👋 Hi friends,

On Wednesday April 1, 2026, four humans left Earth.

Reid Wiseman. Victor Glover. Christina Koch. Jeremy Hansen.

The first Black astronaut, the first woman, and the first non-American (a Canadian) to travel outside Earth's orbit to the moon nearly fifty-four years after Apollo 17 left the lunar surface.

Watch the Artemis II launch footage and ongoing coverage if you haven't. It moved me to tears.

Four human beings are now hurtling toward the moon thanks to a rocket built by thousands of people across dozens of countries, all of them choosing to do something extraordinary together.

That is us. That is what we are capable of when we choose to work together.

And then there is everything else happening at the same time.

As you are probably aware, we in the US and Israel are in a war that’s now well into its second month. Leaders made decisions with apparent certainty that it would be swift and surgical. It has been neither.

Offensive missiles and the resulting retaliatory strikes have struck civilian areas in Iran and neighboring Middle East countries. A US strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab killed more than 170 people, most of them schoolgirls.

The students in Minab who were killed did not vote for this war. They did not lobby for it. They did not have a seat at any table outside of their classroom or their home.  But decisions made by people who were certain they knew best often have the most devastating of consequences.

That is also us.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files continue their slow release into public view. The Navigating to a New Normal research participants, those US adults we have been talking with since the pandemic, revealed something striking and I’d appreciate hearing your perspective on this. (email me: [email protected]).

It is not just outrage they feel. As Ricardo, a Hispanic man in his mid-70s here in Northern California told me: What we've always said for years and years, especially us from the streets and poor poverty communities… behind the rich and famous's closed doors, there's all kinds of secrets.

No one was terribly surprised that there is a different set of rules for the wealthy and powerful. But the disregard for the social contract is cutting deeper than anger.

It’s unveiling the grief of disillusionment.

This form of grief is arriving from different directions for people. One participant, Kelsey, a white woman now living in small town Maine, has built her career on the belief that working hard within the system would be enough. She told me the files made her ask:

Another participant, Dajon, a Black man from Phoenix, who had known for years that the world operated this way, wasn't shocked. He described it as more enraging than anything as it reminded him of the loss of a close friend’s sister to sex trafficking and then his friend’s disappearance six months after that friend began investigating her death. 

All of the participants are experiencing grief. A creeping, disorienting grief about the society they thought they lived in. The realization that the system they believed in has been protecting the wrong people all along.

Here is something worth pausing on this Easter morning.

Passover began on Wednesday April 1, the same night Artemis II launched. Easter is today, April 5.  

Passover is the story of liberation from bondage. A people being crushed by imperial power, freed through something greater than that power. “You were once strangers in a strange land.”

Easter is the story of a man who healed the sick, defended the condemned, touched the untouchable, and fed the hungry and was then executed by the state. And then rose. In Christian theology, the resurrection is the ultimate reversal: the one the empire humiliated is the one who endures. The powerful were certain they had won. They were wrong.

Both of them, in their different ways, asking the same thing.

What do you do with power? Whose suffering do you allow yourself to see? Who counts as your neighbor?

The Hubris Problem

There is a pattern worth naming.

In June 2023, I wrote about the loss of the Titan submersible. OceanGate's CEO had dismissed safety certifications as obstacles to innovation. Paying passengers became de facto test pilots on a vessel that had never been properly certified. Five people died.

I called it textbook hubris then. The belief that the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to you. That the innovation — or the objective, or the ideology — justifies the risk to others. That you already know.

I keep returning to that piece now. Because hubris, it turns out, is not one thing. It has at least three faces. And once you see them, you can’t unsee it.

The first is hubris that destroys the hubristic. The Titan's CEO was certain the safety certifications were unnecessary. He paid for that certainty with his life, alongside the passengers who trusted him. There is a grim, classical logic to it, almost Greek in its shape. The person who believed the rules didn't apply to him was not insulated from the consequences. The fall and the hubristic are the same person. 

The second is hubris that destroys the distant and powerless. A leader who launches a war with confidence it will be swift and surgical and finds himself five weeks in with schoolchildren dead and a global oil crisis, never imagined the schoolgirls of Minab or the masses in his own country. In this hubris, the decision-makers and the consequence-bearers are entirely different populations. The certainty is held at the top. The price is paid at the bottom.

The third is the most chilling. It is hubris as deliberate architecture. This is the Epstein model. This is not overreach or miscalculation. It is the systematic construction of impunity: a network built specifically to exploit the powerless, protected by the mutual complicity of other powerful men and women, engineered to last. The predation is not a byproduct of hubris. It is the point. And the disregard for the social contract it represents -- the revelation that the people at the top of our institutions were operating by entirely different rules is producing something the N2NN research participants named clearly. Grief. And outrage.

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent decades documenting what he calls the paradox of power: the qualities that help people rise, including empathy, social attunement, the genuine desire to make a difference for others, are precisely what the experience of holding power erodes. The higher you climb, the more the instrument that got you there degrades.

