It started, as many things have lately, with a reconnection.

A few days ago, I found myself reaching out to a young man I’d first met more than a decade ago, when I was CTO of a nonprofit called Junior State of America. He was in Ohio at the time, burning with the kind of civic energy you rarely see in someone that age, working on ways to use technology to get young people more engaged with their democracy. I did what little I could to encourage and facilitate his work. You don’t forget a kid like that.

Today, Michael Lahanas-Calderón is the Chief Strategist at Inequality Media, the nonpartisan digital media organization co-founded in 2015 by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth. When I heard about what Michael was doing now, I felt that particular satisfaction of watching a seed you barely watered somehow grow into something real.

But it also got me thinking. What if we could design an AI that reasoned the way Robert Reich does? And what would it look like if we built one patterned instead after, say, Pete Hegseth?

I know that sounds like an odd hypothetical. But I don’t think it is.

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What Gets Poured Into the Machine

Before I explain why, let me say a word about how AI systems actually take on personality.

Most people interact with AI as if they’re talking to a neutral tool, something like a very fast calculator that can also write poetry. But that’s not quite right. AI systems are trained on human writing and human speech — the accumulated record of how we think, argue, teach, persuade, and deceive. And the human voices that influence them most are the ones that show up in what’s called a system prompt.

A system prompt is a set of instructions that shapes how an AI behaves in a specific context, before you ever say a word to it. Think of it as the AI’s standing orders. These prompts, invisible to most users, are enormously powerful. They can make a model that’s fundamentally the same underlying technology act very differently depending on who configured it and with what values in mind.

Anthropic — the company that makes Claude, the AI assistant I use — has been distinctive in publishing their constitution openly. The document is over eighty pages, written in plain language, and released under a Creative Commons license so anyone can read it. It establishes a hierarchy of priorities: Claude should be broadly safe first, then broadly ethical, then compliant with Anthropic’s specific guidelines, and then genuinely helpful. It reads less like a technical document and more like a letter — a careful, philosophically serious attempt to say this is who we want this being to be.

OpenAI has published something related — a Model Spec, updated and publicly available — and Google has long published a set of AI Principles. So the field has moved toward more transparency than I once expected. But Anthropic’s constitution remains distinctive in depth and tone. It reads as if the authors actually wrestled with the ethics, rather than handing the job to a communications team to draft bullet points.

The point is: these documents matter. They’re the philosophical substrate of the machine. And they come from people. The humans who write and refine those documents, who select the training data, who decide which values rank above which other values — those humans are shaping something that will, in turn, shape us and our economy for years to come.

Which brings me back to my question.

The Secretary of War

I’m going to be ungenerous for a moment, and I think the occasion justifies it.

Pete Hegseth — Secretary of Defense, or as he and the administration prefer, the Secretary of War — has a pretty clear set of guiding principles. DEI is not only wrong, in his view; it’s dangerous. Diversity, equity, and inclusion represent, in his telling, a weakening of the essential purpose of institutions. The military’s job is to produce warriors. Warriors are not diverse committees. They are, in his framework, lean and lethal — and lethality doesn’t require a lot of hand-wringing about who gets included.

He’s called “our diversity is our strength” one of the dumbest phrases in military history. He eliminated DEI offices on his first day in office. He’s fired top women leaders. He’s announced ten new directives aimed at moving the department away from what he calls “woke garbage” and toward a “warrior ethos.” He believes, and has put in writing, that irreconcilable differences between left and right in America will lead to conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process.

Now imagine an AI system built — explicitly or subtly — around those principles. Not a hypothetical evil AI, not a cartoon villain, just a system shaped by the same values: merit defined narrowly, inclusion treated as a liability, strength defined as a willingness to dominate. This is not far-fetched. AI systems are being built right now for defense applications. Palantir, whose CEO Alex Karp has published a manifesto calling on Silicon Valley to fulfill its “moral debt” by arming the national security state, is already a primary conduit through which the Pentagon uses large language models.

And here’s where this stops being abstract.

Who Gets to Keep Their Job?

Companies across the economy are already automating work and reducing headcount. The process is accelerating. According to recent data from the Dallas Federal Reserve, employment in the computer systems design sector has declined roughly five percent since ChatGPT’s release in late 2022. White-collar workers — knowledge workers, in Peter Drucker’s phrase — are increasingly in the crosshairs.

