Change Advisory Board

Category: Podcast

  • Twin Peaks and The Unfinished Temple

    Twin Peaks and The Unfinished Temple

    This episode traces a strange and elegant thread between David Lynch’s Twin Peaks cosmology and the philosophical architecture of Freemasonry. Both traditions distrust final answers. Both insist that mystery is not a flaw but a tool—something like a chisel that keeps the builder awake. Lynch treats closure as artistic death; Masonry treats completion as spiritual stagnation. When these two worlds meet, the owl-ring becomes a symbol of perpetual investigation, and the Square and Compasses become the geometry of eternal striving. What emerges is a shared blueprint: the unfinished temple as a living principle, a reminder that the search for light is more vital than the possession of it.

    Source #01: Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really) by Twin Perfect

    Source #02: The Builders. A Story and Study of Masonry by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D. 

    Source #03: The Lecture of the First Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #04: Entered Apprentice Lecture

    Source #05: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

  • The Level and the War-Forge

    The Level and the War-Forge

    This episode traces a sharp line between the Masonic Level—symbol of equality, humility, and shared human destiny—and the immense industrial architectures that manufacture the tools of modern warfare. The Level teaches that all people stand on common ground, “partakers of the same nature,” and that death is the great equalizer that dissolves rank and distinction. Yet the defense industry operates on a different plane entirely: profit-driven hierarchies crafting weapons that divide, destroy, and stratify the world.

    We explore this philosophical collision with care. On one side stands the Fellow Craft’s call to upright living, unity, and the quiet moral geometry of the Level. On the other stands ITAR-governed corporate machinery—engineers, factories, algorithms, supply chains—shaped to produce precision instruments of organized violence. Between them lies a chasm where ethics, economics, and power intersect. This episode asks what becomes of equality when the tools we craft are designed to end lives, not harmonize them—and whether moral architecture can survive inside an industry built on coercion, secrecy, and profit.

    Source #01: Contractors as Military Professionals? by Gary Schaub Jr. & Volker Franke

    Source #02: Ethical Dilemmas in the Global Defense Industry by Daniel Schoeni & Tobias Vestner

    Source #03: What Is ITAR Compliance? by CloudEagle.ai

    Source #04: The Ethics of Defense and Private Security Contracting by George Lucas

  • The Canopy and The Starfield

    The Canopy and The Starfield

    This episode explores the shared sky between Masonry and Starfield—a symbolic canopy that says more about human purpose than it does about stars. In Masonry, the Celestial Canopy stretches from the lodge room to the edge of creation, reminding the initiate that the universe itself is the Temple of the Grand Architect. In Starfield, that same vastness becomes the stage for Constellation’s search for the Unity: a literal attempt to pierce the heavenly veil and discover what truth, if any, lies beyond it.

    We draw parallels between the Lodge’s starry firmament and the cosmic expanse the player navigates. Where Masonry uses the canopy as a moral reminder—boundless charity, an infinite pursuit of light—Starfield transforms it into a philosophical battleground. Sanctum Universum, the Enlightened, and House Va’ruun echo the ancient triad of Beauty, Wisdom, and Strength as they debate what lives behind the cosmic curtain. Constellation’s Lodge stands alone as the one institution content to search without dogma, mirroring the Craft’s insistence that truth must be discovered, not inherited.

    The episode follows this shared journey beneath the vault of heaven: from the Mason’s quiet moral ascent to the traveler’s leap into the Unity. Both paths lead toward a revelation that is less about cosmology and more about character. Whether walking the mosaic pavement or drifting through the nebulae of the Settled Systems, the seeker confronts the same question age after age—what does it mean to find light in a universe that refuses easy answers?

    By the end, the canopy becomes something more than a roof or a sky. It becomes the infinite canvas where meaning is made, where the Lodge and the Starfield overlap, and where the search for truth continues in every universe the traveler is willing to explore.

