The CEO, CFO, and COO have a seat. So do the architect, the general contractor, and a roster of specialty advisors. Every one of them is valued, and every one is good at their piece. Yet on project after project I’ve watched the same costly gap open up, and no one in the room names it.

The gap is timing. And the best way I know to explain it is a timing belt.

In an engine, the timing belt links the crankshaft to the camshaft. The crankshaft drives the pistons up and down; the camshaft opens and closes the valves that let air in and out. The belt forces those parts into a strict, rhythmic dance, so the valves open at the exact instant the pistons expect them to.

When the belt wears or stretches, it slips and skips teeth. Synchronization is lost. You get misfires, poor fuel economy, rough idling, loss of power, and a ticking noise. If the belt snaps outright, the pistons slam into the valves equaling catastrophic failure.

A project runs the same way. However, when the optimal sequencing slips, most don’t feel ALL of it: It might be sensed in rough idling (poor communication), ticking (time passing), sputtering (delays from late or missing decisions), and loss of power (schedule slippage). You get the analogy.

The engine: your design and construction team

Here’s what most owners and corporate occupiers don’t realize: that slippage is quietly costing them money. Not in a line item the CFO can point to, but in premiums and inefficiencies. They aren’t getting the greatest value dollar for dollar.

Why doesn’t the team catch it? Because each part is built to run its own function, not to hold the whole. The architect and engineers are the camshaft: their job is to produce the design, and they’re watching their own P&L, hours estimated versus hours billed. They aren’t measuring the timing; they’re focused on getting the answers and direction they need to start and finish. The crankshaft the Contractor. Here’s the deal. There’s always an invisible line, and it only gets crossed when it’s too late and the belt is about to snap. That’s when everyone starts losing money at once, and only then is it known.

Holding the timing or sequencing, is a full-time role. It takes leadership, relentless follow-up, and the fortitude to pull what’s needed out of every participant, at the right moment. It is not a specification you hand someone. In my billion dollars of experience, every project was custom, with unique constraints. You have to possess precision and little intuition, know-how and execute it.

Why the cost stays hidden

The owner usually absorbs it without ever seeing it. It’s hard to isolate because each party only sees its own slice. It gets priced into fees. It shows up later as Additional Services from the A/E team, which carry their own premiums. From the GC, it comes as added overhead. It rarely appears spelled out in a change order.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: many owners, and even large national and global project management firms, don’t have this depth at the senior-PM level and above. Yet your paying for it here too! The “how to” is rare.

Where I learned it first

My timing-belt analogy isn’t borrowed. My father was a Chief Master Sergeant of Avionics in 181st Tactical Fighter wing, from fleets of F-4 Phantoms onto F-16 Fighting Falcons, nicknamed “The Racers”: fly-by-wire controls, laser-guided bombing systems, ECM pods that can scramble ten square miles of a city’s electronics. So, when he took apart my Honda Prelude engine and spread it across cardboard for me, I trusted he knew exactly what he was doing. As he reassembled it, I learned the inner workings. I had no idea how much that would matter later, on my first project out of college at $16M with HUNT-AECOM, to CBRE, and the largest at $200M+, all totaling millions of square feet.

I also went to university for construction technology, then earned the rest on the jobsite and worked my way up and into the boardroom, through roles as a general contractor, then at a construction management firm, then my own firm for 7 years. A billion dollars of work, 44 projects later.

I want to point out something, because after a quarter century most people still believe a PM is a PM, or that PM equals construction. It doesn’t.

A PM is not a PM

Picture the jump in precision, knowledge, and technology from a corner-shop mechanic, to a Formula One engineer, to an F-16 avionics specialist. Wildly different animals, all “working on engines.”

Project management is the same. Many PMs at the big real estate firms move into the role without ever learning the mechanics, tools, and technology of construction. Some came up as architects. Some came from hospitality programming and find themselves at the advisor helm. Plenty can manage at a high level, speak beautifully, and make you feel taken care of. I call it white-glove project management: smooth, choreographed, served like a seven-course meal. It’s the feeling you get leaving the Mercedes dealership. The real question is what you actually paid versus what it cost, and whether the difference was necessary. Most of us aren’t racing our daily driver in the F1 championship. However, an F1 cars and fighter jets runs $15M+.

Who’s making sure your building is ready for the starting grid or flight line?

Too often, the project belt is slipping and the teeth are worn. To me its obvious. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of slippage, that alone pays for a great Project Management firm and allows you to sleep at night.

Not enough bite and combustion from your belt— A $12M case study

When I landed at the world’s largest commercial real estate firm, I saw the problem firsthand. The client was a global medical-office and insurance company, and their SVP of Real Estate of Global was frustrated. The project management firm running their international projects, everything from site selection to architecture to art, was consistently over budget or behind schedule. And the overages were rarely fixable, because there was no time left in the schedule to fix them.

That’s usually where Value Engineering enters: design changes made after a project is over budget, to cut cost. If you’ve had a PM firm on your project and still hit budget and schedule problems, I don’t fault you. That’s exactly what they’re there to prevent.

The budget on this one was set before I arrived. What I built was the schedule, the design guidance, and above all the sequencing. I call it Designing into the Design: driving to checkpoints, leading the client through finish and feature decisions on time, and building optionality aka Alternates into the first design deliverable, so the owner always had levers on major cost components, from mechanical systems to finish levels.

