First, I want to provide a little context. When Pew asked Americans whether the public understands the problems faced by people in the military, 71% said no. Most of us have little or no idea. (84% of post-9/11 veterans said the same.) That survey is from years ago. I’d love to tell you the gap has closed in the fifteen years since. I don’t think it has.

The introduction that changed everything

I spent 20 years in the Army. Then I took off the uniform and co-founded RideScout. Every veteran I know who made that jump well can name the person who said “you two should talk.” A person who knew a person. It’s the power of people.

That’s the whole game. And it’s the part to many leave to luck.

Most communities has every piece of the puzzle

For instance, here in Central Texas we have tens of thousands of veterans, from Fort Hood to Round Rock to downtown Austin all the way to San Anotonio. We have employers who want to hire them, universities that want to teach them, founders who want to partner with them, and nonprofits and VSOs doing heroic work every single day.

And too often, every one of them is working its own piece of the problem alone. Two great groups book a breakfast on the same Saturday morning and split the room. A veteran who needs a mentor never hears about the meetup three miles away.

We don’t lack talent.
We don’t lack opportunity.
We lack connectivity and coordination.

What Leading2Win actually does

Leading2Win is a Texas nonprofit built to connect those pieces. We don’t provide a product or service that competes with anyone. We bring the organizations already doing the work into the same room, amplify them, and open doors across three lanes: education, employment and entrepreneurship.

Our philosophy fits on a napkin.

Connection creates collaboration. Collaboration builds momentum.

Every month we host a free Military Connected Mentorship Meetup in Austin, where service members, veterans, military spouses, employers and civilian allies sit at the same table and learn from each other. Every year we bring it all together at our summit. In September we held the fourth one, and it ran four days: a reception for Gold Star families at Camp Mabry, the main summit on September 11th at STATION Austin.

Why this belongs in US Tomorrow

If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you know I keep coming back to one idea. Our country has a lot of people trying to divide us. It splits in the space between people.

It’s the same logic behind everything I write here, whether the topic is workforce readiness, mentoring the next generation, or making sure talent and opportunity actually meet. The sociologist Mark Granovetter showed decades ago that most people find their next job through weak ties, the acquaintance of an acquaintance. Not their best friend. The friend of a friend. The military-civilian gap is a weak-ties problem. A transitioning soldier at Fort Hood and a hiring manager in Austin are about an hour apart on I-35. Some days they might as well be in different countries.

A more competitive Texas depends on getting more people into the right rooms. And here’s the part that should keep all of us up at night. Every young person deciding whether to serve is watching how we treat our veterans who already did. If we want the next generation of American leadership to raise their hand, the ones who came home need to land well.

Three ways you can help

1. Make one introduction. Go ahead and thank a veteran today. Then do the part that takes five minutes. Pick one veteran or military spouse you know who’s looking for a next step, and introduce them to one person in your network who could open a door. One email. Two names. “You two should talk.” It’s really that easy.

2. Join the Leading2Win newsletter. Sign up on our Leading2Win website (after 10 seconds on the page we pop-up a sign up). It’s the best way to hear about the monthly meetup, the summit, and the opportunities that cross our desk. While you’re there, check out the Mil-Vet community calendar.

3. If you run an organization, put us on your list. Add calendar@leading2win.org to your newsletter or event distribution list. Everything helpful to the mil-vet community that lands there goes on that public calendar, so we can amplify your events, help everyone avoid stepping on each other’s dates, and make it easier for people to find what’s happening. Got a single event? Suggest it here. The more we share our calendars with each other, the stronger the whole community gets.

If you’re somewhere other than Central Texas, steal the idea. Every community near a base has the same pieces sitting in the same silos.

Connection creates collaboration. Collaboration builds momentum. That’s the work, and not just on Veterans Day. Every day.

Hit reply. I read every one.

Take care,
Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us
Co-Founder, Leading2Win

P.S. If you make an introduction because of this note, hit reply and tell me who. Those are my favorite emails to get.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

If you did not vote for Gina, don’t be afraid, mad or scared. Give her a chance.

Joseph

Co-Founder of USTomorrow

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 32 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

Republicans— Dump Trump.

That’s it. As always, let me know what you think. I read every response.

Joseph

Joseph Kopser

Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 32 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

I could be wrong. That’s the deal with predictions. But I’d rather be on the record than on the fence.

Here’s the short version: I think we’re looking at a perfect storm. Partly literal.

A perfect storm, literally.

Start with the variable no campaign can control: the weather.

Forecasts show a strong front moving across Texas, with the highest probability of storms in the ten-day window falling on Election Day itself. Cooler temperatures, rain, and a sharp swing. That sets up a straightforward stacking of conditions that several observers have noted.

Early-voting messaging this cycle has repeatedly questioned the reliability of mail and early ballots. The practical effect, according to those tracking the numbers, is that a meaningful share of older, more traditional Republican voters appear to have held back for Election Day in-person voting. At the same time, a number of counties have reduced the number of polling locations. Analysts differ on the intent, but the operational result is the same: fewer sites, longer potential lines, and weather that can further slow movement.

Put those three factors together—reduced polling capacity, lines, and weather—and the turnout that materializes on the day is likely to be disproportionately composed of the most motivated voters. The open question the data raise is which side’s remaining voters are more willing to stand in those conditions.

Derek Ryan, the Republican pollster whose early-vote reports are widely treated as one the clearest running scorecard in Texas, has the early numbers running close to the 2018 pace (the Beto–Cruz year). He has indicated that total turnout could approach 10 million. That figure already reflects a large cohort that chose not to wait. Democratic operative Matt Angle has similar views.

Regardless of who wins, I hope the winners learn from what the voters really wanted and I hope the losers really think through why they lost. Worse case, the winners and lose blame the wrong circumstances for their loss. I wrote more about this last week in this piece about how we are one week out.

Four dynamics pulling different voters

What several Texas observers have highlighted as different this cycle is the simultaneous presence of four distinct draws:

James Talarico has been positioned as a moderate white candidate able to reach some of the Republicans who voted for Biden in 2020—voters who, by multiple accounts, respond poorly to high-volume messaging.

Gina Hinojosa, the Austin-area state representative, has emphasized her Valley roots and Hispanic heritage. Analysts following Latino shifts have noted the possibility she pulls back a portion of the voters who moved toward Trump in 2024.

Bobby Pulido, the Tejano star, is on the ballot in the 15th Congressional District against Monica De La Cruz. In a seat Trump carried by 18 points, the race is now competitive in part because Pulido is bringing out voters who have not participated before.

Jasmine Crockett has been actively working to turn out Black voters in DFW and Houston for down-ballot races. Texas political observers have remarked that it is unusual to see all four of these efforts operating at the same time.

If not this time, next time

Jeremy Wallace at the Texas Take noted on his podcast a September post by Bo French (the Republican nominee for Railroad Commissioner). French shared a photo of UT students celebrating a win over Ohio State and objected that the crowd did not look like the Texas he preferred—too many dark-skinned students, not enough white ones. John Cornyn publicly pushed back.

The demographic baseline is straightforward. Of the Texas public high-school graduates in the class of 2024, roughly 26 percent were white. Texas has rewritten its identity multiple times; the Six Flags sequence (Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic, the Confederacy, the United States) is the historical record of that. Population and political composition continue to change. That is descriptive, not speculative.

Scenario: what a sweep would actually change

A number of analysts have sketched what a Democratic sweep would mean in practice, particularly in Austin. The following is a synthesis of those points rather than a forecast.

Governor Gina Hinojosa would make roughly 1,500 appointments over a four-year term—boards, commissions, regents, task forces. For a generation those seats have come from one political network. A new governor would fill them from a wider range of the state (the Valley, West Texas, people who have not previously been asked). That alone would reshape administrative continuity for the next decade regardless of the eventual margin.

Lieutenant Governor Vikki Goodwin would preside over a Senate that still holds a Republican majority. The Senate writes its own rules at the start of each session, including the powers of the presiding officer. The resulting arrangement would be either gridlock or the first sustained bipartisan Senate in recent memory—most likely elements of both, especially in the opening weeks of January.

The seat analysts are already watching: Senate District 14

If Sarah Eckhardt wins the Comptroller race, she would resign her Senate District 14 seat (to which she was re-elected in 2024). The vacancy would fall mid-term and out of cycle, triggering a special election.

The 2020 precedent is clear. When Kirk Watson left the same seat, the special election had no primary; everyone ran on one ballot. It more closely resembled an Austin mayor’s race than a standard partisan contest with polarizing primaries, with the difference that party labels still appear next to names. Democrats, Republicans, and independents share the ballot; every voter in the district chooses from the full field.

In 2020, Sarah (then Travis County Judge) and Eddie Rodriguez (the longtime state representative covering a large share of Austin) both ran as Democrats with high name ID. Neither reached 50 percent. Eddie conceded rather than proceed to a runoff, and Sarah became the State Senator.

Timing adds a further variable. The governor calls the special. A Comptroller is sworn in on January 1; a new governor is sworn in later in January. The date of resignation therefore determines which governor sets the election calendar.

Why the center is the relevant variable

Austin’s last three mayors supply the clearest recent pattern: Lee Leffingwell (right of most of the council), Steve Adler (centered relative to more progressive council members running), and Kirk Watson (2022). Each received measurable support from centrists and moderate Republicans who voted for a Democrat because they preferred a more balanced mayor. Will that apply to the State Senate special election to represent Austin?

In a one-ballot special for SD-14, independents and Republicans can vote for the candidate closest to their preferences. In a district this blue, that historically favors the Democrat who presents as a problem-solver rather than a national party politics.

Names that have been mentioned in local discussions include:

- Eddie Rodriguez (a second run could carry the goodwill from 2020),

- Andy Brown (the successor to Sarah Eckhardt as the Travis County Judge),

- Donna Howard (a very popular current State House Representative),

- Steve Adler (the most recent mayor of Austin),

- Celia Israel (former state representative who ran a competitive mayor’s race in 2022),

- An Austin-area House member looking to move up on a calendar that aligns with the vacancy,

- A centrist or business-oriented independent, or even a moderate Republican, who sees the single-ballot format as the clearest opening available in Travis County.

Those are the names currently circulating among people who follow Austin politics closely. Who else is missing, who runs, and who outperforms expectations are open questions.

The numbers and the expert reads are what they are. Weather, early-vote patterns, polling-place capacity, and the four simultaneous turnout efforts are the variables in front of us. The rest is what the data and the people tracking it are showing.

My prediction…. if lines are over an hour in most polling states at 5 pm in Texas, it will be a Talarico will win and the majority of state wide races will flip from Red to Blue. I think LtGov Patrick will lose before Gov Abbot does.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser

Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

P.S. However you vote tomorrow, vote. Bring an umbrella. And if you see someone who has been in line a long time, bring them a coffee. Country over party.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

So I can’t think of a better metaphor than what just happened to the Eisenhower globe.

Back in February, Secretary Hegseth’s team decided the globe should be moved into his office. The Army’s historians, the people who actually know how to move a priceless artifact, were furloughed during the shutdown. So rather than wait for the experts, his staff tried to do it themselves. They dropped it (no, I’m not making this up). It now has a gash near Antarctica, and the sphere came loose from the mount that lets it turn. We only found out this month, when The Washington Post got the photos.

That one hurts me personally. When I worked for GEN George Casey, he was the Army Chief of Staff and that globe sat in his office. I used to bring friends in just to see it. You could still see pen marks on it from when Eisenhower was talking through the future of World War II. An amazing piece of American history.

Imagine that. Consulting the experts before you break something yourself.

That being said, we’re one week out, and there are important lessons to learn no matter how it turns out.

The middle is showing up

We’re one week from a consequential midterm, heading into the last two years of this administration. I don’t have a crystal ball. What I do know is that if we’re truly going to move forward as a country, both parties need to recognize that their rhetoric has had its good days and its bad days. And both are arriving at the same intersection.

It’s not only the intersection of the midterms and the second Trump administration. It’s an intersection of a lot of different groups. The Tea Party. The Bernie Bros. The MAGA faithful. The Democratic Socialists of America. Whatever labels you want to put on them.

But the group that hasn’t received nearly enough attention, and the one that will carry the day next week, is the people in the center. The hardworking men and women of this country who, at every age and every stage of life, are often disaffected or flat out disgusted by politics. Plenty of them stopped showing up because they didn’t think their vote could make a difference.

This year, in a lot of places, they’ve hit a level of frustration that’s bringing them back to the polls. Here in Texas we’re seeing record turnout in the early vote (Dallas, Harris and Travis counties all set first-day records). Amy and I stood in a line that was over 30 minutes. Worth every one of them.

