Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with someone who, over the past several months, has transformed from a wonderful client to a wonderful friend. For the purpose of this newsletter, let’s call him Dan. (…because that’s actually his name.)

Dan co-founded a media company that has over 10 million subscribers across all platforms. Dan’s an amazing person. Dan’s also an agnostic. In his words, he’s “compelled by the neuroscientific case for Buddhism but still sympathetic to many aspects of Christianity.” (Yeah. Dan talks more eloquently than I do.) He also often says that all the great religions point to the same mountain of truth, just from different angles. And you know what? Even though Dan and I violently disagree on many things (actually, we probably try too hard not to offend each other), he and I largely agree on this point.

He’d say the principles are emergent. I’d say they stem from the Designer who built his intentionality and love into every facet of creation. But either way, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about these principles because of a film we’re working on. The film is about an important public intellectual and his “principles of human progress” – ideas like mutual benefit, equal rights, and openness…

Anyhow, the more Dan and I’ve talked, the more I’ve started seeing these timeless principles everywhere. You know that thing where once you’re focused on something, you start noticing it all around you? The Germans have a word for it that sounds like a sneeze: Baader-Meinhof.

Case in point: I picked up Mere Christianity again recently for a small group I’m in, and right there in chapter one, C.S. Lewis lays it out. And by “it” I mean the “universal moral law.” (He calls it the “Tao” in a different book.) He argues that, deep down, we all know what’s right. We all agree on the basics: fairness, kindness, humility. But none of us consistently live like we believe it.

Here’s Lewis:

“Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’—‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—‘Why should you shove in first?’—‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’—‘Come on, you promised.’

People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

What interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat had a right to do so.”

He goes on for several pages like this, but at the end of the chapter, he summarizes:

“These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it.”

So what do you do with that tension between what we know and how we live?

Enter my latest spiritual tool: the Oura Ring. Yetta bought it for me after finding out that I’d been wanting one for months and now I’m using it to track everything. Heart rate, sleep quality, readiness score (whatever that is). But more importantly, it’s helping me pay attention. To slow down. Breathe. Lower stress. Be here now.

“Mindfulness,” Dan might call it. It reminds me of this:

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” – Jesus (Matthew 6:34)

So I’m learning, slowly, that presence isn’t about zen stillness or escaping the world (although, maybe there can be some of that too). But for me it’s about keeping a clear mind about who I am, how I relate to others (including my Creator), and living a bit less in the future or the past. I’m trying to practice a little less distraction (oof that’s tough), and trying instead to focus on how I’m treating those around me now. How I react to the stress stimuli now. Whether I’m enjoying the moment with my family now. Listening to a friend now. Praying (you guessed it! now). You get the picture.

Even Aristotle, who I’m told did not wear a smart ring (history buffs, check me on this), said something like this:

“Happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. . .in a complete life.”

He didn’t think all men automatically know how to be virtuous, but he did say we learn to be virtuous through practice and repetition (habituation):

“We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” — Nicomachean Ethics, Book II

My point? Through squinting eyes, I think Aristotle, Lewis, Dan and I all agree a bit more than we might sometimes think. Perhaps like Lewis says, all people secretly know the laws of human nature AND perhaps like Aristotle says, it’s only through practicing those virtues that we habituate them into our daily practice to truly discover joy, peace, and happiness.

And perhaps, today as I’m looking at the mountain of deadlines our team is facing, instead of habituating stress or the trappings of mental fatigue, I can practice stopping, breathing, saying a prayer of gratitude, and responding with love, joy, peace, etc. instead.

Perhaps we all can.

Until next time, here’s to Human Flourishing.
-Ian

New Project Spotlight: The Story of America

For the past couple of months, we’ve had the honor of working with Hillsdale College and the White House on a new series on American History, featuring a lot of names you might recognize. New episodes drop every month, so stay tuned for more! Last week we went live with an episode about the 250th Anniversary and history of the U.S. Army (featuring Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth). Check it out!