I’ve written in these pages before about what it felt like to be fired on a Zoom call. The efficient, clinical impersonality of it. The way years of work collapsed into a script and an email with complete details.

As companies automate, they don’t just cut jobs randomly. They make choices. Who stays? Who is worth retaining? What kinds of workers, what kinds of thinking, what kinds of people, does the automated company of the future value?

If the AI tools making those recommendations — HR screening systems, workforce planning platforms, talent analytics — are shaped by values that treat inclusion as weakness and warrior-like productivity as the highest virtue, then we already know the answer. The people who get to keep their jobs will be the ones who score high on whatever that system defines as strength. And the people who get cut will be disproportionately the same people who have always been cut: the ones whose contributions are harder to quantify, whose value is relational rather than transactional, whose way of being in the world doesn’t fit the narrow template.

This is not paranoia. It’s the predictable output of systems shaped by particular values, running at scale.

What Would a Reich-Aligned AI Do Differently?

Robert Reich served as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997, having earlier served in the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Time once named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He’s spent his career at Harvard, Brandeis, and UC Berkeley, written eighteen books, and for the past decade has led Inequality Media. The organization’s videos have been viewed more than a billion times. Its core mission: translate complex economics into digestible truth, and help people understand why inequality is not just an injustice but a structural failure.

Reich’s guiding philosophy is not complicated to summarize. Economic power and political power are inseparable. When wealth concentrates beyond a certain point, democracy corrodes — not because of bad intentions, but because concentrated power rewrites the rules. The antidote is not charity. It’s structure: strong labor rights, progressive taxation, enforced antitrust, a government that sees its role as balancing power rather than enabling its concentration. He’s been making this argument for forty years, and the arc of recent history has been pretty kind to his thesis.

Now imagine an AI shaped by those principles. Not an AI that lectures you about inequality — that would be tedious, and Reich himself never does it that way — but an AI whose underlying value structure, when it encounters a workforce planning question, asks: who gets left behind when this decision is made, and does that matter? An AI that, when helping a company reduce headcount, surfaces not just cost savings but second-order effects: who bears the risk, who bears the cost, what happens to the people at the bottom of the org chart, what happens to the town the factory was in.

Would it slow things down? Probably sometimes. Would it produce different recommendations? Yes. Would those recommendations occasionally turn out to be better — not just more equitable but more accurate, because they account for costs that the warrior-ethos AI would simply externalize onto the people who can least afford to bear them?

I think so. I genuinely think so.

The UBI Detour, and Why It Isn’t Enough

I want to briefly address the counterargument that usually arrives at this point in conversations about AI and labor: “Relax. We’ll just have UBI.”

Universal Basic Income has real advocates and real merit. The idea that governments should tax the companies extracting value from automation and redistribute that value to displaced workers is not crazy — it’s arguably the only way to maintain a consumer economy when consumers are being replaced by machines.

But Howard Marks, not exactly a left-wing economist, said something about UBI that I haven’t been able to get out of my head: financial support alone will not replace the psychological and social benefits of employment. Work gives you a sense of identity. It structures your time. It puts you in a relationship with other people. It gives you a reason to get up in the morning that’s connected to something outside yourself.

I know this from the inside. I know what it feels like to have the Zoom call, to have the script delivered, to become a line item. I also know what it feels like in the middle of a Tuesday when the next thing hasn’t arrived yet and the house is quiet and the dog is looking at you the way he does when he wonders why you’re not doing whatever it is you usually do. Money alone doesn’t fix that.

So even in a world with UBI — which we don’t have yet, and may never have at a meaningful scale — people still need work. At least for most of their adult lives. At least for now. The question of who gets to work, and on what terms, and making what contributions, is not a footnote to the AI question. It is the AI question.

And if the only people who have jobs in the automated economy are the warriors — the ones who score high on the Hegseth index of productivity and dominance — where does that leave everyone else? Not just economically, but as people?

A Quiet Conversation in Colorado

Somewhere in the middle of a drive last year, Paco and I rolled into a diner on the eastern edge of Colorado. It was the kind of place where the coffee comes in a thick mug and the waitress calls you “hon” without it ever feeling performative.

I asked her, idly, whether she worried about being replaced by a kiosk. She laughed, the kind of laugh that has a whole worldview baked into it.

“Hon,” she said, “they tried that already. People didn’t like it. They wanted somebody to tell their day to.”

