What Richie Learned Drying Forks

I've watched the "Forks" episode of The Bear just under a dozen times. I'm not entirely sure what that says about me, but I suspect it says something.

For those who haven't seen it: Richie, a volatile and largely rudderless man, gets sent to stage at a three-Michelin-star restaurant as a kind of punishment. His assignment is to dry forks. He is furious. He is humiliated. And then, slowly, something shifts. He stops trying to dominate the room and starts trying to understand it. By the end of the episode, he has found something he didn't know he was looking for.

HBO's new series Rooster, from the creators of Ted Lasso and Shrinking, appears to be operating in the same territory. Steve Carell plays a celebrated novelist who arrives to rescue his daughter and ends up, predictably, needing rescuing himself. The premise is almost beside the point. What matters is what the show is actually about: a man whose carefully constructed identity turns out to be negotiable.

This is a pattern now. Ted Lasso. Richie and his forks. Whatever Carell's character is working through in Rooster. Television has quietly retired the angry genius archetype that defined prestige drama for twenty years. Don Draper is not coming back. Gregory House is not coming back. The brilliant, caustic, fundamentally furious man as protagonist has given way to something quieter and, frankly, harder to write: men doing the interior work.

The easy read is that this is culture softening. I don't think that's right. What I see is something more interesting: a willingness to let male characters fail without swagger, grow without conquest narratives, and sit with discomfort without immediately trying to solve or escape it. That's not softness. That's a different kind of difficulty.

Whether television is reflecting or modeling a cultural shift is unclear to me. Probably both. But I find myself thinking about what this means outside the screen, in the rooms where actual decisions get made. Boardrooms. Founding teams. Investment committees. The professional cultures most of us inhabit were built on versions of the Don Draper model, even when we would never say so out loud. Competence is performed as dominance. Uncertainty is treated as a weakness. Identity as a fixed and defended position rather than a thing that is, as it turns out, negotiable.

If the stories a culture tells itself matter, and I believe they do, then something is being proposed here. Not a replacement for ambition or rigor, but a different relationship to the self doing the work.

Which brings me to the question I can't stop turning over: If the most compelling version of leadership is no longer the man who dominates the room but the one who is willing to be changed by it, what does that ask of the institutions and cultures we've spent the last twenty years building?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point. More @ www.brigadoon.live.

March 24, 2026

Staying Quiet Is a Risk

I started Brigadoon in 2013 because I was bored.

Not personally. Living and working in Washington, DC, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things. I was bored by the conferences, the panels, the stage-managed conversations that produced nothing you couldn't have found in a decent book, heard on a podcast, or gleaned from a magazine article.

I was bored by the posturing. I wanted something real.

So I built it.

Small gatherings. Off the record. No PowerPoint. No name tags. No one is selling anything.

Founders, investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, authors, doctors, civic leaders — people who don't normally share a room — talking honestly about the things that actually matter to them. Brigadoon has been running for thirteen years. The philosophy is intact. The format works. The community is loyal and, by any reasonable measure, remarkable.

And yet, it is at an inflection point.

Brigadoon 2026 brought 38 people to Sundance Mountain Resort for three days of some of the best conversation I have had in years. I left energized. I also left knowing that 38 is not the number. Not because the experience was diminished — it wasn't — but because the mission requires scale to survive. Forty-six attendees is break-even. Seventy-five is where Brigadoon becomes genuinely sustainable, where it can fund scholarships, expand the Scotland experience, build the salon dinner series, and launch the professional membership program now in development.

Seventy-five is where the thing I built becomes the thing I intended to build.

The gap between 38 and 75 is not a product problem. I am confident in that. The people who come to Brigadoon come back. They describe it, years later, as one of the more valuable professional experiences they have had.

The gap is a communication problem — a decade of deliberate restraint that has kept Brigadoon safe from the noise it was designed to resist, but has also kept it invisible to the people who would value it most. I have underinvested in telling this story. I have been too precious.

That is on me.

The tension I keep returning to is this: Brigadoon's value is inseparable from its restraint. The reason it works is precisely that it does not behave like everything else competing for your attention. The moment it starts performing — the moment the marketing starts to feel like marketing — something breaks. Growth cannot come at the cost of what makes growth worth pursuing.

But staying quiet at 38 attendees is its own kind of failure.

The world is getting noisier. Attention is getting cheaper. The case for a room where serious people can think seriously, without an agenda or a slide deck, is stronger now than it was in 2013. That story deserves to be told.

I just haven't figured out how to tell it without turning it into something it isn't.

So here is what I find myself sitting with: How do you build real awareness for something whose value depends on never feeling like it needs to be marketed?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point. More @ www.brigadoon.live.

March 23, 2026

More Chicken Thigh

For decades, American poultry producers exported their dark meat. Russia wanted it. Mexico wanted it. Asia wanted it. Americans did not.

The dark meat stigma was stubborn and largely unfounded: white meat was lean, white meat was clean, white meat was correct. The industry complied, and a generation of home cooks dutifully pulled apart dry chicken breasts over their kitchen sinks.

Then something shifted. Immigration patterns changed the composition of American neighborhoods and, in turn, American menus. Food media eroded the authority of old nutritional myths. Beef prices climbed. And the boneless chicken thigh, long exported and undervalued, became one of the fastest-growing proteins in the country. Double-digit volume growth across food service. A 93% price increase on bone-in dark meat in five years. Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Cava, and the halal cart on the corner all telling the same story.

Chef Eric Huang, who trained at Eleven Madison Park, put it plainly: kimchi used to get kids teased. Now it is at Whole Foods.

What strikes me about the chicken thigh story is not the reversal itself, but the mechanism. No single actor drove it. No campaign, no mandate, no viral moment. It happened through the slow accumulation of demographic change, cultural contact, economic pressure and chefs willing to say out loud what they had always known. The market did not lead. It followed.

That pattern shows up everywhere, once you start looking for it.

When the mainstream finally catches up to what a subculture already knew, who actually deserves the credit, and what does that tell us about how change actually happens?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point.

Zero Introspection

Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz recently told a podcast audience that he operates with "zero" introspection.

Move forward. Go.

He credited Sigmund Freud with manufacturing the modern habits of second-guessing and self-criticism, and argued that the great men of history never wasted time on such things.

It is a crisp line. And it has the satisfying shape of a contrarian truth.

But I have spent years watching sharp, driven people in rooms together, and I have noticed something Andreessen's framing leaves out: the founder who cannot read the room, the executive who keeps making the same hire, the investor who cannot figure out why his best people keep leaving. These are not people who dwell too much on themselves. They are people who have never seriously tried.

Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10-15% actually are. The gap shows up in decision quality, in relationships, and in how people lead. Andreessen is right that excessive rumination is a trap. But he has conflated rumination with reflection, and that is a meaningful distinction.

There is also the question of what "moving forward" means if you carry the same blind spots from one decision to the next. Speed is not the same as progress.

I am not sure Andreessen is entirely wrong. There is something to the idea that high performers trust their instincts and do not overanalyze every choice. The question is whether that posture is a cause of their success or a story they tell afterward.

Which brings me to what I keep thinking about: If self-awareness is genuinely useful, why do so many of the people who need it most remain convinced they already have enough?

-Marc

+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point.