Then the GC bids came in. Ten percent over budget. Most of the firm’s PMs had historically gone with the large, reputable regional and national GCs they always used, which makes a project easy to manage from the top because the big GC drives it. The three bids were close and well scrubbed, so this must be the market, right? No.

Here’s where finesse matters. All three were regional and national-scale GCs, carrying heavy general conditions and oversized subcontractors. What a project this size needs is right-sizing, from the GC down through the subs. An oversized sub means paying a premium for the same HVAC unit, the same electrical gear, the same paint. If you’re building a semiconductor fab, an international airport, or a stadium, you need that top-tier bench or the project fails. In between is where the experience of a Project & Development Services professional earns its keep.

On this $12M project, architecture through art, selecting the right-sized GC preserved what would have been a $500,000 overage. Same scope, $500K less, delivered on time, all above-board.

Three major moves made it work:

1. Selecting a right-sized GC, from real market knowledge and firsthand experience with that firm.

2. Building a schedule that sequenced the work and the owner decision checkpoints.

3. Designing roughly 30 alternates into the first Design deliverable, so when pricing came in high the owner could decide fast instead of going back to the drawing board (which costs more design fees and time, and time matters when you’re relocating or facing a lease holdover).

The takeaway. Scale, Scope, Depth, and breadth all matter.

It’s First Principles: break the thing into its simplest component parts. Sounds easy. The easy part comes from experience, bite, and combustion.

The Voice lives here on Substack and my Instagram.

The Proof (Commercial Real Estate) is on LinkedIn, archeadvisers.co, and ARCHĒ’s Instagram.

Copyright, Ryan Scherzinger 2026+

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On the surface, George Michael’s “Freedom! ‘90” is a catchy, soulful pop anthem. But beneath its upbeat groove lies a deeply personal, fiercely defiant declaration of independence.

The song and its iconic music video represent George Michael’s formal resignation from his own manufactured image. It was a direct battle with his record label (Sony) and an announcement that he would no longer sacrifice his mental health or authenticity for the sake of MTV stardom.

The Message in the Lyrics: Shedding the Persona

By 1990, George Michael was one of the biggest pop stars on earth following his massive 1987 solo album Faith. However, the relentless promotion, the hyper-sexualized image, and the pressure to stay in the closet left him deeply depressed and trapped.

In the lyrics to “Freedom! ‘90,” he lays it all bare:

· Regret over the “Faith” era: In the opening verses, he references his quick rise to fame with Wham! and his early solo days, admitting he played a character to get what he wanted: “I think there’s something you should know / I think it’s time I told you so / There’s something deep inside of me / There’s someone else I’ve got to be.”

· The commodification of stardom: He sings about how the music industry packages artists like products: “When you shake your ass, they notice fast / And some mistakes were built to last.” He felt he had become a prisoner to his own marketing.

· A plea for his fans’ understanding: The chorus isn’t just about defiance; it’s an honest request for his audience to let him grow up: “I won’t let you down / I will not give you up / Gotta have some faith in the sound / It’s the one good thing that I’ve got... Please don’t give me up on me.”

The Music Video: Literal Iconoclasm

The music video, directed by David Fincher, is where the message becomes unmistakably clear. George Michael famously refused to appear in the video. He was done being the focal point of the camera’s gaze. Instead, inspired by a Peter Lindbergh photo shoot, he hired five of the world’s top supermodels—Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz—to lip-sync the lyrics for him.

By replacing himself with the ultimate symbols of 1990s visual culture, he was making a cynical but brilliant point: If you only care about the look, look at them. Just let me be the music.

Beyond the models, the video features the literal destruction of the props that defined his Faith superstardom:

1. The Leather Jacket: The iconic “BSA” leather jacket he wore throughout the Faith tour is shown bursting into flames on a hanger.

2. The Jukebox: The Wurlitzer jukebox he leaned against in the “Faith” video explodes into pieces.

3. The Guitar: The guitar he famously strummed is shattered.

By blowing up and burning these artifacts, Michael was telling the world that the “Faith” version of George Michael was dead.

The Closet and the Bigger Picture

While “Freedom! ‘90” was overtly about freedom from the music industry and the burdens of fame, it also carried a heavy subtext regarding his sexuality. Michael was a closeted gay man at the time, facing immense pressure to maintain his image as a heterosexual heartthrob to a global audience.

While he didn’t officially come out until 1998, the song’s central theme—that keeping up a false front will destroy you, and true freedom requires burning down your old life to live authentically—remains a timeless anthem for anyone fighting to break free from external expectations… or old version(s) of The Self.

My lesson & insight

I would posit that instead of “blowing up or burning down” your last chapter, you consider, as I have, integrating all the uniquely unique aspects of you into the “new” unique you. Whether an artist-musician, writer, mother, “A Father Figure” (another great song by George Michael) of any sort, a sister, a brother, a friend—all aspects are of value when done with Authenticity. It can be fun and playful when done with presence. It could feel like a little girl dressed up as a princess, the boy playing cowboy, a Lincoln Log builder, or I don’t know, yet. I am seeing my entire life in a retro-casual way, as an artist in whatever it is I am or “do,” as a gift to myself and maybe others of a unique uniqueness. Maybe they are watching, maybe not. Maybe I say something of deep impactful meaning or IDK what the fuck I am talking about. Ha.

