Getting Extracted

The ecology of friendship

I’m just emerging from a professional break up - 6 weeks of intense disagreement with a co-founder.

I’d worked on this project for 7 months, loved what we created but couldn’t convey the importance of shared decision-making to my partner at a point at which we were ready to scale. He was an old friend and creative mentor; one of the few people who gets my obscure film references and understands why some people are insufferable and others, geniuses.

Being both a colleague and friend is what made it so difficult. People say “it’s just business” but I’ve never understood that mentality. Business decisions pay for friends’ kids’ schools. I don’t have two modes and a clear wall between them.

To be clear, I’ve worked with many rich dunces and have friends in whom I wouldn’t invest a dollar. The line is grey I feel best when I know my coworkers’ children’s names.

This person didn’t know mine. Maybe just a coincidence.

Maybe I’m finally growing up and learning to handle dissent and negotiation. The struggle reminds me of the old joke about why academic debates are so heated; “Because there’s so little at stake”.

We self-destructed before the first dollar came in.

One particular thing struck me as we were descending into permanent discord, reaching a point where I finally realized what I was struggling with about him was a permanent feature, not a bug.

By the time you’re talking on the phone, explaining who did what to whom with references to “The scorpion and the frog”, it’s long over. Yes, he may have been acting out of his nature not malice but the fact is I crossed a line and realized that even if he conceded to my points, I could never work with him again.

Maybe the wisest Yiddish saying is “How it begins is how it ends”. It’s usually applied to marriages but it applies to business relationships too. If your wife confesses overspending on your wedding night, expect to pay for vacation houses you never discussed. And if your partner sees the business as his art, if he never concedes, budges or apologizes, it’s over, even before it starts.

I imagine you’re like me and when you hear someone describe a firing, resignation or any professional loss and you think to yourself “I wonder what he did?” and “I’m sure he was wrong and is now whining”.

This wasn’t one of those but it doesn’t really matter. At this point I can talk about it in the past tense and also know that I contributed immensely to a person I believed in.

As for particulars of the project, I’ll be precisely vague. It grew from a book which itself came from a decades-old film which came from a virtual world and played on TV for a few weeks before being shipped out to Youtube.

None of that matters. What matters is the magic trick we were trying to pull off - taking a character made of AI and using him to deliver a wake up call to humanity, real people living on a planet growing hotter by the day due to their carelessness and consumption.

I worked on it with passion and devised a way to tell a story about changing our ways, through video to an audience that could then claim their spot on a map and, using software and tools we supplied, roll up their sleeves, shoulder to shoulder and begin the process of Restoration.

A real “Save Yourself, Save the World” experience for the highest stakes imaginable.

The bad guy in the universe we created was something I never really considered before. Now that I understand it, I see it everywhere.

Extraction.

In its most basic form, extraction refers to the process of removing value from something without making any replenishment. Oil and gas exploration is extraction. Gold mining. Also, technically, pressing almonds for essence to use in baking.

Extraction is delicate - it’s our greatest skill and most dire threat. Humans evolved because we cooked meat and tubers enough to develop bigger brains. Extraction became our birthright and poisoned chalice.

We extracted human labor with slavery and then the cotton gin, steam power and gas, each proclaimed as an advance, each extracting more efficiently. AI may be our greatest extractive act yet.

Interpersonal extraction is common though we often miss it. I once met with an entrepreneur who said to me “I just try to get more out of conversations than I put in”. I’ve never forgotten that philosophy, shared honestly and un-self-consciously.

I don’t see him anymore.

My friend’s career has been a war on the forces of extraction yet he did just that to me. My ideas, introductions, good will and designs, all extracted without a moment of self-knowledge at the irony.

I’m not bitter. I’ve learned many lessons.

Extraction is human and I don’t think he did any of it on purpose.

If I had to bet, he had a vision he was compelled to build and I was useful to that. I wrangled the various pieces into something practical and coherent. Somewhere in the struggle of ideas I couldn’t get behind, he probably decided it would be easier to shift course, minimize my objections and keep it up till I resigned.

It was a set piece in Extraction. Two friends, one baby, no compromise. I blame him for the discord but in the end, I performed the final extraction myself.

On this side of it, I feel much better. Relaxed, comfortable with my integrity, gently tending my slow-fading anger and resentment.

To get through these things, divorces and job losses, we say many helpful and also untrue things. “I’ll never talk to him again” or “I hope she gets what she deserves”.

At the end of the tunnel, the light comes from a harder truth. I love my friend, don’t understand his mind and hope I can talk to him again without having to compromise what I believe.

There’s a word for that too, a gentler, more natural one.

Restoration.

In environmental terms, restoration means reducing carbon-emissions, unclogging streams and tending the land responsibly.

Between people, it’s harder and takes time. Do I hope it unfolds for us in the unknown distance of the future?

YES.

We will need perspective, self-knowledge, grace a forgiveness.

These are the tools. They’re more difficult to master but far more powerful.