I think about that a lot now. The work the waitress does is not, on a flowchart, complicated. Take order. Bring food. Make change. An automation consultant could draw up a slide deck explaining why she’s redundant. A warrior-ethos AI optimizing for throughput would put a kiosk in her place tomorrow morning and call it a productivity gain.

But what a waiter or waitress actually does — the listening, the noticing, the small repairs to people’s days — is most of the value of the diner. Strip that out and you have a vending machine in a building. The numbers might look better for a quarter. The town would be a little lonelier.

A Reich-aligned AI would notice that. A Hegseth-aligned AI would not. That’s the entire argument of this essay, in one mug of coffee.

On International Workers’ Day, which AI would you choose?

I know which one I would choose. And it’s not the one built by the Secretary of War. It’s the one trained to notice the people at the bottom of the org chart, the diner waitress who listens to your problems, the kid whose contribution doesn’t quite fit the template but who might go on to become Chief Strategist to a former Labor Secretary — and to count them as part of the answer, not as rounding error.

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Arthur Morgan is writing a memoir about an 8,000-mile road trip he took with a dog named Paco in search of something resembling American redemption. He lives in Northern California, but travels in search of the real America whenever he can.

Let me explain. In 2018, a company called Rockstar Games released a sprawling Western called Red Dead Redemption 2. It became one of the best-selling, most critically acclaimed games ever made. The main character — a 19th-century outlaw who collects debts for a gang of outlaws and slowly realizes he’s been rationalizing harm his whole life — is named Arthur Morgan.

I am also Arthur Morgan. I am not that one. I am this one: a 62-year-old former Silicon Valley technology executive who spent nearly thirty years building the AI and attention economy, and who also, eventually, couldn’t keep rationalizing what he was doing.

The parallels are not lost on me.

In mid-2024, I was fired on a five-minute Zoom call. My boss read from a script. The woman from HR sat beside him without expression. This is hard, he said. We don’t need senior guys like you anymore, he said. You’ll get the complete details by email. Then the window closed. I stared at a blank screen while thirty years of conference rooms and product launches and strategy meetings dissolved into nothing.

My dog Paco noticed first. He’d been listening from the hallway, monitoring the particular quality of my silence, the way dogs do. He walked in, jumped up on the bench seat beside me, and put his paw on my shoulder. He does this when the stare doesn’t get me moving. Then he waited.

A few months later, I loaded him and a Rivian truck I’d named Roci — short for Rocinante, what Steinbeck named his truck in Travels With Charley — and drove 8,000 miles across America.

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I told myself I was going to gather intelligence. Understand why the country had fractured. Come back with a diagnosis and maybe a remedy. I was, I realize now, still thinking like a product manager. Still operating as if the problem needed a roadmap and a rollout date.

What I found instead was something I hadn’t been looking for. I found it in a truck stop in Wyoming, where a man named Pat told me he’d spent four years homeless because he was too proud to ask for help, and that a church group in Salt Lake City had eventually given him a camper without asking about his politics. I found it in a Basque restaurant in Winnemucca, Nevada, where the food tasted like the kind of community we’ve stopped building. I found it in a teenager named Zayne, sitting on a log near the Golden Gate Bridge, confessing that he’d helped get a stranger fired online and wasn’t sure anymore if he was still one of the good guys. I found it on a stretch of freeway approaching Fort Collins, Colorado, watching myself become my father’s caretaker and realizing I didn’t know him the way I thought I did, because I’d been confusing Google for wisdom for most of my adult life.

And I found it crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in the dark on the first morning of the trip, listening to the th-thump of the bridge deck under my tires, thinking about a neighbor named Dan — a venture capitalist with a beautiful family — who had jumped from that same bridge years before. I’d always thought I understood why. Screens can hollow a person out quietly, and Silicon Valley’s version of success has a way of making even people who resist it feel like they can never climb high enough to escape its gravity. Dan had resisted better than most. He still jumped.

I had resisted less than Dan. I knew that. There were stretches in my life when the thought of ending things flashed across my mind with a clarity that scared me. In those moments, Paco would press against my leg or nudge me toward the door, as if he sensed something in the air I hadn’t yet named.

That’s the book I’m writing.

Travels With Paco: In Search of American Redemption is a memoir about what happens when the man who helped build the machines tries to see what’s on the other side of them. It draws on Robert Putnam’s research on social capital, follows the rough outline of Steinbeck’s road trip, and arrives at a moment when the machines I spent my career building are facing their own reckoning — in courts, in Congress, and in the minds of the people who built them.