The winners need to remember why they won

But it’ll all be for nothing if, coming out of next Tuesday, the winners forget why they won and the losers don’t appreciate why they lost.

Take one example. The Senate race here in Texas between James Talarico and Ken Paxton.

If Talarico wins, it’ll be in large part because he didn’t just appeal to the Democratic base. He made routine, overt gestures to the middle, even talking about looking forward to working with Republican Senator Ted Cruz. He’s deeply centered in his faith. And he ran on jobs, education and our kids’ future.

If Paxton loses, I believe it’s time for Republicans to realize that thirty years of a monopoly on Texas politics has led to a level of corruption, waste, fraud and abuse that Texans themselves, regardless of party, aren’t interested in. That’s exactly what happened the last time one party held a monopoly here. Democrats ran Texas for decades with no real opposition, and they too drifted off the center and toward corruption and insider dealing.

What worries me most? If Paxton does win, I’m worried Republicans won’t use the near death experience to learn that most people actually live in the center, and they need to speak to their needs. We’ve seen this movie. In 2018 Beto came within three points of Ted Cruz, and Republicans lost a dozen seats in the Texas House. The 2019 Legislature that followed was called one of the most productive and civil in recent memory. I believe that’s because Republicans learned from their near death experience and moved closer to where Texans actually are.

The losers need to appreciate why they lost

I’m equally worried that if Democrats win, they’ll mistakenly read it as a call for the far left to rise up. That the Democratic Socialists will think it was their energy and enthusiasm that did it. And riding those coattails, they’ll push for a resurgence of what the right calls woke politics or identity politics. I worry Democrats won’t remember why they lost so much power after the eight years of the Obama administration (nearly 1,000 state legislative seats, for those keeping score).

Why I’m optimistic anyway

A lot of my friends are bracing for the worst right now. Some of them have already written the post-mortem. I get it.

But I’m optimistic. Optimistic that we’re moving back toward the center of our politics. Optimistic that people who for too many years turned a blind eye to the dereliction of duty, the brazen corruption and the disregard for the everyday voter are done looking away. Those days might be numbered.

If this country ends up closer to 50/50, that’s cause for celebration. Rather than red and blue, maybe we realize we’re something far more purple. And maybe both sides sit down and think about why that is.

2026 might be a wonderful turning point in our nation’s history. One where we leave politics at the water’s edge. Where we stand united in support of our allies. Where we look out for all, even those without a voice.

At the end of the day we have far more in common than what separates us. We’re all focused on looking out for our kids. A great education that leads to a great job. A job that’s meaningful and pays the bills. And a brighter tomorrow for all.

So vote. Bring someone with you. Country over party.

Hit reply. I read every one.

Take care,
Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

P.S. Early voting in Texas runs through this Friday, October 30. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

The midterms are less than three weeks away, and there’s an undercurrent the polls may not be fully capturing. The war in Iran has dragged on since late February. Gas prices jumped 9.1 percent in September alone, and inflation climbed to 3.7 percent in the last major price report before the election.

Last week the President cut a deal with Putin to ease sanctions on Russian diesel, hoping to bring fuel prices down before November 3. Yes, Russia.

I wrote this summer about paying over $100 to fill my tank. It hasn’t gotten much better.

When half of us have almost nothing to show on paper for a lifetime of work, it gets hard to believe the institutions are working for you. So people tune out. Or they get angry. I see plenty of both.

So what do we do about it?

We do more to reduce the division, and we get more people to vote.

Only through voting will elected officials be more responsive. That’s not cynical, it’s just how the system works. Officials pay attention to the people who show up. When whole parts of the country stay home, they stop getting represented (and then they get more frustrated, and stay home again).

But people don’t vote in a system they don’t understand. Only through better civic education and awareness will more people be likely to vote. That’s where this starts.

I can still sing the jingle

As a child of the ‘70s and ‘80s, I grew up watching Schoolhouse Rock between Saturday morning cartoons. That’s how a lot of my generation learned how government was supposed to work. Three minutes at a time.

“I’m just a bill. Yes, I’m only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.”

I can still sing it today. (Go ahead and try getting it out of your head now.)

The new Schoolhouse Rock

Luckily, there’s a new effort to bring back engaging civics education in short videos. A good friend and USTomorrow supporter shared his work with me this week on NutShell Videos. It’s brand new, they’ve made really effective, high-end videos that give a compelling overview of what’s going on. I’d encourage you to watch them, starting with the Wealth Distribution video. And very non-political, presenting the facts as the law currently allows it.

Wealth Distribution (3 minutes). Uncle Sam takes the field at “Stadium USA” next to a pile of 100 gold bars representing everything of value in America. Homes, cars, boats, stocks, businesses. Then he hands them out. The top 1 percent gets 31 bars. The next 9 percent gets 36. The next 40 percent gets 31. And the bottom half of the country gets two. The announcer looks around for a ref to throw a flag, and Uncle Sam points out that none of it is against the rules. The closing point is the one that stuck with me: this isn’t just about money, it’s about who gets the power to make the choices that shape our future.

Voting: It’s More Than Picking a President (4 minutes). Two young people notice an election happening in a year with no presidential race and ask what anyone could possibly be voting for. A referee turned “Policy Pete” walks them through it. Congress makes federal law and decides how federal tax money gets spent. The state sets the big rules for schools, highways and healthcare. Local officials handle property taxes, school boards and the pothole that almost ate somebody’s bike. Sometimes you vote on a policy instead of a person. It even explains what a midterm is (no pop quiz). And it lands on this: not voting is a decision too, because you’re leaving your future up to someone else.

Election Races: Follow the Money (5 minutes). An election as a car race. Red promises a lot of winning. Blue promises a lot of giving. Yellow shows up with an actual plan to fix unsafe bridges without growing the deficit, and $35 worth of fuel. Sponsors put their names on the cars likely to win, and one donor funds both of them because “I’m not betting on who wins. I’m investing in whoever does.” Then comes dark money, which you can see in the race even when you can’t see who supplied it. Perfectly legal. The most qualified driver falls behind because qualifications don’t buy ads. The takeaway is simple. Money doesn’t decide elections, voters do. So look past the paint and find out who’s paying for the fuel.

One more for your queue

Daniel Lubetzky (founder of KIND Snacks, and you may know him from Shark Tank) has a new weekly podcast called Build or Break, out of his Builders Movement. He talks with people from business, sports, entertainment and politics about why they took the risk and how they kept going when things started to break. His whole thing for years has been more builders and less us-versus-them, which is exactly what we need right now.

The episode with Matthew McConaughey is really good. He took 20 years of his worst reviews out to the desert and read them in one weekend. And they get into America’s 250th year, too. The entire podcast is really good.

Go vote

Election Day is November 3. Watch the videos. Send them to someone who’s thinking about sitting this one out. Then vote all the way down the ballot, because the potholes and the school boards are on there too.

You might recall my last newsletter on the importance of a free press and the controversy over barring CNN from the White House. Well, the press room discussion continues. The President’s pick for press secretary was fired after just five days on the job. (The White House says she’s “transitioning.”)

Hit reply and let me know what you’re seeing out there. I read every one.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

Weak sauce at the Pentagon

One of our readers, Dan B., sent me a story I’d missed (thank you, Dan). Max Lederer joined Stars and Stripes in 1992 and had been its publisher since 2007. In August the Pentagon fired him.

The reason given was “insubordination.” According to the lawsuit he has since filed, he’d refused an order to fire his editor in chief and a reporter after they talked to CBS News about the paper’s independence. That came a few months after the Pentagon decided everything the paper publishes has to be consistent with “good order and discipline.”

I get the counterargument. Stars and Stripes is not the New York Times. About half its budget is taxpayer money, the staff are government employees, and the audience is in uniform. “Good order and discipline” isn’t a slogan. It is how a force stays a force. A paper that reads to commanders like an opposition research shop will eventually get treated like one. That still doesn’t get you to firing the publisher for refusing to fire an editor and a reporter over a CBS interview about independence. The mission of the paper, for decades, has been to tell service members what is actually happening, including when it is uncomfortable. Lederer isn’t a blogger. He is a former JAG who deployed for Desert Storm and came home with a Bronze Star. If the standard is now “consistent with good order and discipline” as defined by the people being covered, you no longer have a newspaper. You have a public-affairs product with a familiar masthead. It’s weak sauce.

I spent 20 years as a Soldier. The oath we took was to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the very first amendment to that Constitution protects free speech and a free press. You can’t defend the whole document and skip the first part.

Late last month Editor & Publisher named him its News Executive of the Year. Good for them.

There is also a workforce point here that gets lost in the press fight. We already struggle to recruit and keep the people we need. Young Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines compare notes. If the paper written for them starts reading like it cannot print a hard story, they don’t become “more disciplined.” They become more cynical, and they get their news somewhere else. A free press inside the force is not a luxury. It is part of how you keep a professional military instead of a brittle one. That is the same problem we talk about everywhere else: trust the institution, or watch people walk.

Even Fox News turned off the cameras

It’s been quite a month for the press. In September the President announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House because he didn’t like the coverage they were giving him. Then the administration pulled CNN from its turn in the TV pool (the shared crew that films the President for everybody).

So the other networks shut the pool down. ABC, CBS, NBC. And Fox News.

I was heartened to see Fox standing there with the rest of them. Their joint statement was two sentences long: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

That is the rare case where rivals with very different audiences agreed on a rule instead of a team. The rule is the part worth keeping: access is not a reward for favorable coverage. If we only defend that rule when our side is holding the microphone, it will not survive the next administration either.

For a stretch, the President of the United States went without the network pool cameras. It’s rather ironic. It’s no secret that he lashes out at the press. But without the press, without that microphone, much of his message would never get amplified to the general public at all.

A federal judge has put the ban on hold for now, and a longer ruling is due next week. We’ll see.

Dinner with David French

And then there was the Texas Tribune Festival dinner here in Austin, where David French of The New York Times was on stage with Matthew Watkins, the Tribune’s editor in chief.

I didn’t realize how much the two of us have in common. He grew up in Georgetown, Kentucky, just up the road from where I grew up in Lexington. He’s a former Republican (so am I). He served in the Army and deployed to Iraq with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the same regiment I served in as a young officer. My own 14 months in Iraq were up north around Mosul in the same area he served in as well. I never realized all the overlap.

So his story hit me harder than I expected.

He said the party of his childhood has moved so far that it feels, to him, like a cult of personality. Then he went deeper. His evangelical roots have been shaken too, because the church pushed him away for speaking out against the President.

I do not think everyone who stayed is in a cult, and I do not think everyone who left is a hero. A lot of people I served with still vote Republican because of taxes, borders, schools, or a simple distrust of the other party. They are not auditioning for a personality. What French described is what happens when a party and a church make disagreement on one man the price of belonging. That is a real loss. It is also not the same thing as saying the whole coalition is gone.

That was moving to hear him describe that shift he experienced. It reminded me of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta, a book I wrote about here last year. Alberta (a pastor’s son himself) shows how the evangelical movement had been drifting away from its Christ-centered message for years. In its near-unison support of Donald Trump’s antics, too much of it has jumped the tracks. (You can reread the piece below)

Somebody has to shine the light

I’ll fully admit that an increasingly large number of media outlets are biased and have an agenda. I see it too. The answer is not fewer reporters with access. It is more outlets that will print the inconvenient fact and let you decide.

If you are not already supporting local reporting, start there. In Austin that includes KUT, KLRU and The Texas Tribune. Where you live, it is whoever still shows up to the school board, the courthouse, and the military post entrance. A free press is not a partisan actor. It is a constitutional counterweight.

I wrote that after a dinner with Bob Woodward last fall. I believe it more today, including when the coverage annoys me.

Who is doing that work where you live, and where do you think they are getting it wrong? Hit reply. I read every one.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

On a prep call for an interview recently, someone asked me a simple question. What would I most like to talk about? Leadership lessons? Handling tech change? The future of work?

All three, I told her. They’re turning into the same conversation.

The day before, I’d been on the phone with an aspiring entrepreneur who was connected to me. (By the way, that’s one of my favorite things to do. So many people helped me in the early days of RideScout, and paying it forward is not only fun but keeps me on my toes in touch with what all the cool kids are building). She has a health and wellness idea and wants to build an app around it, so she was asking me the questions founders have been asking me for years. How do I raise the money? Where do I find a CTO?

I told her to go to ChatGPT or Replit and type in everything she’d just described to me. She had already written the “requirements” document. She just didn’t realize it. The app would be up in hours (maybe minutes), and she could be testing it tomorrow.

