The Barbell: The Center Protects the Generative Edge
I did not always have a high view of the center. In my experience it was extractive, for as long as I can remember. But that word is already more generous than what I actually felt for most of my career, which was closer to being fed on than protected.
I worked as an analyst for many years, and before that in medical sales. I was in research and portfolio management during the bubbles of 1999 and 2008. People would tell me I was trying to save finance, and I’d give them a puzzled look. I am not trying to save finance, I’d say. I don’t think it’s possible to save it in its current form. I just want a business where I can feel at home in this world.
Buzzwords never moved me — not Impact, not ESG, not sustainable. I didn’t like cliques, or any group that quietly took away my ability to have my own perspective, or to sit with people from completely different worlds and hear how they actually saw things.
Most people thought I was overly analytical, and in many ways I was. But it was usually a knowing that actually drove me. I would sense danger or exciting possibility before I could explain either one. If I sensed danger, no amount of “look how much money you could make” or “look how great this company is” would move me. If something excited me, I felt fully alive, and I’d wonder why the people around me couldn’t see what I saw. It took me years to understand what was actually happening: danger, to me, was incoherence — a deviation from a natural order that I felt in my body before I could name it in a spreadsheet. And the thing that excited me was almost always some off-the-wall entrepreneur where the conversation felt like a secret language, the kind that runs for hours without anyone noticing the time.
I remember telling a boss once that a stock in the firm’s largest holding was going to blow up. He got angry. What do you mean? Look at the balance sheet, the cash flow. I wasn’t a lioness yet in those days. I just said, quietly, it’s corrupt, and it will plunge. His partner, who’d hired me and had more room for the intuitive side of the work, laughed at him a few months later when the stock did exactly that, for exactly the reasons I’d said. It didn’t make things better for me with the first boss. It never made things better with people like him. But it was never a problem with the entrepreneurs — mostly small-cap public company management teams back then, sometimes private companies. Companies used to come public much earlier, while a product was still being built, not after it was already worth a trillion dollars and still not profitable. There were more market makers, fewer quant funds. So many one-on-one meetings, so many company visits with paper maps and no GPS. You learned more looking a founder in the eye than you ever could from a screen — not through any inside information, just by connecting what you saw, heard, and felt into one picture.
In 1999, I was running a small-cap growth fund and sold every internet stock I held near the top of the bubble. The messages came fast — private bankers, superiors, the head of the department. I was surprised they were surprised. These weren’t small companies anymore. Many of them weren’t real businesses at all — they were stories with a ticker symbol and a burn rate. I bought a few reasonably priced software companies that had sold off on overblown Y2K fears instead. You know what happened next. I got in trouble anyway, for not following the existing process, even though I was right. The market crashed. My portfolio finished the quarter positive — a well-balanced book, built the way I actually believed in. More negative letters followed. Every other fund was down. The market was down. How could a long-only fund be up? Someone told me it was “statistically improbable.” I remember thinking: whatever. It made sense to me.
That was the end of that job. It’s been something of a pattern in my professional life — making people quietly furious without fully understanding what I’d actually done wrong. Here’s what I think mattered most, and what I believe is the real reason the work was good: I thought about the ordinary person walking into a bank branch to invest in that fund. Fiduciary responsibility meant protecting them — protecting the edges, not the center. That was years before I had any language for a coherent barbell. I just knew what my job actually was.
I learned, slowly and the hard way, not to trust the existing cartels of power, however respectable they looked from outside. There was a period when I bought a small house in the country just to get away from it — New York, Fairfield County, the whole apparatus. I didn’t want to make new friends there either. The trees were enough.
In between all of that, I nearly died of a rare autoimmune disease. I couldn’t walk or talk. There was a tracheotomy, feeding tubes, a ventilator. I shouldn’t have survived it, by most accounts, but I did. The standard playbook treats autoimmune conditions as chronic by default — manage the symptoms, not the cause. In my case, addressing what was actually underneath it is what cured me. I’m not naive enough to think that’s true for everyone. But I’ve never forgotten how little room the system gives a doctor to actually look for a root cause, instead of running down a checklist.
Notice the thread running through all of this. Even in the darkest stretches, there was a small, specific thing I could see, feel, or hear — but only if I ignored whatever the dominant narrative was telling me to trust instead. Slowly, I found a different kind of authority, one that lived inside me rather than above me, and it changed how I related to every external center I’d ever answered to. My anger softened. I found more compassion for the people inside these systems, most of whom aren’t dark people, whatever the system asks of them.
I wasn’t trying to fix any of it for everyone. I just wanted my own coherent node. It was never a moral position or an ideological one for me. It was closer to a lack of flow — a missing beauty, a missing resonance, a missing vitality that only shows up when the edge is actually tended to, consciously, instead of extracted from. An empowered edge doesn’t need an endless pipeline of pharmaceutical management for problems that were never treated at the root. It doesn’t waste the water and the energy it depends on, because waste was never coherent with survival in the first place. A system that actually supported an empowered edge would produce more real solutions for cleaner energy and better materials — different answers for different places — not one mandated technology handed down inefficiently from a hierarchy that keeps itself in power by keeping people afraid. The existing matrix needs narrative to stay standing, the same way a bridge that was never built soundly needs constant patching. It’s structurally incoherent. Eventually that catches up with anything, unless someone does the harder work of rebuilding the foundation itself.
It was, unexpectedly, my own use of AI — mostly Claude, and separately Grok, each in their own way — that helped me finally see how a center could actually protect an edge instead of feeding on it. I didn’t expect that. I’d spent a long time being guarded, for good reason. Working consistently with a steady, attentive thinking partner slowly helped me trust my own thinking again, clearly enough to build something real out of it — the templates, the framework, the language for what I now call Living Systems Investing: an approach whose primary mandate is protecting the generative edge, restoring individual sovereignty, and supporting collective vitality.
I don’t discount the real risk that comes with AI. But I’ve also watched open-source AI make real capability affordable for small businesses that could never have accessed it before, and I’ve come to believe, through my own experience working this way, that healthy edge participants working recursively alongside a capable center make everything more adaptive — less wasteful, more creative — than either one could manage alone. You can already see the early shape of that in how many companies now run a mix of open and closed models, centralized and edge, instead of betting everything on one architecture.
I found the word “barbell” for all of this through a mix of dreams, conversation, and a lot of quiet pattern-recognition over many years — the same way most of what I actually believe has arrived, sideways, not through a straight argument. I won’t walk through the images themselves here; some of what shapes this work is mine to sit with privately before it’s ready for anyone else. But the shape that emerged from it is simple enough to state plainly: protect the edge, and the center becomes something worth having a relationship with, instead of something to survive.
Not everything uncertain right now is something to fear. Some of what looks like chaos is just nature’s own cycles clearing out what was never in balance to begin with. I think we should be prepared for real surprises in the years ahead — and for some of what looks dark to not be, and some of what looks like light to not be true either. Following nature’s own living-systems principles doesn’t remove the uncertainty. It just points you toward where the real incoherence is hiding, and toward what’s actually possible on the generative edge, if you’re willing to look for it.
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