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See What You Think Podcast

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by Mark Sylvester

64 episodes

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The podcast that flips conventional wisdom upside down. Where hidden truths become competitive advantages. <a href="https://marksylvester.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">marksylvester.substack.com</a>

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3/18/2025

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Recent Episodes

July 19, 2026

The Photographs Weren't Mine

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called None of It Was Mine. If you’d rather listen first, the link is at the end.Two hours into the lesson, I’m standing next to my wife in a room that used to be a dry cleaner’s, except none of it is real. There’s no dry cleaner. There are no photographs on the wall behind us, no five generations of somebody else’s family, no great-great-great-grandfather who started the business. Phyllis Katz put us there with eleven words. A married couple. He’s getting the business in the divorce. Go.The Family That Never ExistedKymberlee started naming them. Her mother. An aunt who sewed buttons. A great-great-great-grandfather who was, she decided on the spot, the queen’s tailor. Each name landed as it had always been there. I stood in the middle of a family that had existed for maybe four seconds, feeling something I did not expect to feel at seventy-three, in a room I’d paid to be humbled in on my birthday.I felt small, and not because Kymberlee was funnier than me in that moment, though she was. The more names she gave to that lineage, the more real it got, and the more real it got, the more I understood that my character had married into something enormous and had brought nothing to it. No trade, no history, just a man who’d noticed she was staying in a business she didn’t want, staying because leaving felt like disappointing relatives who were already gone. I told her that in the scene. I told her the thing she actually wanted was the music, the guitar she wouldn’t put down, and that I’d left, eventually, because she never did.The Actual Assignment Is SilenceThe gift itself was simple. My birthday landed this week, and Kymberlee arranged two hours alone with Phyllis Katz, a founding member and former director of the Groundlings, one of the people who helped build the school itself, decades in television, film, and stage, still teaching, still sharp enough to stop you mid-sentence. Two of the six people in our improv group were there too, Harnoor Lai and Louis John. Our regular coach is Navaris Dawson, Thursday nights over Zoom, here in Santa Barbara. Phyllis subs when he can’t make it, which means a founding member of the Groundlings is our backup, a fact that’s been ironic on a dozen different levels since the first night we found out. Mostly, what Phyllis gave us that day was silence.Not the kind that happens because nobody has anything to say. The kind you build on purpose and then refuse to fill. Two people up at a time, a relationship, a moment that matters, and one instruction underneath everything else. Find the awkward silences. Do not talk your way past them.I am not good at that. I’ve spent a career, four decades of it, making rooms comfortable, filling the gap before anyone else has to feel it. Phyllis was asking me to do the opposite on purpose, in front of people, for no reason except that the silence was where the scene actually lived. Every instinct I have said, keep talking. She kept saying Stay.Productive Struggle, Mid-SceneSo there I was, an invented husband standing in an invented business that belonged to an invented family that was not mine. The actual struggle of the whole two hours had nothing to do with remembering a game or hitting a mark. It was standing still. Letting the moment sit