The fictional Arthur Morgan, the outlaw in the video game, spends most of his story doing damage he tells himself is just business. Near the end, he can’t do it anymore. He goes looking for something to leave behind that isn’t wreckage. He doesn’t have much time left to find it.

I started this journey for similar reasons. I have more time, I hope.

Subscribers to this Substack can get beta reader access to the full working manuscript. I’m working through the final steps with a publisher now, and I’m posting excerpts and essays related to the themes in the book. I want real readers in the room while it takes its final form. If any of this sounds like something you want in your inbox, subscribe below — it’s free.

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Paco is doing well. He is still, by considerable margin, the better half of this operation.

— Arthur Morgan (IRL)

"Buy a pup and your money will buy Love unflinching that cannot lie—"

—Rudyard Kipling, from The Power of The Dog

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In the town nearest my home, a smallish town on the San Francisco peninsula, there’s a street corner that evokes in me pretty much the full gamut of human emotions. In many ways it’s a typical street corner. It has a coffee shop with a few tables outside where retirees sit and chat. Exercisers hang out after their morning workout. A man with a beard works on a crossword puzzle. Commuters rush in and out, grabbing their pre-ordered coffees on their way to the train station down the block.

When I’m standing on the corner sipping my first coffee of the day and chatting with friends, I feel relaxed and content. Paco usually feels comfortable here too, as it’s a familiar place and he knows that friends will stop to give him treats, or at least a friendly greeting.

Sometimes my feelings on the corner are more complex. When I look across the street at the imposing glass windows of the Apple Store, I feel an odd mix of pride and embarrassment. I feel pride because it’s the store where I bought my first iPhone, my first Mac computer, and my first iPad.

On the other hand, I feel embarrassment when I see the Burlingame police officers stationed in front of the Apple store every day, because it reminds me of how privileged I am to be able to afford a new Apple device every few months. A couple years ago there was a series of robberies at the store. Shoplifters would come in and scoop up thousands of dollars of devices from the tables. Since then there’s been a police SUV parked in front of the store every day.

Occasionally I feel anger when I’m on the corner, like the time when I walked into the coffee shop and saw a man “open carrying” a pistol in a holster. He was not in uniform, so I assumed that he was a civilian who was openly carrying a gun for the sole purpose of intimidating and enraging the liberal residents of our town. If so, he certainly achieved that goal with me. I quickly spun around and exited the shop, fuming as I walked down the street to another coffee shop.

This was before I had a firearm of my own, but I think my reaction today would still be one of anger, albeit with somewhat less shock. While I own a shotgun, I would never carry it in public, except to transport it to and from a place where I can hunt or shoot. And I would never load it, except when preparing to shoot a bird or a clay pigeon. I simply can’t imagine myself loading a firearm with the intention of shooting, or even pointing it at, another human.

This is why the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17 year-old who killed two people in Kenosha in August of 2020, angered me so much, and why the not-guilty verdict on all counts angered me even more. The thoughts running through my head after the verdict went something like this: how is it fair that teenagers who shoplift from the Apple Store, especially if they’re black or brown, could spend years in prison, when a white boy can roam the streets with an assault weapon and kill two unarmed people, without so much as a slap on the wrist?

One practice that meditation gurus recommend is to nurture thoughts of gratitude and compassion for all people, including your enemies and people you dislike or even hate. So let me try this technique with Kyle Rittenhouse for a moment.

As with so many things in life, my experiences with Paco help me find empathy for Kyle Rittenhouse. There’s a behavior that dog trainers call “resource guarding,” and it’s a behavior that Paco tends to take to extremes. When I’m chatting with friends on the aforementioned street corner and a well-dressed business woman rushes past us into the coffee shop a little too quickly, Paco will bark loudly at her, as if to say, “Slow down lady! This is my corner. Your coffee will still be there in thirty seconds!” Paco does all this resource guarding without being asked, and sometimes even when we implore him not to do so.

On the surface, resource guarding is exactly what Kyle Rittenhouse set out to do, on that fateful August evening. After the shooting of Jacob Blake by a police officer caused civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rittenhouse had apparently heard that there was a car dealership near where a planned protest march was happening. The dealership had suffered arson damage the night after Blake was shot, and Rittenhouse’s online comrades hypothesized that the owner of the car lot would be grateful if people volunteered to guard the area to prevent further damage. Just as Paco will rush to guard resources that are not his own without being asked, Rittenhouse and his friend decided to guard the car lot, without any formal request from the car dealer.