Invention is limitless. That’s how my friend Chris Treadaway puts it, and I credit him with coining the phrase for this new era of AI. If you’re not following Chris, you should be. He’s doing amazing work in technology and the ethics of AI, so much so that he was invited by the Pope’s team to be part of a conference on artificial intelligence in Rome.

Mrs. Grevious would have loved this part

My sixth-grade teacher at Maxwell Elementary in Lexington, Mrs. Audrey Grevious, was a civil rights icon. She was one of those young women who chained herself to a lunch counter to demand service. And her big lesson for a room full of skinny little 12-year-olds was simple—

I’ve carried that my whole life.

But for most of my life, “go fix it” came with a price tag. You needed capital, a technical co-founder, and a couple of years of nights and weekends. I still remember some of the worst hotels I ever stayed in while building RideScout, because we didn’t have the money for a decent one. (And the summer night on a friend’s couch in Houston with no air conditioning, when I finally gave up and drove home to Austin.)

The great news about AI and emerging technology is that that barrier is falling fast. I’ve been saying for over 25 years that “people will be what they can see” and now they can build what they can see, too.

But who wants a left-handed football bat?

If anyone can build anything, building stops being the hard part. I could design a left-handed football bat this afternoon. It makes no sense, nobody wants one, and the machine will happily help me build it anyway.

So the question moves from “can I build it?” to “does anyone want it or need it?” That was always the real question in a startup (ask anybody who has pitched me with their ideas). AI just takes away the excuse for not asking it first.

And that’s the wonderful part. People can leave jobs they’ve outgrown. They can start side hustles. They can try a second act for the cost of a weekend instead of a second mortgage.

Now, a word of caution. I fully recognize that a lot of people have been taught to be afraid of AI. The swirl of the media, and the people who seek to divide us, are making it worse. And on top of that is the outrage over the dangers of data centers. Some of those dangers are real. Some are imaginary.

I wrote about this back in the spring, when I called data centers the new fracking. If you go back and reread it, I think it frames the current political debate pretty well.

And the debate has gotten strange. On one side of your split screen, the Replublican Governor of Texas is calling for a moratorium on new data centers. On the other side, the President of the United States is trying to rebrand artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence” so we can push faster on the build-out of data centers and everything that comes with them.

Somewhere in the middle is probably the right answer.

If invention is limitless, so is knowledge

Now follow that one more step. If invention is limitless, so is knowledge, and so is information. I can find any document, read any book, get the gist of any podcast ever made. I can listen to Shakespeare in 30 seconds (not that I’d recommend it).

So what’s the role of the person?

Picture a hiring manager with five engineers in the final round, every one of them using the same AI tools. Why wouldn’t she hire the one who is the most interesting, the most personable, the most delightful to be around?

Gone are the days when you had to hire the jerk because that jerk was so talented and came with a resume that made everyone say, oh my gosh. And on the flip side, gone is the cover for the candidate who is just dull. Not a jerk. Just offers nothing to the team. Not curious, not interested, going through the motions.

I wrote this summer that the age of AI won’t be good for the dull jerks of the world.

I believe it more now than I did in July.

The soft skills are about to become the required skills

What we learned in kindergarten is coming back in style. Be nice to people. Share. Take your nap. We spent decades calling those soft skills, like they were electives. I hope we rebrand them soon, because they’re about to become the required ones.

Your reputation is going to precede you into everything you do. And it’s going to do it instantly.

Right now I’m lucky. I have Monica, my teammate (yes, a real human). She reads ahead on a lot of meeting requests, and often I’ll ask her to help me figure out whether a request coming in is from a real person or just a bot. Yes, this is a real company. Yes, this is a human. Yes, you ought to take this meeting. Not everybody has a Monica. I get that.

Soon everybody will have something like her. It’ll tell you in a second whether the person reaching out is a human. Then it’ll scan every public-facing feed that person has ever posted to and decide whether they’re kind or whether they treat people poorly. “That guy is mean. You don’t need this call.”

That’s the “Trust Wall” I described at the Austin Technology Council in June, seen from the other side. A warm introduction gets you over the wall. Your reputation decides whether anyone wants you there once you land.

And speaking of the Austin Technology Council. If you’re in the area, go to their breakfasts when you can. If you’re not, find the equivalent in your town, a technology council that is hosting real conversations without the emotion and the political division.

At yesterday’s breakfast, Brooke Hovey of KUNGFU.AI, a local AI company, said that in the era of AI and its onslaught, she appreciates the human side even more.

So do I. In fact, I wrote on LinkedIn this week that large platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and others, which make money by letting people send unsolicited spam and outreach, ought to share some of that revenue with the people being targeted. You can join in and add your thoughts to that conversation here.

So what do you do about it?

People ask me for practical takeaways, so here are mine:

If you’re building something, start with who wants it. If it’s just for you, great. If you hope to make it a business, make sure folks really need it or want it. The building part is getting cheap. Finding the person who will actually use your left-handed football bat is not.

If you’re looking for work, be curious out loud. Your public trail is part of your resume now, whether you like it or not.

If you’re hiring, stop making excuses for the brilliant jerk. You have options you didn’t have five years ago.

It’s going to be a harsh world for the non-curious, dull jerks. But for anyone willing to see a problem and go fix it, there has never been a better time. Mrs. Grevious would have had a field day with this.

So let me ask you. What would you build if trying it cost you nothing but a weekend? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

It the first night of the fourth annual Leading2Win Summit, a reception for Gold Star families at the Texas Military Forces Museum, underwritten by JPMorgan Chase. Then Glorygrace Dickinson stood up to speak for the families.

She lost her husband, SSG Michael Dickinson on July 17th, 2006. She talked about the grief that came after, the people who carried her through it, and the work she still had to do herself. Then she said she had turned her grief into purpose. That stuck with me. Turning grief into purpose.

One of her many titles now is Survivor Outreach Services support coordinator. In practice that’s long-term case management for Army families after an active duty death. Benefits and counseling and financial help, a Vet Center when that’s the right call, a partnership with a behavioral health clinic or a church or a university when that’s the right call instead, and a card in the mail on the anniversaries nobody else remembers. Before that she spent four and a half years as a physical therapist assistant at Fort Sam Houston, putting Soldiers back together after surgeries and injuries. (She also went back for a human services degree while doing the survivor work. I don’t know when she found the time). Today she speaks out on the loss, but also serves as a role model for those who go through grief and find a new purpose. You can watch a brief video of her story from a USAA video here on Facebook.

We never get to choose when tragedy strikes, but we do get to choose how we react. Glorygrace is proof of that.

Turning grief into rocket fuel

Which brings me to my friend Brian Wynne, who titled his TEDx talk exactly that.

In 2017 Brian’s brother Drew died at 31. Drew had a cold brew coffee business in Charleston, and he was stripping the floors with a product you could buy at any hardware store. The fumes killed him. Methylene chloride.

The Wynne family went to Washington instead of waiting on somebody else’s timeline, and then they kept going back. The Environmental Protection Agency pulled the chemical off consumer shelves in 2019 and banned most of its remaining uses in 2024. Ask anybody who has tried to move a federal agency how long that normally takes. As I said in an interview with him this summer, “It literally took an act of Congress! And he did it!”

A brother’s death turned into a federal rule, and then into a foundation that pays for other people’s ideas. The Drew Wynne Foundation backs entrepreneurs and small businesses, and this year it sponsored the problem and solution workshop for nonprofits at our summit, with Johanna Wynne facilitating the room herself. Brian told that story at our monthly mentorship meetup in July, and his twenty minutes on a TEDx stage are worth yours: Turning Grief into Rocket Fuel.

“I help people quit jobs.”

That was the shirt. If you spent any time in Austin, you saw it.

In June we lost Joshua Baer in a plane crash outside Laredo. He was 50. He co-founded Capital Factory in 2009 and spent the next seventeen years making Austin a place where a founder with nothing could still get a meeting. Patrick Hitchins, who founded LPM Lab, told KUT about asking Josh what still excited him after all of it. Josh looked him dead in the eye. “I just love seeing these small scrappy companies and their founders fight and win, and that’s truly what gets me excited, Pat.”

The shirt was a funny saying that doubled as a mission statement. Quitting a job is the most frightening thing most people will ever do on purpose, and he spent a career making it survivable.

He did it too when the quitting wasn’t anybody’s choice. My favorite story, one I never knew until this summer. When COVID shut down the events business and forced layoffs, Josh personally worked his network on behalf of more than 60 people until they landed somewhere new. His shirt said he helped people quit jobs. In truth, Josh helped people FIND their jobs.

That work isn’t finished, and the need is louder now than it was in 2020. Employers have announced 529,914 job cuts through August, down 41% from last year, and artificial intelligence was named in 116,175 of them, about a fifth, the single most-cited reason of 2026. Whether or not the layoff ever comes, the fear is already in the building.

And it is that fear turned to grief that people have a chance to act on.

And some do, Americans filed a record 5.67 million applications to start a business last year, and 2026 is running about 13% ahead of that pace. (Applications, not open doors.) A lot of people have stopped waiting.

I continue to be inspired by people like Glorygrace. And Brian. And Josh. All those with us and those gone from us.

That’s the work we keep coming back to here at USTomorrow, and it’s why workforce development turns up in this newsletter as often as it does. At SWIFT (Space Workforce Incubator for Texas), which we helped co-found, it looks like a rocket lab in Austin where community college students build and test real hardware for an industry that can’t hire fast enough. At Leading2Win it looks like helping a veteran, a military spouse, or a Gold Star family member find the next chapter of a life they never planned on. Different rooms, same job Josh had. Help somebody find the next thing.

My friend Daniel Morgan sent me a line in June that I keep coming back to. We are not remembered by how we died, but by how we lived.

Life will never be fair. It will never be easy all the time either. When grief shows up, the question isn’t what we do in the moment it lands, because none of us gets a vote on that part. It’s what we choose to do after. Viktor Frankl, who lost his wife and both of his parents in Nazi concentration camps and then wrote the book on finding meaning anyway, said it this way: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

So I’ll ask you what I’ve been asking myself since Thursday night with Glorygrace’s remarks. What’s the one thing in front of you right now that you could fix yourself, instead of waiting for somebody else to get around to it?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one of them.

Take care,

Joseph

Co-Founder of USTomorrow

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

I am spending that day in Austin with close to four hundred people, and I would like you to be one of them. If you cannot make it, forward this to someone who should be there. Honestly, that second ask may be the more valuable one.

Why this year is different

Every generation gets a handful of days it can place itself inside. Where you were. Who you called. What you did next. For a lot of us that day is September 11, 2001, and the hard part about a turning point is that remembering it is a choice. It does not happen on its own. It gets handed down on purpose, or it does not get handed down at all. For perspective, 1966 was the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor for the Baby Boomers.

Twenty-five years is also the length of a career. It is long enough that the young men and women enlisting today were not born when the towers came down. Every one of them volunteered anyway.

That is the second thing worth sitting with. We have run an all-volunteer force through a quarter century of war, and the share of American families with someone in uniform keeps getting smaller. The military world and the civilian world used to overlap in the neighborhood, at church, at work. Now, increasingly, they do not touch at all. Neither side is wrong about the other. They just do not know each other anymore.

So next Friday we are going to spend a day fixing a piece of that.

The invitation

As CEO and co-founder of Leading To Win, it is my honor to invite you to Austin on Friday, September 11.

STATION Austin, 701 Brazos Street. It’s a multi-level event designed to remember 9/11 as well as honor the fallen by living a life of meaning. The Career and Resource Fair opens at 10:00 AM. The main program runs from noon to 6:00 PM.

More than twenty workshops and mentor sessions across nine tracks, and fifty organizations on the fair floor. Every one of them either hires from the military and veteran community or provides services to it. The reason for putting that many organizations under one roof is to bridge the gaps inside the military and veteran community, where a family that needs three organizations usually has to go find all three on its own. The bigger reason is to bridge the gap between the military and civilian worlds.

Topics include:

• Entrepreneurship and financing. From Battlefield to Boardroom, franchising for veteran owners, and where the capital actually is.

• Technology and innovation. AI, autonomy and the future of national defense. Cybersecurity certifications that lead to real jobs. Launching and scaling dual-use ventures.

• Workforce and career development. Navigating government careers, veteran workforce integration, and reskilling for the industries hiring right now.

• Health, wellness and resilience. Preventing burnout, veteran mental health, and a session called Closing the Empathy Gap aimed squarely at the divide I just described.

• Education and talent pipelines. SkillBridge, fellowships and internships, and using your GI Bill for more than school.

• Policy and advocacy. Texas as a defense innovation hub, veterans in policy and politics, and an honest conversation about the future of the VSOs.

• Networking and mentorship. Learning how to better lean on others to accomplish big ideas.