“There’s someone deep inside of me that I forgot to be!”

Similar to a SpaceX rocket, that didn’t blow up or burn...

I took flight from my parents launchpad of home at 18, at the start of summer, post high-school graduation. And I wanted out and away from that place, that environment. I returned to be near my parents and family in ’24, after living across the country for 26 years. At times being near my parents, it has been like observing two people hold each other captive by their childhood traumas/conditioning, as if in a verbal Ground Hog day (a Bill Murry movie) inside a Guantanamo Bay.

So the rocket landed. I was asking Why? Maybe it is for me (interpersonal me) to transmute the memories of my childhood. Or! Maybe I am breaking chains of conditioning—through seeing now clearly what type of environment made me who “I was” or who “I am” becoming. Learning Love, the messy unconditional Love my parents did their best to show me and my siblings, in the only way they knew/know how.

By the way, this all came to me in pieces or lessons, over time. At one point, only months ago, as a straight man—and I won’t pretend I know—I felt as if closeted — unable to relate to, share, or even start a conversation with my father about who I’ve become; about all the new, interesting things I have learned over the last 5, 7, 20 years. The EQ, SQ, esoteric, all the transformative growth and not being able to even start a conversation with him around who I am.

A Kaleidoscope of perspectives

Just this week, I’ve moved from the perspective of an inmate of Guantanamo Bay, to a viewing it from outside the chain-link fencing, to a place of Acceptance and Love. To lovingly see my father and mother—and to admit I don’t know all the difficulties they went through just to get “here.”—versus “They Can’t handle the truth!” of their very own mindsets and World Views. Pretty sure this more right between these lines, here, for me to see. So, I see them as they are, with eyes unclouded by longing for what they might have been. That’s just selfish, even though I think about it wanting the love, for them, for each other. I want my father to feel love, maybe for the first time in his entire life. I want my mother to have more affection. Maybe being George Michael after hitting number 1 on the chart in 1987 was his experience and for another 8 years he maybe felt trapped, and this is mine. No more or less. Just different. Just different musical notes for different folks.

If we all as humans see each other through the eyes of a child and I am only Human and there’s a kaleidoscope of people with different perspectives and each came to experience something different.

Like the Skittles candy commercial— [Let people] Taste the[eir] Rainbow!

Whether you’re currently “corporate,” live in the bush, a musician, a model, a butcher, a baker, or the candlestick-maker YOU have the Freedom to Find the good in the thing that You’ve got right in front of you, now. And! you can change or better yet transmute it, into who I am becoming.

To be clear, this lesson was for me. For my growth. My path, my lesson. My shadows, my mirrors of who I was to who I am becoming. And the growth has come from an interactive interbecoming. Some days feel like a bad acid trip staring into a scary kaleidoscope of WTF, why am I here, I could be doing other things much more valuable and impactful in people’s lives, elsewhere. Here is NOT where I am supposed to be! There’s a teacher in all of our lives.

One more note. I’ve learned that the lesson is complete, when the charge is completely removed. It is not necessarily when you first see it. Not when it is witnessed for the first time—which may result in a burying or avoidance. For me, it is when I can clearly see, observe, hear, and feel all the same behaviors that used to bother me and in 1/10,000^th of a second accept and appreciate the reminder.

I can tell you the future me will hold near and dear this time with them, this chapter, re-membering the parts of me through their eyes and ears and the heart of a me as a rocket man, maybe even a future Father Figure of sorts that I learned how to be in the most peculiar way, with a new-found Freedom.

10, 9, 8, 7, …

© Ryan Scherzinger 2026+

The Voice lives here on Substack and my Instagram.

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“Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions”: being clear-eyed foresight, she, Stevie Nicks in the song ‘Dreams,’ can already see how the love affair completes; nothing has been spent yet, seeing something clearly, without distortion.

“But listen carefully to the sound…In the stillness of RE◦Membering (Stillness).”

It’s the same in nature as in development. In Nature there is a balance that establishes and harmonizes the whole eco-system at scale. In development it is the earliest decisions when buying the land and what is carried through into design and into operations.

That “holding the wholeness” is both the job and a level of energetic awareness most owners must dig much deeper to know that they might be missing “It.”

We all don’t know what we don’t know; many aren’t attuned to see and feel “it.”

This is why I work on the owner’s side or seat, and why my (or our team’s) greatest value comes long before there’s any “thing” to build. I assemble teams of those who can execute wellness development and operations with tactical precision, with ALL the resources of those who’ve done it for decades, creating brands that pioneered the way for us all. Starting when wellness resorts were “fat farms.”

You see, I reset, researched, and re-educated myself over the last 7 years. To go to it: the core. To know thyself. And the journey led me to those who know.

I’ve traveled to Egypt and learned The Physics of Quality from Egyptian architects who have studied the ancient knowdledge, and from countless other renowned experts in the physics of subtle energy.

I reset. I tapped-in. I’ve done a lot of work and research beyond the sticks and bricks of construction. Like getting multiple master’s or PhDs in Hidden Reality. Now I am back. Better. Wiser to the bigger picture of what makes a development exemplary.

