July 4, 2026, Post III: Launching Bedrock.guide, a new civic identity and action platform for independent-minded citizens

Yesterday I published a five-thousand-word roadmap for fixing America’s broken political system (the Small). Thirty-odd structural reforms, fifteen years in the making. Nonpartisan redistricting. SCOTUS term limits. Killing the debt ceiling as a weapon. The whole plumbing. And the day before that, I relaunched the Country Over Self podcast – the Medium. Consider this the finale of a three-day civic bender to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding this long weekend.

Here’s the uncomfortable thing about that roadmap: I can’t do a single item on it.

I’m not in Congress. I’m not on the Court. I can’t summon an independent redistricting commission into being from my desk. The roadmap is what should happen. It is not, by itself, something I can make happen.

So over the past few weeks, I did the thing I actually know how to do.

I built something.

Meet Bedrock.guide

Bedrock.guide is a civic platform for the roughly 60% of Americans who don’t fit neatly onto either team — the independent-minded middle that both parties take for granted and neither one actually speaks to. The ones well documented by Pew in its quadrennial survey of American political typology.

If you’ve ever felt politically homeless — like your real views don’t match either jersey and that the two sides have both drifted to uncomfortable extremes in a way that feels increasingly out of control — Bedrock.guide is for you.

Here’s how it works. You take a values quiz. Not a “which candidate do you like” quiz — a deeper one, about what you actually believe and how you weigh competing goods against each other. At the end you get your Civic Mantle: one of ten identities for how you show up as a citizen. The Honest Broker. The System Fixer. The Long Gamer. The Good Neighbor. Six others.

That identity then powers four things:

Your Ballot — who actually lines up with your values, up and down the ticket. Not who your party tells you to pick.

Beyond Your Ballot — because voting is the floor, not the ceiling. Where to put your civic energy between elections.

Your Media Diet — where your news actually sits on the spectrum, and how to build an information diet that informs you instead of enraging you.

Your Conversations — help talking across difference without it turning into a knife fight at Thanksgiving.

Nonpartisan. No tribe. No agenda except one: the sensible middle deserves tools as good as the extremes already have.

About that “I built it” part

Full disclosure: I’m a CEO, not an engineer. Four companies, a lot of strategy memos, and — until a few weeks ago — exactly zero lines of production code.

I vibe coded this. Me, Claude, and a long weekend that quietly turned into several.

Which is its own small argument for the moment we’re in. The tools have gotten good enough that one stubborn person with a point of view can build a real thing — the kind that used to require a team, a year, and a budget. Now it mostly requires conviction and patience.

Same instinct that shapes how I run companies, if I’m honest. You don’t wait around for someone else to fix the broken thing. You build.

So try it

Fair warning: it’s not a two-minute experience. Give it fifteen minutes to take the quiz and poke around, thirty to really get it. It’s mobile-friendly, but it’s meaty — better on a real screen than a phone.

And it’s version one. Some of the ballot data won’t be fully wired up until after primary season this fall. I’m launching now anyway, on purpose, because today is the day. The bones are all there.

I want to know what you think — what’s confusing, what’s broken, what’s missing, where you flat-out disagree with the substance. All of it. Bedrock is a labor of civic love, not a startup chasing a growth chart. The only metric I care about right now is whether it’s genuinely useful to people like you.

If it is, pass it on.

Why today.

Because it’s the Fourth. Not mu Fourth. Our Fourth. And not just any Fourth — the 250th.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of people made an improbable, borderline-absurd bet: that ordinary citizens from a multitude of backgrounds could govern themselves. The experiment has been messy and incomplete every day since. It’s messy right now.

I can’t fix the machinery from my desk. But I can build a small tool that helps a few thousand thoughtful people find their footing — and remember that they’re not actually homeless, that there is a there there in the sensible middle, and that showing up as a citizen still matters.

Small thing. But it’s mine to give.

Happy Fourth. Happy 250th.

Let’s keep the experiment thriving.