• Identity and service. Finding Your Tribe, for the part of transition nobody puts on a resume.

• Creative and storytelling. Tell Your Story, because the gap does not close until we can explain ourselves to each other.

We’re excited by the interest from others that led to all fifty tables on the fair floor being claimed, the fastest that has ever happened to us, and between those organizations there are nearly three thousand open jobs in the room on Friday.

Tickets are free for anyone currently serving, Guard and Reserve, veterans, DoD civilians, military spouses and Gold Star families. General admission is $15 for everyone else, and every sponsorship dollar comps another service member’s seat. Sponsorships are still open, and so is the waiting list for the fair floor.

Register at leading2win.org.

And then the ask I opened with, one more time. Who do you know who is in transition right now? Send them this. Somebody who walks in when the doors open at 10:00 AM can reach a dozen organizations before dinner.

Hit reply. I read every one.

For more on the event, check out my interview with Walt Maciborski on CBS Austin.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

P.S. Friday is the summit, and three community events surround it. Thursday the 10th is the Gold Star Families Reception at the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry. Saturday the 12th is the game-day tailgate with ROTC and student veterans. Sunday the 13th is the Travis Manion Foundation 9/11 Heroes Run at Lakeline Park in Cedar Park. Come for the day, or come for the weekend.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

Two weeks in the Mediterranean with Amy. It was great. I would like to say it was relaxing, but that’s not usually how I roll. I go hard into the sightseeing. When Amy takes some downtime, I go back out for the things that are only interesting to me (rooftop bars with a great view, military museums, etc…).

Regardless of where we travel, one of my favorite things is people-watching. That does not change whether I’m nerding out in an ancient ruin or watching the inner workings of a little shop from the sidewalk with a beer. I’m always trying to learn something new. And I’m fascinated by what makes people tick.

Today’s newsletter is about three people who have never met each other and are still running the same playbook.

Three thousand feet up a mountain in Montenegro

We came into the port of Bar (yes, that is the city’s name) on a Thursday, and I would guess Bar is not on most folks’ bucket list. Montenegro has only been its own country since a referendum in May 2006, when independence squeaked through at 55.5 percent against a 55 percent threshold, and the century before that is still lurking in the shadows. You drive past buildings that were boarded up a long time ago, past broken glass, and then thirty seconds later you are looking at a stretch of coastline that ought to be famous and somehow isn’t yet.

We had hired a car for the day with friends. Our guide was a young guy named Milan, and Milan wasn’t only proud of his country, he actually knew his country well, which is rarer than it ought to be. The history, the arguments about the history, what their identity is trying to become.

He took us to an olive tree first, and I nearly let it go by as scenery.

The Old Olive Tree at Mirovica, just outside Bar, is more than 2,200 years old. It was already a couple of centuries old when the Romans came through, and it was standing about six miles from where a local named Stefan Vojislav ran the Byzantines off in 1042, which is the moment people here point to as the beginning of the idea of Montenegro. (Milan had that whole battle at his fingertips. Dates, names, who switched sides. But I digress.)

It was amazing to realize the olive tree still makes olives. Over 2200 years!

Our last stop was lunch at the mountain house of the man who owns the tour company, three thousand feet up. His name is Drago. Milan is his best friend and stood up in his wedding as his best man, which we found during our ride up and down the cliff side roads of Montenegro.

Drago fed us beef he’d marinated overnight and then slow cooked in a barrel, local wine, local olive oil off that same mountain, and the local moonshine (kinda like grappa).

And of everything I ate and saw that day, the thing I keep coming back to is the bathroom.

It was spotless. Somebody had thought about it. I know how that sounds, but the bathroom is the part of the experience the customer is never supposed to notice, and thinking about it anyway is the whole job. Drago had thought about the pacing too, and the order the food came out in, and where you sit and what you are looking at while you sit there. Amy and I left blown away. I have paid a great deal more for a great deal less in cities with a concierge in the lobby. Drago knows what he’s doing.

Here is what makes it a business and not just a good afternoon. Drago has a TripAdvisor page, Viator, and GetYourGuide, and a traveler from Canada named Michel left a review three days before we showed up that does the job better than anything I am going to write about him:

Small family/friends enterprise that is starting to grow. Personalized customer service. All the food and wine served is family grown.

A woman from the States named Alison had written back in June that she felt like she was hanging out with friends and getting a true taste of Montenegro, which, having now done it myself, is exactly right. But you can’t teach that! Drago told how he started his “company” but no one came for a year. And when someone did sign up, he learned from their feedack. And got better each time.

So a guy on a mountain in a country of 620,000 people is findable by every cruise passenger who docks in Bar. Talent, plus a review page, and the world comes up the hill to him.

I don’t think Drago is the story, though. I think he is the front end of about nine other stories, and Milan is one of them. Milan and his wife both work in technology and he is angling toward cyber security. When something like Drago’s works in a town like Bar, the next person watching doesn’t have to be talked into believing it is possible, because it just happened down the road from their house.

People will be what they can see.

The same thing was going on in Rome, and then again on the boat

Before we ever got on the ship we had four days in Rome, and around the corner from the hotel was a little shop run by a family that came from Bangladesh.

Three nights running we walked past places that were “fancier” and easier and sat down at theirs instead. Not just for the beer. But for how hard that place worked. Somebody always came out, somebody always took the heavy tray, always a smile, and all of it in a language that wasn’t their first, under a set of rules they had no hand in writing.

Then there was Ash, who worked one of the pool bars.

You can always tell when somebody has that spark. Standing in the sun all day is nobody’s first choice and Ash was clear-eyed about that, but he told us about his village in India, and about a family friend who went off to work on a cruise ship years ago and supported his whole family doing it for a very long time. Ash is doing the same thing now. What he actually wants is to be a sommelier, and he is studying wine the way you study something you fully intend to be good at.

I told him that is a real career and he should go get it. (I hope he does. If he pulls it off I would like to hear about it.)

Every one of them was following somebody

I have been saying the same sentence to audiences for more than twenty years.

People will be what they can see.

What I did not expect was to see it play out so powerfully. Ash had the family friend who went to sea. Drago had somebody who showed him that a lunch on a mountain could be a business. And Drago talked warmly about six months he spent in the United States as an exchange student more than a decade ago, which is the part I haven’t been able to put down since. Same with Milan and his time visting/working in the United States.

Now here is where I had it wrong, and the correction is more interesting than what I believed walking in.

I had Montenegro filed as a place climbing out of a closed, state-run past. Tito, Yugoslavia, all of it. That turns out to be half right at best. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, and starting in the early sixties Yugoslavia ran the most open borders in the socialist world. Its citizens could travel visa-free across much of Europe at a time when nobody else on that side of the line could. By the mid-1970s more than 800,000 Yugoslavs were working abroad, and by 1980 the money they were sending home ran to something like ten percent of GDP.

So going out and coming back isn’t new here. It is two or three generations old, and Drago’s grandparents could have done it.

What is new is that Drago doesn’t have to leave. He went, he came home, and now the customers come to him, and the whole arrangement runs on a connection, a review page, and a man who thought about his bathroom.

We are in the middle of cutting the thing that does this

Which brings me to the frustrating part. Several people I talked to on this trip were still waiting on visas or had been denied outright.

I don’t know who paid for Drago’s six months here and it never occurred to me to ask him. What I do know is that we have been running exchanges like that for decades, including one built for his part of the world since 2005, out of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It is a rounding error in the federal budget, and it is also one of the highest-return things this country does, because a kid who spends a stretch of his youth here spends the next fifty years explaining us to his neighbors, whatever he ends up concluding about us.

The budget request the White House sent up on April 3 would cut that bureau by 68 percent, down to $215 million. It eliminates the Gilman Program and the Stevens Initiative outright and takes Fulbright down by almost 80 percent. Congress has pushed back on this before, and the Alliance for International Exchange has been tracking it the whole way. Last year’s request was a 93 percent cut and appropriators brought it down to about five, and the House has already voted down an amendment to kill Fulbright altogether. But a budget request tells you the intent, and the intent here is to stop doing it.

Look at that as an accounting question rather than a political one. We spend an enormous amount of money trying to persuade the world of things. This is the version that actually works, it costs less than a rounding error on a typical weapons program, and the return shows up thirty years later as a man on a mountain who is glad he came.

We argue constantly in this country about who gets to come in, and some of those questions are genuinely hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But we have gotten so far into the argument that we stopped noticing the benefit. I say it all the time that I wish more people would listen to Reagan’s farewell speech. In it he reminded us of something simple and powerful: you can move to France and never be French. You can move to Japan and never be Japanese. Come here and become an American, and you are an American. That isn’t sentiment. It is our unfair advantage, and it is the one nobody else has figured out how to copy.

Bret Boyd and I put a chapter on demographics and immigration in Catalyst for the unromantic reason that you cannot look honestly at where this country is headed and leave it out. The arithmetic has not gotten friendlier since we wrote it. Birthrate declines in the US will rely on immigrants for decades to come to sustain our economy.

What the three of them have in common

None of them are waiting for permission.

That is the whole of it. Entrepreneurship is not a business plan or a pitch deck, it is somebody deciding to go fix the thing in front of them instead of waiting around for someone else to come do it for them. Drago didn’t wait for Montenegro to finish becoming Montenegro, and the family in Rome didn’t wait to be made welcome, and Ash isn’t sitting by the pool waiting to be discovered.

As they say in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. So do people, when you leave them the room to.

The free flow of information, of ideas, and of people is what made us, and not one of the three keeps flowing on its own just because it always has. That tree above Bar has been making oil for twenty-two centuries through every empire that came through and left again. We have been at this for two hundred and fifty years.

If you ever find yourself in Bar, go up the mountain and find Drago. Tell him I sent you.

So who is it in your town? Tell me about the person, young or old, who demonstrates that hustle.

Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

Last Tuesday the rule sent me to Deep Eddy Cabaret, which is where I learned that I had walked into a party. Austin Monthly was releasing its July/August issue, an ode to the city’s dive bars, and Deep Eddy was hosting. The bar turns 75 in November. Raymond and Mickey Hickman opened it in 1951, and they borrowed the name from the swimming hole up the road, which back in 1915 became the first swimming pool in the state of Texas.

So there I am, not getting on MoPac, drinking a Miller High Life (a shout out to my late father), reading a magazine article about the room I’m standing in. It was also a cool moment that I got to meet Executive Editor Bryan C Parker and share that my first company RideScout made it into an Austin Monthly article back in 2013. (But I digress).

I’ve had three things rattling around my head for weeks. The midterms. A soccer team. A book. Standing in that bar, they finally clicked into the same idea.

The magazine got the important part right.

The feature runs 25 bars, written by Anthony Head and Bryan C. Parker, and it doesn’t waste much time trying to define a dive bar, which I appreciated. It settles on this: “good conversation, affordable drinks, and an absence of pretentiousness.”

Read that again and think about how few places are left that clear all three.

A dive bar has no membership. No dues, no committee, no pledge drive, no sign-up genius. It has opening hours and that’s the whole barrier to entry. You don’t have to believe anything to walk in. Some people find that kind of belonging at a church or a synagogue or a Rotary club, and they are important too. But a lot of people don’t join anything at all anymore, and the jukebox doesn’t ask.

The magazine put it in terms of college kids and hippie holdovers sharing the same room. I’d put it in terms that are less charming and more urgent. Dive bars are one of the last affordable places in America where you end up next to somebody who is nothing like you and stay there long enough to find out you’re wrong about them.

Ninety-Nine days.

I heard that this week about the mid-term election. Ninety-nine days until November 3.

Everyone I talk to assumes this midterm will be another brawl. I’m not sure. What I’m picking up feels less like division and more like exhaustion. People aren’t fired up. They’re tired.

And here’s the thing about exhaustion in an election year. It doesn’t show up as anger. It shows up as an empty primary.

Look at what our own low-turnout primary produced in Texas. Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn in the May runoff and became the Republican nominee for Senate. Since then, reporters have found something remarkable in the campaign finance data. Of the nearly 100 donors who gave at least $50,000 to Cornyn’s campaign or its major supporting PACs this cycle, none appeared to have written a check directly to Paxton’s campaign or affiliated PACs after the runoff. Not a slow start. Reporting at Houston Public Media, KERA and Texas Standard all landed on the same finding, and Axios Austin got there a week earlier. Meanwhile the Democratic nominee, state Rep. James Talarico, has been outraising him roughly three to one.

I’m not making a prediction but I am hoping that decency will prevail over politics. I’ve voted for candidates in both parties and I’ll do it again as needed. My point is about the machinery, and it should bother you no matter which jersey you own.