The kicker is: “she keeps those visions to herself, Fleetwood Mac ‘Dreams‘.” So, there’s a quiet power in it: she, the terra firma, is not arguing, not pleading, not pounding on a boardroom table. She just sees, and lets him find out for himself.

The translation

If that opening drifted somewhere unfamiliar, hang on — because the point is that I live in two very real languages, and the work is translation.

Where the old traditions say listen, an underwriter says do your diligence — soils reports and test cores, title and entitlement, the target-market feasibility study. Same discipline, older vocabulary. Where I say holding the wholeness, the pro forma calls it the basis of design — the handful of early decisions that, once made, quietly govern roughly 80% of a project’s cost and very nearly all of its character. The Trophic Cascade that can regenerate a whole watershed from a single returning keystone is the same shape as a development: a few upstream choices — the land, its purpose, the team — cascade through design, through construction, and out the far side into operations, setting the ceiling or best limited version of the project for the entire life of the asset.

And the Physics of Quality I went to Egypt in 2020 to study is not incense and hand-waving. It is proportion, orientation, light, water, and placement — the craft every serious builder has worked in deliberately, from the temple architects to the anonymous hands that shaped the hill towns people now cross the world to feel. It is architecture as frozen music — a Pythagorean melody you feel rather than hear. And don’t expect a dead AI rendering to summon it; that life-force doesn’t survive the export. You feel it the instant you arrive, and so does the guest. That feeling isn’t decoration. It is the asset, living. It is why one place earns the rate, the loyalty, and the word-of-mouth — while its better-located, better-capitalized neighbor quietly discounts to fill rooms.

So, yes, I underwrite. I Financial Model. I proforma. I read the Market Mix Comparison; I know what a four-year stabilization demands and what patient capital can actually hold. I’m assembling a team that built the brands this category now imitates — back when a “wellness resort” was a punchline, the polite term was “fat farm,” and the grounded knowledge was still kept by the ancient keepers of place.

I am, unglamorously, a developer and a lifelong student of the building craft. Not to toot my own horn, but to ground experience in the reality of risk: my first project was $16M out of college, and the last one I helped land was $250M. I am also fluent in the older earth-language, and among those who know it. I spent 7 years on the inner journey, and 19 in development before it, 26 in all, getting fluent enough to translate it into a number you can finance.

Because the master’s-degreed analyst’s imaginary lines in the Excel model strain to translate into the realer ones: the earth’s energy grid beneath the site, and the lasting connection a place makes with a guest’s memory.

That is the quiet power in the song. The land, like the divine woman in it, doesn’t argue or demonstrate significado egoico — egoic significance — across a boardroom table. She keeps her visions to herself and lets you discover them in your own time — the expensive way, a year after the grand opening, or the wise way, in the Stillness before a dollar is spent. My job is to help you hear her early, while the cheapest and most valuable hours of the project are still in front of you.

So — where, and what, is The Project?

The Voice lives here on Substack and my Instagram.

The Proof is on LinkedIn, archeadvisers.co, and ARCHĒ’s Instagram.

Copyright, Ryan Scherzinger.

We chased more until our feet forgot the ground.

The opposite of a poverty mindset isn't excess. It's rootedness.

Loud luxury is rich - and starving.

So we walk the other way. Barefoot.

We believe in power, over force.

The calm belongs to whoever is complete.

Real wealth is

soil,

lineage,

time,

health,

presence.

It cannot be faked, rushed, or bought loudly.

AND ALL OF IT, LOVE

Underneath the soil and the lineage, the time and the health and the presence - one current runs through all of it. Call it by its truest name. Love. Beyond the soft word, the binding force: the gravity that gathers a family, a place, a life, and connects. Everything here is Love, learning to take a form you could live in.

If the grind never delivered the life it kept promising - you already belong here.

Take off your shoes.

Welcome home.

Sign-up for updates here.

©️ Ryan M. Scherzinger

With 32 mystical paths of Wisdom engraved Yah

This opening verse is doing something unusual even for mystical literature.

Most cosmogonies begin with substance — the void, the waters, the darkness.

The Sepher Yetzirah begins with structure — paths, number, inscription.

Before anything exists, there is already a geometry of knowing.

Structure

32 is itself the glyph: the Hebrew word for heart — לב (lev) — has a gematria of 32.

So the 32 paths aren’t just a map of creation outward;

they’re a map of the intelligence that beats at the center of it.

Heart

Wisdom and Heart as synonyms, at the root.

Breath

Yah — not Elohim, not YHVH in full — specifically the compressed, breath-form of the Name.

The smallest utterance.

Engraved

Which suggests the act of engraving these paths required almost nothing — a whisper of existence was enough force.

Engraved (chakak) is also worth dwelling on. Not spoken, not willed — inscribed into a medium.

Reality as substrate that receives impression.

The paths aren’t projected outward; they’re cut into something that was already there waiting.

The One who finds them

There’s a contemplative question buried in the opening that the text never directly answers:

Who was the 32 paths engraved for?

Not for Yah — Yah enacted them.

Possibly for the one who finds them.

Inside the cosmology from word one.

© Ryan Scherzinger

Substack Sections:

The Voice is here.

The Proof, where I am building.

The Promise is what’s to come.

