My phone was at 17%.
I had 40 minutes until LAX.
I could keep texting and drain the battery—or put it down and do something retro… like talk to another human. 📵

Pre-iPhone me used to do this all the time. I was a Chatty Cathy with every cab driver I met. I’ve heard wild immigration stories, family dreams, startup pitches, and once, an impromptu rant about poppyseed bagels.

Over the years, between email pings and doomscrolling, I stopped talking. And started tuning out.

Until this Uber ride. 👇
My driver was from Uganda, living in LA for 12 years.
I asked what he missed most about home.
“The food,” he said. “But more than that… community.”
In Uganda, after work, people GATHER. They leave work to eat, talk, joke and just hang.

“In America,” he told me, “people work, go home, and close the door. Here, you gather maybe once a year—for Thanksgiving.”

He smiled: “In Uganda, it’s Thanksgiving every day.”

Then, we talked about matoke—mashed green bananas with spices. And I thought: if my phone had been at 42%, I probably would’ve missed this entire exchange.

It reminded me of how the Lumineers wrote Cleopatra—based on a deep, spontaneous conversation with a female Uber driver about her life, her regrets, and her fierce independence.

Sometimes the best stories don’t come from books, they come form the driver’s seat.

“The need for connection and community is primal—as fundamental as the need for air, water, and food.” —Dean Ornish

So now I’m asking myself, how can we build community like in Uganda?

✨ What if we turned every day into Thanksgiving? What if community happened as a regular occurrence?
✨ What if we made room for more stories, more gathering, more green banana mash?

Maybe the real connection we’re all craving… doesn’t come with 5G.