Go east, young man

San Francisco is in a golden age.

You can feel it in any cafe. Everyone is building. Everyone is talking about AI, agents, chips, compute, the future of humanity. Wealth is being created at a speed that feels unreal until you sit in the room long enough and realize it is normal there.

The whole place hums.

And I am leaving.

On June 15, the day after the Gemini new moon, I move to Berlin.

Why the move? The simple answer is my children. Their mother is from Berlin. Her family is there. She asked if we could move back, and my choices were Berlin or Davis.

I chose Berlin.

The simple answer, though, contains a fuller one.

I do not want to be a father who teaches his children wholeness while living as a divided man. I want my children to know me as fully as I can bear to be known. Not only the cheerful, open-hearted, optimistic Californian version of me. Not only the competent provider, the playful dad, the man who makes pancakes and books flights and figures it out.

The shadow too.

The seriousness. The grief. The hunger. The power. The parts I have spent years learning not to exile.

So yes, I am going for my children.

And the fuller answer is to become more whole.

California gave me lightness.

A sunny disposition. Open-heartedness. Plant medicine. Intimate connection. A world without many traditions or rules to obey.

You do not have to do things a certain way here. You do what feels true. You throw out the rule book, or laugh at the idea of one.

That has been liberating.

I am a California boy in ways I cannot and do not want to disown. Cheerful. Heart-led. Optimistic. A little ridiculous. More willing than most to follow the strange thread and see where it leads.

California taught me that life is supposed to be alive. Not endured. Not managed. Though sometimes put in a spreadsheet, at least in San Francisco.

In San Francisco, every hour is wanting to become output. Every friendship a network node. Every strange impulse a productivity system.

And I love San Francisco, too. The buzz is part of why I am the way I am. California taught me to be alive. San Francisco taught me to be effective. Both are now mine. Both come east with me.

Berlin doles out something else.

Shadow. Memory. Friction. Skepticism. Seriousness. The weight of history.

It is colder. Darker. More traumatized. More suspicious of easy optimism, and for good reason. You cannot walk through that city and pretend history is some abstraction, some thing that happened somewhere else to other people.

The past is in the concrete.

A wall ran through this city. It came down in 1989, when I was almost two. Division and reunification are not abstractions there. They are civic memory. I have only ever been alive in a Berlin that was learning to be one again.

I have been drawn to Germany, Russia, and the space between since college. I wrote my undergrad thesis on the fraught relationship between the two nations. I studied abroad in those countries instead of sexy places like Spain or Argentina where other friends did.

In most ways, that area isn’t sexy.

It is darker than that. More painful than that. More haunted than that.

And still, I am going back.

To be clear, Berlin is open.

It is not like the rest of Germany. Berlin is strange, permissive, rebellious, porous, alive in its own way. It has its own kind of freedom.

But freedom has a shadow.

Sometimes openness becomes nihilistic. Skepticism becomes an identity. The refusal to believe in anything becomes an excuse not to risk, not to create, not to be excited, not to do the things that make you feel alive.

By feeling alive, I do not mean only drugs and sex (though they are part of it).

I mean creation.

I mean devotion.

I mean the willingness to look stupid because something in you wants to dance before anyone else has joined in.

If nothing matters, why build the thing? Why write the song? Why open the door?

What is the point of freedom if it does not make you more alive?

California has the opposite problem.

Too much spotlight. Not enough shadow.

Too many status games. Too much good-vibes-only energy that is not, in fact, true.

California is no paradise. There is staunch conservatism here. Immense greed. Desperate status-seeking. A whole machinery of image and money and being seen near the right people. Free love started here, or at least one version of it did, but we are a long way from the Summer of Love.

California can be so committed to openness that it forgets discernment, so committed to healing that it avoids the wound, so committed to the light that it refuses to sit in the dark room long enough for its eyes to adjust.

I love the dark room.

I love shadow work, the hidden parts of us, the places where the psyche says, “Not there,” because that is usually where the treasure is buried.

This move is not me leaving the light for the dark.

It is not California good, Berlin bad. It is not Berlin deep, California shallow. That would be too easy, and mostly false.

The work is the integration of the two.

California’s aliveness with Berlin’s shadow.

Optimism with seriousness.

Freedom with form.

Play with depth.

Heart with power.

On a Berlin visit in 2023, I took a Conscious Connected Breathwork class at ŌHIA in Mitte, led by Harman Holiday.

ŌHIA is not only a yoga studio. It is a room for breath, sound, meditation, and energy work. Bodies gathered around practice. Modern people trying to remember something ancient.

Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. No drugs. Just breath.

Somewhere in that altered state, something opened.

Afterward I wrote an Apple Note with the words:

Berlin beckons. You are a healer. You are here to change this place and these people. You are a leader and a challenger.

Some notes feel like thoughts. This one did not. It felt like something that arrived. A sentence from some deeper layer of the psyche that had been waiting for me to get quiet enough to hear it.

I do not think I am moving to Berlin to save anyone. That would be grotesque. I am not the messiah of Kreuzberg, thank God.

But I do think I am moving there to participate in the rooms where people are already gathering, breathing, sweating, practicing, and trying, however imperfectly, to become more whole.

That is what I am building Tala for too.

Tala is my attempt to build quiet infrastructure for studio owners, so they can spend less time fighting software and more time tending the room.

Not as a grand announcement. Not as a pitch deck. As a tool for the places where people practice becoming alive together.

A good studio is not a room with mats and a payment processor. It is a container for intention, attention, and repetition. And when the room is alive, it becomes a place for catharsis, ecstasy, and community.

The old medicine is the new medicine.

There is a clip I return to sometimes. A shirtless man dances alone in a field while a crowd watches. He looks ridiculous. Then one person joins him. Then another. Then the movement begins. Derek Sivers calls it how to start a movement.

Maybe leadership is that at first. The willingness to look stupid for a few minutes before the second person arrives.

I am going east to look stupid.

To follow the strange thread.

To bring California’s open heart into Berlin’s shadow, and to let Berlin’s shadow make my California heart less naive.

We do not need more light that refuses the dark.

We do not need more darkness that refuses aliveness.

We need integration.

Berlin knows something about this. East met West. The seam is still in the cobblestones, but the city is one body.

So this young man is going east.

Not because the west failed.

Because the next thing is waiting where opposites meet.

P.S. If you know the people in Berlin who are already doing this work, the studio owners, teachers, builders, healers, the strange brave ones trying to make community real, I would like to meet them.