Up to this point I’m able to follow the thought process of Rittenhouse fairly easily (with Paco’s help, of course). But to understand why Rittenhouse decided to arm himself with an AR-15-style military assault weapon that night requires me to exercise my empathy muscles more strenuously. Rittenhouse was not simply reacting instinctively to guard resources. He was succumbing to a string of emotions that are common in men of all ages, but especially to teenage boys who are struggling to make sense of a world that has been turned upside down by a stew of hormones.

The emotion at play here is what I’ll call “machismo.” Paco has helped me recognize my own susceptibility to machismo. When I first started thinking about getting a Spanish Water Dog, I was drawn to their strong, rustic look. They come in a variety of colors, but I wanted to get one that was mostly brown, because the curly hair of a brown Spanish Water Dog looks similar to dreadlocks when it gets long. As my wife and I got older and I felt my youthful manliness flagging, I thought that an athletic, dreadlocked dog walking beside us would restore my lost masculinity and make me look both hip and inclusive at the same time.

I didn’t realize how feverishly I had been trying to vicariously experience machismo through Paco until one day when my friend Jose told me that he had concluded that I was “like one of those parents who forces his kid to play sports against the kid’s will.” While I think Paco genuinely enjoys the activities that I do with him, I’ll admit that some of them probably stem from a subconscious desire to boost my coolness or manliness. As I described in my last post, I’m teaching him how to be a pretty decent bird dog.

Little did I know that hunting is now considered by the most recent generation of gun owners to be the opposite of cool and masculine. The new crowd of gun owners apparently think that hunters are old fashioned wimps, because our firearms are not lethal enough. They call hunters fudds, after Elmer Fudd, the bungling rabbit hunter in Warner Brothers cartoons who talks with a lisp and never manages to kill Bugs Bunny.

The desire to be strong or masculine is not a bad thing per se, but when it veers into the realm of “toxic masculinity” it becomes a serious problem. My theory is that hyper-masculine behavior stems from self-esteem issues, and I suspect that’s what led Rittenhouse to purchase his assault weapon, and then to carry it to Kenosha. Everyone experiences dips in their self-esteem at times. If you’re an adult and lose your job, or just feel that your career has plateaued, you may try to boost your confidence by doing things that you think will make you appear more masculine. If you’re a student and you’re having problems in school or at home, you may take similar steps.

According to a very thorough article in the New Yorker about Kyle Rittenhouse, Kyle’s father was an alcoholic and eventually left the family, leaving Kyle’s mother to raise him and his two siblings on her own. Rittenhouse’s mother consistently had trouble paying rent, and the family was repeatedly evicted. On two occasions Kyle and his family had to briefly live in a shelter. Knowing this background, I can understand better how Rittenhouse fell into the trap that had been laid for him.

Paco eventually stopped guarding his food bowl. Not because I trained it out of him with force, but because I kept showing up at the same time every day, putting the bowl down, and walking away. He figured out, slowly, that I wasn’t competition. That the food would keep coming. That he didn’t have to treat every meal like it was the last one.

I think about that when I’m at the sporting clay shooting range, watching a first-timer from the city work up the nerve to rack the slide on a shotgun for the first time. There’s always a moment where you can see the fear and the fascination fighting each other on their face. That’s the moment. Not a lecture about policy, not a debate about Rittenhouse or the Second Amendment. Just a steady hand on the shoulder and a quiet word: it’s okay, I’ve got you, let’s try again. The people who learn to shoot that way — slowly, with someone they trust — almost never become the kind of gun owner anyone is afraid of. The people who were never invited into that moment are the ones I worry about.

I don’t know if any of this adds up to a solution. I’m not sure I believe in solutions anymore. What I believe in, after a lot of miles and a lot of conversations with people who don’t look or vote like me, is that most Americans are more like Paco than like the worst version of their political tribe. Scared, a little, of having what they love taken away. Willing, sometimes, to share the bowl — if someone they trust shows them how.

