Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t know everything. I have biases, blind spots, and the occasional compulsion to overexplain historical metaphors. But I’m going to do my best to make this interesting…

Every month, I keep my inbox informally open to questions from Pro members. I try to answer as many as I can privately, but occasionally, a handful of them deserve more room to breathe. So I’m adding a new Pro benefit.

This post is for you - the Pro members who sent in thoughtful questions over the past few weeks. Thank you. If you want to contribute to next month’s Q&A, feel free to email me at [email protected].

Below are a few of the best questions I’ve received this month.

Teach them history. Not a trivia contest, I'm talking more about a sense of causality. Revolutions that ate their children, policies that turned into dogma, utopias that turned bureaucratic. Give them Gibbon, Arendt, Orwell, and de Tocqueville. Show them that ideas are dangerous, but their absence can be, too.

But more than anything: give them agency. Let them try things. Let them fail in recoverable ways. Praise the attempt more than the outcome. Cultivate what the Greeks called thumos - spiritedness, ambition, righteous indignation when the world is misaligned. Because we do not need more passive passengers on Spaceship Earth. We need engineers, poets, whistleblowers, reformers.

And maybe - tell them that they're not here to optimize their brand. They're here to do work that makes everything around us slightly less fragile than it was yesterday.