ALSO, if you’re one of my many friends who might wonder “How can Ian work on something with THAT administration?!” Check out my Linked-in post about this very topic. We live in contentious times, but if we can all add a bit more truth, beauty, and goodness into the world, I’m all for trying to help make that happen!

<p>The post Buddhism, C.S. Lewis, and Practicing Presence. first appeared on Distant Moon.</p>

Ok, gang. this is a long one, but I think it’s valuable. I also think that if you start practicing what I unpack below, it could start serving your organization, projects, and storytelling immediately. I hope it’s as valuable to you as it has proven to be for me and the team over the past few months. So with out further ado, here we go!

Introduction: The Problem No One Wants to Admit

In mid-May 2025, I had the honor of attending the Webby Awards in New York. (I promise this is the last time I’ll mention this in our newsletter, ok!?) Our team at Distant Moon, alongside our technical and agency partners, had just won Best Multimedia Storytelling. It was a moment of celebration, of creative validation, and of anticipation – because I was about to meet the minds who had supposedly shaped the internet over the past year.

But what I encountered instead was a culture standing at the crossroads.

One by one, the honorees paraded on stage. Not for their world-changing vision or stories that stirred the soul. But for content that was – at best – amusing. TikTokers. YouTubers. Instagrammers. A guy who went viral posting squirrel videos. A woman whose performance art could be summarized as “very demure, very mindful.” There was no shortage of attention, but I couldn’t help wondering: To what end? Where were the stories that shaped people’s lives for the better?

Ironically, at my own table sat people whose work did that – projects that gave voice to peacemakers from every nation, or helped viewers understand the experiences of others from radically different backgrounds. But they weren’t the creators on stage. The spotlight went to the spectacle, not the substance.

Why?

Because Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan were right. “Who are Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan?” I’m glad you asked, more on them in a moment, but in short, they’re famous for the well-known aphorism: “The medium is the message.”

Today’s dominant media – TikTok, Instagram, YouTube – were built for attention, not transformation. These platforms reward brevity, not depth; spectacle, not soul. And when you try to tell meaningful stories in a medium designed for distractions, the medium wins. This is not to say that NO longform and insightful content can capture attention on these mediums. In fact, as you’ll see, we’re convinced that with strategic and mindful (but not demure) processes applied to the traditional film and content creation process, you can co-opt inherently distraction-prone media platforms for soul-enriching and message-delivering content.

But this requires a rigorous and often ignored approach. One that helps brands with something truly worth saying break through all the noise.

Section 1: The Hidden Architecture of Modern Media

In his prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman warned us that the greatest threat to truth wasn’t censorship, but entertainment. He built on Canadian philosopher, Marshall McLuhan’s insight that the form of communication – the medium – shapes the content it conveys.

McLuhan put it bluntly: The medium is the message.

Postman took it further: in a television-dominated world at the time of his writing, even serious subjects become entertainment. In our era, the dynamic is supercharged. TikTok doesn’t just favor the trivial. It penalizes the profound.

The result? Content that actually matters struggles to survive. It gets buried under waves of viral fluff.

And this is where many brands (especially purpose-driven ones) get stuck. They have stories that matter. But they try to tell those stories through platforms that trivialize everything.

Section 2: Why Traditional Film Still Doesn’t Cut It

Some might say, “Just make a long-form film. Invest in quality. Tell the story cinematically.” And sure, that’s better than a TikTok video. But traditional film storytelling, when applied to messaging and brand-building still carries a fatal flaw:

It’s broadcast. Not a conversation.

Even beautiful films can fall flat if they’re built on assumptions about what an audience wants or needs. Films that are made for an audience, but never with them.

This one-directional approach often leads to heartbreaking outcomes: high-effort films that miss the mark, don’t connect, and fade into oblivion.