When you drive north on U.S. 93, crossing the border from Nevada into Idaho, there’s a large billboard that proudly proclaims, “Welcome to Trump Country.” Most of the time, however, there are neither signs nor borders when you enter “Trump Country.” To paraphrase a cliché, Trump Country is not a place, it’s a state of mind. And in my opinion the phrase is a poor moniker for any particular place, even those locales where nearly everyone voted for Donald Trump. I arrived at this opinion after realizing that very few people who voted for Trump actually behave like Trump. Trump voters typically aren’t greedy or power-hungry like Trump. They’re almost never as thin-skinned or as prone to lying as Trump. And they usually aren’t as persistently pessimistic as Trump. More often than not, they’re honest, decent, hardworking people, just as I like to think I am.

I didn’t always feel this way. I used to avoid places that might now be considered Trump Country. I didn’t take road trips much, preferring to fly to my destinations, which were typically major cities and often not even in the United States. Trump country truly was “flyover country” to me, and I snobbishly thought that I was successfully avoiding exposure to a dark underbelly of American society. It was only after I got a dog — a Spanish Water Dog with a thirst for activity levels that are impossible to satisfy indoors or on an airplane — that my feelings about rural America and the people who live there started to change.

An occasion that highlights my shift of perspective was a road trip that my wife and I took with our dog Paco, one sunny weekend in early March. My wife had agreed to go hunting with me and Paco for the first (and quite possibly the last) time. How I had become a hunter, after disavowing firearms for over 40 years and not eating meat for over 15 years, is a story for another blog post. The short version is that I had taken up hunting as part of my quest to reacquaint myself with a part of America that I no longer understood.

The bargain I had struck with my wife was that I would take her to Napa Valley before our hunting outing on Sunday. On Saturday we drove up to Napa to sip wine and picnic alongside tourists from all corners of the globe. We followed that with a sunset hike for Paco at a dog park that could only exist in Napa, with Irish Wolfhounds and Wirehaired Pointing Griffons rollicking amidst vineyards. To cap off the evening, we had dinner (and more wine) at a very frou-frou restaurant where my wife had once sighted Gordon Ramsey and David Beckham dining together with their families.

On Sunday morning we drove from Napa to Garcia’s Hunting Preserve, in California’s Central Valley. The rolling hills of Napa, followed by rice fields scattered with elegant egrets and great blue herons, provided no discernible indication of the cultural and attitudinal differences between the dilettantes of the place we had just left and the hard-working farmers of the region we were entering. As we pulled into the hunting preserve, I was suddenly self-conscious about the Biden/Harris bumper sticker on the back of my Toyota Highlander.

When I took up hunting I thought briefly about finding a sticker I could use to temporarily cover the Biden/Harris sticker when I went to hunting preserves and sporting clay ranges. I bought a Googan Baits sticker that I thought would make me look sufficiently outdoorsy. But it was triangular, and if I had put it on my bumper over the Biden/Harris sticker it would have left two blue edges exposed on either side. I felt like that could leave me easily exposed as an imposter. It would also look a bit tacky, and would be inconsistent with my self-image as a liberal but buttoned-down, neat, and organized sort of guy. I eventually decided it was better to leave the Biden/Harris sticker in plain view. “Stand tall, stand proud,” I told myself. My compromise was to put the Googan Bait sticker above the Biden/Harris sticker. “Moderately liberal, yet outdoorsy in a sufficiently masculine, hunter/fisherman way,” that said to the world, or so I told myself.

The parking lot at Garcia’s Hunting Preserve was much smaller than I expected. There were only three or four trucks, and Jim Garcia and his family were sitting in lawn chairs beside a small shed. I got out of the car and checked in with a blonde woman who I guessed was Jim’s daughter-in-law. It was apparent that Garcia’s was truly a family-run business. The grandkids were doing homework and assisting in counting harvested birds, dad gave instructions to hunters and handled the California Department of Fish and Wildlife paperwork, mom answered emails and phone calls, and Grandpa Jim supervised, while shooting the breeze with a buddy about recent hunting experiences.

Once we got started, our chukar hunt was somewhat uneventful, at least in comparison to my first hunt with Paco a couple months earlier. In January we had hunted for pheasant, and Paco was surprisingly good at it, especially when considering the fact that his only training for his job as a bird dog came from someone with no hunting experience. I had done my best to teach him the basics, running practice drills I had learned from books, YouTube, and an online video course. But when we got out in the field, it was Paco’s instincts that saved the day. When I told him “find the bird,” he expertly homed in on a pheasant. He flushed the first bird a bit too quickly and I missed the shot, but he happily bounded through the field and found another. Eventually I winged a pheasant and we saw it go down in deep cover, about 150 yards away. My first thought was we would never be able to find the bird, since our view of where it had landed was obscured by both trees and distance. But Paco charged forward into the brush like a man on a mission, and within a few minutes he came strutting back with the pheasant dangling from his mouth. He repeated the sequence again about an hour later, and with two pheasants in the bag, we considered the afternoon a success.