As I complete my two-mile morning walk in rural South Carolina, I feel as if I am at another threshold, surfing yet another wave of growth and awareness — another wave of awareness of The Self, one that has poured more into me through the practice of Equanimity I learned during a 10-day silent Goenka Vipassana meditation course.

Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation. It was rediscovered by Gotama Buddha more than 2,500 years ago and was taught by him as a universal remedy for universal ills — an Art of Living. This non-sectarian technique aims for the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation.

The course is ten days of silence (no phone), meditating ten hours a day — 100 hours in total. Vegan or vegetarian meals. Starting at ~5am and going until ~10pm.

The course requires hard, serious work. There are three steps to the training. The first step is, for the period of the course, to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual activity, speaking falsely, and intoxicants. This simple code of moral conduct serves to calm the mind, which otherwise would be too agitated to perform the task of self-observation. The next step is to develop some mastery over the mind by learning to fix one’s attention on the natural reality of the ever-changing flow of breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils. By the fourth day the mind is calmer and more focused, better able to undertake the practice of Vipassana itself: observing sensations throughout the body, understanding their nature, and developing equanimity by learning not to react to them. Finally, on the last full day, participants learn the meditation of loving kindness or goodwill towards all, in which the purity developed during the course is shared with all beings.

(Credit: Dhamma.org)

Over my last 128 days, the first wave ended softly — yet it was not “easy.” Wave two was a Nazaré, Portugal kind of wave: quickly towed into it on a jet ski, ~100 feet tall — equivalent to a 10-story building. Exhilarating, fast, and quick finish. Both waves were my teachers, happening for me. I learned a lot from reflection and contemplation, and from feeling the feminine flow and energy of them. Power versus Force.

Years ago — before Meditation, before Vipassana, before more Awareness — I would have chalked the experiences up to the wave being the problem: external. As a semi-pro soul surfer, I am looking more in the mirror. I am using The Art of Contemplation (see the Gene Keys system); I am more aware of my Human Design, and of how my emotional decision-making centers (aka Chakras), and others, can govern or drives us. And last, I am deep into the 3 Mirrors principles taken from The Gospel of Thomas.

Gospel of Thomas (91):

“You read the face of the sky and of the earth, but you have not recognized how to read this Moment.”

The 1st mirror is that you are presented with others as a reflection of who you are being. Self-explanatory, yet the ego leads us to believe otherwise.

The 2^nd mirror is who you are attracting, and why. The subtle truth of this could entail being very integrous in business and your interactions, yet judging those who are not, or who have ulterior motives — whether they are aware of it themselves or not. For example: out of a fear of being cheated or stolen from in the past, a person attracts “not being stolen from” — and so “bad actors” are what they see, even though that may not be what is actually occurring. That just what they see. Their/our fear shows up as control, asymmetry, gatekeeping, or overly prudent protection, when in reality it’s a lack of forgiveness, lack of trust, or missing the unconditional state of love — of seeing everyone as pure divine beings at the core. So, the second mirror has been a tremendous teacher for me. I see where I had a “charge,” an emotional charge of judgement toward such behavior — which might have been the very purpose of that wave: to teach me the 2nd mirror, a greater awareness of my emotional guidance system saying, Please proceed to the highlighted route.

The 3rd Mirror is The Vessel — pouring out too much of yourself for another, unknowingly, until storehouse of what you have to give, your emotional bank account, is empty, overdrawn. So, this taught me Discernment, in many forms.

Discernment, for me, is present in my Gene Keys ‘12’ — which shows up 4x in my chart! Gene Keys is based on a system derived from the I-Ching. In Gene Keys you have 14 numbers. Of my 14, I have ‘12’ four times! Lots to learn here!

• The Shadow – Vanity

• The Gift – Discernment

• The Siddhi – Purity

The last wave corresponded precisely with astrological timing (a 5-day period in June), when, with clarity, I was riding the wave into Discernment. So you can track with me — and for those not familiar with the system, each Gene Key has a ‘Key’ and a ‘Line.’ For example, 12.5 is my sphere of EQ (Emotional Intelligence): the 12 is the Key (think: you as the Character), and the .5 is the Line (think: you acting out the Plot).

The Plot! [ACTION! ]

The .5 Line, for me, is Respect / Disrespect (think: two-way):

“Your [my] secret to healthy relating involves cultivating emotional maturity, humility, and honor as you strive to make the world a better place.”

COWABUNGA! (1960s surfer slang)

For me it felt like being super stoked to catch the wave! A 90-day ride! AND BAM!!

Interspersed with twisty-tingy, guttural feelings coming from my emotional center, the solar plexus — right in the Fn gut! UGH. But wait Ryan. That’s your emotional guidance system. It was like my internal GPS. If only… Okay — now I know how to better read a different instrument: my body. In the moment. Discernment. That said, layering in the 3rd mirror perspective, it was my disposition to see only the good in “the wave,” so I didn’t correctly read the danger.

To tie all this winding, interwoven, roller-coaster of a wave together,

What did I learn: A LOT.

Each of these studies and practices has allowed me, as the student, to go deeper within — revealing greater and greater insights. Seeing reality as it is.

