequins.Collecting is an exercise in creating a framework, the logic of what is in or out. But then there are decisions that seem associative or intuitive. For instance, the office has a shrine of objects that have been donated, which reside together as their own category until more permanent homes are found. It’s like how we introduce animals to each other in new environments: slowly, and with measure.Why is this interesting?That this office exists, and in Las Vegas, is interesting in itself. But even more curious is the way it serves as an homage to the act of organizing—the deep satisfaction we take from putting things in place. Humans seemingly organize everything, from people to data to land. We can’t help it. We admire organization. We stress about it. We pathologize those who cannot do it. We make reality television about it.Here’s a partial list of what people I know collect, then organize, and sometimes display: Unique purses, jazz records, old electronics, baskets, cameras, comic books, stickers, skateboards, surfboards, Care Bears, hotel keys, depression-era glass candlestick holders but only in green, and books. Many, many books.So in contrast to organizing personal collections such as those, what’s unique about the office is that guests get the opportunity to organize like artists. The objects are the paint. For a small fee, you can create a visual arrangement—your own subset category of anything from the archive—as a “flatlay” design. The museum’s back corner and Instagram are galleries of polaroid images of flatlays created by others.If you choose to make a flatlay yourself, make sure you book a reservation in advance. They say it takes two hours, but it seems to me it would take a lifetime. Then, you can organize according to whatever categorizing principles you choose. It could be anything—relational, historical, philosophical, nostalgic, whimsical. Anything at all. (SB)—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Stephanie (SB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Organizing Edition

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote the Organizing edition, among others.Stephanie here. I had to write several drafts of what is interesting about Sedona to slough off or at least temper my conviction that the local experience, or the way it used to be, or what it’s really like is a more authentic story.I grew up in Flagstaff, thirty miles north of Sedona. And like many people from places that attract tourists, I seem to have a complicated relationship with them.Visitors to northern Arizona spend money and fuel the economy. Of course, we know this. But we don’t necessarily like our dependence on them. We don’t like the traffic they bring, or their big-city attitudes and privileges and complaints. We don’t like when they post photos of their marriage proposals or yoga poses or epic hikes on Instagram. And yet a tourist’s experiences are not entirely unlike my own. As a kid, my family would take summer guests to Sedona and the neighboring Village of Oak Creek. We’d spend the day at Slide Rock State Park or Grasshopper Point, suntanning and eating sandwiches out of coolers, then driving to town to get ice cream and browse the shops that sold metaphysical books, crystals, and real scorpions embedded in resin.I remember the electric buzz of the cicadas at Tlaquepaque, an arts and shopping village built in the 70s and modeled after small town markets in Mexico. Cicadas are so goddamn loud, by the way. And before it was an overrun destination, we would hike West Fork and eat sour blackberries off the bushes, then scramble up the creek bank to where we’d abandoned the car on the shoulder of Highway 89A as if we were never coming back.I asked my northern Arizona people what they like about Sedona today: “Yeah I don’t actually know that much about it anymore. I know there’s a bunch of legit mountain biking there these days.” “It’s super crowded and the traffic is horrendous.” “I try to go to places with as few people as possible so not sure that’s what you’re looking for.”West Fork, photo by my dadIt’s not only that our Sedona felt undiscovered and under-developed, but it also seemed more honest, and I am stubborn about this. Even now I’ll sometimes describe it as a place with a rainbow trout farm and a Dairy Queen to people who I know want to be enchanted.In fact Sedona was a sacred place and home to Indigenous Americans for centuries before white people colonized the land and commercialized their culture. And while this shame-fueled welter underlies all of the Southwest, it seems particularly acute here with the abundance of kokopelli t-shirts and dream catchers for sale, off-road jeep tours, shamanic retreats, 10,000 residents, and 3 million annual visitors packed into 18 square miles.Films brought Sedona to the wider world. The intrigue accelerated in the 90s though, as travel photographers published images of monsoon clouds brewing over Cathedral Rock or dustings of snow covering Devil’s Bridge, and writers included it in almost every list of the most spiritual places on the planet, along with Jerusalem, Machu Picchu, Tulum, and Mecca. It boasts high-end resorts and spas, award-winning restaurants, and multi-million dollar homes nestled in the cliffs as a result.Chapel of the Holy Cross, completed in 1956, also photo by my dadAnd yet it does feel mystical. It is stunningly beautiful. The whole of Sedona is considered to be a vortex swirling with spiritual energy, but there are a few spots that vibrate at an even higher frequency, whatever that may mean to you. Healers, guides, and psychics from all traditions descend to pursue enlightenment, start businesses, or both. The region’s geology is unique in the world, and that is not hyperbole. It is the only place you can see the Schnebly Hill Formation, a 800-1,000-foot-thick