there, ugly and unresolved, instead of rescuing it with a joke or a line or anything at all. I have a word for what that felt like now, one I picked up a few weeks back from a teacher talking about how children learn: productive struggle. I was in it, mid-scene, wanting badly to fill a hole Phyllis needed me to leave open, not knowing yet whether I could.I pushed forward instead of talking. I let the pause sit past the point where every part of me wanted to say something, anything, to make the discomfort stop. Kymberlee let it sit too. And in that stretch of nothing, standing surrounded by five generations of people who had never existed until she named them, something actually happened between us that no line of dialogue would have gotten to faster.None of what happened in that room was real. The two of us, standing in it, were completely real. That’s the difference between listening and waiting for your turn to talk.Later, working with Harnoor, Phyllis said something I wrote down without meaning to. His character already had the answer, she told him. He just had to stop getting in its way. Once you actually know who you’re playing, the character thinks of it. You don’t have to. It gets fast enough that it starts moving on its own, and that speed isn’t a trick. It’s just enough time inside the thing that your own thinking finally gets out of the way and lets the truth through. I recognized what she was describing. It’s the same reason I could stay inside a silence by the fourth scene without bailing the way I’d wanted to on the first. Fluid and authentic turned out to be the same word, arriving late, after enough of it that I stopped deciding what to say and started actually being there.None of It Was Real, All of It Was RealHere’s the part I keep turning over since. None of what happened in that room was real. The photographs weren’t real. The dry cleaning business wasn’t real. The great-great-great-grandfather was invented on the spot by a woman who had never met him, because he doesn’t exist. We built the whole thing out of nothing but the words we chose to say to each other.But the two of us, standing in it, were completely real. What passed between us in that silence, the discomfort, the decision not to fill it, the actual attention we were paying each other instead of waiting for our turn to talk, that part wasn’t pretend. That part is the same skill whether the room is invented or not. It’s the difference between listening to someone and waiting for the gap where you get to speak next. Most conversations I’ve had in my life, the good ones and the forgettable ones both, come down to which one of those two things I was actually doing.I’ve run companies. I’ve produced over a hundred TEDx talks from the wings of a stage in Santa Barbara. I’ve built systems meant to help other people say what they mean. None of that taught me to sit in a silence I’d built with someone else and let it stay uncomfortable until it turned into something true. Phyllis Katz taught me that, at seventy-three, standing in a fake dry cleaner’s, surrounded by a family that was never mine, on the one night of the year built entirely around the fact that I was born.The Pause I’m Supposed to KeepKymberlee teaches her speaking clients something she calls the Power of the Pause, a breath, a beat, room enough for what was just said to land. What Phyllis had us do was the same thing stretched longer and left raw, uncomfortable on purpose, never rescued.I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it away from the stage. I know the silence is still there, the next time someone I love is talking and I’m already deciding what I’ll say back.Listen to None of It Was Mine on Suno: <a target="_blank" href="https://suno.com/s/seXowXziIKjJryR2">https://suno.com/s/seXowXziIKjJryR2</a> Get full access to Through Another Lens at <a href="https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe</a>

July 14, 2026

You're In

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called Knock Twice. Read first and let the song land after, or listen first and let it open the door. Either order works.I get on a video call with a stranger named Patrick Phillips, and the first thing I learn is where he’s sitting. A coworking space that could be anywhere, across a twenty six mile bridge from New Orleans. Forty one years old. Alone at a desk most days, building things nobody asked him to build.Twenty six miles of causeway across Lake Pontchartrain connects his side of the water to New Orleans. He crossed it for high school, then again for college in Baton Rouge. His father was a Marine, so home was wherever the next base happened to be. Louisiana is the place that stuck.Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The SkipA few weeks back, he was coding a project management tool for himself, the way some people build model trains. Twenty years in government will teach you every framework and every throwaway best practice there is. So when the AI helping him build the tool suggested a system he’d never heard of, that got his attention. He didn’t stop to study it. Instead of researching the framework the way he’d researched everything else in his life, he skipped straight to a person. Close by, in New Orleans. He found the guy online and just connected.When Matt Hayne, an EOS coach, heard Patrick’s story, he said, “You gotta meet my buddy in Santa Barbara, Mark,” and sent the intro. When Matt sends me someone, I pay attention. He knows I love meeting new people.That’s how a former Treasury employee turned solo builder ended up on a video call with me. I’ve spent forty three years building software. Six Academy Awards worth of it.Patrick spent most of his career in government, mostly at Treasury, then a stretch at a private consulting firm doing portfolio oversight work most people have never heard of and wouldn’t enjoy hearing about if they had. Somewhere in the last year he started building his own tools instead of buying software built by other people. He hit walls the way everyone does who tries this. Then it worked, and it was, in his own words, the best feeling in the world.Cortado BuddiesMatt and I didn’t meet through business either. A couple of years back, he was in Santa Barbara visiting clients and went looking for an improv school to sit in on. He found the one my wife and I run, and turned out to be the funniest person in the room. We found out we were both coaches, different disciplines, and started meeting for coffee whenever he was back in town. We both liked the same drink, it turned out. A cortado. We became Cortado Buddies. Years of it now, pictures of coffee sent back and forth, no agenda, nothing to sell each other. He’s careful about who he introduces me to. That care is the entire reason the introduction meant anything.The TourFor the next hour, Patrick got the tour. The Atari user group in Santa Barbara, Cold War engineers who taught a kid who couldn’t code how to make graphics because I kept showing up and asking. The company that came out of it, Wavefront, three friends, six Academy Awards for visual effects software that ended up inside Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and pretty much every Marvel movie made since 1999. The TEDx events, two hundred seventy five of them and counting. Cooking for seven families during the lockdown because I used to be a chef and nobody could get to the store. Teaching myself to build my own tools to run all seven menus because that’s what a chef does when the machine shows up and I happen to be bored.None of it was a pitch. It was me answering a question a stranger asked, at length, the way you do when you like the person on the other end of the call.The AsideThen, close to the end, something shifted. I’d asked him if he had a family. No, he said. Ten years with someone he loved. It didn’t work out. No kids. Forty one now, and honestly, right now, focused on getting the next stage of his life off the ground. He mentioned the coworking space again, a shared room full of strangers all staring at their own screens, building their own things, alone. He said it almost as an aside. I don’t really have many people to bounce ideas off of.I didn’t fix that. I didn’t offer advice. I said, Cool, cool. Well, you’re in.Two words doing the actual work of an entire hour.The framework was never going to be what mattered. What mattered is that someone was standing on the other side when he knocked. I let him in.The KnockHere’s what’s strange about how this happened, from where I sat. An AI recommended a framework. A stranger read the recommendation and, instead of researching it alone the way he used to at Barnes and Noble as a kid, decided to knock on an actual door. The framework was never going to be what mattered. What mattered is that someone was standing on the other side when he knocked. I let him in.Somewhere near the end of the call, talking about nothing in particular, I told Patrick something I tell my improv students. If you try to be funny, you will fail. If you just try to be human, the human condition is hilarious, and you’ll be awesome without trying. I was talking about improv. I was also, without quite meaning to, talking about the hour that had just happened between us.A coding tool suggested some homework. A stranger did the homework. And somewhere in Louisiana, a guy who spends his days alone in a room full of other people stopped being quite as alone as he was an hour before.Listen to Knock Twice on Suno: https://suno.com/s/D7I3XZinoWazpmL9 Get full access to Through Another Lens at <a href="https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe</a>