I truly believe that through these teachings — and their integration through real-life experience, after getting back to livin’ in the world, away from the meditation hall — I am being prepared for a much bigger life purpose: the next chapter. All the experiences of these waves — in my life, with my family and friends, and in business — are happening for me. And I am finally able to feel, hear, and, most importantly, listen.

Surf’s up, soul surfers!

With Grace and Gratitude for all my teachers.

© Ryan Scherzinger 2026+

The Voice lives here on Substack and my Instagram.

See my other section The Proof and The Promise for business and what’s coming.

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When viewed high above you, distant, or inviting. It might fall upon you. It might require climbing up.

The husk—from Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, or Pride feels defiant. By design it absorbs impact, weathers, floats across oceans for months and arrives intact.

The shell—smooth inside, unyielding from the outside. The three dark eyes—one point of entry flowers—a Vesica—bearing possibility. Structural integrity, its first instruction.

The meat—white, fragrant, fleshy, endosperm in solid form. Stored energy. Intention. Sweet. Fatty fruit. What once the husks’ hardened perimeter protected now gives. Two become one.

The water—held, a living-liquid, throughout The All. Always. Already there. Before you knew, it was waiting.

Four states as one.

A living demonstration.

Each state a different giving: complete protection, complete offering; Courage, Neutrality, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason—meaningful and wise.

Each further, deeper, inward; the center, of the center, of the center.

The shell holds water. Fluid feminine : masculine container.

From Interdependent to Interbecoming.

Nourishing water juxtaposition to shell—ionic—energy in relationship. Charge seeking its complement. Movement to equilibrium. Plasma. The non-linear transcendent life-force throughout the universe; in cell, coconut, cosmos.

A demonstration of Reverence and Revelation.

by Ryan Matthew Scherzinger

© May, 2026

Photo illustrated version below. 👇🏻

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By the time the ink dries on the blueprints, roughly 80% of your project’s cost — and most of its spirit — is already locked in. Here’s where it actually gets decided.

There’s a comforting myth for the first-time wellness-hospitality developer: that the big costs — and the big risks — live in design and construction. Concrete, steel, change orders, the tradesmen sweating on site. It looks tangible and it looks expensive, so that’s where we assume the money is won or lost. After all, we spent a fortune on design and construction.

After thirty years of projects, I’ve come to know better. The most expensive decisions on any wellness or regenerative project are made months — sometimes years — before anyone breaks ground. They’re made quietly, by listening, before the boardroom and the investment committee and the polished presentations — before the financial projections or the time-value-of-money is ever calculated, when the stakes feel low. That is where clarity lives.

Consider what actually gets decided during pre-acquisition, at the concept stage: which piece of land you buy; what the place truly was, and what it should be “for”; who conducts the vision; who has a say on the design and consultant team; how the concept and experience are framed for capital and underwriting. None of it shows up as a hard cost yet — and may not for a long time.

Unbeknownst to most, these choices set the invisible ceiling on every length of track laid afterward. Choose the wrong land — or the wrong purpose for the land — and no brand or architectural wizardry can save you. Hire advisors who have never operated optimized wellness or well-being hospitality assets, and you’ll spend the next two years value-engineering the soul out of the project, one reasonable compromise at a time.

I’ve watched it happen. An owner with a genuinely beautiful vision — a place meant to heal people — began on land that was never meant to carry a commercial business. (This deserves more depth than one article allows; we’ll circle back.) The land had been a sacred ancestral breeding ground for animals. The indigenous people knew it and honored it. It was first developed in the early 1960s, then passed through several owners and decades of trouble before landing in bank ownership. Are you tracking? This isn’t the only version of the story — there are endless others, all tracing back to not looking deeply enough or not listening enough: dishonoring the local community, its cultural heritage, or its eco-social economics.

In my example, everyone is competent. Everyone means well. And yet, month by month, the ancestral character of the grounds becomes an amenity for wedding parties — or gets chalked up as a bad decision by the team that came before, who obviously weren’t as smart or business-savvy as we are — instead of being treated as the organizing principle of principles: First Principles. And so the spa becomes a photo op; the quiet coherence that made the land special gets paved over in a rush for a luxury-car event, with an EV charger thrown in for good measure. No one decided, “I want to ruin all of this.” They simply optimized each piece in isolation — with the depth of a two-dimensional spreadsheet, or for a trend — because no one was holding the whole.

It isn’t the architect’s job — they serve the design, and that design should create a harmonized built environment that functions optimally in service to the experience. It isn’t the contractor’s — they serve the technical reality of building the architect’s and owner’s dream while dancing the tango with every mid-stream change. It isn’t the broker’s, or most operators’. It is the owner’s duty, as steward — and that requires fluency in ecology, in the physics of quality (a concept for a future article), and in the economics of long investment horizons that every great multigenerational brand understands to be paramount. Those brands weren’t driven by a bonus or a pre-determined exit. Think of the growth of bamboo, or slow-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano. Just maybe they were thinking of their great-great-grandchildren inheriting a legacy that honors a cornerstone laid decades earlier.

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Here’s the reframe I’d offer anyone standing on the hill overlooking the start of a project: leverage in development is retro-causal. It is enormous at the very beginning — when nothing seems urgent and little has been spent — and it shrinks fast once the capital clock starts ticking. It is gone once the machinery is moving. A single clear-eyed assessment, and a real conversation with the land, beforehand, can prevent seven-figure corrections later — in perpetuity. A team with greater awareness in month one is worth more than the best-stacked deck of advisors, designers, and contractors in month eight.

