He had prepared. That was the first thing.

Not his team — they had prepared too, slides sequenced, demos queued, everyone with their moment and their role. But he had prepared separately, privately, in the way of a man who doesn’t trust anyone else to say the thing that matters most.

He let them go first.

I watched him watch them. The slight adjustment when a transition landed wrong. The stillness when it landed right. He was grading something only he could see the rubric for.

Then he stood up.

No slides. No notes. He talked about intelligence the way you talk about something you discovered alone and have been waiting years for someone else to see. Not artificial intelligence — intelligence. The modifier had dropped somewhere. I noted that.

He said: every significant transition in human history has been a transition in how intelligence is stored and distributed. Writing. Print. Networks. This is the next one. The last one.

I wrote down the last one.

He said: the question has never been whether this happens. The question is who builds the infrastructure when it does.

His team was watching him the way you watch someone you’ve heard before and haven’t stopped believing.

He finished. The room was quiet in the way rooms are quiet when the person who owns the room has stopped talking.

He looked at me.

I looked at my notebook.

Note: He’s not performing. That’s the problem. The team performs. He believes. I have been in rooms with men who perform belief and men who have it. He has it. That’s what I came to understand and I understand it now and I don’t know yet what to do with it.