A small number of people voted in March and May. That small number picked the nominee. Now a much larger number of people, including some of that party’s most committed funders, are looking at the result and quietly declining to participate. What I hope that means is that a larger number of Republicans I know and trust cannot stomach the idea of Ken Paxton as a US Senator. And this time, they might be willing to vote for a Democrat.

Which brings me to soccer, believe it or not.

We hosted a World Cup. Our men won Group D, beat Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0, and then got taken apart 4-1 by Belgium in the Round of 16 on July 6 in Seattle. Home soil. Round of 16.

The griping started immediately, and most of it missed. The question isn’t why 26 guys underperformed. The question is why a country of 340 million with more athletes and more money than anyone can’t reliably produce a deeper pool.

The answer showed up in a wave of reporting this summer, and it isn’t complicated. Youth sports in America has become a paid product. Select teams, club fees, travel tournaments, private coaching, hotel rooms in another state most weekends. If your family has the money and one parent with a flexible calendar, your kid gets the experience and visibility needed. If not, your kid gets cut at eleven and never finds out what they had.

Now look at our women, who are the best in the world at almost everything they play. A big reason is that America decided decades ago to give girls a field, a coach, and a season, at a time when much of the world wouldn’t let their daughters play at all or wouldn’t pay for it if they did. We built an advantage on access. That’s the whole trick.

So the same country that proved access wins is currently pricing access out of reach of most kids in America today. (Don’t even get me started on the number of MAGA folks praising the talents of our first generation American players that would not be in the country if they had their way. I love sitting next to them in real life asking them to explain their way out of that logic. I enjoy every conversation like that!)

Robert Putnam warned us about this, and I’ve written about it before.

In Our Kids, Putnam laid out what happens when a community stops funding the things that mix children together. Cut the after-school program, cut the competitive team, cut the band, and you don’t just lose the activity. You lose the only structured hours in a kid’s week where they sit next to somebody from a different part of town.

That’s the loss nobody puts on a budget line. The rich kid and the poor kid stop knowing each other. The rural kid and the city kid stop knowing each other. Two kids at the same high school, in the same building, can now go four years without a single real conversation, because one of them is on the club team and the other one is working. Or worse.

We are running the same experiment on adults, and we’ve been running it longer. Fewer leagues. Fewer lodges. Fewer front porches. More sorting.

(I wrote more about Putnam’s work with Our Kids here below)

The book that tied it together.

Jim Collins published What to Make of a Life this past April, and it’s a departure from the business books that made him famous. It’s built on 34 people studied in matched pairs across ten years, two people with comparable starting conditions who arrive at radically different places. He’s after the pivotal moments, what he calls the cliffs, where a life turns.

Here’s the connection I couldn’t stop thinking about at the bar. Collins studies the moment a person meets a decision that changes everything. Putnam studies whether a kid ever gets close enough to such a moment to meet it at all.

Same method, matched pairs, pointed at two different halves of one question. Collins asks what you make of a life. Putnam asks who was in the room when you were deciding.

For most people, the honest answer is a coach, a teacher, a neighbor, somebody’s dad who ran the concession stand. People they’d never have met if the gym had been locked.

People will be what they can see. Collins thinks its important for Gen Z and Gen Alpha to work in the office and avoid the at-home experience. Putnam warned us already what happens when high school kids are not allowed to mix in person after school. The divisions fester and grow.

I like to say, “Friends at work make work more friendly.” It’s humanizing to get to know the people you work with. Just like organized sports and afterschool activities.

So here’s my ask for the next 99 days.

That’s what takes me back to Dive Bars and the role they play in society.

Go somewhere with a jukebox and no membership.

I wrote a piece last fall called “Save The Jerseys for Sports, Not Politics,” about a conversation with , who ran against me for the same Congressional seat in a different primary. Watch that video and you genuinely cannot tell which of us was the Republican and which was the Democrat. The line that stuck with me from that whole exchange was hers, and it’s the thesis of everything above.

You can’t demonize people you’ve actually gotten to know.

Social media will not introduce you to your neighbor. It’ll show you the worst thing he wrote in 2019. A bar stool will introduce you to him, and it turns out he coaches a team, or he’s worried about his mother, or he agrees with you about four things out of six and you’d never have guessed which four.

Ninety-nine days. Go be in a room with somebody. Buy the next round. Leave the jersey in the car.

Then in November, do the boring thing and vote.

What’s your favorite dive bar?

One of mine’s on Lake Austin Boulevard and it’s about to turn 75. Tell me yours, and tell me about somebody you met in it who you’d never have met anywhere else. Hit reply. I read every one.

Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

CBS Austin with ran a special edition of “Tech This Out” called Defending 250, about the companies building the tools we’ll need to protect the next 250 years

You can see our full discussion here.

They asked me on to talk about the hard part, the part nobody wants to slow down for: how do we move fast on artificial intelligence and still do it responsibly? I’ll come back to my answer. First, look at who else was in the room. Because every one of these companies is within an hour’s drive of my house.

The battlefield changed while we were still arguing about it.

Drones did it. Cheap, fast, and everywhere. In Ukraine, by some counts, roughly 80 percent of casualties now come from drones. That is not a future threat. That is the war being fought right now.

An Austin company called Allen Control Systems is answering it with a machine they named Bullfrog: a standard rifle bolted to an AI brain that spots a drone, measures it, predicts where it’s going, and takes it out of the sky, while the human operator stays focused on the mission. Their co-founder Steven Simoni will tell you we’re still underestimating this threat as a country. He’s right.

Cheap now beats expensive later.

Here’s the math that keeps defense planners up at night. Put a three billion dollar destroyer against two hundred naval drones that cost under a million dollars apiece, and the economics stop working in your favor.

Saronic, right here in Austin, is building the cheap side of that equation on purpose: autonomous boats built to scale. One of them, earlier this year, helped rescue two US Army pilots after their helicopter went down over the Strait of Hormuz. Their team put it simply. Two Americans got to see their families again. That’s the point.

Same story on land. Aeon Industrial is building a shoulder-launched guided missile called Zeus, with 3D-printed parts, aimed at a cost the taxpayer can actually afford. And in the small town of Luling, X-bow Systems has shrunk a rocket-motor factory that used to sprawl across thousands of acres and cost hundreds of millions of dollars down into something the size of a shipping container. A rocket factory in a box, mobile and front-line ready.

You can’t defend what you can’t build.

This is the thread I’ve been pulling on in this newsletter for a while now, from energy to housing: innovation is worthless if you’ve forgotten how to build the thing.

We used to know that. On the outskirts of Lockhart, a startup called Oklo is racing to bring a reactor named Groves One critical, part of a federal push to get new nuclear online. Their CEO put it in a way that stuck with me: America didn’t fall behind on nuclear because of safety. It fell behind on will. We still have the edge in designs and innovation. That edge means nothing if we don’t build them.

And when the Pentagon said crumbling barracks were hurting military readiness, an Austin company answered with robots. ICON 3D-printed ten military barracks in six months. The Department of War told the Senate that job would normally take two years. Six months. Next stop, Fort Polk, and a goal of nearly 900 structures nationwide.

Building at scale is never just one factory. It’s the thousands of suppliers behind it, and right now that base is scattered and brittle. Sustainment, another Austin company, is working to organize our national supply chain into a single connected network, so a program manager can find the American shop that makes the part instead of learning too late that only one supplier left in the country still makes it. You can’t surge what you can’t source.

Fast is not the same as reckless.

So back to the hard question CBS asked me. Here’s my whole answer, and it fits on an index card.

First, don’t panic. Second, stay transparent about what’s under the hood of what we’re building. Do those two things well, and over the long run we’ll be fine.

And there’s a floor underneath all of it that never moves. You cannot do anything illegal. You cannot do anything immoral. You cannot do anything unethical. And if you are ever faced with one of those three things, it is your responsibility to be the whistleblower. Not your option. Your responsibility.

That’s not a brake on innovation. It’s the thing that lets innovation be trusted with the keys. The founders I just named are moving at startup speed on some of the most consequential technology of our lifetimes. The reason I’m comfortable bragging about them is that the good ones know exactly where that floor is.

Which brings me to the news this week.

None of what I just described is a hypothetical. Look at the map.

The Strait of Hormuz, the same stretch of water where that Saronic boat pulled two American pilots to safety, slid back into a shooting war this month. Iran and the United States are trading strikes over who controls it, and roughly a fifth of the world’s oil moves through that one chokepoint. You’re already paying for it. Crude is back near eighty dollars a barrel and the number on the gas pump climbed while you weren’t looking. (I just paid over $100 at the pump to fill up my car.) I’ve written it here before and I’ll keep writing it: energy security is national security. We don’t get to treat the two as separate problems.

And in the middle of all that, the loudest debate in Washington about military readiness landed on testosterone. The Secretary of Defense ordered annual screening for troops over thirty, with hormone therapy on offer. I spent 20 years in uniform, so let me say the uncontroversial part first: I will always take better health care for the people who serve. Check their blood, treat what needs treating, good.

But I’ve stood next to enough Soldiers to know where strength actually comes from, and it has never been a number on a lab panel. It’s the young operator who keeps her focus while the machine tracks the drone. It’s the founder who could have built anything and chose to build for the people who serve. It’s knowing exactly where the ethical floor is and refusing to step below it. That’s readiness. You can’t prescribe it.

And in a serious time of war, I don’t want a single reader of this newsletter mistaking that debate for the main event. A conversation about testosterone at the Pentagon is not the prize. The prize is strategy and diplomacy, and right now we can’t afford to take our eyes off it.

We used to know how to write a strategy.

There’s an old framework we learn early in uniform for the levers a government pulls in a crisis and tries to prevent them. It fits in one word: DIME. Diplomacy. Intelligence. Military. Economic power. Pull one of those without the other three and you don’t have a strategy, you have a reaction. The best example this country ever produced came out of the early Cold War, a 1950 document called NSC-68 that lined all four up behind a single goal: contain the Soviets. Diplomacy, alliances, economic strength, and military force, all rowing in the same direction. In the decades since, politics has crept further and further into our national security strategy, and the coherence NSC-68 had is harder and harder to find.

The good news buried in the Iran story is that the innovation is real. Just as it was remarkable that a Saronic boat could pull two pilots out of the sea, ICON is printing barracks for our troops at a fraction of the old cost and on a timeline nobody thought possible. Those are the two things that have to travel together now: protect the warfighter, and cut the bill. The military is still the single largest slice of discretionary spending in the federal budget, and I’ll be honest with you. Across 20 years in uniform I watched us spend more than we needed to, delay decisions in ways that cost us dearly, and fall short of being the best stewards of your tax dollar.

In a fight, you spend whatever it takes to protect your Soldiers and bring them home. I will never argue otherwise. But firing a multimillion-dollar missile at a twenty-thousand-dollar drone boat in the Strait of Hormuz is not something you can keep doing.

My friend , the first Iraq War veteran elected to Congress and a former Under Secretary of the Army, made the point sharper than I could in his latest SitRep. Ukraine, he notes, has spent 18 months knocking out Russian refineries worth hundreds of millions of dollars with drones that cost a few thousand apiece, the military equivalent of crippling an aircraft carrier with something assembled from the electronics aisle. His conclusion is the one Washington keeps dodging: “Offense has become cheap while defense remains ruinously expensive.” The next war, Patrick writes, may be decided “not by which country can build the most exquisite weapon, but by which can survive the ugliest arithmetic.” A multimillion-dollar interceptor against a twenty-thousand-dollar boat is exactly that arithmetic, and the math does not get better with time. More from Patrick here: Ukraine’s Cheap Drones Exposed Russia’s Defenses. America Should Take Notice.

That’s the whole case for companies like Aeon. Reinventing how we build these tools lets us defend the homeland, stand up for democracy and freedom abroad, and hand the government instruments it can actually afford to use.

My one real concern in all of this is simple. We have the boats. We’re building the barracks. We can build the missiles that cost what they should. What we don’t seem to have right now is a strategy.

The people are the point.

The host closed the show with a line I wish I’d written. America’s greatest strength has never been the technology alone. It’s the people willing to imagine it, build it, and use it responsibly.

I know it seems like I am talking a lot about machines. But every one of them is really a story about a person who served, or who’s building for the people who do, and who decided Central Texas was the place to do it. That’s the arsenal of the next 250. It’s not in a catalog. It’s in a shipping container outside Luling, on a test stand in Briggs, in a reactor room in Lockhart, and it’s being built by people you can actually go meet.

I’d love to hear what you’re seeing out there. Who’s building something for the next 250 in your corner of the country?

Take care,
Joseph

Joseph Kopser
Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

P.S. The full CBS Austin segment is worth seventeen minutes of your time: Defending 250.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

The pause didn’t hold.