Chukars are a type of partridge and are much smaller than pheasants, which allows them hide better from nosey bird dogs. They’re about the size of a well-fed pigeon, but while a pigeon will do it’s best to get in your face and ruin your picnic in the park, a chukar will often stay hidden under a small clump of grass for hours on end. This makes them well-suited to their role as practice birds at hunting preserves.

At this point I should provide a brief sidebar to explain what hunting preserves (less formally known as hunting clubs) are, and how they work. Hunting at a hunting preserve is not real hunting. At least it’s not the type of upland bird hunting that our grandparents and 19th century ancestors would have practiced in forests and prairies across North America. In some ways the experience is like the hunting equivalent of glamping, often featuring a clubhouse where they butcher and clean birds for you after a hunt, fresh water buckets and showers for your dogs, and other modern conveniences that grandpa would have scoffed at as frivolous and unnecessary. But what really distinguishes hunting preserves from true hunting in the wild is where the birds come from and how they get to the fields. Game birds in hunting preserves are raised by farmers in large pens called “flight pens” — fenced areas with netting on top to keep the birds in and predators out, while allowing enough space for the birds to learn how to fly as they grow. The mature birds are then released into fields in the morning, before the hunters arrive with their dogs. Some hunting preserves are less regimented than this, but at the two preserves that I’ve been to, each hunting group has to stay within clearly delineated boundaries during their hunt. If your dog flushes a bird and it flies outside the boundaries of your field, it lives to see another day.

At this point you may be thinking that all of this sounds like a cruel contest akin to the Hunger Games, with birds playing the role of the district tributes, and orange-clad shotgun-toting humans the capitol game-makers. I can certainly understand this sentiment, but this is another example of how Paco has changed my perspective. Pre-Paco, I would have been disappointed to learn that the red-blooded pastime of hunting had been reduced to a game, with carefully prescribed prerequisites and rules. But with Paco as the newest member of our family, I had a renewed appreciation for safety precautions. Paco reminded me of my daughter at age four: rambunctious and seemingly ready to conquer the world, but in need of scaffolding, both to encourage success and to prevent disaster.

Bird hunting preserves provide that scaffolding, both for new hunters and new hunting dogs. To hunt at a preserve you first need to get a hunting license, which requires you to take a hunter’s education course and pass a fairly rigorous test covering not just firearm safety, but also ethics, wildlife habitat, and conservation. The preserve managers and fellow members provide additional guardrails, advice, and encouragement. Next, as anyone who has trained a dog (or raised a child) well knows, learning requires both failures and successes. Setting your dog up for success at each step in the training process is crucial to keeping him or her motivated, and this allows you to successfully shape the desired behaviors. Allowing a dog to track, flush and chase several birds in one day at a preserve can accelerate the learning process dramatically compared to learning in the wild, where you might go days without encountering a game bird. And since hunters at a preserve are not under the same psychological pressure to hit a “bag limit” of a certain number of birds, they also learn more quickly. A hunter on a preserve can calmly pass on risky shot, knowing that another opportunity is likely just around the corner. So while my long-term goal is to be able to hunt for wild birds while enjoying the natural beauty of this country, hunting preserves made the learning process much less intimidating and frustrating, both for me and for Paco.

I’ll offer one final point about hunting preserves in response to the argument I often hear (from my wife, among others) that it’s just plain cruel to kill birds. If this argument came from a vegan I would not presume to rebut it. To my vegan friends, I salute you for doing your part to end factory farming and reduce the environmental footprint of the food that you eat. You are better men, women, or non-binary individuals than I am. But for the carnivores, omnivores, “pescatarians,” and “poultry doesn’t count as meat” vegetarians who make this argument, I put forth this counterpoint. As I mentioned earlier, the birds released at preserves are raised in relatively large spaces, and they have reasonable odds of surviving well past their release date. Contrast this with the life of the factory farm-raised chicken that you might buy in a restaurant or grocery store. After growing up in cages so packed with birds that their beaks are often clipped to keep them from pecking each other to death, they are shuttled to their death on a conveyor belt with no chance of escape. My firm opinion is that birds harvested from hunting preserves live a more “natural” and humane life than most of the poultry we get from grocery stores.

