Threaded: A Day in the Life of a Thinking Mind
I was just planning a trip, but it became so much more.
Sometimes, the most interesting thing you can do is just watch yourself think.
This afternoon started simply: I was planning a family trip to Las Vegas. Nothing dramatic. No deep philosophical tension. Just logistics. What can we do that doesn’t involve gambling? What’s fun in July on the Strip?
Then I checked the weather forecast.
Las Vegas in July regularly hits 115°F, but was originally built before air conditioning. Which begged the obvious question:
Who the hell builds a city in a place like that?
Desert Mirage, Existential Crisis
That cracked the day wide open.
We started looking into the origins of Las Vegas — not as a city of entertainment, but as an infrastructure artifact. A product of railroad geography, natural springs, and later, Hoover Dam labor camps. It made sense — in a way.
But then I thought of Phoenix. Hotter. Bigger. No real water source. And yet, there it sits — a sunbaked megacity built on Hohokam canal ruins and Cold War aerospace subsidies.
Which led, inevitably, to the Colorado River — and the slow-motion hydrological collapse of the American Southwest.
Turns out? Vegas and Phoenix aren’t just hot. They’re existentially screwed.
Export Water, Import Madness
Digging into Arizona’s water use, I found that 70–80% of it goes to agriculture. But weirdly, not really human crops — alfalfa, hay, feedstock. Stuff we feed to cows.
But not even our cows. A massive chunk of that hay is exported overseas — to Saudi Arabia, China, and others — because they ran out of water and now grow their feed here.
We're literally pumping Arizona’s groundwater, in a drought, to grow hay for dairy cows in Riyadh.
And all of this is protected by capitalist incentive structures and contractual water rights written a century ago, in a climate that no longer exists.
It’s legal. It’s profitable. It’s completely insane.
Meow Wolf and A Game of Thrones
We needed a break, I was starting to get really bummed out for us as a species. So we looped back to Vegas — specifically, to Meow Wolf, the immersive art collective with a trippy installation just off the Strip. They have one here in Houston, but I've never been. I wondered where they came from.
Turns out? Meow Wolf was funded early by George R. R. Martin, flush with HBO money after Game of Thrones exploded.
We live in a strange and wonderful timeline, where a fantasy novel written in 1996 became a TV show in 2011, which made a writer rich enough to fund an art project, which became an attraction I’ll visit nearly thirty years later.
That opened a new loop: the weird interconnectedness of things.
Threaded Reality
This was the moment the day turned reflective.
The whole arc — from Vegas to hay exports to Meow Wolf — felt eerily like something out of James Burke’s *The Day the Universe Changed*. And that led to another realization:
Burke’s series wasn’t just about historical coincidences. It's not just a ride on rails through scientific history, outlining the odd thread of causality that connects distant inventions and innovations. (That show is Connections, also by Burke, which is also amazing.)
It was about epistemology — how we understand what we know. And crucially, how changes in how we think, and our approach to knowledge, changes and reframes what we do with it, and how that is expressed through discovery and inventions.
His work showed how shifts in knowledge rewire societies. It captured the tick-tock of the pendulum: new discoveries reshape how we think, and those shifts in thought spark new discoveries. Over and over. An endless cycle.
Today, I wasn’t just jumping topics.
I was mapping the intricate tapestry that is made up of millions of seemingly unrelated threads, woven in hidden and often inscrutable ways. A tapestry that you can't even begin to make sense of until you step back far enough to take it all in.
From travel plans to water rights. Foreign cows to fantasy art. From outrage to wonder to reflection.
Burke would’ve smiled at the chaos. He always struck me as having a hint of mischief about him – like he was sharing secrets he shouldn't, but couldn't keep them to himself.
Pulling the Thread
I didn’t set out to do this. I was just planning a trip.
But I am a curious person, and one question led to another. One thread pulled loose an entire section of tapestry, even if only for a little while.
By dinner, I was sketching a modern sequel to The Day the Universe Changed — outlining episodes about AI, algorithmic truth, and the collapse of consensus. I don't know that anything will ever truly come of that, but if it does, I can at least point to how it started.
This wasn’t procrastination. It was mental cartography.
Some people make to-do lists.
Some people build knowledge trees.
I map constellations of thought.
If you enjoy watching a brain at full tilt — tracing the absurdly interconnected, emotionally tangled, system-level mess we call modern life — then you might just be my kind of person.