    Source #01: Searching for God in Starfield

    Source #02: What Is The Best Starting Religion In Starfield? by Alexander Maksymiw

    Source #03: The Lecture of the First Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #04: The Builders. A Story and Study of Masonry by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D. 

  • Compassion and The Compass

    Compassion and The Compass

    This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof.

    Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services under stress—incidents, outages, RTOs, RPOs, blameless postmortems—and show that both people and platforms need the same thing: clear limits, honest observation, and recovery plans that actually work.

    This isn’t an abstract seminar. It’s trauma, rent, sobriety, hatred, love, and the quiet power of one small, consistent life lived decently in front of another broken person.

    In this episode, we explore:

    • How trauma reshapes a worldview—and why one honest counter-example can start to crack it

    • Why “compassion does not require self-immolation,” and what healthy boundaries really look like

    • How Marcus Aurelius would diagnose over-giving, resentment, and walking away “without hatred”

    • The parallels between personal recovery and organizational recovery: incidents, DR tests, and blameless postmortems

    • Practical steps for people who feel like Paul (the overwhelmed helper) or Eunice (the traumatized survivor) today

    This is an episode about keeping your heart open and your compass steady.

    Source #01: Paul and Eunice is a personal story from real people in my personal life. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.

  • The Temple and the Error Budget

    The Temple and the Error Budget

    What happens when you put Solomon’s Temple next to a modern error budget and ask them both what “perfection” really means? In this episode, we explore the idea that reliable service is not just a technical outcome but a moral consequence — the visible result of character, duty, and brotherly love expressed through IT work.

    Drawing on Freemasonry, Stoic philosophy, and the writings of Marcus Aurelius, we unpack what it means to work logarithmically toward an ideal you will never fully reach. We contrast the Masonic Temple and its working tools with SRE and ITIL principles: why 100% uptime is the wrong target, how continual improvement mirrors lifelong moral refinement, and how duty becomes the backbone of both spiritual life and professional reliability.

    Then we zoom in on the real builders of today’s “Temple”: the backup and recovery specialist guarding the sacred data; the infrastructure engineer hewing and setting the foundation; the Citrix/WebSphere/DB2 specialist adorning the inward workings; the mainframe programmer quietly automating away chaos; and the mainframe operator keeping vigil in the sanctum of production. By the end, your ticket queue, your runbooks, and your change windows look less like random toil and more like stonework on a shared, enduring structure.

    Source #1: ITILv4 Foundation

    Source #2: The Meditations by Marcus Aurellius

  • The Architecture of Eternity

    The Architecture of Eternity

    Freemasonry’s Moral OS and the Birth of Human Reliability

    This episode of The Cab Call traces the long arc of Masonic history as if it were the version-history of humanity’s oldest moral operating system. Instead of treating the Craft as a museum of rituals, we explore it as a living reliability framework—prophecy, practice, and interpretation—evolving over thousands of years to keep human beings resilient in a world full of entropy.

    We move from the prophetic era, where symbols like the Cube and Square encoded universal laws of stability, through the great operative builders who carried those laws through collapsing empires and dark ages. The Comacine Masters, the Roman Collegia, the cathedral architects—all appear not as quaint historical footnotes but as early maintainers of an ethical architecture designed to produce both strong buildings and strong men.

    The episode follows the rise of Speculative Masonry, when the craft stopped building cathedrals and began building character instead, and culminates with the 1717 Grand Lodge—the moment Masonry became a universal, non-sectarian system for producing “Good men and True.” Across the entire journey, we frame the fraternity as a blueprint for human reliability engineering: an attempt to harmonize fallible people with immutable moral laws the same way an engineer harmonizes fallible systems with physical ones.

    It’s an episode about continuity across collapse, symbols that outlast empires, and why an ancient institution built for stoneworkers still feels modern in an era of distributed systems and digital drift.

    Source #1: The Builders. A Story and Study of Masonry by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D.