This isn’t a soft claim. Study after study of project delivery finds the same shape: the decisions locked in during the earliest feasibility and pre-development phase — when only a few percent of the budget has been spent — go on to govern the large majority of lifecycle costs across the land, the project, the site, and operations. Your influence over the outcome is highest at the very beginning and collapses as design drawings print and harden into commitments. By groundbreaking, you aren’t steering anymore; you’re paying for the steering you did — or didn’t do — a year earlier.

This is why I work on the owner’s side, in project and development services, and why my greatest value comes long before there’s any “thing” to build. The role has an unglamorous name — owner’s representation, or P&DS — though I think of it as total project awareness. The substance is simple, and it saves: someone whose only loyalty is to you and to the integrity of what you’re dreaming, in the room, listening for the decisions that are made before they look expensive — and bringing in the rare, specialized advisors who are seldom engaged and even less often heard. Not a vendor selling you a deliverable, not someone tracking RFIs, submittals, change orders, and monthly draws. We act as a fiduciary for the land and the vision: vetting the land; assembling a team that genuinely understands the well-being of nature and of people; aligning the psychographics with the social media and marketing messaging — the price of admission — to today’s sophisticated members and guests; applying first principles to pressure-test the concept against the capital seven, ten, and twenty years out; and naming the standards you refuse to compromise — before anyone tempts or pressures you to.

To be fair, the instinct to wait is rational. The early days are abstract and, frankly, fun; they’re on the owner’s time, and the spending feels premature. The risks don’t feel real yet. But they are real — both upstream and downstream — because the contractor is only solving a problem whose hardest variables were set before they were ever hired. Investing in pre-acquisition land advisement can produce the “No-Go” you’ll one day be grateful for.

So if you’re betting big on the regenerative agri-tourism and wellness gold rush, you don’t need more ideas or vendors yet. You need the somewhat esoteric expertise to ask you the fifteen to two hundred and fifty questions about your intent, vision, and the land, that determine whether the next five to twelve years go well — the questions about the land and its purpose, the team, the capital, the reconnaissance and observation, and the standards that will hold as your legacy investment.

The most valuable hours of your project are the first ones. If you’re at that stage, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

A few of the things that get evaluated early — or missed:

• Watersheds and syntropic systems.

• Regenerative practices that draw the greatest yield from nature.

• Property Condition Reports assessing the remaining useful life of mechanical systems — and the unglamorous sewer.

• Capital maintenance and upgrades to outdated systems.

• Noise attenuation between mechanical systems and guest rooms — or financial audits that reveal individual rooms being underused.

• Grease-interceptor placement.

• Acoustic and visual shielding from noise and sightlines.

• Durable case good furniture and stone surfaces — because everything gets abused.

• Commercial-grade furniture chosen by experienced hospitality operators or designers — because you don’t want to replace it in year three, or pay three times its value in cleaning labor for the lounger that looked beautiful on day one and great in the portfolio.

• A QA/QC review of your multimillion-dollar hydrotherapy spa, so neither it nor the HVAC becomes a breeding ground for mold.

• Constructability reviews.

• The list goes on — and if these aren’t evaluated and priced into the deal or the renovation, you can lose the revenue and end up storing soap and linens in what should be a guest room for the rest of the property’s life, equating to millions lost.

Let’s talk before your project.

Ryan Scherzinger — ARCHĒ Advisers

For a beautiful color PDF of the article click here.

The Voice lives here on Substack and my Instagram.

The Proof is on LinkedIn, archeadvisers.co, and ARCHĒ’s Instagram.

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Beyond “Sustainable”: Why I’m Becoming a Regenerative Developer — and what that asks of Us All

Sustainability asks us to do less harm. Regeneration asks us to leave a place more alive than we found it. After years in commercial real estate, I’ve come to believe those are not two points on the same line. They are two different states of awareness. Regenerative is to Re◦Membering — the process of bringing all parts of yourself back together — mind, body, emotions and spirit — to feel whole and connected again.

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For most of my career, “sustainable” was the highest compliment a project could earn. We chased the certifications, modeled the energy loads, specified reclaimed timber, and counted the gallons we didn’t flush into the municipal sewer. It felt like progress, like a “gold star” earned in grade school, and in fairness it was. Sustainability dragged the design and building industry of its worst habits. It gave designers a vocabulary for
restraint, developers more questions of “does this return?” and gave capital a reason to care. Let’s give credit to progress — the people doing serious sustainability work are doing good, and the cynics who mock it signal they’ve built little to nothing.

But somewhere along the way I noticed what the word was quietly becoming: hollow. Sustain means hold steady. Do less damage. Net out closer to zero. The entire moral imagination of sustainability is organized around a single verb: reduce. Reduce the footprint, the waste, the harm. It is the ethics of a guest trying not to leave a mark on someone else’s house. Think about it. The footprint isn’t the kind you might imagine left in the sand at the beach. Here’s the real image. It is either being cut down or “mined” from gaping holes in the ground.