The pause broke over the weekend

The ceasefire went from fragile to finished. Iran attacked a container ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the United States answered with a series of strikes to protect the waterway, and the President said the plain part out loud: the deal is over. Talks that were supposed to run sixty days barely made it three weeks.

If you want to know what the fight is really about, do what I told you to do last time. Don’t watch the missiles. Watch the oil.

Brent crude is back up near the high seventies, its highest since the day the memorandum was signed. Shipping through the strait has collapsed, more than half of last week’s traffic simply gone, because tankers and the companies that insure them decided the risk wasn’t worth it. And the Treasury just moved to shut off the authorization to sell Iranian oil after July 17. Every one of those numbers is the market pricing the same thing it priced in June. Not the war. The chokepoint.

The protection money changed hands

Here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about, because I called it three weeks ago and then watched it happen in reverse.

In June, the story was that Iran wanted to charge ships for passing through Hormuz. Tehran called them fees for services. A strategist at the Naval War College said the only service Iran was actually providing was not attacking your ship. I told you we used to have a word for that, and it wasn’t service fee. The mafia calls it protection money.

This week the United States started talking the same way. According to reporting out of Washington, the plan now on the table would reinstate a blockade, appoint us the guardian of the strait, and charge other ships a twenty percent toll to pass through it. Read that twice. The exact arrangement I flagged as extortion when Iran proposed it is now being floated as American policy, just with our flag on the tollbooth.

I’m not making a partisan point. I’m making a physics point. A chokepoint doesn’t care who holds it. Whoever controls the narrow water controls the price of everything that moves through it, and the temptation to charge for passage is built into the geography. That’s why controlling that geography has cost us fifty years of Navy carrier groups, and why getting off the dependency, not renegotiating the toll, is the only real win.

The next chokepoint won’t be oil

I told you in June that AI data centers are the new fracking, that the shape of the story repeats every time a hungry new appetite collides with the physical world. Here’s the next repeat, and it’s already loading.

I wrote recently that the clean-energy transition we keep arguing about, wind versus gas versus nuclear, runs on rare-earth magnets. So do EV motors, transformers, precision weapons, and the power gear feeding those data centers. China controls roughly ninety percent of the high-performance supply, and on July 1 it stood up a new enforcement regime to police who gets them. We spent twenty years and two of my tours learning that the free flow of oil was national security. We’re about to learn the same lesson about the free flow of electrons, and the strait this time is a supply chain we handed to one country without a fight.

The oil chokepoint we can see from space. The magnet chokepoint we can’t see at all, which is exactly what makes it more dangerous.

This stuff is hard. It isn’t won on social media or with quick declarations. It gets won by the people who do the patient work of understanding it before the headlines force them to. I’d rather we be those people.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser

Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

P.S. If you missed the piece this one builds on, it’s here: Iran Ceasefire: Why Energy Security Is Still National Security. One question for you this week: when you read about the strait, do you see a war story or an energy story? Hit reply. I read every one.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

Last month I wrote here that AI data centers are the new fracking.

That piece got me invited to share some of my thinking with the Austin Technology Council.

This time my focus was less on the power grid and more on people. On workforce, on disruption, and on what the displacement of jobs means for the next generation. If you think are politics are bad now, wait until AI gets into the mix and makes it harder for us to seek truth.

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But I did not go up there to sell doom and gloom. I told the room the truth about myself: I am a 99% AI optimist. I always leave that one percent open for the knuckleheads of the world who can still find a way to screw it up.

AI will displace jobs faster than a lot of people are ready for

That part is real, and I said so. But like almost every other step function in technology and innovation, the same wave that closes some doors kicks open whole new ones. New sectors get invented. New kinds of work appear that no previous generation could have imagined, and they turn out to be not just ways to make a living, but ways to support a family. I have watched it happen more than once in my own career. I believe it will happen again.

Then I walked the audience through a couple of ideas I have been chewing on.

We are going to need a “Trust Wall”

In a world where information is close to limitless, we are all about to face a never ending onslaught of outreach. Organizations are already using AI tools to scrape the web and figure out who you are, what you do, and what you like. Then they use it to write to you in a voice engineered to sound like your oldest friend.

Think about how many people already fall for scams over the phone or online today. Now hand the bad actors even better tools. It gets worse before it gets better.

The good news is that we get to build back. I call it the Trust Wall. It is a digital barrier we put up around ourselves to keep the flood of fake friendliness out. But a wall that only plays defense is not enough. If you are going to keep the bad actors out, you also need a way to decide who you let in.

Here is the line I put on the screen at ATC. When you can reach anyone, trust is the only key. Invention is now limitless and AI makes infinite outreach nearly free, so the walls get higher, the filters get better, and inboxes get buried. In that world the warm introduction stops being a nicety and becomes the only key that still opens the door.

Your friends, family, and network are the ones who get over the wall

Here is the part I find hopeful. The people who get to breach your Trust Wall, who get waved over the top, are the ones you choose. Your friends. Your neighbors. Your family. Your real network.

And when they are building their own Trust Walls at the same time, the whole thing compounds. A network of people who vouch for each other is a network that nefarious folks have a much harder time getting through. This is the same social capital I write about constantly: the trust we build simply by being in each other’s corner is one of the most valuable, and most fragile, things we have. In the age of AI it stops being a nice-to-have and becomes your first line of defense.

My friend Thom Singer put it perfectly in one of his ATC newsletters:

“Austin’s competitive advantage is not code, it is collaboration. Austin became Austin because people crossed paths and helped each other.” Thom Singer, at the Austin Technology Council

That is a Trust Wall described from the other side. The city that got built on people helping people is exactly the city that knows the warm intro is the only key.

When anyone can do the work, employers get to be choosy

Now play that out. If the new tools mean that just about anyone can do the technical part, and two candidates show up with near identical credentials, then employers get to be a lot more selective about who they actually want on the team.

Gone are the days of keeping someone around only because they are a wizard with the technology and you feel like you cannot replace them. Technology is about to be able to replace just about anybody on the technical merits alone. That sounds ominous, but it hands us something better: permission to focus on the winners.

The winners live at two ends of the same spectrum

On one end are the genuinely creative. The bold, original thinkers who see the world in a way the machine cannot. AI, at its essence, is a compilation of all the world’s existing knowledge. If you can blaze a brand new trail, a trail that is not already in the training data, you have a very bright future.

On the other end are the people who are just plain good to be around. Pleasant, thoughtful, engaging, the kind of person others cannot say no to. If an employer is choosing among twelve candidates who are all armed with the same tools, they are going to pick the one they most want to work with.

That is the whole thing on a bumper sticker: choose the novel, and the good to be around. When the tools are equal, those are the two edges that still cut.

So who actually gets hurt by AI? The dull jerks.

If you follow that logic all the way down, the people who struggle most in the long run are the dull jerks of the world. Dull, meaning they bring nothing new to the table. Jerks, meaning they treat people poorly. Land in either bucket, and worse in both, and unless you are cushioned by generational wealth, this is going to be a hard world to make your way in.

The one skill I tell folks to work on

Afterward, people asked me the question I get most from parents and from high schoolers and college students themselves. In a world of AI, what is the single skill worth working on the most? Technology? Liberal arts? Something else?

My answer surprised them. It is not really a subject at all. It is making sure you don’t grow up to be a jerk.

The future of work in an AI world is genuinely unknown. But history has a few known knowns. Adaptive people who are willing to take a risk tend to land on their feet over the long haul. You will take a lot of swings that come up short. That is fine. Keep stepping back up to the plate, keep repeating the same mantra I gave my kids growing up, try to be happy, try to do the right thing, try to have a good thing to say, and rinse and repeat that over a lifetime, and you are going to do just fine.

Why I still hold onto that 1%

That is why I am a 99% AI optimist. For every tool we build, yes, some people will find ways to use it to cause harm. But more people will find ways to guard against that harm, and more still will find ways to use it for good. I have bet my career on that math, and I am not changing it now.

So let me turn it over to you. Where are you right now on the spectrum of AI optimism? Optimistic? Pessimistic? Still a question mark? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.

And tell me what you are reading. The book I just finished that gives me the most cause for hope is Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, which traces our information technologies all the way from the Stone Age to the age of AI. It is worth your summer. (Maybe not exactly beach reading, but it is for me!)

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser

Co-Founder, USTomorrow.us

P.S. Where do you fall on the optimism spectrum, and what’s on your nightstand? Leave a comment or hit reply. I read every one.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

That’s me in the red tank top, with the blond hair I still miss, pedaling a bicycle wrapped in red, white, and blue streamers down a street in our neighborhood. The little one on the Big Wheel is my sister Jennifer. The date is July 4, 1976. America’s 200th birthday.

For as long as I can remember, love of country and the Fourth of July have been the same thing to me. I owe a lot of that to my father, who did something rare for the 1970s: he not only took the pictures, he shot the home movies. This week, with the country about to turn 250, I went digging through eleven gigabytes of his movies and found this two minute clip of my sister and me riding in the Bicentennial parade.

More than any flag or firework, that clip is what the Fourth has always been to me. It is the one day on the calendar built to bring all of us together for love of country.

Every kid in America was in that parade (so I thought)

If you were a kid in 1976, you remember. The fire hydrants painted like minutemen. The Bicentennial quarter with the drummer boy on the back. Red, white, and blue on cereal boxes, gas stations, and garbage trucks.

And we were organized. It was our parents who pulled it off, especially the moms, like mine, pushing my sister up the hill on her Big Wheel when the climb got too steep for a three year old’s little legs. The whole street turned into the parade.

Here’s what I didn’t understand at five years old. The magic wasn’t the decorations. The magic was that everybody showed up to the same party at the same time. I write about this constantly now: the bonds, the norms, and the trust we build simply by being in the same place together, especially between neighbors. Scholars call it social capital, and it is one of the most important, and most fragile, elements of the human experience.

And it wasn’t that we had no other options. It was that everybody was so excited about the 200th birthday that they showed up anyway. You could see it in the sheer mob of kids on bikes. Most everyone showed up, and everyone showed out.

Trading the Bike for the Uniform

That feeling of patriotism, riding down the street on my red, white, and blue bicycle, is the same feeling I got to trade up for thirteen years later, when I swapped the bike for the chance to wear my country’s uniform. I reported to West Point for R-Day on June 28, 1989, and spent that Fourth of July less than a week into Beast Barracks, with a fresh haircut and a new salute, alongside a thousand other kids who had watched the same Bicentennial from their own bikes in their own hometowns.

Different parade, same pride. Whether I was on that bicycle in Kentucky or standing in formation in Cadet Gray, I felt the same two things I still feel every Fourth: pride in my country, and the deeper pride of being part of something much larger than myself.

The Fourth of July with no children

Fifteen years after that, on July 4, 2004, I was a Major at Saddam’s former Presidential Palace in Baghdad, sent there to help plan Iraq’s national elections. The 1st Cavalry Division band came down and set up by the pool. I wrote home about it that summer, in an e-mail diary that later ran in West Point’s Assembly magazine, and I’ve never been able to say it better than I did then:

The longer I sat there looking at all the contradictions, something seemed very out of place. We had American flags, patriotic music, a swimming pool, and ice cream—and some had beer. The only thing missing was children. I had never been to anything 4th-of-July-related without kids running everywhere. There was no one there to hold tightly and reassure as the fireworks boomed overhead, no one who would stare wildly into the sparklers as they lit up their face. There were plenty of people—but no one who really matters to me. Bittersweet. A holiday event I will never forget, but one I never hope to repeat.

That day in Baghdad taught me what the holiday actually is: the kids under the flags.

Why can’t you be a Republican?

By 2018 I was back in a Fourth of July parade myself, this time in Central Texas, running for Congress. Before the parade stepped off, I was in the staging area and wandered over to say hello to the folks on the Republican float. They had a great time giving me a hard time, and we went back and forth on the issues, all in good humor. What I loved most was that most of my answers landed far more in the center, far closer to where everyday people actually live, than anyone expected. I think it caught a few of them off guard. They were not quite ready for a former Republican, Combat Vet, businessman running as a Democrat.

But here is my favorite moment of the whole day. As I was walking away, one nice little old lady called my name and waved me back over to the GOP float. She pulled me in close to whisper in my ear.

“Why can’t you be a Republican?”

I loved her for that question. Not because of the party, but because she asked it sincerely, and a little distraught, having just realized in real time that she had been putting party over country, choosing a line on the ballot instead of choosing the candidate standing in front of her. I told her what I still believe. Service to your country in uniform, and service to your country in business, are not Republican values or Democratic values. They are American values. On that day, the 4th of July.