The question that sits underneath all three faces of hubris for leaders, for institutions, for all of us  is the same one every religious tradition observing something sacred this month is asking in its own way.

Who do you think you are?

And who is paying for that answer?

The Hubris We Are Building Right Now

Hubris has a fourth face and we are cultivating it on server farms across the United States.

There is a documentary in theaters called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. An apocaloptimist looks at the full range of what's possible, all the promise and all the peril, and chooses to act anyway. That’s the posture this moment requires.

The promises of the current AI are real and extraordinary, from assisted medical diagnosis, personalized education, collaboration on research to scientific breakthroughs that could extend human life by decades. I believe in that. But that’s not where AI ends.

Here is the thread that runs from OceanGate to Minab to Epstein's island to those data centers humming quietly in cities near you.

The people building Artificial General Intelligence rose to the position of building it through exactly the qualities Keltner describes: curiosity, collaboration, vision, a genuine desire to solve problems for humanity. And now, in the act of holding that power, perhaps the most extraordinary power any humans have ever held, the power to create a new form of intelligence, to make something in our own image, the Paradox of Power kicks in. The project starts to feel more important than the people it is supposedly for. The scale of the ambition crowds out the empathy that inspired it.

Every society humanity has built has a story about this moment. Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. The Tower of Babel reaching toward heaven. The warnings are not against ambition itself. They are against ambition without wisdom. Against the reach for divine power in the absence of divine accountability.

We are attempting to create something in our own image. But we are not logical creations. We are emotional ones. And we do not yet fully understand what that means.

What we are building with AI is extraordinary at logic, pattern recognition, and output. What it does not have and what it seems no one is seriously trying to give it is the capacity for genuine compassion. Emotional intelligence is not an upgrade to add later. It is the feature in our own human coding that makes us trustworthy to each other. It is what makes the difference between a doctor who sees a patient and one who only sees a diagnosis. Between justice and mere legal process. Between a leader who feels the weight of sending people to war and one who doesn't.

We are encoding our logic. We are not encoding our lived wisdom and emotions.

And if Keltner's paradox holds — if the very experience of holding this much power degrades the empathy that made the project worth doing in the first place — then the question is not only what we are building. It is whether the people building it can still feel the weight of who they are building it for.

The Titan's CEO skipped the safety certifications. He was certain.

What Empathy Has to Do With All of This

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist David French, a conservative Christian wrote about something spreading through American evangelical Christianity: the idea that empathy itself is a sin. That feeling compassion for migrants, for the poor, for the vulnerable, is a form of manipulation Christians must resist.

The rejection of empathy is not just a theological position. It is, whether its proponents recognize it or not, the permission structure that allows all three faces of hubris to operate without friction.

When Keltner's paradox erodes empathy in those who hold power, that is a tragedy.

When empathy is then reframed as sin for everyone else, that is a system.

The powerful, having lost their own capacity for compassion, are now actively working to eliminate it in others.

French's response, and mine, is that the problem is never too much empathy. The problem is selective empathy. We feel deeply for people like us and almost nothing for people who aren't.

The solution is not less compassion. It is more empathy, applied more consistently, to more people.

The first of my 5 Steps to Empathy is Dismantle Judgment.

It means pausing before you render a verdict, before you decide you already know…and asking what you don't know. What shaped this person? What it might feel like to be them?

Dismantling Judgment is not a passive act. It is a discipline. And in this particular moment, it is also a form of defiance — a refusal to have your compassion managed out of you by people who benefit from your indifference.

Extend it to the disillusioned, who have stopped trusting institutions because the Epstein files confirmed what they feared.

Extend it to the Iranian civilians and the Israeli families and every ordinary person caught in the crossfire of someone else's certainty.

Extend it to yourself. Because people who care may decide that hope is for people who haven’t been paying attention.

Don't keep it bottled up.

On Wednesday night, while four astronauts were beginning their journey to the moon, President Trump addressed the nation about the Iran war.

Both things happened. On the same night. On the same planet. By the same species.

The question in front of all of us, not just leaders, all of us, is the same question every religious tradition observing something sacred this month is asking.

Who do we want to be?

I choose the moon. Who’s with me?

Ask the harder question. When you find yourself reacting to a person or a situation with quick judgment, about Iran, about the Epstein files, about AI, about the behavior of the person in front of you… pause. Ask what you don't know about how they got here. You don't have to agree. You just have to get curious.

Say something about AI.  Speak up in your company, your community, your elected representatives. Ask what values and safeguards are being built into the systems being developed. Ask who is accountable if they get it wrong. The people in those rooms are making decisions for all of us. We are allowed, we are obligated to have a voice. 

Let this week's convergence mean something. Easter or Passover, if you observe either of these traditions, let this be the year you take seriously and put into action what the traditions are actually asking. If you don't, the message is the same: every society humanity has built, across centuries and cultures, centers compassion as the measure of a life. Not certainty. Not power. Compassion.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. And to everyone — happy spring.

Stay curious. Ask good questions. Let empathy follow.

-Rob

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