After that circuitous verbal detour about hunting preserves, let me return to my story of our March road trip. At the end of the day I had shot just one chukar. Paco had flushed six of them over the course of a few hours, but either my poor marksmanship or the subconscious pressure of my wife watching had caused me to miss all but one. Since my wife had gone back to the car by the time I finally got one, I’ll go with the subconscious pressure theory.

With bird in hand, Paco and I headed back to the parking lot where the Garcia family was waiting for us. I gave Jim junior the chukar to tag for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and started to ask Jim senior about whether they could clean the bird for me. It was only at this point that I noticed that Jim’s camouflage-color hat was embroidered with the words “Trump 2020.” The letters were embroidered in the same camouflage colors of the hat itself, so I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It was a subtle MAGA hat, but a MAGA hat nonetheless.

My heart skipped a beat, and I started to stumble over my words. In the back of my mind I had been thinking that with a name like Garcia, they might be politically center-left like me. This was, after all, the land of Cesar Chavez, the famous labor leader and civil rights activist who had organized migrant workers and stood up to wealthy California grape growers in the 1960s and 70s. On the other hand, I also knew that many Hispanic families are socially conservative, and naturally skeptical of latte liberal political leaders who claim to have the best interests of Latinos at heart, but then mostly act to preserve the status quo once in office.

After explaining that the bird cleaning facilities were at his house about 15 minutes away, Jim asked me how many birds I had that needed to be cleaned. “Um, just one,” I said meekly. Jim paused and looked at me with steely eyes. Was he shocked that I had shot just one bird in three hours? Had he noticed my Biden/Harris bumper sticker and was now mulling over how this city-slicker liberal standing in front of him had the gall to ask him to drive 15 minutes to process just one bird?

“Maybe it’s not worth it?” I offered nervously.

“That depends,” said Jim. “Have you ever had chukar before?”

I had eaten chukar before, at Christmas a few months earlier. Two days before Christmas my daughter and I had gone on our first-ever hunt, paying the owner/handler of a trained bird dog to help us find the birds. The seven-year-old Brittany named Sky had found and pointed several pheasants and one well-hidden chukar, holding his point so staunchly that even a beginner like me couldn’t miss them. I remembered Sky’s owner saying that chukar are a real delicacy, much better than pheasant. To be honest I hadn’t noticed the difference when we cooked and ate them them on Christmas, due perhaps to my underdeveloped taste buds after rarely eating meat for 17 years. But I sensed a chance to use this knowledge to scramble out of the hole I had dug myself into.

“I have had chukar before, at Christmas. I think they’re even tastier than pheasant,” I said, in as confident a voice as I could muster.

“I think you’re right,” Jim said, his expression brightening. “Here, let me have that bird. I’ll skin it for you, behind the shed. It’ll take me two minutes.”

As Paco and I waited for Jim to return, I chatted with Jim’s family. “Are there many Spanish Water Dog breeders in California?” they asked.

“No, not yet. They’re mostly out east or in Canada,” I explained. I neglected to mention that we had flown all the way to Spain to get Paco, picking him up after a mini-vacation in Spain. I figured that information might damage my newfound rapport with these good citizens of Trump Country.

Jim returned with the freshly skinned bird, and Paco trotted up to him with his nose sniffing in the air and his tail wagging. Jim smiled at Paco, and let him take a whiff of the bird. “Be sure to rinse it off well when you get home,” Jim said, as he handed me the chukar. He had probably broken several health department rules in skinning it for me there onsite, but I was grateful for his help, as I would have had no clue how to do it myself at home.

We thanked the Garcias and said our good-byes. As we drove back home, I mulled over what I would say to Paco, if he could understand more than one or two-word sentences. I think my ode to Paco would go something like this:

“Gracias, mi amigo, for leading me on this journey to better understand America and Americans. You intuitively know that pausing to smile, and giving you a scratch behind the ears, is a better indicator of the character of a person than who they voted for, the clothes they wear, or the color of their skin. You’ve already taught me more than you’ll ever know, and I hope we’ll share many more adventures, for years to come!”

Postscript:

The chukar was indeed delicious, thanks in part to a spicy clay box chicken recipe that an Indian friend recommended when he heard I was going hunting for game birds.