Raconteur Retreat Quick and Dirty AAR

Additional thoughts from the OG Intern Steve

Hey, gang! Nick here. Just to piggyback off what the Sergeant Major said, we’ve recently completed our 2025 planning retreat. It was a good time. Tears were consumed, food was spilled, and blood was cooked.

Just like my beloved Counting Crows when they’re recording a new album, we rented a big house and did all our work there, rather than a stuffy old office space. I was shocked by how large and cavernous this place was. It was like the Minotaur’s labyrinth but with gorgeous wooden flooring and 1970s-era appliances.

I will say this, also, about the home office team: they know how to feed a guy. If I hadn’t already accumulated my congressionally-mandated “Retirement Forty,” I would have easily gained those forty pounds just in the food we ate this past weekend. Great meals, excellent coffee from King Harv’s, and abundant snack food, all served to fuel our creative energies throughout the retreat.

I won’t give you a play-by-play, since Mike already did so, but some of the highlights for me were as follows:

-Breakfasts around the table, not doing any formal work, but brainstorming and spitballing. More than one half-baked idea turned into a real project with deadlines and a marketing plan over eggs, bacon, donuts and coffee.

-Saturday night dinner with a large crew of friends of the press. Great pizza from Luigi’s and good conversation, some of which lasted long into the night. With such a sprawling, large house, it was fun to wander from room to room and catch snippets of the various discussions underway.

-Getting to meet and speak at length with the Wolfhound himself: prolific and excellent writer John van Stry. He’s a font of great stories about the industry and has led an interesting life even before becoming a pro. He gave me some great writing advice, which I’ve already begun to put into practice. I even discovered that in a previous life, he field-tested one of my favorite pieces of military tech. Sadly, the DOD decided not to mass-field the final product, which was possibly the biggest mistake the department has made in the last twenty years, but it was still fascinating to hear him discuss the testing.

-I particularly liked seeing a group of people with a shared vision all pull oars in the same direction. In my military career, planning sessions were often derailed or hindered by people with their own agendas. Promotion, looking good for the boss, spying for a colonel in some other unit, or just good old-fashioned “I secretly hate my family, so I want to draw this out as long as possible so I have an excuse to not go home.” But the amount of work that can get done when everyone agrees on the goals and wants to achieve them…it was a pleasant surprise to this burned-out, jaded and cynical old staff officer.

-Speaking of which, I deeply appreciate how little pushback I got when I was a taskmaster about sticking to the agenda. Nobody ever stomped their foot or got out of sorts when I would say something like, “Okay, guys, refill coffees and go to the can, and we’re back here in ten,” or “We have fifteen more minutes to discuss this before we need to move to the next item.” If anyone rolled their eyes, at least it wasn’t hard enough to make an audible rattle.

Those are just some of the things I enjoyed most about the weekend. We worked hard, but it was enjoyable and rewarding. Next year will be full of amazing projects, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you all in the near future.

For now, stay frosty and don’t try to ice-skate uphill.

All right, good talk. I’ll see you out there.

-Nick