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The same curb

Two years later, at a small town Fourth of July parade in the Hill Country, I took my favorite photograph of the whole fifty years. The Republican float rolled by with a stuffed elephant and a cutout of Abraham Lincoln riding on a pickup. A few minutes later the Democratic float came down the same street. The same families waved at both from the same curb, and everybody’s kids chased the same candy. I captioned it that day: finding common ground, because democracy works for everyone.

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The full suit

By 2024 I had leaned all the way in. The Uncle Sam hat had grown into the full suit: stars, stripes, tailcoat, the works. Amy maintains I’m not allowed to wear it to dinner parties. The jury is still out on the 250th. I wore it to VFW Post 3377, where we’ve now spent our last several Fourths, three generations of family around one table, next to veterans who have their own Baghdads to remember.

What the 250th is really for

I’ve written before about whether the truths we celebrate on this day are still self evident. Last year I answered: maybe. That answer hasn’t changed.

But fifty years of my family’s Julys keep teaching me something simpler. At the end of the day, the Fourth of July should be the one great holiday that still brings all of us together. It is the day that reminds us of the child in every one of us. Whether that child grew up riding a red, white, and blue bicycle in a neighborhood parade, or is a kid on the other side of the world right now, on this very Fourth of July, dreaming of one day moving to the United States to build a better life.

We’ve gone from three channels to infinite channels, from one neighborhood parade to a thousand personalized feeds. The Fourth of July parade is one of the last things left that the whole country can still do at the same time, together. You can’t stream it. You have to stand on the curb next to people who didn’t vote the way you did, while your kids chase the same candy.

So here’s my one ask for America’s 250th birthday. Go to the parade. Stand on the curb. Bring a kid, yours or a neighbor’s. See it through their eyes. Long before they can see political division.

And somewhere in that pack of bikes and Big Wheels is a five year old who’ll be telling this story at the 300th. (This particular former 5 year old will be 105 years old).

Amy and I wish you and your family a joyful Fourth. Take care of each other out there.

Take care,
Joseph

Joseph Kopser

CEO, USTomorrow.us

P.S. I want to see your archives too. What do you remember about July 4, 1976? If you weren’t born yet, what’s your first Fourth of July memory? Leave a comment, or hit reply if you’ve got a photo. I read every one.

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

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First, a thank you, and what your financial support has unlocked.

I wanted the first donors-only edition of USTomorrow to be a little extra.

This is something new. It is the first edition written specifically for our paid subscribers who want to go deeper on an issue— the people who decided this work was worth a few dollars a month. I do not take your support lightly. You are the reason USTomorrow will be reaching even larger audiences soon. That is a direct line from your support to better work. Thank you.

85-5 and 358-32.

Those are the votes. Last week the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85 to 5, and the House followed 358 to 32. In an era when we are told nothing can pass and no one can agree, the United States Congress just put up the largest housing bill in a generation, and it did it with margins you almost never see anymore.

I have to be honest with you. Even a news junkie like me almost missed it, the real work and the bipartisan passage by lawmakers in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle. The country still works when we let it.

As I write this, the bill has passed both chambers but the President has not signed it. In fact, he abruptly cancelled the signing ceremony and announced that he will not sign it until Congress also passes the SAVE America Act.

I will let others cover the daily back-and-forth. I want to do something the coverage is not doing, which is tell you why this Housing bill matters far more than the phrase everyone keeps reaching for.

That phrase is the American dream of homeownership. It is a good phrase. It is also hiding the real story, and if we only talk about owning a home, we will misunderstand what we just did.

Let me give you the heart of it now, and go into depth later.

If you have found the place you never want to leave, wonderful. That is its own kind of success, and no one should take it from you. But the American dream was never about owning the house you are standing in. It was about being free to move to a better one when you needed to. The dream has always been the freedom to go. For too many families right now, that freedom is slipping away, and this bill is about getting it back.

Here is what is waiting inside this edition. I make the case for three things the headlines are walking right past:

• Why your home is really how you find your neighbors.

• Why the dream was never the house. It was being able to leave it.

• Why a cheaper roof is the most pro-entrepreneur policy we have.

Plus the old stain none of this works without naming, and the one lesson from building RideScout that changed how I see every street in America. And there is one more thread I can only gesture at today, the quiet return of three generations under one roof, which I am saving for an edition all its own.

If you have been meaning to upgrade, this is the moment. Less than one fancy coffee a month. It funds the new teammates, the faster pace, and the full version of pieces like this one.

Consider this your invitation to come inside.

Read more

Back to USTomorrow….. We all spent four months watching a war with Iran, and this week we are watching “the peace.” If you want to better understand either one, do not watch the missiles. Watch the oil.

Twenty years ago this October, I deployed to Iraq for the second time.

By then I had learned which jobs in a war zone were the ones that got people killed, and one of the most dangerous was also one of the most ordinary. It was moving fuel. The convoys that hauled diesel and gasoline across that country were targets, and Soldiers died protecting them. I came home convinced that how we move and how we power ourselves is not a side issue to national security. It is national security. That conviction is why I started a mobility company, why I helped launch the Defense Energy Summit, and why I have spent twenty years working on energy whether the headlines cared or not.

This month the headlines do care.

Here is where things stand as I write this. After four months of open war that began at the end of February and reached all the way to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the United States and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17 to stop the shooting. It calls for a sixty-day ceasefire and, notably, for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiators are now meeting in Switzerland, and on June 22 they announced a roadmap toward a final agreement within sixty days. That is the good news, if it’s real.

It is also fragile. Within seventy-two hours of the memorandum, follow-on talks were cancelled, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced it was closing Hormuz again, the U.S. military said the strait was open and that Iran does not control it, and the President of the United States went on social media to threaten to hit Iran “very hard again, only harder,” all while his own Vice President sat at the negotiating table. The single most important question, whether Iran gives up the right to enrich uranium, sits exactly where it started. Iran’s president says he will never back down from it. So handle the word “peace” with care. What we have is a pause.

Follow the Money

Now watch the oil, because the oil tells you what the war was actually about.

When the fighting was at its worst, Brent crude spiked above $120 a barrel. By last week it had fallen back to around $80, roughly a third off its peak . What moved the price was not the body count. It was whether tankers, and the companies that insure them, believed they could get through the Strait of Hormuz. Prices fell when ships started moving and rose when the talks fell apart. The market was not pricing the war. It was pricing the chokepoint.

Then came two revelations that sharpen the point.

First, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 16 that the deal waives American sanctions on Iranian oil, along with the banking, shipping, and insurance that make those sales possible. In plain terms, the first thing the winning side put on the table was letting Iran sell its oil again. (You may have seen this described as Iran being allowed to sell oil “in dollars.” That is not quite right. The accurate version is that the sanctions come off so the oil can flow, and Iran does not get its frozen funds back up front.)

Second, and this is the one I cannot stop thinking about, Iran has announced that once the sixty free days are up, it intends to charge ships for passing through Hormuz. Tehran is careful to call these “fees” for services like navigation and insurance, not “tolls,” and it has stood up a new authority to collect them. A strategist at the Naval War College said the quiet part out loud: the only service Iran is actually providing is not attacking your ship. We used to have a word for a payment you make so that nothing unfortunate happens to your cargo. We did not call it a service fee. The mafia refers to it as protection money.

Step back and look at the shape of it. We fought a war. We won it, by any military measure. And the moment the shooting stopped, the negotiation turned out to be about the free flow of oil to and from the Middle East, and about who controls the narrow water it passes through. Twenty years and two of my own tours later, it is still about the oil. It always was.

I have written before that fracking did something close to a miracle for this country.

In 2005 we were building terminals to import natural gas, certain we would run short. By 2017 we were a net exporter and soon the world’s largest LNG exporter. We bought ourselves a kind of energy independence almost no one predicted. But the rest of the world got no such gift. Europe, Japan, India, and especially China still depend on oil and gas that must move through places like Hormuz. As long as that remains true, keeping those lanes open stays an American interest — one we’ve paid for fifty years, not in cash, but in Navy carrier groups.

That is energy security as national security, and we are watching it negotiated in real time among the United States, Israel, and Iran.

This stuff is hard. It is not won on social media or with quick declarations.

Here is what worries me, and it is the reason I am writing today instead of just reading the news like everyone else.

I have argued in this newsletter that AI data centers are the new fracking. The shape of the story repeats. A new and voracious appetite, this time for computing power, collides with the physical world, and the binding constraint is energy. Data center electricity demand in this country is on track to nearly double in just a few years. Right here in Texas, the grid operator is now holding a queue of requests to connect that is larger than the entire current peak demand of the state, and close to ninety percent of it is data centers. Last week our utility commission approved a brand new process just to triage who gets to plug in. Read that again. We are building a system in which a handful of players compete for access to scarce power through a single chokepoint, and a central authority decides who passes.

We have seen this movie. We have the receipts, in blood and treasure, from forty years of it in the Middle East. The difference, and it is the only unqualified good news in this whole essay, is that this chokepoint is ours. The uranium is in Wyoming. The natural gas is under Texas. The reactors, the transmission lines, and the rules for who connects are decisions we get to make at home, on our own timeline, without a fleet. We spent two generations, and too many of my friends, learning how dependence works when the resource sits under someone else’s dirt. We are about to find out whether we learned anything, now that the resource sits under our own feet.

I will say one more thing, and I will try to say it the way I try to say everything here, as someone who has voted for both parties and cares more about getting this right than about who gets the credit. I have been a student of military history my whole life, of national security for forty years, and of energy security for more than twenty. Watching the past four months, what concerns me is not ideology. It is the apparent belief that a region with three thousand years of memory can be handled like a real estate deal. (If you want a detailed analysis of how bad the MOU and deal are among several interest groups, you might enjoy the AIPAC breakdown point-by-point of the deal. I’ve personally never seen AIPAC push back this hard on Trump.). While I won’t share private conversations, many Trump voters and national security professionals I know believe this deal is shaping up to be weaker than the Obama-era agreement.

You cannot threaten to restart a war while your own diplomats are still in the room and call it strategy. You cannot declare the Strait of Hormuz “permanently toll free” in a press release while the other side stands up an agency to charge for it. Complexity does not care how confident you sound. The free flow of oil, and now the free flow of electrons, will be governed by the people who do the patient work of understanding how the system actually behaves. I would like that to be us.

You always get what you pay for

A White House that prefers shortcuts and “get rich quick” thinking tends to underestimate how complex these systems actually are. The Reflecting Pool debacle is my favorite example, but I digress.

So here is my penny for your thoughts. Do not let the ceasefire headlines convince you the story is over, and do not let the word “energy” get lost in the shuffle as a buzz word. What happened this month is the oldest story in modern statecraft: power, in both senses of the word, moving through a place narrow enough to squeeze. We have a rare chance to write the next chapter at home, on our own terms, with the tuition already paid. Energy security is national security. It was true in the fuel convoys outside Mosul. It is true in the Strait of Hormuz tonight. And it will be true in the server farms rising on the Texas prairie, if we are wise enough to see it coming.

Let me know what you’re seeing out there.

BTW— If you’re able to make it, I’m speaking on the topic of AI and its impact on business and society at the Austin Technology Council on June 30th. Join us if you can.

More soon,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser

Co-Founder of USTomorrow.us

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

The truth is, I’ve barely been home. Over the last two months I’ve logged more miles than I can remember in any stretch of my life:

• France, for Amy’s birthday.

• Boston, for the retirement of one of my favorite professors from 25 years ago.

• Lexington, Kentucky — my hometown — to watch the Texas women’s softball team win the SEC Championship.

• And a long Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, where my sister-in-law sang the National Anthem and my father-in-law was honored on the big board, out on the field, as the hero of the game during the third inning.

I can’t recall another two-month stretch where I’ve been away from home — and away from the 24 hour news, and my normal routine — as much as I have been lately. And here’s the strange part: it was both refreshing and disheartening at the same time.

Let me give you a few examples.

The last time I was really plugged in this spring was the final weekend of February, when we launched what was supposed to be a very quick war in Iran to disarm their nuclear capability. Here we are on June 3rd, and instead I’ve come home to a never-ending series of Trump and a seemingly ineffective negotiating style that has sent energy prices spiking around the world. This morning’s Wall Street Journal carried reports from the OECD warning of possible recessions stretching into 2027.

At the same time, I fear the souring of our 250th anniversary as a country. Our president seems intent on making it about him — and less about the achievements of the world’s most successful and longest-running democracy.

I consider Jon Stewart the Mark Twain of our time. On Monday, he did a great job of summarizing the season of political turmoil.

But here’s what stepping away gave me. With that time, I tried to fill the void and seek meaning in ways that reminded me how precious life really is.