  • The Gauge and the Calendar

    The Gauge and the Calendar

    This episode explores the Twenty-four-inch Gauge — one of the earliest and most quietly profound symbols in Freemasonry — as a blueprint for surviving and thriving in modern system administration. The gauge’s ancient triad of vocation, refreshment, and service becomes a practical lens for navigating today’s impossible mix of project deadlines, user interruptions, enterprise timetables, automation demands, and mental load.

    We trace how the symbolic 8/8/8 division maps directly onto the SA’s world: focused work protected from interruption, rest defended as a prerequisite for cognitive reliability, and an ethical block of time reserved for strategy, documentation, personal growth, and helping others. Along the way, we connect the gauge to principles like conserving RAM, externalizing memory, automating repeated tasks, and carving out time for long-term improvement over perpetual tactical firefighting.

    In both Masonry and IT, time is a material you carve — not a stream you ride. This episode examines how the structure of the gauge can stabilize a chaotic profession and help every administrator build a life, and a system, that holds its shape.

    Source #1: Lecture of the First Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli

  • From Rough Ashlar to Righteous Re-Engineer

    From Rough Ashlar to Righteous Re-Engineer

    This episode reflects on the journey from Rebellion to Responsibility, tracing how both individuals and systems evolve through disciplined self-correction. We explore the Masonic allegory of the Rough Ashlar—a person full of natural flaws—being refined into the Perfect Ashlar through the Common Gavel, symbolizing self-discipline and reflection.

    The 1980s punk scene serves as a living example of the unrefined Ashlar: a volatile system rejecting all authority. SLC Punk captures its collapse when chaos meets consequence—most tragically in Heroin Bob’s death. The Straight Edge movement emerged as a self-imposed reformation, a kind of ethical debugging through sobriety and restraint.

    Maturity, then, is Righteous Re-Engineering—transforming rebellion into mastery. When Stevo chooses law over anarchy, he embodies the truth that sustainable change requires structure. In both character and code, reliability is born not from chaos, but from conscious design.

    Source #1: Lecture of the First Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #3: SLC Punk! (1999)

    Source #4: Dischord Records: Ian MacKaye

  • The Square and the Server

    The Square and the Server

    In this episode, Change Advisory Board draws a straight line from the lodge to the datacenter via the square, exploring how the symbolic working tools of Freemasonry — the gauge, gavel, square, level, plumb, compasses, and trowel — can be reinterpreted as instruments of modern Site Reliability Engineering.

    From the Entered Apprentice’s 24-inch gauge to the SRE’s time budgets and service-level objectives, each tool becomes a lens for understanding the moral and operational discipline behind reliable systems. The common gavel’s task of removing rough edges parallels how engineers refine noise from telemetry. The Fellow Craft’s square and level emerge as early templates for data integrity and fairness — the moral geometry of incident response. The plumb rule, once a test of uprightness, becomes the model for aligned observability: systems and people both measured against their true vertical.

    Finally, the Master Mason’s compasses and trowel remind us that every great system — like every enduring fraternity — is held together not by code alone but by the invisible cement of trust, accountability, and shared purpose. Observability, in this light, is not just about data; it is the moral act of ensuring that what we build is true, just, and aligned with the architecture of higher principles.

    It’s a conversation about craftsmanship in code and in character — an investigation into how the oldest working tools of humanity still guide the newest disciplines of reliability engineering.

    Source #1: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

  • The Watchtower and the Mirror

    The Watchtower and the Mirror

    This episode examines modern software maintenance practices, specifically Monitoring and Observability, through the lens of Masonic symbolism to illustrate principles of operational wisdom. Monitoring is aligned with the Watchtower, focusing on tracking real-time quantitative data about known system conditions, much like a Tiler guards a perimeter to detect anticipated problems. In contrast, Observability is compared to the All-Seeing Eye and the Mirror, representing the capacity to ask questions about a system’s inner workings to troubleshoot novel problems or “unknown unknowns.” Together, these concepts constitute the operational wisdom required by Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), which is further mapped onto the Masonic pillars of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty to guide the pursuit of system reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

    Source #1: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy