Summer, 1965. Renton, Washington. My dad sat at the kitchen table with the sports page folded in thirds. He’d scan it before he said a word to anyone. Scores from the night before. Standings. A trade rumor. By the time he poured his second cup of coffee, he knew the story. And when he walked into work, he could talk about anything.
He wasn’t a sports fanatic. He was a man who understood something most people never articulate: knowing what happened yesterday gives you standing in today’s conversation. You can lead it, or you can join it. But you are never left on the outside looking in.
I’ve thought about that kitchen table a lot lately.
The World Changed Twice
The first change was COVID. Offices closed. Zoom opened. For a year and a half, everyone lived on their phones trying to stay ahead of news that moved faster than anything we’d tracked before. We developed habits. Scrolling became muscle memory. Screens became the default for nearly every human interaction that used to happen face to face. The average person now spends six and a half hours a day looking at a screen. Laptop, iPad, phone. Six and a half hours of waking life.
Then work transformed. Hybrid became permanent. In-person events, which once felt routine, began to feel rare. And somewhere in that shift, something happened that nobody saw coming.
We started to crave what we’d lost.
People are hungry for in-person now. Not the obligation kind. The real kind. Smaller. Warmer. Rooms where you actually look at each other and have a conversation that goes somewhere. You can feel it if you pay attention. Workshop attendance is up. Dinner parties go longer. People are staying at the table.
The old playbook for finding and building relationships with your ideal customer is dead. The webinar grind. The cold LinkedIn sequence. The nurture email drip. Real business happens in rooms now. Small rooms. Ten to twenty people. Real faces. Real conversation. The room where it happens.
The Second Change Is Still Arriving
Most people are treating it like weather. Something to observe, not something to move with.
AI is here. I’ve spent almost three years inside it, building with it, watching what it can and cannot do. And I want to say something plainly: this will have the same scale of impact as COVID. By conservative estimates, 1.4 billion people have AI at their fingertips right now. One in six people on earth. It is global. It affects every industry, every job category, every aspect of how we communicate, how we work, how we make decisions.
COVID was sudden. AI is gradual. And gradual is harder, because you can convince yourself you’re keeping up when you’re not.
So in 2026 we are sitting inside two massive disruptions simultaneously. Post-COVID, still rewiring how we connect. And inside the early part of what will eventually be called the AI era. Which means two things have to be true at the same time: you need to be faster than you have ever been, and you need to be more human than you have ever been.
Those two things are not in conflict. They depend on each other.
The Condition for Owning the Room
When you get ten or fifteen of the right people in a room together, something happens that cannot be replicated through a screen. Trust builds faster than you’d expect. Relationships that would take eighteen months of LinkedIn exchanges to build can form over a two-hour workshop. People remember you. More importantly, they remember how they felt when they were with you.
That is where business gets built now. Not in funnels. In rooms. The room where it happens.
But there’s a condition. You have to show up ready. Prepared. Current. Not just on your own business, but on the world your clients are operating in.
I’ve sat in enough rooms to know the difference between a facilitator who has done their homework and one who hasn’t. The one who hasn’t might still be smart. They might have good ideas. But they are playing catch-up the whole time, and people feel it. There is a credibility gap that opens when you are not quite current, and it is very hard to close in real time.
The imposter voice is quieter when you walk in knowing. That’s not a small thing.
And it turns out there is a deeper reason this matters than anyone talks about in a business context. Kara Swisher has pointed to research showing that the single greatest factor in positive longevity is friends and family. Not diet. Not exercise. Human connection. The small room is not just where business gets built. It is where we are most alive.
Being current is a power move. Not a nice-to-have. A power move.
Everyone in a position of authority carries some version of imposter syndrome. I don’t care how successful you are. There is a version of the question floating somewhere in the background: do I actually belong in this room? Do I know enough to be taken seriously here?
The way to silence that voice is preparation. Not performance. Preparation.
Walking in knowing what is happening in your clients’ world, not just yours, changes the dynamic immediately. You stop being a vendor. You start being a peer. You stop presenting. You start conversing. Conversation is where trust lives.
The Sports Page
My dad didn’t read the sports page because he loved sports.
He read it because knowing the scores was a form of preparation. It was how he showed up ready for the conversations that mattered.
I built Watch because I needed my version of that. Watch is part of EVERYWHERE Studio and it is where everything begins. It runs continuously, tracking the topics I care about and the topics my clients care about. Every morning I get a briefing. Every evening an update. And as I read, what I pay attention to shapes what gets tracked the next day. It learns what matters to me, and it gets better at finding it.
This is not about drowning in information. It’s the opposite. Watch filters the flood. It brings me the signal so I can be present in the rooms that matter instead of spending hours a day trying to stay current on my own.
The sports page used to do that for my dad. One section, folded in thirds. Everything else was noise.
Watch is my sports page. Not for sports. For the world I actually operate in.
Where to Start
You don’t have to read everything. You don’t have to follow every newsletter, every trade publication, every AI update that lands in your inbox. That path leads to anxiety, not intelligence. I’ve been down it.
What you need is a system that does the reading for you and brings you the right signal. Specific to you, specific to your clients, specific to the rooms you are trying to own.
The AI does the background work. I do the human work. They’re not competing. They’re the same thing.
In 2026, the leaders who will build the best client relationships show up in person, in small rooms, with something to offer beyond their own expertise. They know what’s happening. They connect ideas. They make the people across the table feel like they are with someone who has done their homework.
That is not magic. It’s a practice.
My dad did it with a newspaper. You can do it with a system that runs while you sleep and delivers what you need before you walk in the door.
The room is waiting. Don’t blink.