A friend recommended the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. As a self-confessed productivity geek — always hunting for the right life hack to squeeze more out of a day — this book hit me like a lightning bolt. The premise is that we’ve become so over-engineered by modern technology that we’ve forgotten to step back. The shift Burkeman asks for is simple but profound: stop thinking about how you’re using your time, and start thinking about how your time could be using you — in a more fulfilling way.

I’m only on Chapter 3, and I already love it. I recommend it to you. (Here is a quick Ted Talk from the author if you don’t have time for the book)— I recommend you make the time. In a world of endless political noise, Burkeman reminds us that finite time is best spent on what actually builds the tomorrow we want

Looking forward

There are still a lot of answers that remain out of reach.

The political landscape is a head-scratcher. It’s hard to know what happens in November. Will enough people — Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike — feel the exhaustion and still have the energy for one more season of political push? That’s what would let the midterms become a defining moment in our nation’s history.

With the primary losses of Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and our own Senator John Cornyn here in Texas, I think space may be opening up — if only behind the scenes — for Republicans to push back and try to check the administration in a number of areas. We’ve already seen signs of it: the $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6th rioters, as it’s been described, looks set to meet an untimely end.

But the larger question remains. And the Senate race here in Texas is the one to watch: James Talarico versus Ken Paxton.

The Paxton crew has a number-one mantra they’re running on loop — an older clip of Talarico talking about meat and meat products, and about the unknown nature of God, and the controversy that sparked. It’s already been packaged into a scathing campaign ad, and it’s going to be a tough video to overcome once it starts spreading in MAGA circles.

Here’s what more people need to realize: Paxton isn’t even in that video. He never speaks. He never moves. The whole thing is Talarico’s own footage — and Paxton himself only shows up at the very end, in a photo standing next to Trump. But if Democrats are not careful, Republicans will run those clips over and over, and if that’s all everyday voters see, Talarico is likely to lose. A Senate seat that shapes AI investment, energy jobs, and education funding for the next generation for our kids’ future.

Think about what that would mean. The U.S. Senate could be filled by a Trump acolyte who was not only indicted by his own Republican-controlled state legislature, but who stood alongside Trump as a speaker at January 6th. I honestly can’t think of a lower point. Many of his own former staffers have said publicly that he should go — including Congressman Chip Roy, who once served as Paxton’s first assistant attorney general. As Roy put it: “For the good of the people of Texas and the extraordinary public servants who serve at the Office of the Attorney General, Attorney General Ken Paxton must resign.”

Whether you’re a Republican tired of the chaos or a Democrat ready for new energy, the real question is whether we show up.

We’re going to need to motivate a lot of people that don’t vote to vote.

We’re also going to convince a lot of our neighbors to vote outside their party lines.

The work that doesn’t wait for November

While many of us keep our attention on the midterms, there’s still real work to be done in the workforce — specifically, coming together as a community to talk honestly about the impact of AI data centers and their explosive growth.

Here’s a fact worth sitting with: if it weren’t for AI and the investments it’s driving nationwide, many experts believe our economy would already be in a recession right now.

As my last newsletter argued, AI has become the new fracking.

I’d encourage you to read the 100-plus comments I received on the LinkedIn post about that article. What struck me — and you’ll appreciate this, having read this far — is that it was obvious many of the people commenting never read the actual newsletter (imagine that!) They took the headline and formed their own opinions. If anything, that’s an indictment of where we are today.

Over to you

Let me know what you’re seeing out there. I’m genuinely curious where people are putting their energy this summer and into the fall, as we head toward a midterm cycle that matters.

What’s the most exciting race where you live? What should I be paying attention to and highlighting in future newsletters?

Hit reply. I read every one.

Take care,

Joseph

Joseph Kopser

Co-Founder of USTomorrow

Joseph Kopser is a lifelong problem solver committed to building the teams needed to take on our toughest challenges. He is currently President of Grayline after he co-founded and served as CEO of RideScout, before it was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years earning the Combat Action Badge, Army Ranger Tab and Bronze Star. He is a graduate of West Point with a BS in Aerospace Engineering and also received a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and former member of the Army Science Board. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his efforts in Energy and Transportation as well as won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. He co-authored the book, Catalyst, a book focused on helping teams adapt to change. He is the Chair of the Board of Advisors for the CleanTX, an economic development and professional association for energy innovation. In 2025, Joseph was selected for the Texas Business Hall of Fame Future Texas Business Legend Award. Joseph and his wife of 31 years, Amy, live in Austin and they are extremely proud of their three adult daughters living their best lives.

That story is going to repeat itself in towns and counties across this country. A March Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans now oppose building AI-supporting data centers near them. I have not seen public sentiment swing that hard against a piece of physical infrastructure in a long time.

So before the country splits into “data center yes” and “data center no” camps and stops talking to each other, I want to lay out how I’m thinking about this. Because if we get the debate wrong, we lose more than we know.

Start with what change actually is

In the opening chapter of Catalyst: Leadership and Strategy in a Changing World, my co-author Bret Boyd and I spend the whole first chapter on one question: what is change, really?

Not innovation. That’s the easy part. Change is what happens to everyone around the innovation. It’s the disruption to a town’s tax base, a worker’s identity, a homeowner’s view out the kitchen window, a utility’s load forecast. Innovation is a press release. Change is a fight.

Every wave of new technology runs into the same pattern. The people closest to the disruption push back first and loudest, and they are often right about the specific harms they see. But the question is never “is this disruption uncomfortable?” Of course it is. The question is whether we shape it together or let it happen to us.

Data centers are this generation’s test of that question.

The closest parallel: fracking

If you want to know how this story plays out, look back about fifteen years.

Hydraulic fracturing wasn’t a new idea in 2010. The basic technique dated to the 1940s. What changed was that horizontal drilling and modern fracking finally made it economic at scale. The early days were chaotic. There were real environmental problems. There were towns that voted it down, lawsuits, documentaries, kitchen sinks lighting on fire on YouTube. A lot of the concern was legitimate.

Then look at what happened. In 2005, the U.S. was importing about 15% of the natural gas it consumed and building LNG import terminals because we were sure we’d run short. By 2017 we were a net exporter. By 2023 we were the world’s number one LNG exporter, ahead of Qatar and Australia. Cheap domestic natural gas displaced a huge amount of coal, which, whatever you think of fossil fuels, was the single biggest driver of falling U.S. carbon emissions in the 2010s. (I highly encourage Michael Webber work that you can find here. His documentary goes deep into the story of energy.)

Fracking wasn’t harmless. I am not arguing that. But on the net, over the long arc, fracking did more good than harm for American energy, American manufacturing, and American geopolitical leverage. The people who screamed loudest in 2010 weren’t wrong that there were problems. They were wrong about the shape of the future.

AI data centers are the same shape of story. We’ve had data centers for decades. Every credit card swipe runs through one. What’s different now is that modern AI models have a voracious appetite for compute, and that compute requires new chips, larger campuses, and a frankly mind-boggling amount of power and water. U.S. data center electricity demand is projected to nearly double from roughly 80 GW today to 150 GW by 2028, and to consume about 12% of all U.S. electricity by 2028. A typical 100 MW AI campus drinks 1.5 to 3 million cubic meters of water per year for cooling.

Those numbers are real. The concerns are real. And just like fracking in 2010, they’re getting tangled up with something else.

Two kinds of “no”

When I read about a town meeting where a data center package gets voted down, I try hard to separate two very different groups of people standing at the same microphone.

The first group are neighbors and ratepayers genuinely worried about water tables, electric bills, traffic, and the night sky. Those are not unreasonable things to worry about. We should listen.

The second group are people with an ulterior motive. Folks who don’t actually want the digital economy to scale at all, or who are using local zoning as a proxy fight for a much bigger argument about technology itself. (Keep an eye on the Chinese or Russians messing with our social media influecning this political debate because they do not want the Americans to win the AI race). I see those two groups getting looped together, and the result is that the legitimate concerns of the first group never get answered, because the political energy gets captured by the second.

I’ll also say what is true about the other side. The hyperscalers and tech giants building these campuses have not, historically, been great citizens at the local level. They show up with lawyers and tax-abatement asks before they show up with listening sessions (some are better than others with community outreach! My friend Jose Beceiro is a great example). Some of them pour money into political causes that run directly counter to my own beliefs. They have earned a chunk of the suspicion they’re getting. They need to do dramatically better as stewards of the communities they enter and the watersheds they tap.

But “the developers have behaved badly” is not the same as “the infrastructure shouldn’t exist.”

The silver lining that few are talking about

Here’s the part that gets me genuinely excited, and I don’t think it’s getting enough airtime.

If we structure the incentives correctly, the private sector building this AI infrastructure is about to fund the biggest acceleration in new energy production, storage, and distribution in modern American history. Hyperscalers are signing power purchase agreements for new nuclear. They are restarting Three Mile Island. They are building behind-the-meter gas-plus-renewables, deploying batteries at unprecedented scale, and quietly pioneering microgrid campuses.

Picture a data center campus that is also a community microgrid. Generation, storage, and load on one site, with the spillover used to stabilize the regional grid and, in some scenarios, deliver heavily subsidized or near-free electricity to the surrounding community. That is not science fiction. That is a structure we can negotiate for, if local governments come to the table understanding what leverage they actually hold.

The communities that say “no, never” miss that leverage entirely. The communities that say “yes, but here’s what we want in return” are about to write themselves a generation of upside.

And then there’s China

I don’t bring up China to wave a flag. I bring it up because the math is the math.

China is on track for roughly 400 GW of spare power capacity by 2030. That’s about triple the projected power demand of the entire global data center fleet. In the first half of 2025 alone, China installed 357 GW of new wind and solar, more than the entire installed power capacity of India. Chinese data centers pay less than half of what American ones pay for electricity, and a project there moves from plan to operation in months rather than years.

Meanwhile, nearly half of planned U.S. data center builds for 2026 have been delayed or canceled. Power shortages. Transformer backlogs. Local opposition. Permitting purgatory.

If we lose this round, the country that wins it is one that does not recognize the rights of its own people, does not have a free press, and does not subject its decisions to the consent of the governed. I am not willing to hand that government compounding leadership over the most important general-purpose technology of our lifetimes because we couldn’t figure out how to talk to each other about a 200-acre campus in our county.

We’ve seen this movie

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Luddite weavers smashed the looms because they were certain the machines were coming for their livelihoods. They were, in a narrow sense, right. And in the longer sense, no industrial society since has ever willingly gone back. The looms won. The question was always whether we would build the schools, the safety nets, and the new jobs fast enough to bring the people forward with the technology.

That’s the same question on every college campus where students boo speakers who want to talk honestly about AI. I get the fear. I also know that booing the conversation off the stage doesn’t make the technology go away. It just guarantees that the people who do show up to shape it don’t look like you.

A few months ago I had a long conversation with my friend Brett Hurt, founder of data.world and one of the clearest thinkers I know on the ethics and architecture of AI. We spent most of it on a single point. The potential of this technology, properly harnessed, is staggering. The risk isn’t that AI gets built. The risk is that it gets built somewhere we don’t have a say in how.

What I’m asking of you

I know this is not the most popular position to take with the US Tomorrow audience. Push back. That’s the point of this newsletter.

But before you vote no at the next zoning meeting, I’d ask four things.

1. Replace “yes or no” with “yes, and what do we get?” Demand water reuse, grid contribution, ratepayer protection, workforce pipelines, and a local tax structure that actually funds schools. The leverage is real.

2. Insist on public-private partnerships. Private capital, nonprofit accountability, workforce-development institutions, and local voters at the same table. Not separate tables.

3. Hold hyperscalers to a higher standard of citizenship. Make community stewardship a precondition, not a press release.

4. Don’t let the loudest voice in the room speak for the whole town. The folks with ulterior motives are organized. The folks who just want a fair deal need to be more organized.

We’ve done bigger things together than this. The interstate highway system. Rural electrification. The internet itself. Each one came with real, painful disruption. Each one paid back the country many times over because we decided to shape the build instead of refusing it.

The looms are coming either way. Let’s be the country that owns them.

— Joseph

Co-Founder of USTomorrow

Catalyst: Leadership and Strategy in a Changing World, co-authored with Bret Boyd, is available wherever books are sold. The first chapter is the foundation for how I think about everything in this piece

Joseph Kopser is a serial entrepreneur and leadership development expert. Prior to that his company, RideScout, was acquired by Mercedes. He served in the Army for 20 years after graduating from West Point and Harvard. He was recognized as a White House Champion of Change in clean energy and won the U.S. DOT Data Innovation Award. Co-author of Catalyst: Leadership and Strategy in a Changing World, co-authored with Bret Boyd, is available wherever books are sold.