outcrop of dark red sandstone at the edge of the Colorado Plateau. Imagine the sandstone is like an artist’s medium that has been worked and reworked by wind and water over 270 million years, forming spires and buttes and cliffs. (I meant to invoke the artist to explain how the land looks sculpted, but it also sounds like I’m referencing a higher power. Given the context, maybe that’s apt.)Then there’s the sand itself, a fine dust that stains your socks, sticks to your sunscreen and hair, and coats the lenses of your sunglasses. No need to buy cheap trinkets, you will be taking it home with you. But if you want a more valuable treasure, my recommendation is Garland’s for traditional Navajo, Hopi and Zuni jewelry. It’s one of my favorite shops anywhere—not just in Sedona—and you can hardly go wrong with any purchase. Oak Creek from L’Auberge in December 2017, and that man on the far right in the hat is my dadAnother thing about Sedona that may interest you: it’s the only place where McDonald’s golden arches are teal blue. The city has strict signage requirements to maintain its dark skies and particular outdoor aesthetic, so McDonald’s, in turn, markets the branding anomaly as one of its most iconic locations in the U.S. If I could wipe the slate clean and pretend Sedona were new to me today—and let’s also say that money is no object—here’s what I would do. I would eschew the newer luxury resorts and book a month-long stay at L’Auberge de Sedona, now a vintage property having opened in 1984. I would want a casita with a view and a cedar-lined outdoor shower, and I would use my time to write. I imagine this would be a solo retreat but then I’d also make friends with fellow guests. We’d dine at Elote and hike the Brins Mesa Trail during the full moon. I’d know the baristas and bartenders by name. I’d take yoga classes at sunrise and meditate at sunset. I would become a tourist and a local. And I’d probably post it all on Instagram. (SB) —Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Steph (SB) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is Sedona Interesting? 

Stephanie Balzer (SB) is a writer, coach, and founder of Mission. She recently wrote the Why is Sedona Interesting? edition, among others.Stephanie here. Noah sent me a copy of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, published in 1967 because I’d never read it. (How is it possible I hadn't read it? Who knows. Moving on.)For others who are uninitiated, McLuhan was part philosopher, part futurist who predicted the internet, part poet-slash-artist who wrote at the intersection of media, technology, and humanity with a great deal of curiosity and concern. He became a pop icon with a cameo in Annie Hall, was featured in magazines like Harper’s and Vogue, cited everywhere, referenced on The Sopranos and in Peter Gabriel lyrics, etc. It’s been widely reported that he was religious. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say he was deeply spiritual, a seeker who anchored his longing for beauty and truth in the orthodoxy of organized religion, which did not necessarily mean the same thing in 1937, the year he converted to Catholicism at age 26, as it does today.McLuhan’s style seemed matter-of-fact and his temperament, pragmatic. In short, he probably would have squashed a wayward spider with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet rather than gingerly relocating it to the backyard. But that’s not to say he was unemotional. He wrote with the urgency of the atomic age. His sentences read like the incessant ringing of a rotary phone that possibly no one will answer, his themes develop in bold graphics and with black-and-white images that emerged from the chemical baths of their darkrooms. Why is this interesting?All of this surfaced, several weeks ago, when Noah wrote about McLuhan’s relevance to today’s public discourse on artificial intelligence. And as I dove into my gifted book, I realized I had absorbed more of McLuhan’s influence and ideas than I’d originally assumed: I just hadn’t become a superfan yet. That may describe you, too.Know that those superfans exist. In some tech circles, McLuhan is thought of as a prophet, a diviner of technology due to his ability to predict trends (he was named the patron saint of Wired in 1992). Consider this passage, which opens The Medium is the Massage:The medium, or process, of our time—electronic technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically.Imagine his university late one night. Buildings are empty and locked, library books are put away on shelves, mice snuggled up and asleep in their laboratory cages. There’s McLuhan in his office, smoking a cigarette and thinking, “Everything is changing and by force. Every aspect of our lives. Dramatically.”It is the language of the crusader and dissident alike, the way rhetoric from strongly opposing sides of an argument sometimes meets at the seams.Once, years ago, I stepped into an elevator in a bank building in downtown Phoenix. An old man, already in the elevator, with wild white hair and sandals, looked at me and said, “I can tell by the shape of your eyebrows that one day you will work in a field that hasn’t been invented yet.” I rarely think about that encounter, but it isn’t one you easily forget, either. It reminds me of the time a psychic at a street fair told me I had “owl eyes”—I desperately wanted that to be true, to believe this woman could know my essence.In that moment in the elevator, an entirely new sense of self whooshed through me and I envisioned a future I’d never dreamed of before. How is it that wanting to be in technology is like no other wanting?Then the elevator dinged. Its doors opened. I stepped out.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Stephane (SB) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.