TOM HEGEN

And this is the imagery that woke me up to say, wait. Because the places I am loving the most these days — the working farms (watch the film The Biggest Little Farm), the terraced hillsides, the majesty of coastlines that have been tended for centuries — were not carved by people trying to leave no mark or do “less bad.” They were carefully crafted by those who left a better place than they found — not by those who maximized density to extract profit. The land is richer and produces a livelihood for the community from having regenerated it. A sustainable relationship to a place asks, “How do I take less?” A regenerative one asks something harder and more humbling: “What can I DO that makes this whole system more alive, fruitful, and living after I’m gone?”

That is not a louder version of the same question. It is a different question, and it reorganizes everything downstream of it.

Here is the reframe I’d offer anyone standing where I stood. Sustainability treats a place as a stock of value to be protected from depletion. Regeneration treats a place as a living system to be partnered with — the soil, watershed, community, culture, climate — so that the total bio-system itself grows in health and capacity over time. The first is spun as conservation. The second is regenerative cultivation. And cultivation is the older, deeper craft, the one every regenerative farmer and every conservation re-forester already understands: you don’t always preserve a living system by leaving it alone, and you don’t improve it by extracting
from it. You improve it by participating with it.

What does that actually demand of a developer? More than a checklist, which is exactly why it’s harder to sell. It demands that you start before the “Acquisition,” before “The Pro Forma,” before programming or design — instead of the first question being “what do we build and how can we spray-paint it green?” ask: “What is this place? What is it already trying to become or return to? What are we missing?” It demands that the watershed and the community get a vote in the design, not a “comment box” after the design is done. It demands that you measure success in things that don’t ft squarely into a pro forma: soil health, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity rising rather than holding, local livelihoods deepening rather than merely surviving, a place that is measurably more alive in year ten than it was the day you arrived. Sustainability can be audited. Regeneration has to be lived, and it commits you to the place long after the thin certificates or hollow vanity plaques would lie to us all.

I’ve watched a project designed with a grey-water treatment plant be deleted solely due to budget constraints, post capital-call. The building was double-piped for it, the water treatment system wasn’t and will likely never be installed. The water was cheap. The solar panels survived — primarily because of the tax credits that transfer to the owners. It’s the proverbial budget landslide that shears of good intentions.

To be pragmatic, none of this makes sustainability wrong. It makes it incomplete — a floor we needed, mistaken for a ceiling. Doing less harm is the right place to start and a poor place to stop. The honest tension is that regeneration is slower, harder to standardize, and asks for more patient capital than a quarterly-earnings or four-year-stabilization mindset wants to commit to. Anyone who tells you it’s free or fast is selling the label, not doing the work. I’d rather name the cost plainly than pretend it away.

So I’ve become convinced the cost is the point. The places people travel across the world for, visit as a child and return with their children, and feel energetically reinvigorated by are almost never the ones that merely minimized “less bad.” They are the ones that listened to the land then did “better” for the land and the people living around it — that left the whole system more alive — with a radiating life-force energy. You can feel it. This should be the new standard, and it is the bar, a new standard that I am inspired to build toward.

So, I’m moving beyond “sustainable.” Not because it was false, but because it was the question of a guest, and I no longer want to develop like a guest. I want to develop as a steward who partners with the place and makes it more beautiful — which is the oldest definition of stewardship there is.

Drake Bay, Costa Rica by Florian Delée.

Costa Rica returned much of its land to forest in a single generation — proof that "more alive than we found it" is not a slogan but a track record. Photo: Florian Delée

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That’s the thread I’ll be pulling on here, one tug at a time and being my 1^st article only scratches the surface of the macrocosm & microcosms of what’s to come: what it actually takes to inspire others to achieve optimal potential; the land, eco-social aspects of community, scientifically grounded knowledge and wisdom of metaphysical aspects of a master builder, and demonstrations of what is possible. If curious, Follow and send some Likes and Love.

To download a PDF of this article click here.

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Additional perspective:

The first verse of the Sepher Yetzirah:

With 32 mystical paths of Wisdom engraved Yah.

The opening verse is doing something unusual even for mystical literature. Most cosmogonies begin with substance — the void, the waters, the darkness. The Sepher Yetzirah begins with structure — paths, number, inscription. Before anything exists, there is already a geometry of knowing.

32 is itself the glyph: the Hebrew word for heart — לב (lev) — has a gematria of 32. So the 32 paths aren’t just a map of creation outward; they’re a map of the intelligence that beats at the center of it. Wisdom and Heart as synonyms, at the root.

Yah — not Elohim, not YHVH in full — specifically the compressed, breath-form of the Name. The smallest utterance. Which suggests the act of engraving these paths required almost nothing — a whisper of existence was enough force.

Engraved (chakak) is also worth dwelling on. Not spoken, not willed — inscribed into a medium. Reality as substrate that receives impression. The paths aren’t projected outward; they’re cut into something that was already there waiting.

There’s a contemplative question buried in the opening that the text never directly answers:

Who was the 32 paths engraved for?

Not for Yah — Yah enacted them. Possibly for the one who finds them. Which puts the reader inside the cosmology from word one.

The Sepher Yetzirah’s opening is essentially a cosmology of first principles: reality structured through the precision of number, letter, and sound.

The Voice lives here and my Instagram.

The Proof is on LinkedIn, archeadvisers.co, and ARCHĒ’s Instagram.

The Promise.

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