July 12, 2026

What the Drone Cannot Hear

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Nine Feet Up.” Read first and let the song land after, or listen first and let it set the room. Either order works.Duey Freeman rides a horse named Moon, and when he does, the top of his head is nine feet off the ground. He spent sixteen years on search and rescue in Colorado, and when the terrain got too rough for vehicles, they sent crews of six or eight horses out in formation across the plains and into the boulder fields. From that height, you could see three times what a person on foot could cover. But the real advantage wasn’t the altitude. It was the silence.You could hear people. Sometimes it was shouting, sometimes it was crying, and sometimes, in the worst cases, it was just breathing. That sound, a human being making the smallest possible noise to signal they were still alive, is what found them in the places where nothing else could.Then the drones came, and that part went away.Duey is clear that drones are remarkable. They go where horses can’t, they cover ground faster, and with the right equipment, they can read heat signatures through terrain no human team could navigate. The tool genuinely solved a problem. But the drone’s rotors make noise, constant noise, and that noise filled the very silence that used to carry the signal. You gained a camera and lost an ear. The team got more altitude and less contact. Those two things happened simultaneously and they weren’t separate events. They were the same event.Every Tool Upgrade Is a Sense TradeEvery tool upgrade is a sense trade. It sharpens one kind of perception and dulls another, in the same motion, no exceptions. This isn’t a complaint about technology, it is just the architecture of how tools work. A tool extends one capability by concentrating energy there, and that concentration always costs something on the other side of the ledger. The drone designers weren’t careless. They were solving the visibility problem, and they solved it. The hearing problem wasn’t in their design brief. It wasn’t even visible to them as a problem, because they had never been nine feet up on Moon in a boulder field listening for someone’s exhale.The tool doesn’t know what it is missing. That isn’t a flaw in the tool. It is the definition of a tool. The flaw only enters the picture when the person operating the tool forgets that the tool’s ignorance isn’t the same as their own, and stops trusting what sixteen years in the boulder fields already taught him.Having the Tools Isn’t Having the TasteHaving every tool in the kitchen doesn’t make you a chef. The knives, the pans, the right burner, none of that turns out a good plate.What turns out a good plate is having cooked the same dish wrong a thousand times until you know, by smell and by feel, when it’s finally right. That’s taste.It doesn’t come from the equipment. It comes from having been in it long enough to trust your own judgment over anyone else’s, including the machine’s.The Trust ProblemThis is where the conversation about AI lands, and lands hard. There is a version of working with these systems where the reps you’ve put in are still the final judge of what’s good, where the tool’s speed serves your taste instead of replacing it. Then there is the other version, the one worth worrying about, where you stop trusting what you know and start trusting what the system hands you, simply because it arrived fast and looks finished. You take the output at face value instead of running it through everything you’ve earned. That isn’t a tool problem. It’s a trust problem, and the trade is yours to make or refuse.How the Habit Moves InHanding your taste to the tool isn’t a dramatic failure. It happens in small increments, each one reasonable in isolation. You let the AI draft the language because it sounds close enough, so you stop asking whether it actually sounds like you. Absence stops registering. Not because you stopped caring. Because the machine kept moving, and it was easier to let it. The habit doesn’t announce itself either. It just moves in, one skipped question at a time, one place where your own taste would have caught something and didn’t get asked to. The crying goes unheard. Not once, loudly, in a way you could catch and correct. It goes unheard at scale, quietly, across everything you are producing, and the gap between what your work used to carry and what it carries now widens without announcing itself.The Leaders Worth WatchingThe leaders worth watching right now are the ones who still trust the thousand reps over the machine’s confidence. They use capable tools, and they bring something the tool can’t access: a long memory of what the work felt like before the tool arrived, a calibrated sense of what a real result sounds like versus a plausible one, and the discipline to stay in the search even when the drone is already in the air covering ground. You can see it in the small habits. They read the draft twice, not once, the second time listening instead of scanning. They ask what’s missing before they ask what’s polished. They trust the plate they know how to cook, not the recipe the machine just handed them. They aren’t Luddites.Duey still gets calls sometimes, years after he stopped riding search and rescue. People want to know how he found the ones nobody else did. He never says the equipment. He says the ear. The ear caught the exhale nobody else heard, once, under a downed pine, in weather that would’ve grounded any drone, and the ear only knew what to listen for because of sixteen years spent trusting it.Refined taste isn’t about selecting better tools. It’s about trusting what your own experience already taught you, over whatever the tool hands you first, and refusing to serve the plate before you’ve tasted it yourself. Nine feet up in the silence is where you learn the difference.Listen to “Nine Feet Up” on Suno: https://suno.com/s/kNwnXcCGuwRQ99ZJ Get full access to Through Another Lens at <a href="https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe</a>

64 total episodes available

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What is See What You Think Podcast?: The podcast that flips conventional wisdom upside down. Where hidden truths become competitive advantages. <a href="https://marksylvester.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">marksylvester.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.

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