I saw Tears for Fears live in November 2024, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't get emotional. I did. In public. Surrounded by strangers. At a volume that made my chest vibrate. I'm not sorry about it.
When Roland Orzabal hit the opening riff of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," something happened in me that I wasn't expecting. Not nostalgia — nostalgia is soft and warm and safe. This was sharper. This was the feeling of being 12 years old and believing you were going to do something enormous with your life. Not hoping. Believing.
That Song Is About You.
Here's what most people get wrong about "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" — they think it's cynical. They hear the title and assume it's a critique of ambition. A warning. A finger wag at the power-hungry.
It's not. Or at least — it's not just that. The genius of the song is that it holds two truths at the same time: ambition is real and human and sometimes beautiful, and it also destroys things. The line "there's a room where the light won't find you" isn't about some dictator in a bunker. It's about the version of you that works until midnight, builds something meaningful, and then sits alone wondering if any of it mattered.
If you've ever built anything — a business, a project, a life that doesn't fit neatly into someone else's template — you know that room. You've been in it. You might be in it right now.
Ambition isn't the problem. The loneliness that comes with it — that's the part nobody warns you about.
The 80s Understood Something We Forgot.
I listen to 80s music constantly and I'm not apologetic about it. Not in an ironic way. Not as a guilty pleasure. I genuinely believe the best music of that decade contains more emotional honesty than 90% of what gets released today.
And I know how that sounds. I know there's a version of this where I'm just some guy romanticizing the decade he grew up in, filtering everything through memory and sentiment. Maybe there's some of that. But listen to "Shout" all the way through — not the chorus, the whole thing — and tell me that's not a song about someone who is absolutely fed up with being told to sit down and shut up. Tell me that doesn't hit different in 2026.
The 80s didn't bury the emotion under seven layers of irony. Depeche Mode wrote love songs that sounded like the world was ending. New Order made you want to dance and cry at the same time. And Tears for Fears — they named themselves after a psychological concept and then made pop music that slapped anyway. That takes a kind of confidence that I think we've lost.
the year "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" came out. Reagan was in office, the Cold War was still on, and two guys from Bath, England wrote the most honest three minutes about ambition ever recorded.
I Work in Telecom. I Think About Signals a Lot.
This is going to sound like a stretch, but stay with me.
I've spent my career building infrastructure — the stuff that carries signals from one place to another. Fiber. Towers. The invisible architecture that makes your phone call actually reach somebody. And the thing about signals is that they degrade. They weaken over distance. They hit interference. They get lost.
Music is a signal too. A songwriter sits in a room and feels something so strongly they have to turn it into sound, and then that sound travels — through studios and record labels and radio stations and streaming algorithms and decades of cultural noise — and somehow, if the song is good enough, it arrives. It reaches you. In a car. In your headphones at 1 AM. In a concert venue in 2024 when you're way too old to be this affected by a song you first heard when you were a kid.
That's not nostalgia. That's signal strength.
A good song doesn't remind you of who you were. It reminds you of who you still are underneath all the noise.
I'm Not Done Wanting to Rule the World.
Look — I know I'm not going to rule the world. That's not the point. The point is the wanting. The point is that there's a version of ambition that isn't about accumulation or ego or getting your name on a building. It's about refusing to be comfortable with ordinary when you know you're capable of more.
I run a telecom company. I'm back in school getting a degree I probably don't need on paper. I'm building websites at midnight because I like making things. I'm starting a podcast because I have things to say and I'm tired of only saying them to people who already agree with me.
Is that ruling the world? No. But it's not sitting in the room where the light won't find me, either.
Roland and Curt figured that out in 1985. Took me a little longer.