The brand-building and media landscape is littered with more examples of failure than success. Just look at the graveyard of branded videos on YouTube and Instagram that never reach beyond a few dozen views. For every viral campaign that breaks through, there are thousands of high-effort, high-cost pieces of content that vanish into the void. But this dynamic isn’t unique to marketing; it’s foundational to the entire storytelling industry. Hollywood, the very machine built to manufacture dreams, is structured around failure. In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say the business model of Hollywood relies on the rare success subsidizing a sea of flops. According to industry analyses, only about 20% of Hollywood films manage to achieve profitability, leaving approximately 80% failing to break even at the domestic box office.

This means that most films lose money. And I’m not talking about obscure indie projects. I’m saying some of the most anticipated, studio-backed films with A-list talent and nine-figure budgets regularly underperform or outright bomb. The 2023 box office saw colossal losses on titles like The Marvels, which had the lowest opening of any Marvel Cinematic Universe movie and lost an estimated $237 million, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which, despite massive marketing spend and global recognition, is estimated to have lost over $100 million.

So if even Hollywood, with all its data, budgets, and storytelling talent, struggles to connect with audiences, what hope does a mission-driven brand have of breaking through without a radically different approach?

Section 3: A New Way Forward – Audience-Powered Film

When considering these hurdles, I began talking with a good friend of mine who is a well-respected audience-analysis expert who has spent over 25 years in experience marketing. We  started discussing what filmmakers can do to overcome the significant risks that clients face in funding new film projects. The result? Something we call Audience-Powered Film.

It’s a storytelling model rooted in Human-Centered Design (HCD). At its core, HCD flips the creative process on its head: instead of assuming we know the answer, we design with the user, not just for them.

We’ve adapted this approach for film on several projects over the last year, and the initial results have been extraordinary.

Here’s how it works (warning, the steps seem shockingly obvious, and yet few people practice them):

1. GATHER (Insights)

• Interviews with stakeholders and subject matter experts
• In-depth interviews with real audience members
• Audience, story, content, and format hypotheses

2. IMAGINE (Co-creation)

• A 2-day concept summit with creatives and clients
• Co-creating multiple film concepts
• Testing the best ideas with audience members
• Final script and story plan crafted with real feedback

3. DEVELOP (Film & Experience)

• Shoot and edit a rough cut
• Screen that cut with audience members
• Revise based on real-world reactions
• Deliver a final film shaped not just by creative vision, but end audience

Section 4: Why This Works When Nothing Else Does

We don’t just connect with audiences. We build with them.

That’s the difference.

• When an audience sees themselves in the development process, they’re not just viewers – they’re participants.
• When the story reflects their real fears, hopes, and beliefs, they don’t just watch it – they share it.
• When the medium is tailored to their habits and their hearts, it doesn’t just break through – it lands.

Section 5: Who This Is For

This isn’t for every brand. But it’s exactly right for:

• Cause-based organizations that want to shift minds and move hearts.
• Philanthropic leaders who believe storytelling can scale good.
• Culture builders who know that the best ideas don’t go viral unless they’re designed to connect.

Section 6: How You Can Use Audience-Powered Film

Feel free to steal anything of value in this newsletter! First and foremost, I want to bless all of you reading this, so if something sticks and is helpful, it’s yours to use!

But if you’re thinking, “This sounds like a lot of work and I don’t want to do this myself,” we’d also love to help you. We’re offering a limited number of Audience-Powered Film pilot projects, with early-stage pricing to refine and validate the process.

Timelines:

• GATHER & IMAGINE: 2-4 months (driven by availability and audience access).
• DEVELOP & GO-TO-MARKET: Varies by scope but typically 4-12 months.

If you’re leading a brand or initiative that has something truly worth saying, let’s build something that actually breaks through.

Here’s to Human Flourishing!
– Ian

<p>The post Breakthrough! How Brands Can Reach Audiences in the Age of Distraction.  first appeared on Distant Moon.</p>